The Secret Splendour

I

(From the French of Sully Prudhomme)

Dim archipelago of the endless sea,

The Great Bear's light foreshone earth's infant day—

August ere Chaldea watched its mystery

Or the soul's yearning vexed the ambiguous clay.

A myriad eyes since then have caught its gleam

Of unapproachable splendour blindly hurled;

In agelong unconcern its rays shall stream

On the last mortal's dumb death-desolate world.

No Christian look is thine: unchangeably,

O fatal form, thou glimmerest in the night,

Like seven gold nails fixed in c ark drapery.

Thy slow precision and thy frigid glare

 Discourage faith: 'twas thou, monotonous light,

First chilled the passion of my evening prayer.

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II

(Suggested by Sully Prudhomme's Sonnet)

Remote, disdainful, the celestial Bear

Prowls through the desert centuries of gloom,

 A Spirit whose stark spectral hush of doom

Blights the brief sanctity of human prayer.

Whence this invariable frigid stare

Of pitiless splendour? From what monstrous womb

Sprang these cold fires that vacantly consume

 The sweet oblations of the soul's despair?

Or findst thou, fatal form, too lust-alloyed

Our hungry worship craving to commune

With heaven's light for fugitive earth-boon?

 Lo then my love—a single-aimed flinchless dart!

 Shall it not pierce, lone-leaping through the void.

The dim indifference of thy God-heart?

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