The twilight reigns above the fallen noon Within an ancient land, whose after-time Lies like a shadow o'er its ruined prime. Like rising mist the night increases soon...
I dreamed that each most lovely, perfect thing That Nature hath, of sound, and form, and hue - The winds, the grass, the light-concentering dew, The gleam and swiftness of the sea-bird's wing;...
A voice came to me from the night, and said, What profit hast thou in thy dreaming Of the years that are set And the years yet unrisen? Hast thou found them tillable lands?...
Above its domes the gulfs accumulate To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed; But here the buried waters take no heed - Deaf, and with clos'd lips from press of weight...
Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen, Told how a witch, with gaze of owl or bat Found, and each root malevolently fat Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken...
What nights retard thee, O Sirius! Thy light is as a spear, And thou penetratest them As a warrior that stabbeth his foe Even to the center of his life. Thy rays reach farther than the gulfs;...
Around its walls the forests of the west Gloom, as about some mystery's final pale Might lie its multifold exterior veil. Sculptured with signs and meanings unconfessed, Its lordly fanes and palaces attest...
It seemed that from the west The live red flame of sunset, Eating the dead blue sky And cold insensate peaks, Was loosened slowly, and fell. Above it, a few red stars...
One tone is mute within the starry singing, The unison fulfilled, complete before; One chord within the music sounds no more, And from the stir of flames forever winging The pinions of our sister, motionless...
I flow beneath the columns that upbear The world, and all the tracts of heaven and hell; Foamless I sweep, where sounds nor glimmers tell My motion nadir-ward; no moment's flare...
As drear and barren as the glooms of Death, It lies, a windless land of livid dawns, Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills That seem the fleshless earth's outjutting ribs,...
This Rome, that was the toil of many men, The consummation of laborious years - Fulfilment's crown to visions of the dead, And image of the wide desire of kings - Is made my darkling dream's effulgency,...
Poised as a god whose lone, detach'd post, An eyrie, pends between the boundary-marks Of finite years, and those unvaried darks That veil Eternity, I saw the host...
Imagination's eyes Outreach and distance far The vision of the greatest star That measures instantaneously - Enisled therein as in a sea - Its cincture of the system-laden skies....
O woven fabric and bright web of sound, Whose threads are magical, And with swift weaving thrall And hold the spirit bound! We may not know whence thy strange sorceries fall -...
O many-gulfed, unalterable one, Whose deep sustains Far-drifting world and sun, Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee; And thou shalt be When never world remains;...