Classic Poem

Hark ! a sound. Is it I sleep?
Wake I? or do my senses keep
Commune yet with thoughtful night
And dream they feel, not see, the light
That, with a chord as if a lyre
Were upward swept by tongues of fire,
Spreads in all-seeing majesty
Over crag, dale, curved shore, and sea?

If this be sleep, I do not sleep.
I hear the little woodnote weep
Of a shy, darkling bird which cries
In a sweet-fluted, sharp surprise
At glimpse of me, the faun-beast, sleeping
Nigh under her. My crook'd leg, sweeping
Some dream away, perhaps, awoke her,
For dew shook from a bough doth soak her.

And all elsewhere how still it is! —
The mist beyond the precipice
Smokes gently up. The bushes hang
Over the gulph 'cross which I sprang
Last midnight, — though the unicorn,
Who with clanged hooves and lowered horn
Raging pursued, now hidden lies
Amid the cragside dewberries
And sweats his frosty flanks in sleep,
Dreaming he views again my leap
Thrice hazardous.
The silver chasm
Sighs, and many a blithe phantasm
Turns in the sunlight's quivering ray.
I couch in peace. Thoughts fond and gay
Feed on my sense of maiden hours
And earth refreshed by suns and showers
Of nightly dew and heavy quiet. —
Though last night rang with dinning riot:
Dionysos in headlong mood
Ranged through the labyrinthine wood;
Fleet maids sped, yelping, on with him,
Brandishing a torn heifer's limb,
Dissonant cymbals, or black bowl
Of wine and blood; a wolfish howl
Fled ululant with them. . . .
Now there is
Depth, the white mist, the great sun, peace.

Too numb such sunshine! — Let me hence
Out of the solemn imminence
Of yon chill spire whose shadow creeps
Toward me from the stagnant deeps
Of the ravine. For now I will
Descend and take again my fill
Of fancy wild and musing joy,
Such as each dawn brings to alloy
The long affliction of a spirit
Who a complete world did inherit,
And feels it crumbling.
I will down
Whither twin bluffs of sheer stone frown
Over sunk seas of billowing pine
Terrace on terrace, line on line,
Below whose heads the broad downs slope
Away, away till senses grope
At something rather felt than seen:
The sea, — not wave-tops, but a sheen
Under the dazed and distant sky. . . .
Curled on a cliff-top let me lie.
(For yonder, hap, a breeze is blowing,
And the sun's first gleam is showing
Under far wreckage: since our height
Inherits day while yet their light
Quakes gold under the low clouds' rift.)
Down, then! Miraculously swift
These limbs the gods have given me! . .
Couched mid the gorse, anon I see,
Opposing this my bluff, the face
Of the sheer rock, and 'long it trace
A sill scarce ample for a goat,
Yet midway in the ledge-path note
A cave's mouth, which thick creepers hide
Fallen in a silvery tide
From a slant crevice overhead.
And, lo! the creeper stirs, is shed —
And all falls quiet.
Till at last
Issues a voice deep, young and vast: