Nature and Elements

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.

 

And here face downward in the sun To feel how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on.

 

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

 

great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

 

great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

 

A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.

 

Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark.

 

Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea, But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

 

Dosn’t thou ’ear my ’erse’s legs, as they canters awaäy? Proputty, proputty, proputty—that’s what I ’ears ’em saäy.

 

From the great deep to the great deep he goes.

 

All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon.

 

All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon.

 

Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone.

 

I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.

 

I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.

 

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

 

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky!

 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky!

 

The great world’s altar-stairs, That slope through darkness up to God.

 

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

 

So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.

 

Sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

 

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South, Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves, And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.