ALCHEMY

Some souls are strangers in this bourne;

Beauty is born from such men's discontent;

Earth's grass and stones,

Her seas, her forests, and her air

Are seas and forests till they mirror on some pool

Unusually reflecting in an exile's mind,

Who tarries here protesting and alone;

And then they get strange shapes from memories of other stars

The banished knew, or spheres he dreams will be.

Thus is the fivefold vision of the earth recast

By ghostly alchemy.

But there are favored spots

Where all earth's moods conspire to make a show

Of things to be transmuted into beauty

By alchemic minds.

Such is this island beach where Poe once walked,

And heard the melic throbbing of the sea,

With muffled sound of harbor bells —

Bells — he loved bells!

And here are drifting ghosts of city chimes

Come over water through the evening mist,

Like knells from death-ships off the coasts of spectral lands.

I think some dusk their metal voices

Yet will call him back

To walk upon this magic beach again,

While Grief holds carnival upon the harbor bar.

Heralded by ravens from another air,

The master will pass, pacing here,

Wrapped in a cape dark as the unborn moon.

There will be lightning underneath a star;

And he will speak to me

Of archipelagoes forgot,

Atolls in sailless seas, where dreams have married thought.