Koya San

High on the mountain, shrouded in vast trees,

The stillness had the chastity of frost.

I trod the fallen pallors of the moon.

The path was paven stone: I was not lost,

But followed whither it should lead me soon

Into the mountain’s midmost secrecies.

Wandering into the mind, sweet, luminous, warm

Remembrances of the body,—

Smell of the woods in the irradiated noonday,

Flushes of foliage,

The ridged horizon opening far and blue,—

Came with a breathing of colour, and then sank

Remote as flames gleam in a dark pane glassed.

Earth had rolled onward into regions new,

And all the darkness at my senses drank,

Aware now, subtly, as of a frontier passed.

On either side the trees unending rose.

No shadowy sound stirred amid all their plumes.

Each seemed a separate and a soaring night,

Black canopies of cold uncounted tombs.

Pilgrims had here fallen on their repose:

Graven with names, their tablets gleamed upright.

And softly as the fallen lightness of a willow-leaf

On the liquid stealing

Of water unrippled, profound, my spirit was stolen

By the crystal silence.

And with me it seemed invisible others went,

Spirits unhistoried, of such dim surmise

As in the dark the tremble of a leaf.

With them I went, and Night was eloquent

Of things that are not in the day’s belief,

And made me of those things, like a blind man, wise.

Obscurity at last relented round

A glimmering space: the inmost Shrine appeared.

Before it, motionless as any tree,

Praying, a pilgrim stood. There was a sound

Of water in the distance hardly heard:

But most that living man astonished me.

Many stone lanterns made a clustered shining

As if in a wondrous

Cavern of lost and intricate shadows, enclosing

The light’s clear vigil;

But the air behind that solitary form

Was trembling like a veil of trembling light,

Where from an urn rose endless incense-fume

That left a ghostly fragrance on the night.

It seemed a spirit sighing to resume

The touch of what was breathing, human, warm.

Bare-headed, sandalled, still that pilgrim prayed,

Unconscious of all else but his heart’s prayer.

Out of his breast a broken murmur deep

Came with his frosted breathing on the air

Before the shrine in its tree-guarded shade

Where that great Saint continued in his sleep.

It seemed that from Time’s beginning he had stood there

In a hushed vastness,

Solitary, erect, amid the unimagined motion

Of worlds unnumbered,

Absorbed, secure in his small star of light.

And now that ceaseless, fugitive frail smoke

Appeared to me like shadowy souls in flight

Woven together into a veil of breath

That wavered as their little life awoke

And passed for ever into birth or death.

What prayer was his that mingled with the mist

Of the forgotten sighings of the dead?

I knew not; yet in him I seemed to share

Longings that still were patient to persist

Through Time and Death from lips that once were red.

In that one image all my kind stood there.

Lover of the body, lover of the divine sun,

Of earth’s replenished

Fullness and change and savour of life rejoicing

Careless of all care,

Me now the Silence for its vessel chose

And filled from wells unsounded by the mind.

No other need I had, and could not less

Than to be wholly to this spell resigned

And dark communion with the spirit that knows

Vigil and frost and solitariness.

Fragments we are, and none has seen the whole.

Only some moment wins us to restore

The touch of infinite companionship.

I that had journeyed from so far a shore

Found at the world’s end the same pilgrim soul,

And the old sorrow, no flight can outstrip.

Now in the midst of the irradiated noonday

Suddenly absent,

While in my ear is the sound of familiar voices,

Light talk and laughter,

My thought has in an instant flown the seas;

A great remoteness occupies my heart;

And there arises on my inward sight

The shadowy apparition of vast trees.

A pathway opens; I am stolen apart,

And I ascend a mountain in the night.