Night Rhapsody

    How beautiful it is to wake at night,

    When over all there reigns the ultimate spell

    Of complete silence, darkness absolute,

    To feel the world, tilted on axle-tree,

    In slow gyration, with no sensible sound,

    Unless to ears of unimagined beings,

    Resident incorporeal or stretched

    In vigilance of ecstasy among

    Ethereal paths and the celestial maze.

    The rumour of our onward course now brings

    A steady rustle, as of some strange ship

    Darkling with soundless sail all set and amply filled

    By volume of an ever-constant air,

    At fullest night, through seas for ever calm,

    Swept lovely and unknown for ever on.

    How beautiful it is to wake at night,

    Embalmed in darkness watchful, sweet, and still,

    As is the brain's mood flattered by the swim

    Of currents circumvolvent in the void,

    To lie quite still and to become aware

    Of the dim light cast by nocturnal skies

    On a dim earth beyond the window-ledge,

    So, isolate from the friendly company

    Of the huge universe which turns without,

    To brood apart in calm and joy awhile

    Until the spirit sinks and scarcely knows

    Whether self is, or if self only is,

    For ever....

    How beautiful to wake at night,

    Within the room grown strange, and still, and sweet,

    And live a century while in the dark

    The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns;

    To watch the window open on the night,

    A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs,

    And, lying thus, to feel dilate within

    The press, the conflict, and the heavy pulse

    Of incommunicable sad ecstasy,

    Growing until the body seems outstretched

    In perfect crucifixion on the arms

    Of a cross pointing from last void to void,

    While the heart dies to a mere midway spark.

    All happiness thou holdest, happy night,

    For such as lie awake and feel dissolved

    The peaceful spice of darkness and the cool

    Breath hither blown from the ethereal flowers

    That mist thy fields! O happy, happy wounds,

    Conditioned by existence in humanity,

    That have such powers to heal them! slow sweet sighs

    Torn from the bosom, silent wails, the birth

    Of such long-treasured tears as pain his eyes,

    Who, waking, hears the divine solicitudes

    Of midnight with ineffable purport charged.

    How beautiful it is to wake at night,

    Another night, in darkness yet more still,

    Save when the myriad leaves on full-fledged boughs,

    Filled rather by the perfume's wandering flood

    Than by dispansion of the still sweet air,

    Shall from the furthest utter silences

    In glimmering secrecy have gathered up

    An host of whisperings and scattered sighs,

    To loose at last a sound as of the plunge

    And lapsing seethe of some Pacific wave,

    Which, risen from the star-thronged outer troughs,

    Rolls in to wreathe with circling foam away

    The flutter of the golden moths that haunt

    The star's one glimmer daggered on wet sands.

    So beautiful it is to wake at night!

    Imagination, loudening with the surf

    Of the midsummer wind among the boughs,

    Gathers my spirit from the haunts remote

    Of faintest silence and the shades of sleep,

    To bear me on the summit of her wave

    Beyond known shores, beyond the mortal edge

    Of thought terrestrial, to hold me poised

    Above the frontiers of infinity,

    To which in the full reflux of the wave

    Come soon I must, bubble of solving foam,

    Borne to those other shores — now never mine

    Save for a hovering instant, short as this

    Which now sustains me ere I be drawn back —

    To learn again, and wholly learn, I trust,

    How beautiful it is to wake at night.