TO IMOGEN AT THE HARP

Hast thou seen ghosts? Hast thou at midnight heard

In the wind's talking an articulate word?

Or art thou in the secret of the sea,

And have the twilight woods confessed to thee?

So wild thy song, thy smile so faint, so far

Thine absent eyes from earthly vision are.

Thy song is done: why art thou listening?

Spent is the last vibration of the string

Along the waves of sound. Oh, doth thine ear

Pursue the ebbing chord in some fine sphere,

Where wraiths of vanished echoes live and roam,

And where thy thoughts, here strangered, find a home?

Teach me the path to that uncharted land;

Discovery's keel hath never notched its strand,

No passport may unbar its sealed frontier,—

Too far for utmost sight, for touch too near.

Subtler than light, yet all opaque, the screen

Which shuts us from that world, outspread between

The shows of sense; like as an ether thin

Fills the vast microscopic space wherein

The molecules of matter lie enisled.

A world whose sound our silence is; too wild

Its elfin music beats, too shrill, too rare,

To stir the slow pulse of our thicker air.

A world whose light our darkness is; that lies

With its sharp edges turned toward mortal eyes,

Like figures painted on a folded fan —

The broken colors of some hidden plan.

The few who but an instant's look have had

At the spread pattern broadwise have gone mad.

As in a high-walled oriental street

A sudden door flies open, and a fleet

Departing dream the thirsty traveler sees

Of fountains leaping in the shade of trees,

So they who once have caught the glimpse divine:

They have but wet their lips with goblins’ wine,

And, plagued with thirst immortal, must endure

The visions of the heavenly calenture,—

Of springs and dewy evening meadows rave,

While hotly round them shines the tropic wave,

And the false islands of mirage appear,

Uplifted from some transcendental sphere

Far down below the blue horizon line.

And thirst like theirs is nursed by songs like thine.

For thou, in some crepscular dim hour,

When the weak umber moon had hardly power

To cast a shadow, and a wind, half-spent,

Creeping among the way-side bushes went,

Hast seen a cobweb spun across the moon,

A faint eclipse, penumbral, gone full soon,

Yet marking on the planet's smoky ring

A silhouette as of a living thing.

Or on the beach making thy lonely range,

Close upon sunset, when the light was strange

And the low wind had meanings, thou hast known

A presence nigh, betrayed by shadows thrown

On the red sand from bodies out of sight;

Even as, by the shell of curving light

Pared from the dark moon's edge, the eye can tell

Where her full circle rounds invisible.

Teach me the path into that silent land.

Take once again the haunted wires in hand,

And pour the strain which, waking, thou hast heard

Whistled when night was deep by some lone bird

Hid in the dark and dewy sycamore,—

When thou hast risen and unbarred the door

And walked the garden paths till night was flown,

Listening the message sent to thee alone.

Ah! once again thy harp, thy voice once more,

Fling back the refluent tide upon the shore.

All nature grows unearthly; all things seem

To break and waver off in shapes of dream,

And through the chinks of matter steals the dawn

Of skies beyond the solar road withdrawn.

Oh, flood my soul with that pure morning-red!

It is the sense that's shut, the heart that's dead:

All open still the world of spirits lies

Would we but bathe us in its red sunrise.