The Night-Walk
AWAKES for me and leaps from shroudAll radiantly the moon’s own nightOf folded showers in streamer cloud;Our shadows down the highway whiteOr deep in woodland woven-boughed,With yon and yon a stem alight.
I see marauder runagatesAcross us shoot their dusky wink;I hear the parliament of chatsIn haws beside the river’s brink;And drops the vole off alder-banks,To push his arrow through the stream.These busy people had our thanksFor tickling sight and sound, but themeThey were not more than breath we drewDelighted with our world’s embrace:The moss-root smell where beeches grew,And watered grass in breezy space;The silken heights, of ghostly bloomAmong their folds, by distance draped.’Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,That cried to have its chaos shaped:Absorbing, little noting, stillEnriched, and thinking it bestowed;With wistful looks on each far hillFor something hidden, something owed.Unto his mantled sister, DayHad given the secret things we soughtAnd she was grave and saintly gay;At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;She flew on it, then folded wings,In meditation passing lone,To breathe around the secret things,Which have no word, and yet are known;Of thirst for them are known, as airIs health in blood: we gained enoughBy this to feel it honest fare;Impalpable, not barren, stuff.
A pride of legs in motion keptOur spirits to their task meanwhile,And what was deepest dreaming slept:The posts that named the swallowed mile;Beside the straight canal the hutAbandoned; near the river’s sourceIts infant chirp; the shortest cut;The roadway missed; were our discourse;At times dear poets, whom some viewTranscendent or subdued evokedTo speak the memorable, the true,The luminous as a moon uncloaked;For proof that there, among earth’s dumb,A soul had passed and said our best.Or it might be we chimed on someHistoric favourite’s astral crest,With part to reverence in its gleam,And part to rivalry the shout:So royal, unuttered, is youth’s dreamOf power within to strike without.But most the silences were sweet,Like mothers’ breasts, to bid it feelIt lived in such divine conceitAs envies aught we stamp for real.
To either then an untold taleWas Life, and author, hero, we.The chapters holding peaks to scale,Or depths to fathom, made our glee;For we were armed of inner fires,Unbled in us the ripe desires;And passion rolled a quiet sea,Whereon was Love the phantom sail.