The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems — Reading Companion

But did you ever stand alone In a black, forsaken land? Then the wonderful things that God can do One comes to understand:

How He turns the desert dust to a dream, And the lonely wind to a friend, And makes a bright beginning Of what had seemed the end: 'Twas in such an hour God placed in mine The moonbeam hand of a friend.

"I THOUGHT, BEFORE MY SUNLIT TWENTIETH YEAR"

I thought, before my sunlit twentieth year, That I knew Love, and Death that goes with it; And my young broken heart in little songs, Dew-like, I poured, and waited for my end Wildly--and waited--being then nineteen. I walked a little longer on my way, Alive, 'gainst expectation and desire, And, being then past twenty, I beheld The face of all the faces of the world Dewily opening on its stem for me. Ah! so it seemed, and, each succeeding year, Thus hath some woman blossom of the divine Flowered in my path, and made a frail delay In my true journey--to my home in thee.

O bird that somewhere yonder sings, In the dim hour 'twixt dreams and dawn, Lone in the hush of sleeping things, In some sky sanctuary withdrawn; Your perfect song is too like pain, And will not let me sleep again.

I think you must be more than bird, A little creature of soft wings, Not yours this deep and thrilling word-- Some morning planet 'tis that sings; Surely from no small feathered throat Wells that august, eternal note.

As some old language of the dead, In one resounding syllable, Says Rome and Greece and all is said-- A simple word a child may spell; So in your liquid note impearled Sings the long epic of the world.

Unfathomed sweetness of your song, With ancient anguish at its core, What womb of elemental wrong, With shudder unimagined, bore Peace so divine--what hell hath trod This voice that softly talks with God!

All silence in one silver flower Of speech that speaks not, save as speaks The moon in heaven, yet hath power To tell the soul the thing it seeks. And pack, as by some wizard's art, The whole within the finite part.

To you, sweet bird, one well might feign-- With such authority you sing So clear, yet so profound, a strain Into the simple ear of spring-- Some secret understanding given Of the hid purposes of Heaven.

And all my life until this day, And all my life until I die, All joy and sorrow of the way, Seem calling yonder in the sky; And there is something the song saith That makes me unafraid of death.

Now the slow light fills all the trees, The world, before so still and strange, With day's familiar presences, Back to its common self must change, And little gossip shapes of song The porches of the morning throng.

Not yours with such as these to vie That of the day's small business sing, Voice of man's heart and of God's sky-- But O you make so deep a thing Of joy, I dare not think of pain Until I hear you sing again.

Only a breath--hardly a breath! The shore Is still a huddled alabaster floor Of shelving ice and shattered slabs of cold, Stern wreckage of the fiercely frozen wave, Gleaming in mailed wastes of white and gold; As though the sea, in an enchanted grave, Of fearful crystal locked, no more shall stir Softly, all lover, to the April moon: Hardly a breath! yet was I now aware Of a most delicate balm upon the air, Almost a voice that almost whispered "soon"!

Not of the earth it was--no living thing Moves in the iron landscape far or near, Saving, in raucous flight, the winter crow, Staining the whiteness with its ebon wing, Or silver-sailing gull, or 'mid the drear Rock cedars, like a summer soul astray, A lone red squirrel makes believe to play, Nibbling the frozen snow.

Not of the earth, that hath not scent nor song, Nor hope of aught, nor memory, nor dream, Nor any speech upon its sullen tongue, Nor any liberty of running stream; Not of the earth, that hath forgot to smile; But, strangely wafted o'er the frozen sea, As from some hidden Cytherean isle, Veil within veil, the sweetness came to me.

Beyond the heaving glitter of the floe, The free blue water sparkles to the sky, Losing itself in brightness; to and fro Long bands of mists trail luminously by, And, as behind a screen, on the sea's rim Hid softnesses of sunshine come and go, And shadowy coasts in sudden glory swim-- O land made out of distance and desire!-- With ports of mystic pearl and crests of fire.