Chapter II: Space and Solitude

IMMENSITY

At noon I watched
In the large hollow of eternal heaven
A soaring hawk climb slowly toward the sun
Through gyres of adoration without end.
His flight was a great prayer....

SEA-HORIZONS

The sorrowful expanse from heaven to heaven,
From zone to zone, from deep to height above,
The mute arch of the everlasting heaven
Bends over me with Your unwearied love.

Immeasurable, unutterable, and soundless--
Wide as the east from the west Your love is wide;
The unfathomable distances are boundless
Infinite tenderness on every side.

Against the dark strength of Your huge endurance
My little being beats her baffled wings,
Lifts her shrill voice, and wounds the calm assurance
And tenderness of Your large evenings.

In the vast robes of Your serene compassion
She hides her soiled and burning face of shame--
Your solemn and inexorable passion
Lifts her blurred eyes to meet Your glance of flame.

As bread that for my daily fare is broken,
The eternal loveliness before me spread--
Unutterable gesture--word unspoken,
In the proud silences forever said!

The sun puts forth his strength, the reaches shimmer
With inarticulate rapture, and the proud
Waters are thrilled; the fields of ocean glimmer
With shifting light and overshadowing cloud.

Noon upon noon in heaven takes up his station,
Day follows night, and night succeeds to day:
Your infinite and lonely meditation
Sinks with the sunset down the starry way.

Veiled is the Vast: the heaven of evening burning.
Reveals on the large waters of the sea
Hopelessness--hopelessness--the patient yearning
And dumb caress of the Immensity.

What message have You left for me, what token
Of Your lone love, whose laboring Will has wrought
The firmament over my head, and spoken
Unto my nothingness Your starry Thought!

Sorrowful is the mighty Heart that reaches
Around this brief and scornful heart of mine--
The dim curve of the melancholy beaches,
And vacancies along the lone sea-line.

In the huge longing of the far sea-spaces,
The tremulous rim about the waters curled,
Waits the eternal Gentleness, and traces
His sad horizons ’round the fading world.

Cloud beyond cloud, the arch of heaven goes over--
Steep beyond steep, the patient skies descend:
The illimitable wastes and waves discover
Loneliness--loneliness--without an end.

Inexorable Compassion, may I never
Reach the last verge and limits of Your love!
Beyond me, still beyond me melt forever
The eternal margins, fading as I move.

OF DAY CAME NIGHT

We lay by the sea, and knew
Darkness must make us one:
Heaven was thrilled clean through
By the trumpets of the sun,
The sea burned gold and blue.

The sand in the pale heat
Was parched as desert sand--
Your wrist where the veins meet,
The cool veins of your hand,
Made thirst seem bitter-sweet.

Never a word was said
Of what must be so soon;
In longing and in dread
The golden afternoon
Burned down, till dusk was shed.

It was not hope, nor fear,
Yet something of them both,
That held us trembling here,
Half eager and half loath
For darkness, dread but dear.

Few were the words were spoken,
But in each other’s eyes
We read the certain token
That sealed our destinies--
Our wings of pride were broken.

So, while the waters paled
Around us, and the west
Fainted, our hearts that failed,
In silence were confessed.
Silence at last prevailed.

And now up her clear stair
The evening-star began
To climb, where heaven was bare
A homing fish-hawk ran
Down avenues of air.

Night swallowed up the sun,
And darkness, like a hood,
Sank--and the sea breathed on;
In silence and solitude
The eternal will was done.

PILGRIM

The cold wind cries across the rolling dunes,
The gray sails fleck the margins of the world:
I watch the rolling dunes along the barren sky,
And wan, white waters by the swift wind hurled.

O where are Queen Faustina, and Babylon, and Tyre,
And pale Troy, lost in a silver mist of tears--
And I, O earth, your child, more old than all these others,
What have you done to me these many thousand years!

BY THE GRAY SEA

Where the gray sea lay sad and vast
You turned your head away,
And we sat silently at last--
There was no word to say:

_By the thunder,
By the iron thunder of the sea._

We could not speak, for the lost hope
Of the glad days before;
We sat beside the long sea-slope,
Watching the endless shore--

_By the thunder,
By the iron thunder of the sea._

So that, as in the old despair,
I reached you pleading hands;
But you sat pale and helpless there,
Beside the barren sands:

_By the thunder,
By the iron thunder of the sea!_

THE FISH-HAWK

On the large highway of the awful air that flows
Unbounded between sea and heaven, while twilight screened
The sorrowful distances, he moved and had repose;
On the huge wind of the Immensity he leaned
His steady body in long lapse of flight--and rose

Gradual, through broad gyres of ever-climbing rest,
Up the clear stair of the eternal sky, and stood
Throned on the summit! Slowly, with his widening breast,
Widened around him the enormous Solitude,
From the gray rim of ocean to the glowing west.

Headlands and capes forlorn of the far coast, the land
Rolling her barrens toward the south, he, from his throne
Upon the gigantic wind, beheld: he hung--he fanned
The abyss for mighty joy, to feel beneath him strown
Pale pastures of the sea, with heaven on either hand--

The world with all her winds and waters, earth and air,
Fields, folds, and moving clouds. The awful and adored
Arches and endless aisles of vacancy, the fair
Void of sheer heights and hollows hailed him as her lord
And lover in the highest, to whom all heaven lay bare!

Till from that tower of ecstasy, that baffled height,
Stooping, he sank; and slowly on the world’s wide way
Walked, with great wing on wing, the merciless, proud Might,
Hunting the huddled and lone reaches for his prey
Down the dim shore--and faded in the crumbling light.

Slowly the dusk covered the land. Like a great hymn
The sound of moving winds and waters was; the sea
Whispered a benediction, and the west grew dim
Where evening lifted her clear candles quietly ...
Heaven, crowded with stars, trembled from rim to rim.

DISDAINFUL BEAUTY

On the wide waste the web of twilight, trembling
Hangs low with stars and night;
The dying day in the worn west, dissembling,
Crowns his defeat with light.

Here by the grave, gray sea my soul sinks crying,
By beauty stabbed to death--
“O, in the dusk of the world, let me, too, dying,
Mix with all these my breath!”

There is no answer. In the cold heavens shining,
Star trembles unto star:
The virgin moon in the clear west declining
Hangs, like a scimitar.

MY LONELY ONE

Even as a hawk’s in the large heaven’s hollow
Are the great ways and gracious of your love:
No lesser flight or wearier wing may follow
In those broad gyres where you rest and move.

Most merciless, most high, most proud, most lonely--
In the clear space between the sky and sea
Wheel her huge orbits, where the sea-winds only
Wander the sun-roads of Immensity.

Yet have I known your heart and of what fashion
Your love, how great, how hardly to be borne--
Your tenderness, too perfect for compassion,
Your divine strength, too pure and proud for scorn.

You are most beautiful, but it is given
But few to find you, fewer still to keep
Your high path through the solitude of heaven,
My lonely one, your watch upon the Deep.

Now toward the gold glow of the sunset’s splendor
Veer your great vans. What haven in the west
Now draws you--while the mellowing light makes tender
Your dripping plumes--what islands of the blest?

Lift me, O lift me up to you forever,
Beautiful Terror! Let your sacred might
Stoop to me here, and save--O let me never
Sink from you now, to share a lesser flight!

Even as I pray, my wings of longing fail me,
And my heart flags. In solitude you move
Down the night’s shore: not praying shall avail me,
To lift me, fallen from your faultless love.