Stars in the sky, fold upon fold of stars!
And still beyond the stars those gulfs of air
Flecked soft and pale with milkier stars beyond,
Millions of miles above our dusky world:
Pale stars, whose light down the unplumbed abyss
Falls, ere it reach us, through a thousand years.
There was a God in the unwritten years
Who lit the flaming order of the stars:
Let there be Light! He said, and lo! the abyss
Grew live and tremulous with rustling air,
Grew bright with stars and moons, and each a world
Shining, a light to other worlds beyond.
O were you even as we, bright orbs beyond
Who shine and shed your glory all these years,
Not light, but smoke would fall from every world;
Smoke, black with human evil, black, O stars
With His neglect who lit the sparkling air;
But left within—unformed and void—the Abyss.
O stars that dance indifferent in the Abyss,
Our Earth may seem as bright to you beyond;
Yourselves, to them that breathe your delicate air,
As desolate; Life in the Lunar years
As long; and the straight rivers of the stars
And primal snows divide as drear a world.
And men, perchance, as we, in every world
Fill with their dreams the bright and vast abyss:
A Christ has died in vain on all the stars,
And each, unhappy, seeks a star beyond
Where God rewards the dead through endless years....
And so we circle, dumb, in the silent air.
What shall we find more holy in all the air?
Lo, when the first huge, incandescent world
Burst out of Chaos and flamed a million years,
Until, with too much flaming, thro’ the abyss
Flake after flake dropped off and flamed beyond:—
That was the God who lit the host of stars!
For Light, the stars; for breath, the realms of air;
For Hope, beyond this dark and suffering world,
Nought in the Abyss, nor ought in the endless years.
_Etruscan Tombs._
[Illustration]