Masters of the known and found
Singers of a world completed,
All to a time and end ordained,
Powers foredestined to their bound
And truth immutably contained,
A dominion mapped and meted,—
Like as in Egyptian noon
Gods of granite throned august
Gaze on old realms round them strewn
Far as the horizon dust,—
All beneath that searching sky
Gathered into wisdom’s eye!
Prophets of the found and known,
Chanters of the Laws unchanging,
Comes not an hour that undoes all
With a whispered homelessness,
With a sudden touch estranging?
Certainties you deemed your own,
Housing with a friendly wall,
Glide into a doubt and guess
Swift as when, the low light going,
Darkness on the wind comes flowing
Out of nothing; and surmise,
Dream, desire, are frontierless;
And the unroofed mind has skies
To breathe of, where a rumour sings
Of other mind and vaster things
Wooed to wilder destinies.
Thought throbs: there a power entices
(Like, on a wonder-night, all June
In a draught of stolen spices)
Not to stay, not to stay,
But to embark for the outer dark.
Only charms the untrodden way,
Only the unspelt secret rune.
Conqueror with foot superb
Planted on the last step won,
Whom the trumpet-mouths proclaim
Destiny’s accepted son,
Robed in a resounding name,
What profounder pangs disturb
Something that’s unquarried yet
In the deep soul? All the gain
Weighs but as an ashy grain
In the world those pangs beget.
Fierce fruitions but betray
And deliver to the hard
Hope of things unhazarded.
Where that world is, who shall say?
Under western evening starred
Black waves tempt to far-away
Visioned walls of a wide shore,
Lands the only-coveted,
Gleaming as they gleamed before
Alexander’s dying eyes
In the tent at Babylon.
Dumb his soldiers streamed beside him,
Dumb’d with grief that only saw
The pillar of the world undone,
Nor guessed what potent visions gnaw
The unsated mind with cruelties,—
Ramparts where Time’s jealous spies,
Sentinelled afar, deride him,
Mocking all that passion willed
With the frustrate and the unfulfilled.
O the inexorable Lure
Spur to the demon hearts of men!
Ravening Genghis, hot Timour,
And the empire-storming Saracen,
Fate’s infuriate charioteers,
Fly from a whisper in their ears
(Earth before them, Time behind)
Whispering, ‘Haste, ere blood be chill,
Storm and scatter, work your will!’
Hunters hunted in the mind,
Hunting what they cannot name,
Thunder over earth, to find
Nothing. Though the harvest black
Be reaped in rue and curse and wrong,
There’s a thing they cannot tame.
Still they keep their torrent-track,
Maddened by a shadowy song
Sung beyond the reach of sense.
What song is this which wastes the worth
Of human things, and distastes earth,
And fevers with magnificence
Of swiftness trampling, ruin-crowned,
Toward a goal that none has found?
Is it the song the Adventurer stole
Body-bound upon the mast
For the enchantment of his soul?
Over farthest foam of waves
That are sailors’ restless graves,
He heard exulting as he passed
Perilous voices challenging
The mortal heart of him, and fear
Became a glory, so to hear
Secure as an immortal, sing
The Sirens.