O divine summits and O unascended solitudes!
O alone soaring over care and stain!
Who without wing shall set foot upon your pinnacles?
Or who your spaciousness of light attain?
Flames in the dawn-cold, towering incredible,
When else the earth is shadow-drowned and prone,
Veiled and unveiled by the misty-footed winds that guard
Bright chasm and black gulf round a thunder-throne,
Realmed with a vision beyond reaches of mortality,—
Thither some splendour in the mind aspires,
Sharing the terror of your dark, tumultuous sisterhood,
Silent in glory as of chanting quires.
Changing and changeless, O far-illumined Presences
In apparition from some world august,
Up from this flesh have you drawn us, as in ecstasy
That thirsts to elude this forfeiture of dust.
Even on your last heights man has set his perilous foot,
And mid the void as on some dazzling shore
Stands in the vast air, stricken and insatiate,
Wingless, a spirit craving wings to soar.
Now at last voyaging a fabulous dominion
Surpassing all the measures of his kind,
He, a free rider of the undulating silences,
Has in himself begotten a new mind;
Made him a companion of the winds of Heaven, travelling
Unpaven streets of cloudy golden snows,
Piercing forlorn mist, cold though it encompass him
Like a dead mind that nothing sees or knows,
Vacant, a cavern fleecy and immaterial,
A soundless vapour that he pulses through,
Suddenly emerging, and swims into the sun again
And steers his path up toward the topless blue;—
Towers in the frosty flame-apparelled mystery
Of brain-intoxicating sharp sapphire
Round him and above him, throbbing in the midst of it,
A daring, a defiance, a desire!
Mote in the hollow vast, drowned amid the vivid light,
Invading far and far the virgin sky,
Charioting with beats of fire the fiery-beating heart of man
(O heart of flesh, O force of dread!) on high!
Careless of death is he, riding in the eagle’s ways
Above the peak and storm, so dear a sting
Drives him unresting to strive beyond the boundaries
Of his condition, being so brief a thing,
Being a creature perishable and passionate,
To drink the bright wine, danger, and to woo
Life on the invisible edge of airy precipices,
A lover, else to his own faith untrue,
Giving the glory of youth for flower of sacrifice
Upon the untried way that he must tread,
So that he savour the breath of life to the uttermost,
Breath only sweet when all is hazarded.
Is it that, moving in a rapture of deliverance
From chains of time and paths of dust and stone,
Serving a spirit of swiftness irresistible,
He makes his pilgrimage, alone, alone,
Seeking a privacy of boundlessness, abandoning
A self surpassed, yet other worlds to dare?
Nay, in that element hailing his predestinate
World, and exulting to be native there?