l and of triumph and passion and pride that it
yearns to know
Bore witness there to the soul of its likeness and kinship, above
and below.
The joys of the lightnings, the songs of the thunders, the strong
sea's labour and rage,
Were tokens and signs of the war that is life and is joy for the
soul to wage.
No thought strikes deeper or higher than the heights and the depths
that the night made bare,
Illimitable, infinite, awful and joyful, alive in the summit of
air--
Air stilled and thrilled by the tempest that thundered between its
reign and the sea's,
Rebellious, rapturous, and transient as faith or as terror that
bows men's knees.
No love sees loftier and fairer the form of its godlike vision in
dreams
Than the world shone then, when the sky and the sea were as love
for a breath's length seems--
One utterly, mingled and mastering and mastered and laughing with
love that subsides
As the glad mad night sank panting and satiate with storm, and
released the tides.
In the dense mid channel the steam-souled ship hung hovering,
assailed and withheld
As a soul born royal, if life or if death be against it, is
thwarted and quelled.
As the glories of myriads of glowworms in lustrous grass on a
boundless lawn
Were the glories of flames phosphoric that made of the water a
light like dawn.
A thousand Phosphors, a thousand Hespers, awoke in the churning
sea,
And the swift soft hiss of them living and dying was clear as a
tune could be;
As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of
life or of sleep,
Audible alway alive in the storm, too fleet for a dream to keep:
Too fleet, too sweet for a dream to recover and thought to remember
awake:
Light subtler and swifter than lightning, that whispers and laughs
in the live storm's wake,
In the wild bright wake of the storm, in the dense loud heart of
the labouring hour,
A harvest of stars by the storm's hand reaped, each fair as a
star-shaped flower.
And sudden and soft as the passing of sleep is the passing of
tempest seemed
When the light and the sound of it sank, and the glory