Daybreak.
CHORUS OF PLANETARY SPIRITS.
YE interstellar spaces, serene and still and clear.
Above, below, around!
Ye gray unmeasured breadths of ether, – sphere on sphere!
We listen, but no sound
Rings from your depths profound.
But ever along and all across the morning bars
Fast-flashing meteors run –
The trailing wrecks of fierce and fiery-bearded stars,
Scattered and lost and won
Back to their parent sun.
Through rifts of bronzing clouds the tides of morning glow
And swell and mount apace.
We watch and wait if haply we at last may know
Some record we may trace
Upon the orbs of space.
Above, below, around we track our planets’ flight;
Their paths and destinies
Are intertwined with ours. Remote or near, their light
Or darkness to our eyes
A mystic picture lies.
FIRST SPIRIT.
Close to the morn a small and sparkling star-world dances,
Bathed in the flaming mist;
Flashing and quivering like a million moving lances
Of gold and amethyst
By slanting sunrise kissed.
A fairy realm of rapid and unimpeded sprites,
That fly and leap and dart;
All fierce and tropic fervors, all swift and warm delights
Bound and flash and start
In every fiery heart.
SECOND SPIRIT.
Deep in the dawn floats up a star of dewy fire –
So pure it seems new-born;
As though the soul of morn
Were pulsing through its heart in dim, divine desire
Of poesy and love; – the star of morn and eve –
Whose crystal sphere is shining
With joys beyond divining –
Passion that never tortures, and hopes that ne’er deceive.
THIRD SPIRIT.
There swims the pale, green Earth, half drowned and thunder-rifted,
Steeped in a sea of rain. Above the watery waste
Of God’s primeval flood, all other land effaced –
One peak alone uplifted.
The baffled lightnings play around its crags and chasms;
So far away they flash, I hear no thunder-spasms.
But now the scowling clouds are drifting from its spaces,
And leave it to the wind and coming day’s embraces.
FOURTH SPIRIT.
Beyond, a planet rolls with darkly lurid sides,
Flooded and seamed and stained by drenching Stygian tides;
Deep gorges, up whose black and slimy slopes there peep
All monstrous Saurian growths that run or fly or creep;
And, in and out the holes and caverns clogged with mud,
Crawl through their giant ferns to suck each other’s blood.
I see them battling there in fog and oozy water,
Symbols of savage lust, deformity, and slaughter.
FIFTH SPIRIT.
I see an orb above that spins with rapid motion,
Vaster and raster growing –
Belted with sulphurous clouds; and through the rents an ocean
Boiling and plunging up on a crust of fiery shore.
And now I hear far off the elemental roar,
And the red fire-winds blowing:
A low, dull, steady moan a million miles away,
Of whirling hurricanes that rage all night, all day.
No life of man or beast, were life engendered there,
Could bide those flaming winds, that white metallic glare.
SIXTH SPIRIT.
But yonder, studded round with lamps of moonlight tender,
And arched from pole to pole with rings of rainbow splendor,
A world rolls far apart; as though in haughty scorning
Of all the alien light of his diminished morning.
SEVENTH AND EIGHTH SPIRITS.
Cold, cold and dark – and farther still
We dimly see the icy spheres
Like spectre worlds, who yet fulfil,
Through slow dull centuries of years,
Their circuit round the distant sun who winds them at his will.
CHORUS.
Round and round one central orb
The wheeling planets move,
And some reflect and some absorb
The floods of light and love.
The rolling globe of molten stones,
The spinning watery waste,
The forests whirled through tropic zones
By circling moons embraced –
We watch their element strife;
We wait, that we may see
Some record of their inner life,
Where all is mystery.
A pause. The Spirits approach the Earth. The Sun rises over the Continent of Asia.
SECOND SPIRIT.
Look, brothers, look! The quivering sunrise tinges
Our nearest orb of Earth. The forest fringes
Redden with joy; and all about the sun,
That gilds the boundless east, the cloud-banks dun
Flame into gold; and with a crimson kiss
Wake the green world to beauty and to bliss.
See how she glows with sweet responsive smile!
Hark, how the waves of air lap round her!
As though she were some green, embowered isle,
And the fond ocean had just found her,
In Time’s primeval morn of unrecorded calms
Hidden away with all her lilies and her palms;
And flattering at her feet, had smoothed his angry mane,
And moving round her kissed her o’er and o’er again.
THIRD SPIRIT.
And now, behold, our wings are rapid as our thought;
And nearer yet have brought
Our feet, until we hover above the Asian lands
Beyond the desert sands.
There, girt about by mountain peaks that cleave the skies,
A blooming valley lies:
A pathway, sloping down from visionary heights
Through shades and dappled lights,
Lost in a garden widerness of tropic trees
And flowers and birds and bees.
Far off I smell the rose, the amaranth, the spice,
The breath of Paradise.
Far off I hear the singing through hidden groves and vales
Of Eden’s nightingales;
And, sliding down through pines and moss and rocky walls,
The murmuring waterfalls.
And lo, two radiant forms that seem akin to us,
Walk, calm and beauteous,
Crowed with the light of thought and mutual love, whose blisses
Are sealed with rapturous kisses.
Ah, beautiful green Earth! ah, happy, happy pair!
Can there be aught so fair,
O brothers, in yon vast unpeopled worlds afar,
As these bright beings are!
CHORUS OF SPIRITS.
The stars in the heavens are singing
Response to the wonderful story;
Joy, joy to the race that is springing
To cover the earth with its glory!
The race that enfolds in its bosom
A birthright divine and immortal;
As the fruit is enwrapped in the blossom,
As the garden is hid by the portal!
DISTAINT VOICES.
(A change to a minor key.)
Sin and weakness, misery and pain,
Cloud their sunlit birth;
And the sons of Heaven alone remain
Gods unmixed with earth.
Light and darkness are the twins of fate;
Undivided they,
Through all realms that bear a mortal date,
Hold alternate sway.
Through the universe the lords of life
Never at peace can be.
Good and evil in a ceaseless strife
Fight for victory.
THIRD SPIRIT.
I hear in the spaces below
A discord of voices that flow
In muttering tones through the air.
But where are they hidden – where?
There are trailings of gloom through the spaces,
And far-darting cones that eclipse
The splendor of planets whose faces
Are dimmed by their darkening traces,
And frozen by alien lips;
And the dream of a swift-coming change
Foretokens a destiny strange.
And what is yon Shadow that creeps
On the marge of her crystalline deeps?
On the field and the river and grove,
On the borders of hope and of rest;
On the Eden of wedlock and love;
On the labor contentment hath blessed?
That crawls like a serpent of mist
Through the vales and the gardens of peace,
With a blight upon all it hath kissed,
And a shade that shall never decrease?
That maddens the wings of desire,
And saddens the ardors of joy –
Winged like a phantom of fire –
Armed like a fiend to destroy!
SECOND SPIRIT.
Before me there flitted a vision –
A vision of dawn and Creation,
Of faith and of doubt and division,
Of mystical fruit and temptation:
A garden of lilies and roses,
Ah, sweeter than dreams ever fashioned;
Hopes in whose splendor reposes
A love that was pure and impassioned.
But alas for the sons and the daughters
Of man, in the morning of nations!
Alas for their rivers of waters!
Alas for their fruitless oblations!
The curse and the blight and the sentence
Have fallen too swift for repentance.
I see it, I feel it – O brother!
It shadows one half of their garden.
O Earth! O improvident Mother!
Where left’st thou thy angel, thy warden?
Is it theirs, or the guilt of another?
Must they die without hope of a pardon?
What is it they suffer, O brother,
In the red, rosy light of their garden?
THE SPIRITS.
Ye Angels – ye heavenly Powers
Whose wisdom is higher than ours –
From the blight, from the terror defend them –
Help, help! In their Eden befriend them.
THE ANGEL RAPHAEL.
Beyond the imagined limits of such space
As ye can guess, I passed, yet heard your cry.
For ye are brother spirits. And I come,
Swifter than light, to shield you from the dread
Of earth-born shadows, and the ghostly folds
Of seeming evil curtaining round your worlds.
Yet can I bring no amulet to guard
One peaceful breast from sorrow; for yourselves
Are girt about, as I, by that divine,
Exhaustless Love, whose pledge your souls contain.
THE SPIRITS.
Ah, not for ourselves – but our brothers
We plead, in their dawn overglooming,
For the death is not theirs, but anothers.
Help, help! from the doom that is coming;
For they stand all alone and unguided;
No Past with its lesson upholds them;
Their life from their race is divided;
A childhood unconscious enfolds them.
Is it sin – is it death that has shrouded
Their souls, or a taint in their nature?
Is there hope for a future unclouded?
Tell – tell us – angelical teacher!
RAPHAEL.
Yon earth, which claimed your closer vigilance,
And seems so near to you in time and space,
Is far away. Your present is its past.
To spirits, worlds and
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Based on Topics: Love Poems, Man Poems, God Poems, Life Poems, World Poems, Night Poems, Light Poems, Mind Poems, Time Poems, Soul Poems, Joy & Excitement PoemsBased on Keywords: embowered, tinges, enwrapped, deformity, divining, breadths, fervors, interstellar, unimpeded, saurian, bronzing