The Immortal Question

I wept as I watched the break of dawn,
For between that coming blaze of light
That lifts so gently the haze of night,
Allows the passage of eyeless sight,
All devastation and its wandering storm,
The unknown worm seeks eyeless lawn
To be safe while gods lie maimed
And when the day is so long dying, shamed
In such iniquity, night can dream.

The body's crown is sick when dead
But the servant will not lie
Beneath the sun's rosette-filled sky.
Just when the moon seems yet so nigh
And man so slow, takes to his bed
The needless bread leaves poor unfed
Grey came this concrete explosion
Like pillars of fog, black on the ocean.
Understanding of that could turn sea steam.

The December's winter's iciest peak
Warms the arctic brain like no race can,
Makes life-blood's ice crystals flow undamned,
Burns like coals through the heart of man.
The snow-haired wise mountains there did I seek,
To those whose answers they would not speak;
If not those, how much less the city
Could bandage a mortal man with pity,
Where myriads of lights, not wisdom will gleam.

I travelled down to the world-wide ocean,
Read lines it writes on its shores each day.
So soon it returned to score them away,
Like a child refusing to play,
Coveting its pearls with usual devotion,
Of its lacy, unblosomed emotion:
Her strong-embraced kisses never die,
Unfathomed, unwearied, never dry,
That spurns the too-strong barks by wiping them clean.
The sweetest realms of the wordless poet,
Who dreams by day, rapt in thoughts by night,
Her strong-embraced kisses never die,
Unfathomed, unwearied, never dry,
That spurns the too-strong barks by wiping them clean.
The sweetest realms of the wordless poet,
Who dreams by day, rapt in thoughts by night,
Whose nimble words are untaught, as sight,
Fail on my eyes to shed any light.
He refuses to say, or does not know it;
He knits it but cannot show it.
From Clotho's spindle he draws his yarn
Paints it with what he will, a song or a psalm,
While Lachesis sharpens her scissors keen.

I thought I could ride those star-lit roads,
Which studded the Nile, threw light on the deep,
The wearisome heartsease, its hue cannot sleep
For Pharaoh's tormented counting of sheep.
They built him a temple and whipped him with goods,
For him they carried innumerable loads
To join the circumpolar stars,
Con the unknown and set it in laws
Which cannot be what never has been.

Plato found his Necessity's spindle,
Put stars in their orbits, suns in their order,
Girded it round with a finite border,
Saw Ariel smiling and tried to afford her
Was trapped by the footsteps of Phoebus's kindle
And tried to bail the sea with a thimble.
Copernicus laughed it to scorn
The gurgles of that baby new-born.