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Francis Thompson - Ode To The Setting Sun
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Alpha and Omega, sadness and mirth,
  The springing music, and its wasting breath--
The fairest things in life are Death and Birth,
  And of these two the fairer thing is Death.
Mystical twins of Time inseparable,
  The younger hath the holier array,
    And hath the awfuller sway:
  It is the falling star that trails the light,
  It is the breaking wave that hath the might,
The passing shower that rainbows maniple.
  Is it not so, O thou down-stricken Day,
That draw`st thy splendours round thee in thy fall?
High was thine Eastern pomp inaugural;
But thou dost set in statelier pageantry,
  Lauded with tumults of a firmament:
Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky,
  Thy cymbals clang to fire the Occident,
Thou dost thy dying so triumphally:
I SEE the crimson blaring of thy shawms!
    Why do those lucent palms
Strew thy feet`s failing thicklier than their might,
Who dost but hood thy glorious eyes with night,
And vex the heels of all the yesterdays?
    Lo! this loud, lackeying praise
Will stay behind to greet the usurping moon,
  When they have cloud-barred over thee the West.
Oh, shake the bright dust from thy parting shoon!
  The earth not paeans thee, nor serves thy hest,
Be godded not by Heaven! avert thy face,
    And leave to blank disgrace
The oblivious world! unsceptre thee of state and place!

Ha! but bethink thee what thou gazedst on,
  Ere yet the snake Decay had venomed tooth;
The name thou bar`st in those vast seasons gone--
    Candid Hyperion,
  Clad in the light of thine immortal youth!
    Ere Dionysus bled thy vines,
Or Artemis drave her clamours through the wood,
    Thou saw`st how once against Olympus` height
      The brawny Titans stood,
And shook the gods` world `bout their ears, and how
Enceladus (whom Etna cumbers now)
  Shouldered me Pelion with its swinging pines,
The river unrecked, that did its broken flood
Spurt on his back:  before the mountainous shock
      The rank-ed gods dislock,
Scared to their skies; wide o`er rout-trampled night
Flew spurned the pebbled stars:  those splendours then
  Had tempested on earth, star upon star
  Mounded in ruin, if a longer war
Had quaked Olympus and cold-fearing men.
      Then did the ample marge
      And circuit of thy targe
    Sullenly redden all the vaward fight,
      Above the blusterous clash
      Wheeled thy swung falchion`s flash
    And hewed their forces into splintered flight.

Yet ere Olympus thou wast, and a god!
    Though we deny thy nod,
We cannot spoil thee of thy divinity.
    What know we elder than thee?
When thou didst, bursting from the great void`s husk,
Leap like a lion on the throat o` the dusk;
    When the angels rose-chapleted
      Sang each to other,
    The vaulted blaze overhead
    Of their vast pinions spread,
      Hailing thee brother;
How chaos rolled back from the wonder,
And the First Morn knelt down to thy visage of thunder!
    Thou didst draw to thy side
    Thy young Auroral bride,
  And lift her veil of night and mystery;
    Tellus with baby hands
    Shook off her swaddling-bands,
  And from the unswath-ed vapours laughed to thee.

Thou twi-form deity, nurse at once and sire!
  Thou genitor that all things nourishest!
  The earth was suckled at thy shining breast,
And in her veins is quick thy milky fire.
Who scarfed her with the morning? and who set
Upon her brow the day-fall`s carcanet?
    Who queened her front with the enrondured moon?
    Who dug night`s jewels from their vaulty mine
      To dower her, past an eastern wizard`s dreams,
  When hovering on him through his haschish-swoon,
    All the rained gems of the old Tartarian line
Shiver in lustrous throbbings of tinged flame?
      Whereof a moiety in the Paolis` seams
      Statelily builded their Venetian name.
        Thou hast enwoof-ed her
        An empress of the air,
And all her births are propertied by thee:
        Her teeming centuries
        Drew being from thine eyes:
Thou fatt`st the marrow of all quality.

Who lit the furnace of the mammoth`s heart?
  Who shagged him like Pilatus` ribb-ed flanks?
        Who raised the columned ranks
Of that old pre-diluvian forestry,
Which like a continent torn oppressed the sea,
  When the ancient heavens did in rains depart,
      While the high-danc-ed whirls
Of the tossed scud made hiss thy drench-ed curls?
      Thou rear`dst the enormous brood;
      Who hast with life imbued
    The lion maned in tawny majesty,
      The tiger velvet-barred,
      The stealthy-stepping pard,
    And the lithe panther`s flexuous symmetry.

How came the entomb-ed tree a light-bearer,
      Though sunk in lightless lair?
      Friend of the forgers of earth,
    Mate of the earthquake and thunders volcanic,
    Clasped in the arms of the forces Titanic
      Which rock like a cradle the girth
        Of the ether-hung world;
    Swart son of the swarthy mine,
    When flame on the breath of his nostrils feeds
      How is his countenance half-divine,
      Like thee in thy sanguine weeds?
    Thou gavest him his light,
    Though sepultured in night
  Beneath the dead bones of a perished world;
    Over his prostrate form
    Though cold, and heat, and storm,
  The mountainous wrack of a creation hurled.
    Who made the splendid rose
    Saturate with purple glows;
Cupped to the marge with beauty; a perfume-press
    Whence the wind vintages
Gushes of warm-ed fragrance richer far
  Than all the flavorous ooze of Cyprus` vats?
Lo, in yon gale which waves her green cymar,
    With dusky cheeks burnt red
    She sways her heavy head,
Drunk with the must of her own odorousness;
  While in a moted trouble the vexed gnats
Maze, and vibrate, and tease the noontide hush.
  Who girt dissolv-ed lightnings in the grape?
Summered the opal with an Irised flush?
  Is it not thou that dost the tulip drape,
    And huest the daffodilly,
    Yet who hast snowed the lily,
And her frail sister, whom the waters name,
  Dost vestal-vesture `mid the blaze of June,
  Cold as the new-sprung girlhood of the moon
Ere Autumn`s kiss sultry her cheek with flame?
    Thou sway`st thy sceptred beam
    O`er all delight and dream,
  Beauty is beautiful but in thy glance:
    And like a jocund maid
    In garland-flowers arrayed,
  Before thy ark Earth keeps her sacred dance.

And now, O shaken from thine antique throne,
  And sunken from thy coerule empery,
Now that the red glare of thy fall is blown
  In smoke and flame about the windy sky,
Where are the wailing voices that should meet
  From hill, stream, grove, and all of mortal shape
Who tread thy gifts, in vineyards as stray feet
  Pulp the globed weight of juiced Iberia`s grape?
    Where is the threne o` the sea?
    And why not dirges thee
The wind, that sings to himself as he makes stride
  Lonely and terrible on the Andean height?
    Where is the Naiad `mid her sworded sedge?
  The Nymph wan-glimmering by her wan fount`s verge?
The Dryad at timid gaze by the wood-side?
    The Oread jutting light
  On one up-strain-ed sole from the rock-ledge?
    The Nereid tip-toe on the scud o` the surge,
With whistling tresses dank athwart her face,
And all her figure poised in lithe Circean grace?
    Why withers their lament?
    Their tresses tear-besprent,
  Have they sighed hence with trailing garment-gem?
    O sweet, O sad, O fair!
    I catch your flying hair,
  Draw your eyes down to me, and dream on them!

A space, and they fleet from me.  Must ye fade--
O old, essential candours, ye who made
  The earth a living and a radiant thing--
    And leave her corpse in our strained, cheated arms?
    Lo ever thus, when Song with chorded charms
Draws from dull death his lost Eurydice,
  Lo ever thus, even at consummating,
  Even in the swooning minute that claims her his,
  Even as he trembles to the impassioned kiss
  Of reincarnate Beauty, his control
  Clasps the cold body, and foregoes the soul!
    Whatso looks lovelily
Is but the rainbow on life`s weeping rain.
Why have we longings of immortal pain,
And all we long for mortal?  Woe is me,
And all our chants but chaplet some decay,
As mine this vanishing--nay, vanished Day.
The low sky-line dusks to a leaden hue,
  No rift disturbs the heavy shade and chill,
Save one, where the charred firmament lets through
  The scorching dazzle of Heaven; `gainst which the hill,
    Out-flattened sombrely,
Stands black as life against eternity.
    Against eternity?
    A rifting light in me
  Burns through the leaden broodings of the mind:
    O bless-ed Sun, thy state
    Uprisen or derogate
  Dafts me no more with doubt; I seek and find.

    If with exultant tread
      Thou foot the Eastern sea,
      Or like a golden bee
    Sting the West to angry red,
    Thou dost image, thou dost follow
      That King-Maker of Creation,
    Who, ere Hellas hailed Apollo,
      Gave thee, angel-god, thy station;
Thou art of Him a type memorial.
  Like Him thou hang`st in dreadful pomp of blood
      Upon thy Western rood;
  And His stained brow did veil like thine to night,
      Yet lift once more Its light,
And, risen, again departed from our ball,
But when It set on earth arose in Heaven.
Thus hath He unto death His beauty given:
And so of all which form inheriteth
    The fall doth pass the rise in worth;
For birth hath in itself the germ of death,
  But death hath in itself the germ of birth.
It is the falling acorn buds the tree,
The falling rain that bears the greenery,
  The fern-plants moulder when the ferns arise.
  For there is nothing lives but something dies,
And there is nothing dies but something lives.
      Till skies be fugitives,
Till Time, the hidden root of change, updries,
Are Birth and Death inseparable on earth;
For they are twain yet one, and Death is Birth.
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