NIGH r IN WARTIME CITY-WORKERS who know darkness but not
Night. Sunset-dwellers in these Western isles
By Atlantis lost (swallowed by the waves) Out of your bright houses with the blinded window-frames Step carefully, blinking, into darkness out of the light. Out into the splendour of Night!
Behold, cloudless, the starry hosts of the Astronomeri, Nighes invaders in untellable millions Day-submerged, like Atlantis rising or an Army's camp-fires, Panorama untouchable of miraculous worlds Unvisited, incomprehensible progeny of our sight 0 Spiritual Night Smile benignly upon us,.Visionary Ones; While our scientists in wonder speculate (Newton, Einstein, Schrodinger and Dirac) Linking star-clustered cobwebs of pallid beams With the legions dancing in the atom, Spectres of invisible Might Spectres! (for is not all our imagining spectral?) Do not let us—owls in the sunshine—forget We ourselves are mere complementary phenomena, Children of the playing fields of Gravitation, All our knowledge the slow infaztevelation In darkness of Light.
Hail Light! unhurried offspring of the unknown
With thy slower sister Sound, married to all men,
Creators of all beauty, whose dwelling is throughout the World, Shall you one day depart from us, vanish unnoticed, As do all lovers, their consummation over, Where then shall live Delight?
In a Silence in which everything is known, In a Unity in which everything is held, In an Absence of deceitful illumination, In an inward, indwelling concentration, In the Peacock spreading in pure darkness
Previous page
