POETRY.
TERMINOLOGY.
TREES have been named, and brutes with shining skins
And in pure darkness many a planet spins No living eyes have seen, yet men say " There Orion's gathering in his massy hair."
New stars will burn when all our lights are gone.
Our world moves slower and our Sun grows wan, Lighting pale girls who crowd the city's edge—
Frail flowers that cannot pierce Time's thick ranked sedge.
So in the cold faint mirror of the mind These syllables beckon the firm shapes behind, Though Ecstasy, that lofty unicorn, Starts at the bidding of no common horn ; But lingers ghostly in mysterious moods, A milky angel hid in flowering woods.
Except a strangeness from the nameless comes We shrouded lie within sepulchral homes.
Speech is most precious when the words we use Leap to an end the speaker did not choose, As sometimes leopard from the accustomed haze Breaks, and the beast moves down his leafy ways ; Or one unheedingly may call up whales Smashing the city with their tails.
These are but emanations out of Sense, Intangible stuff, vortices in the dense And universal stillness, wherein birds Lie folded that not yet have winged from words, And other novel qualities that be No less substantial than our He and She ; Departments still unopened, stores of Worth, For mystery is commonplace when Earth Moves through symbolical forests. But the pure Intractable substance is not thus obscure, And in clear forms the mind may crystallize
The word-cloaked phantoms that delude our eyes—
By means of passions, ecstasies, deceits Of sense and reason and the brutish heats.
Then the familiar trees and fair-named flowers Shut in the four-fold stuff of space and hours, The curious elephants, like women grown Too gentle in a habit not their own, And all fierce lives subdued to what they seem, Shed their coarse husks and naked in Time's stream Stand up unsullied, out of the Sun's beam.
EDGELL EICKWORD.
(This poem is discussed in an article on page 1011.)
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