Ode on Imagination

Imagination's eyes Outreach and distance far The vision of the greatest star That measures instantaneously— Enisled therein as in a sea— Its cincture of the system-laden skies. Abysses closed about with night A tribute yield To her retardless sight; And Matter's walls reveal the candent ores Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores. She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield, And through that inner vastness, sphered and dire, Pierces his dreadful heart, whose gurge of fire Heaves outward, riven by Titanic throes, And fills his frame with tide and cataract Of thunder-pulsing, incandescent streams. Her eyes exact From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows In wastes celestial, alien dreams Brought down on wings of spectral beams. Adown the clefts of under-space, She rides, her steed a falling star, To seek, where void and vagueness are, Some mark or certainty of place. Upon their heavenly precipice, The gathered suns shrink back aghast From that interminate abyss, And threat of sightless anarchs vast.

She stands endued With supermundane crown, and vestitures Of emperies that include All underworlds and overworlds of dream— Domains with shadow bound, Cimmerian and profound, And heights of some Himalaya supreme Where moon-transcending light endures. She roams in grey, fantasmal lands, where grow In scarce-discernèd fields and closes blind, Faint blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons; Or wanders all bemused and slow In woods where only nameless echoes go And wraiths of ancient wind: In twilight there she shuns The strident day, while ecstasy and grief Speak only in vague whispers like the leaf.

Upon some supersensual eminence She hears the fragments of a thunder loud, Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense Flame through the walls of hollow cloud. But these she may not wholly grasp With unsupernal clasp. Her eyes inevitably see, 'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things, The movements of Essentiality— Of ageless principles—that alter not To temporal alterings— Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more, And stars no longer hot; Or broken constellations strewn Like coals about the heavenly floor, And rush of night upon the noon Of their lost worlds, unsphered retrievelessly In icy deserts of the sky. From the beginning of the spheres, When systems nebulous out-thrown Drove back the brinks Of nullity with limitary marks, Till end of suns and sunless death of years, To her are known The unevident inseparable links That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks.