Ode to the Abyss

O many-gulfed, unalterable one, Whose deep sustains Far-drifting world and sun, Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee; And thou shalt be When never world remains; When all the suns' triumphant strength and pride Is sunk in voidness absolute, And their majestic music wide In vaster silence rendered mute. And though God's will were night to dusk the blue, And law to cancel and disperse The tangled tissues of the universe, His might were impotent to conquer thee, O indivisible infinity ! Thy darks subdue All light that treads thee down a space, Exulting over thine archetypal deeps. The cycles die, and lo! thy darkness reaps The flame of mightiest stars; In aeon-implicating wars Thou tearest planets from their place; Worlds granite-spined To thine erodents yield Their treasures centrally confined In crypts by continental pillars sealed. What suns and worlds have been thy prey Through unhorizoned reaches of the past! What spheres that now essay Time's undimensioned vast, Shall plunge forgotten to thy gloom at length With life that cried its query of the Night To ears with silence filled ! What worlds unborn shall dare thy strength, Girt by a sun's unwearied might, And dip to darkness when the sun is stilled!

O incontestable Abyss, What light in thine embrace of darkness sleeps— What blaze of a sidereal multitude No peopled world is left to miss ! What motion is at rest within thy deeps— What gyres of planets long become thy food— Worlds unconstrainable That plunged therein to peace Like tempest-worn and crew-forsaken ships; And suns that fell To huge and ultimate eclipse, And from the eternal stances found release ! What sound thy gulfs of silence hold ! Stupendous thunder of the meeting stars And crash of orbits that diverged, With Life's thin song are merged; Thy quietudes enfold Paean and threnody as one, And battle-blare of unremembered wars With festal songs Sung in the Romes of ruined spheres; And music that belongs To undiscoverable younger years With words of yesterday. Ah ! who may stay Thy soundless world-devouring tide ? O thou whose hands pluck out the light of stars, Are worlds but as a destined fruit for thee ? May no sufficient bars Nor marks inveterate abide As shores to baffle thine unbillowing sea ? Still and unstriving now, What plottest thou, Within thy universe-ulterior deeps, Dark as the final lull of suns ? What new advancement of the night On citadels of stars around whose might Thy slow encroachment runs, And crouching silence, thunder-potent, sleeps?