Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/108

98 Ghastly, fantastic, elongate, macabre;

Spectral they moved, like monsters in sea-depths,

Eye-witchcraft; dim his eerie sight beheld,

Midmost a stagnant pool that barred his way,

A fringe of rushes round a phantom isle;

Silence engirt it, and a dreadful calm.

Afar he heard the inland waters beat

The desert strand,—a fall, and then a roar

Of grinding pebbles under the hoarse wave;

And on him swept the mystery of his birth,

That fused his being with the visible scene,

And made his senses voices of the soul.

There, standing on the edges of the world,

He seemed to hear the ceaseless surge of thought

Breaking on nature, and himself was drawn

In the dark undertow down unknown deeps,

And aye in him the climbing thought again

Made up the steeps of life in breaking waves,—

And, like an echo, there a spirit stood:

"O fallen star of morning beautiful,—

But sad thy beauty,"—the deep voice began—

"Why comest thou, breath of the living flesh,

From the lost lands of unfulfilled desire

Into the waste and turmoil of this death?

Not of our race, thee other gods protect."

A fire-tongued crescent blazed upon his brow,