Poems (Whitney)/Sonnets—night

by Anne Whitney

SONNETS.

 

NIGHT.

I.

O calmly, lovingly, Night, vast and deep,
Bend round the breathing world! Thou cool-browed wife
Of fiery Day—he, stirrer of old strife,
Thou, soother, mother; in whose heart we keep
A hiding-place to dream, to hope, to weep!
Who still exhalest in the purple sky,
The old star-bloom of immortality,
Wreathing our momentariness and- sleep
With dignity so sweet and sovereign!
Happy the earth to kiss thy broidered hem!
Her weak and flagging aspirations take
New pinions in thy shadows; thou dost make
Love deeper bliss, and even care and pain
Are great and worthy, since thou touchest them,

II.

Thou seem'st to solve the eternal unity
That holds us all. How far, and dim, and deep,
Bathed in the separate sanctity of sleep—
Lost in thy wide forgetting do we lie!
O, lest that dim abyss, where Memory
Beats her disabled wing, and hope is not,
Point to yet wilder deeps, unearth our thought
In thy far glances! Through the serene sky,
When Day from the impurpled hills furls up,
And heaven's white limits fail, the Infinite,
Long crushed within, breathes forth its mystic pain;
From vast of height, and depth, and silence, stoop,
And lift with mystic faith its brow again,—
Call unto peace the eternal child, dear Night!

III.

Darkness surrounds me with its phantom hosts,
Till silence is enchanted speech. I feel
Those half-spent airs that through the laurel reel,
And Night's loud heart-beats in the tropic coasts,—
And, soaring amid everlasting frosts,
To super-sensual rest, as it might outweigh
A whole world's strife, o'er me gaunt Himaleh
Droops his broad wing of calm.—Those peaks, ghosts
Outstaring Time, through darkness glimmering!
No rush of pinion there, nor bubbling low—
But death, and silence past imagining;—
Only, day in and out, with endless swing,
Their aged shadows move, and picture slow
One on another's unrelenting snow.

IV.

O high-born souls, such as God sends to mould
His ages in—and you too, who have known
The pang of strife, and are at last at one
With nature so,—yea, all who have made bold
Our timid dreams, and proffered to the hold
A certain joy—come mingle in life's cope
Star-fields of verity and stable hope,
With these swift meteors and illusions old!
I sent this summons through the deeps of june,
When life surged up so warm and affluent,
It wrapt the very whiteness of the moon;—
No wonder many came—they came and went—
And thou, who sleep'st half sad and wak'st with pain,
Thou camest too and dost alone remain.

V.

So reed-like fragile, in the world's whirl nought,
Beggared in earthly hope, alone and. bare,—
Heart pierced, wings clipped, feet bound, but grandly there,
Ay and with odds 'gainst Fate, thou standest, fraught
With courage to know all!—Thus is thy lot
Worlds deep beneath thee.—Lovest thou that keen air?
Thou ask'st not hope, nor may the falsely fair
Approach thy clear integrity of thought.
Such power, what shall we call it? For this time,
Not love, nor yet.faith; but Eternity
Dilating the mean Day,—the spirit, free
And self-reliant, from its purer clime
O'erruling earth, by spirit-law sublime—
God cleaving for thee the remorseless sea.

VI.

Of better fortune coming, then, talk not,
Thou teachest, and think not:—nay, rather dare
The utmost of the world's ill strength, despair.
Take up with courage the unlovely lot,
And it shall grow in thy familiar thought
To beauty.—Dumb sorrows that the life-strings wear,
And stings—the points of broken trust, and care,
And those hot, random arrows, whose keen shot
Must find thine or another heart, shall all
Be rounded in the sweet and ample sky
Of the enfranchised soul. Eternity
Shall come home to the hour.—Thou didst not call
Light, light—heaven, heaven—till now, when not a thrall,
But king thou art—yea, free, forever free.

VII.

In the still hours, a stiller strength was born
Deep in my heart.—It was no selfish dream,
Nor even hope, with far and tender beam,
To make me for the moment less forlorn:
Nor was it child of will, before the morn
To dream itself away. With life dismayed,
God help me, O God help me!—so I prayed;—
A simple prayer, but winning swift return;
A hand, that raised all gently from the dust,
And led me childlike on, beyond the strife
Of vulgar aims, past anguish and distrust,
And the pale warders of our daily life,
To where God binds above our harvest sun,
All fragmentary being in his one.

VIII.

Stoop low, dear Night, a little star-breeze wakes
The solemn pines.—Child-love doth come and pass,
And when 'tis gone, how beautiful it was
We know. "Thou art like this dear Night, that shakes
Her long hair down, and sits star-throned in lakes
And loving seas," he said—forgive the boy!
"And you are gold-tressed Day, the sun-flower's joy,
Each each pursues—but neither overtakes."
"O dull astronomer, do not these two
Mingle at dawn and even with lovely grace,
Till one for joy dies in the long embrace?"
Experimental science is sole true;
And like those twilights 'mid the arctic snows,
The dusk and fair blent sweet on cheeks and brows.

IX.

O night, a terrible dismay still lurks
In thy close caves. Is there another grief
Than mine upon my soul, or spectral leaf
In the great record of the years, where works,
Not dreams, find place—a task declined
Which the wise heavens appointed for my own
Nay, or a haunting memory to strike down
The future's open hand;—then, down the wind
With sadly human eyes, but fanged like wolves,
The pale Erinnyes sweep. O happy, then,
If I with night-long prayer may win again
Lost faith—faith in Eternity that solves
Time's stoniest spectres—faith in the broad
Serenity of things—yes, faith in the good God!

X.

When my friend went, half-stunned, I thought,
Great God, what then has fallen from me? Power to feel
The sun, after the three days' storm—to kneel
Before the sacred presence in the wood,
Or by the throbbing sea—to shun the brood
Of slave-besetting ills? But more, more went.
I did not know, the fearful bow once bent,
What arrows it could send:—still, all is good;
What am I, God, to say, spare this and this?
The rain-drop moulds a world. Turning, I knew
Thy pulse in one still, patient love, that drew
Me sweetly upward ever, like a kiss;
Like him, who, sinking in his lonely hour,
Found heaven within the desert's single flower.

XI.

Within my life another life runs deep,
To which, at blessed seasons, open wide
Silent, mysterious portals. There reside
These shapes, that cautiously about me creep,
This iron mask of birth, and death, and sleep,
Familiar as the day and open-eyed;
And there, broods endless calm. And though it glide
Ofttimes beyond my sight, and though I keep
Its voice no more, I know the current flows
Pulsing to far-off harmonies, and light
With most unearthly heavens. The world but throws
A passing spell thereon—as winter, bright,
Pale feudatory of the arctic Night,
Swathes with white silence all these murmurous boughs.

XII.

Yet are there sunbeams, though the kingly sun
Reveal not his full eye; yet flowers, to bear
Mute witness of the Heart that keeps the year,
Through all its wintry chill; and I have won,
Where was no face nor voice, a glance, a tone,
A spirit, call it, that all shapes doth wear,
And brings me knowledge which I scarcely dare
Call mine. Now, out of grief it sings; anon,
It calls me in another's deed or word.
Capricious is the sprite, and now will herd
With common things, now wing me wind-warm cheer
From far-off times and climates happier,
And when from distant fields I call the bird,
A quiet chirp proclaims it nested here.

XIII.

I know this spirit bridges unknown space
And half-forgotten centuries, that I
May know I am of royal family,
And live to my high birth. The marble face
Of Destiny grows fluent, as I trace
These arteries of broad being. I can wait
More years than earth allots me, for my state
Is not of time: nor binds me any place,
Since on and on the mazy current tends,
That takes my little thread, a breath might sever,
To mingle it with universal ends;—
And tho' I fail and fall, yet am I still
Most strong; since every high, tho' balked endeavor,
God intertwines with his eternal will.

XIV.

Alas! and yesternight I woke in terror,
Crying, Great God, what awful shadows press
Around us from this dreary nothingness
Of death, and life's old, caverned glooms of error!
Are we immortal, Father, are we dearer
To thee than common dust? "Thou art but one
Of this dense throng, through time still hast'ning on;
Thy blood with theirs is warm," my good Familiar
Said softly unto me,—"how canst thou slake
Thy thirst when their lips parch, or rightly see
With twilight misting round thee? Dearest, wake!
Thy brethren are not saved except in thee;
Nor thou, save in their health, their joy, their sight,
Hast any lasting peace, or heavenly light."

XV.

O mankind's God! most silent and most lowly
Is wisdom's entrance to our hearts; with less
Of conscious power, than self-forgetfulness
And an enduring patience! Though most slowly,
Thou winn'st us by such lovely paths to know thee,
And the immortal life that from thee flows.
But if thy mild lure fail, come untold woes,
Doubt, pain, and learning's poor, convicted folly,
To make self bitter, and compel us forth.
We live not in a part; our prophecies
Are infant wailings—wailing of the earth!
Only the ocean matches the great skies—
Only the infinite of love and ruth
Receives the living infinite of truth.