And I kissed the gentle earth. Slowly the shadows crept To the bases of the crags, and I slept.... ’Once, in another life, had I remembered sleep, When tired children creep on to their mother’s knees, And there a dreamless peace more quietly descendeth Than gentle evening endeth or ring-doves fold their wings, Before the nightjar spins or the nightingale begins; When the brooding hedgerow trees where they nest lie awake And breathe so soft they shake not a single shuddering leaf Lest the silence should break. ’Other sleep have I known, Deeper, beyond belief, when straining limbs relax After hot human toil in yellow harvest fields Where the panting earth yields a smell of baked soil, And the dust of dry stubbles blows over the whitening Shocks of lank grain and bundles of flax, And men fling themselves down forgetting their troubles, Unheedful of the song that the landrail weaves along Misty woodlands, or lightning that the pale sky laves Like phosphorescent waves washing summer seas: And, more beautiful than these, that sleep of dazèd wonder When love has torn asunder the veils of the sky And raptured lovers lie faint in each other’s arms Beneath a heaven strewn with myriad starry swarms, Where planets float like lonely gold-flowered nenuphars In pools of the sky; yet, when they wake, they turn From those burning galaxies seeking heaven only In each other’s eyes, and sigh, and sleep again; For while they sleep they seem to forget the world’s pain, And when they wake, they dream.... ’But other sleep was mine As I had drunk of wine with bitter hemlock steep’d, Or sousèd with the heapèd milky poppyheads A drowsy Tartar treads where slow waters sweep Over red river beds, and the air is heavy with sleep. So, when I woke at last, the labouring earth had rolled Eastward under the vast dominion of night, Funereal, forlorn as that unlighted chamber Wherein she first was born, bereft of all starlight, Pale silver of the moon, or the low sun’s amber. ’Then to my queen I prayed, grave Ashtoreth, whose shade Hallows the dim abyss of Heliopolis, Where many an olive maid clashed kissing Syrian cymbals, And silver-sounding timbrels shivered through the vale. O lovely, and O white, under the holy night Is their gleaming wonder, and their brows are pale As the new risen moon, dancing till they swoon In far forests under desolate Lebanon, While the flame of Moloch’s pyre reddens the sea-born cloud That overshadows Tyre; so, when I cried aloud, Behold, a torch of fire leapt on the mountain-side! ’O bright, O beautiful! for never kindlier light Fell on the darkened sight of mortal eyes and dull Since that devoted one, whom gloomy Caucasus In icy silence lonely bound to his cruel shoulders, Brought to benighted men in a hollow fennel-stem Sparks of the torrid vapour that burned behind the bars Of evening, broke dawn’s rose, or smouldered in the stars, Or lit the glowworm’s taper, or wavered over the fen, Or tipped the javelin of the far-ravening levin,