I could not sleep for thinking of the sky, The unending sky, with all its million suns Which turn their planets everlastingly In nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs. If I could sail that nothing, I should cross Silence and emptiness with dark stars passing; Then, in the darkness, see a point of gloss Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing, And rage into a sun with wandering planets, And drop behind; and then, as I proceed, See his last light upon his last moon’s granites Die to a dark that would be night indeed: Night where my soul might sail a million years In nothing, not even Death, not even tears. How did the nothing come, how did these fires, These million-leagues of fires, first toss their hair, Licking the moons from heaven in their ires, Flinging them forth for them to wander there? What was the Mind? Was it a mind which thought? Or chance? or law? or conscious law? or power? Or a vast balance by vast clashes wrought? Or Time at trial with Matter for an hour? Or is it all a body where the cells Are living things supporting something strange, Whose mighty heart the singing planet swells As it shoulders nothing in unending change? Is this green earth of many-peopled pain Part of a life, a cell within a brain? It may be so; but let the unknown be. We, on this earth, are servants of the sun: Out of the sun comes all the quick in me, His golden touch is life to everyone. His power it is that makes us spin through space; His youth is April and his manhood bread; Beauty is but a looking on his face; He clears the mind, he makes the roses red. What he may be, who knows? But we are his; We roll through nothing round him, year by year, The withering leaves upon a tree which is, Each with his greed, his little power, his fear, What we may be, who knows? But every one Is dust on dust a servant of the sun. What is this life which uses living cells It knows not how nor why, for no known end, This soul of man upon whose fragile shells Of blood and brain his very powers depend? Pour out its little blood or touch its brain, The thing is helpless, gone, no longer known; The carrion cells are never man again, No hand relights the little candle blown. It comes not from Without, but from the sperm Fed in the womb; it is a man-made thing That takes from man its power to live a term, Served by live cells of which it is the King. Can it be blood and brain? It is most great. Through blood and brain alone it wrestles Fate.