I see it all, I hear it all, and lie Under my swaying poplars, and the sky Is fretted with frail leaves. The mortal dream Is in my heart: I hear the night-hawk’s scream Shatter the silver silences, I hear The owl’s clear tremolo rise over-clear-- The mouse’s blood along his veins has made His love-note lovelier and the night afraid Of beauty’s dreadful secret--and I know Soft shapes of stealth that in the darkness go, Of furry lusts and gnawing hungers, small Twittering things obscene, that flit or crawl In furtive secrecy, vague mouths and blurred Of the night creature or nocturnal bird-- Amorphous moth and bat-wing--and the earth, With all her burrows, nooks and nests of birth Crowded, and wreck of many a perished might, By the ebbed waters of Life’s fierce delight Washed up on shores of silence--spoiled and spurned Altars where once the sacred fire burned-- Forms flowing back into the Formlessness; In a supreme embrace, a long caress, Mixing their bodies with the mother mould-- And all the heaven of stars around me rolled, Whose brooding eyes have stared so many an age Upon this theatre of lust and rage, Of death and adoration. And a breeze Rustles the branches of the poplar-trees. Dear Spark, that shinest in the solitude! One Consciousness, that in the brotherhood Of all earth’s living creatures movest on The shaken ramparts of Oblivion-- Whose starry cry, across the darkness hurled, Makes music in the silence of the world! Life, whose sole splendor in red slaughter spills The blood of its own breast; in many wills Wars on the one Will; and in wrath or dread Feeds on itself and, on itself being fed, Shines forth in song and color; gilds the dress Of the green-fly; and pours its loveliness In rapture on the earth; in theatres Of crowded congregation sits--nor stirs-- Watching itself, itself the spectacle; And builds the swallow’s breast, and shapes the shell And all these mansions of its thought that are Between the morning and the evening-star, On earth, in heaven, or in the glimmering caves And grottoes of the world below the waves-- Butchers the ox, and, gladdened by his meat, In the young mother’s downward smile is sweet; Or, sated on his body, walks abroad In symphonies, and poems, and prayers to God; Sins, and has conscience and, repenting, sins; And in the lowly patient spider spins Its fragile web; and in these words of mine Flings out its groping utterance, line by line, Across the intangible abyss of thought-- With infinite passion, infinite patience wrought-- Dread Loveliness! Be strong in me, be strong, To utter forth your meaning in my song! THE LION-HOUSE Always the heavy air, The dreadful cage, the low Murmur of voices, where Some Force goes to and fro In an immense despair!