But higher than stars and deeper than the waves Of day and night and morrow [_Ant._ 8. That roll for all time, sorrow Keeps ageless watch over perpetual graves. 300 From dawn to morning of the soul in flower, Through toils and dreams and visions, to that hour When all the deeps were opened, and one doom Took two sweet lives to embrace them and entomb, The strong song plies its wing That makes the darkness ring And the deep light reverberate sound as deep; Song soft as flowers or grass more soft than sleep, Song bright as heaven above the mounting bird, Song like a God's tears heard 310 Falling, fulfilled of life and death and light, And all the stars and all the shadow of night.
Till, when its flight hath past [_Ep._ 8. Time's loftiest mark and last, The goal where good kills evil with a kiss, And Darkness in God's sight Grows as his brother Light, And heaven and hell one heart whence all the abyss Throbs with love's music; from his trance Love waking leads it home to her who stayed in France. 320
But now from all the world-old winds of the air [_Str._ 9. One blast of record rings As from time's hidden springs With roar of rushing wings and fires that bear Toward north and south sonorous, east and west, Forth of the dark wherein its records rest, The story told of the ages, writ nor sung By man's hand ever nor by mortal tongue Till, godlike with desire, One tongue of man took fire, 330 One hand laid hold upon the lightning, one Rose up to bear time witness what the sun Had seen, and what the moon and stars of night Beholding lost not light: From dawn to dusk what ways man wandering trod Even through the twilight of the gods to God.
From dawn of man and woman twain and one [_Ant._ 9. When the earliest dews impearled The front of all the world Ringed with aurorean aureole of the sun, 340 To days that saw Christ's tears and hallowing breath Put life for love's sake in the lips of death, And years as waves whose brine was fire, whose foam Blood, and the ravage of Neronian Rome; And the eastern crescent's horn Mightier awhile than morn; And knights whose lives were flights of eagles' wings, And lives like snakes' lives of engendering kings; And all the ravin of all the swords that reap Lives cast as sheaves on heap 350 From all the billowing harvest-fields of fight; And sounds of love-songs lovelier than the light.