Reverie

What ogive gates from gold of Ophir wrought,     What walls of Pariah, whiter than a rose,     What towers of crystal, for the eyes of thought,     Hast builded on far Islands of Repose?     Thy cloudy columns, vast, Corinthian,     Or huge, Ionic, colonnade the heights     Of dreamland, looming o'er the soul's deep seas;     Built melodies of marble, that no man     Has ever reached, except in fancy's flights,     Templing the presence of perpetual ease.     Oft, where o'er plastic frieze and plinths of spar,     In glimmering solitudes of pillared stone,     The twilight blossoms with one violet star,     With thee, O Reverie, I have stood alone,     And there beheld, from out the Mythic Age,     The rosy breasts of Cytherea fair,     Full-cestused, and suggestive of what loves     Immortal rise; and heard the lyric rage     Of sun-burnt Poesy, whose throat breathes bare     O'er leopard skins, fluting among his groves.     Oft, where thy castled peaks and templed vales     Cloud like convulsive sunsets shores that dream,     Myrrh-fragrant, over siren seas whose sails     Gleam white as lilies on a lilied stream,     My soul has dreamed. Or by thy sapphire sea,     In thy arcaded gardens, in the shade     Of breathing sculpture, oft has walked with thought,     And bent, in shadowy attitude, its knee     Before the shrine of Beauty that must fade     And leave no memory of the mind that wrought.     Who hath beheld thy caverns where, in heaps,     The wines of Lethe and Love's witchery,     In seald Amphor a sibyl keeps,     World-old, for ever guarded secretly?     No wine of Xeres or of Syracuse!     No fine Falernian and no vile Sabine!     The stolen fire of a demigod,     Whose bubbled purple goddess feet did bruise     In crusted vats of vintage, where the green     Flames with wild poppies, on the Samian sod.     Oh, for the deep enchantment of one draught!     The reckless ecstasy of classic earth!     With godlike eyes to laugh as gods have laughed     In eyes of mortal brown, a mighty mirth.     Of deity delirious with desire!     To breathe the dropping roses of the shrines,     The splashing wine-libation and the blood,     And all the young priest's dreaming! To inspire     My eager soul with beauty, 'til it shines     An utt'rance of life's loftier brotherhood!     So would I slumber in the old-world shades,     And Poesy should touch me, as some bold     Wild bee a pulpy lily of the glades,     Barbaric-covered with the kernelled gold;     And feel the glory of the Golden Age     Less godly than my purpose, strong to dare     Death with the pure immortal lips of love:     Less lovely than my soul's ideal rage     To mate itself with Music and declare     Itself part meaning of the stars above.