The Twilight Of Earth

The wonder of the world is o'er:     The magic from the sea is gone:     There is no unimagined shore,     No islet yet to venture on.     The Sacred Hazels' blooms are shed,     The Nuts of Knowledge harvested.     Oh, what is worth this lore of age     If time shall never bring us back     Our battle with the gods to wage     Reeling along the starry track.     The battle rapture here goes by     In warring upon things that die.     Let be the tale of him whose love     Was sighed between white Deirdre's breasts,     It will not lift the heart above     The sodden clay on which it rests.     Love once had power the gods to bring     All rapt on its wild wandering.     We shiver in the falling dew,     And seek a shelter from the storm:     When man these elder brothers knew     He found the mother nature warm,     A hearth fire blazing through it all,     A home without a circling wall.     We dwindle down beneath the skies,     And from ourselves we pass away:     The paradise of memories     Grows ever fainter day by day.     The shepherd stars have shrunk within,     The world's great night will soon begin.     Will no one, ere it is too late,     Ere fades the last memorial gleam,     Recall for us our earlier state?     For nothing but so vast a dream     That it would scale the steeps of air     Could rouse us from so vast despair.     The power is ours to make or mar     Our fate as on the earliest morn,     The Darkness and the Radiance are     Creatures within the spirit born.     Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might     Forget how we imagined light.     Not yet are fixed the prison bars:     The hidden light the spirit owns     If blown to flame would dim the stars     And they who rule them from their thrones:     And the proud sceptred spirits thence     Would bow to pay us reverence.     Oh, while the glory sinks within     Let us not wait on earth behind,     But follow where it flies, and win     The glow again, and we may find     Beyond the Gateways of the Day     Dominion and ancestral sway.