Ode On Imagination

Imagination's eyes         Outreach and distance far         The vision of the greatest star         That measures instantaneously -         Enisled therein as in a sea -         Its cincture of the system-laden skies.         Abysses closed about with night         A tribute yield         To her retardless sight;         And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores         Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores.         She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield,         And through the obstruction of his vestment dire,         Pierces the centermost sublimity         Of his terrific heart, whose gurge of fire         Heaves upward like a monstrous sea,         And inly riven by Titanic throes,         Fills all his frame with outward cataract         Of separate and immingling torrent streams.         Her eyes exact         From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows         In wastes celestial, alien dreams         Brought down on wings of fleetest beams.         Adown the clefts of under-space         She rides, her steed a falling star,         To seek, where void and vagueness are,         Some mark or certainty of place.         Upon their heavenly precipice         The gathered suns shrink back aghast         From that interminate abyss,         And threat of sightless anarchs vast.         She stands endued         With supermundane crown, and vestitures         Of emperies that include         All under-worlds and over-worlds of dream -         Kingdoms o'ercast, and eminent heights extreme         Where moon-transcending light endures.         She wanders in fantastic lands, where grow         In scarce-discernd fields and closes blind,         Vague blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons;         Or roves in forests where all sound is low:         Each voice that shuns         The noiseful day, and enters there to find         Twilight that naught exalts nor grieves,         Is quickly tuned to the susurrous leaves.         Upon some supersensual eminence         She hears the fragments of a thunder loud,         Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense         Flame through the walls of hollow cloud.         But these she may not wholly grasp         With incomplete terrestrial clasp.         Her eyes inevitably see,         'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things,         The movements of Essentiality -         Of ageless principles - that alter not         To temporal alterings -         Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more.         And stars no longer hot;         Or broken constellations strewn         Like coals about the heavenly floor,         And rush of night upon the noon         Of their lost worlds, unsphered restorelessly         In icy deserts of the sky.         From the beginning of the spheres,         When systems nebulous out-thrown         Drove back the brinks         Of nullity with limitary marks,         Till end of suns, and sunless death of years,         To her are known         The unevident inseparable links         That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks.