Scirocco

Out of that high pavilion     Where the sick, wind-harassed sun     In the whiteness of the day     Ghostly shone and stole away -     Parchd with the utter thirst     Of unnumbered Libyan sands,     Thou, cloud-gathering spirit, burst     Out of arid Africa     To the tideless sea, and smote     On our pale, moon-coold lands     The hot breath of a lion's throat.     And that furnace-heated breath     Blew into my placid dreams     The heart of fire from whence it came:     Haunt of beauty and of death     Where the forest breaks in flame     Of flaunting blossom, where the flood     Of life pulses hot and stark,     Where a wing'd death breeds in mud     And tumult of tree-shadowed streams -     Black waters, desolately hurled     Through the uttermost, lost, dark,     Secret places of the world.     There, O swift and terrible     Being, wast thou born; and thence,     Like a demon loosed from hell,     Stripped with rending wings the dense     Echoing forests, till their bowed     Plumes of trees like tattered cloud     Were toss'd and torn, and cried aloud     As the wood were rack'd with pain:     Thence thou freed'st thy wings, and soon     From the moaning, stricken plain     In whorled eagle-soarings rose     To melt the sun-defeating snows     Of the Mountains of the Moon,     To dull their glaciers with fierce breath,     To slip the avalanches' rein,     To set the laughing torrents free     On the tented desert beneath,     Where men of thirst must wither and die     While the vultures stare in the sun's eye;     Where slowly sifting sands are strown     On broken cities, whose bleaching bones     Whiten in moonlight stone on stone.     Over their pitiful dust thy blast     Passed in columns of whirling sand,     Leapt the desert and swept the strand     Of the cool and quiet sea,     Gathering mighty shapes, and proud     Phantoms of monstrous, wave-born cloud,     And northward drove this panoply     Till the sky seemed charging on the land....     Yet, in that plumd helm, the most     Of thy hot power was cooled or lost,     So that it came to me at length,     Faint and tepid and shorn of strength,     To shiver an olive-grove that heaves     A myriad moonlight-coloured leaves,     And in the stone-pine's dome set free     A murmur of the middle sea:     A puff of warm air in the night     So spent by its impetuous flight     It scarce invades my pillar'd closes, -     To waft their fragrance from the sweet     Buds of my lemon-coloured roses     Or strew blown petals at my feet:     To kiss my cheek with a warm sigh     And in the tired darkness die.