Waking

Darkness had stretched its colour,     Deep blue across the pane:     No cloud to make night duller,     No moon with its tarnish stain;     But only here and there a star,     One sharp point of frosty fire,     Hanging infinitely far     In mockery of our life and death     And all our small desire.     Now in this hour of waking     From under brows of stone,     A new pale day is breaking     And the deep night is gone.     Sordid now, and mean and small     The daylight world is seen again,     With only the veils of mist that fall     Deaf and muffling over all     To hide its ugliness and pain.     But to-day this dawn of meanness     Shines in my eyes, as when     The new world's brightness and cleanness     Broke on the first of men.     For the light that shows the huddled things     Of this close-pressing earth,     Shines also on your face and brings     All its dear beauty back to me     In a new miracle of birth.     I see you asleep and unpassioned,     White-faced in the dusk of your hair--     Your beauty so fleetingly fashioned     That it filled me once with despair     To look on its exquisite transience     And think that our love and thought and laughter     Puff out with the death of our flickering sense,     While we pass ever on and away     Towards some blank hereafter.     But now I am happy, knowing     That swift time is our friend,     And that our love's passionate glowing,     Though it turn ash in the end,     Is a rose of fire that must blossom its way     Through temporal stuff, nor else could be     More than a nothing. Into day     The boundless spaces of night contract     And in your opening eyes I see     Night born in day, in time eternity.