Page 91 of 172 TAMERLANE - Complete Poetical Works

Afar from its proud natural towers

Of rock and forest, on the hills--

The dwindled hills! begirt with bowers

And shouting with a thousand rills.

I spoke to her of power and pride,

But mystically--in such guise

That she might deem it nought beside

The moment's converse; in her eyes

I read, perhaps too carelessly--

A mingled feeling with my own--

The flush on her bright cheek, to me

Seemed to become a queenly throne

Too well that I should let it be

Light in the wilderness alone.

I wrapped myself in grandeur then,

And donned a visionary crown--

Yet it was not that Fantasy

Had thrown her mantle over me--

But that, among the rabble--men,

Lion ambition is chained down--

And crouches to a keeper's hand--

Not so in deserts where the grand--

The wild--the terrible conspire

With their own breath to fan his fire.

Look 'round thee now on Samarcand!--

Is she not queen of Earth? her pride

Above all cities? in her hand

Their destinies? in all beside

Of glory which the world hath known

Stands she not nobly and alone?

Falling--her veriest stepping-stone

Shall form the pedestal of a throne--

And who her sovereign? Timour--he

Whom the astonished people saw

Striding o'er empires haughtily

A diademed outlaw!

O, human love! thou spirit given,

On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!

Which fall'st into the soul like rain

Upon the Siroc-withered plain,

And, failing in thy power to bless,

But leav'st the heart a wilderness!

Idea! which bindest life around

With music of so strange a sound

And beauty of so wild a birth--

Farewell! for I have won the Earth.

When Hope, the eagle that towered, could see

No cliff beyond him in the sky,

His pinions were bent droopingly--

And homeward turned his softened eye.

'Twas sunset: When the sun will part

There comes a sullenness of heart

To him who still would look upon

The glory of the summer sun.

That soul will hate the ev'ning mist

So often lovely, and will list

To the sound of the coming darkness (known

To those whose spirits hearken) as one

Who, in a dream of night, _would_ fly,

But _cannot_, from a danger nigh.

What tho' the moon--tho' the white moon

Shed all the splendor of her noon,

_Her_ smile is chilly--and _her_ beam,

In that time of dreariness, will seem

(So like you gather in your breath)

A portrait taken after death.

And boyhood is a summer sun

Whose waning is the dreariest one--

For all we live to know is known,

And all we seek to keep hath flown--

		"What has a soul differentiates of what doesn't have one, by the fact of being alive." Arist teles