High on the mountain, shrouded in vast trees,
The stillness had the chastity of frost.
I trod the fallen pallors of the moon.
The path was paven stone:
I was not lost,
But followed whither it should lead me
Into the mountain’s midmost secrecies.
Wandering into the mind, sweet, luminous,
Remembrances of the body,—Smell of the woods in the irradiated noonday,
Flushes of foliage,
The ridged horizon opening far and blue,—Came with a breathing of colour, and then
Remote as flames gleam in a dark pane glassed.
Earth had rolled onward into regions new,
And all the darkness at my senses drank,
Aware now, subtly, as of a frontier passed.
On either side the trees unending rose.
No shadowy sound stirred amid all their plumes.
Each seemed a separate and a soaring night,
Black canopies of cold uncounted tombs.
Pilgrims had here fallen on their repose:
Graven with names, their tablets gleamed upright.
And softly as the fallen lightness of a
On the liquid
Of water unrippled, profound, my spirit was
By the crystal silence.
And with me it seemed invisible others went,
Spirits unhistoried, of such dim
As in the dark the tremble of a leaf.
With them I went, and Night was
Of things that are not in the day’s belief,
And made me of those things, like a blind man, wise.
Obscurity at last relented roundA glimmering space: the inmost Shrine appeared.
Before it, motionless as any tree,
Praying, a pilgrim stood.
There was a
Of water in the distance hardly heard:
But most that living man astonished me.
Many stone lanterns made a clustered
As if in a
Cavern of lost and intricate shadows,
The light’s clear vigil;
But the air behind that solitary
Was trembling like a veil of trembling light,
Where from an urn rose endless
That left a ghostly fragrance on the night.
It seemed a spirit sighing to
The touch of what was breathing, human, warm.
Bare-headed, sandalled, still that pilgrim prayed,
Unconscious of all else but his heart’s prayer.
Out of his breast a broken murmur
Came with his frosted breathing on the
Before the shrine in its tree-guarded
Where that great Saint continued in his sleep.
It seemed that from Time’s beginning he had stood
In a hushed vastness,
Solitary, erect, amid the unimagined
Of worlds unnumbered,
Absorbed, secure in his small star of light.
And now that ceaseless, fugitive frail
Appeared to me like shadowy souls in
Woven together into a veil of
That wavered as their little life
And passed for ever into birth or death.
What prayer was his that mingled with the
Of the forgotten sighings of the dead?
I knew not; yet in him I seemed to
Longings that still were patient to
Through Time and Death from lips that once were red.
In that one image all my kind stood there.
Lover of the body, lover of the divine sun,
Of earth’s
Fullness and change and savour of life
Careless of all care,
Me now the Silence for its vessel
And filled from wells unsounded by the mind.
No other need I had, and could not
Than to be wholly to this spell
And dark communion with the spirit that
Vigil and frost and solitariness.
Fragments we are, and none has seen the whole.
Only some moment wins us to
The touch of infinite companionship.
I that had journeyed from so far a
Found at the world’s end the same pilgrim soul,
And the old sorrow, no flight can outstrip.
Now in the midst of the irradiated
Suddenly absent,
While in my ear is the sound of familiar voices,
Light talk and laughter,
My thought has in an instant flown the seas;
A great remoteness occupies my heart;
And there arises on my inward
The shadowy apparition of vast trees.
A pathway opens;
I am stolen apart,
And I ascend a mountain in the night.
