Numbers

Trefoil and Quatrefoil!

What shaped those destinied small silent

Or numbered them under the soil?

I lift my dazzled

From grass to sky,

From humming and hot

To scorching, quivering light,

Empty blue! — Why,

As I bury my face

In a sunshot vivid gloom — Minute infinity's mesh,

Where spearing side by

Smooth stalk and furred

Their luminous green secrets from the grass,

Tower to a bud and delicately divide — Do I think of the things

Before man was?

Bodiless Numbers!

When there was none to

Your winding labyrinths occult,

None to delve your

Of strange virtue, or

Your magical business,

Were there, never old nor new,

Veined in the world and alive: — Before the Planets,

Seven;

Before these fingers,

Five!

You that are globed and single,

Crystal virgins, and you that part,

Melt, and again mingle!

We have hoisted sail in the night On the oceans that you chart:

Dark winds carry us onward, on;

But you are there before us, silent Answers,

Beyond the bounds of the sun.

You body yourselves in the stars, inscrutable dancers,

Native where we are none.

O inhuman Numbers!

All things change and glide,

Corrupt and crumble, suffer wreck and decay,

But, obstinate dark Integrities, you abide,

And obey but them who obey.

All things else are

In the colours of man's desire:

But you no bribe nor

Avails to soften or sway.

Nothing of me you share,

Yet I cannot think you away.

And if I seek to escape you, still you are

Stronger than caging pillars of

Not to be passed, in an

Where human wish and

Fall like a frozen bird.

Music

In pulses of sound, in the waves!

Hidden runes rubbed bright!

Dizzy ladders of thought in the night!

Are you masters or slaves — Subtlest of man's slaves, — Shadowy Numbers?

In a vision I

Old vulture Time,

On the flesh of the world;

I

The home of our use undated — Seasons of fruiting and

Withered, and hunger and

Dead, with all they fed on:

Till at last, when Time was sated,

Only you persisted,

Dædal Numbers, sole and same,

Invisible skeleton

Of the peopled earth we tread on — Last, as first.

Because naught can

To wound or to tarnish you;

Because you are neither sold nor bought,

Because you have not the power to

But live beyond our furthest thought,

Strange Numbers, of infinite clue,

Beyond fear, beyond ruth,

You strengthen also

To be in my own truth.