Lament Of The Stars

    One tone is mute within the starry singing,
    The unison fulfilled, complete before;
    One chord within the music sounds no more,
    And from the stir of flames forever winging
    The pinions of our sister, motionless
    In pits of indefinable duress,
    Are fallen beyond all recovery
    By exultation of the flying dance,
    Or rhythms holding as with sleep or trance
    The maze of stars that only death may free -
    Flung through the void's expanse.

    In gulfs depressed nor in the gulfs exalted
    Shall shade nor lightening of her flame be found;
    In space that litten orbits gird around,
    Nor in the bottomless abyss unvaulted
    Of unenvironed, all-outlying night.
    Allotted gyre nor lawless comet-flight
    Shall find, and with its venturous ray return
    From gloom of undiscoverable scope,
    One ray of her to gladden into hope
    The doubtful eyes denied that truthward yearn,
    The faltering feet that grope.

    Beyond restrainless boundary-nights surpassing
    All luminous horizons limited,
    The substance and the light of her have fed
    Ruin and silence of the night's amassing:
    Abandoned worlds forever morningless;
    Suns without worlds, in frory beamlessness
    Girt for the longer gyre funereal;
    Inviolate silence, earless, unawaking
    That once was sound, and level calm unbreaking
    Where motion's many ways in oneness fall
    Of sleep beyond forsaking.

    Circled with limitation unexceeded
    Our eyes behold exterior mysteries
    And gods unascertainable as these -
    Shadows and shapes irresolubly heeded;
    Phantoms that tower, and substance scarcely known.
    Our sister knows all mysteries one alone,
    One shape, one shadow, crowding out the skies;
    Whose eyeless head and lipless face debar
    All others nameless or familiar,
    Filling with night all former lips and eyes
    Of god, and ghost, and star:

    For her all shapes have fed the shape of night;
    All darker forms, and dubious forms, or pallid,
    Are met and reconciled where none is valid.
    But unto us solution nor respite
    Of mystery's multiform incessancy
    From unexplored or system-trodden sky
    Shall come; but as a load importunate,
    Enigma past and mystery foreseen
    Weigh mightily upon us, and between
    Our sorrow deepens, and our songs abate
    In cadences of threne.

    A gloom that gathers silence looms more closely,
    And quiet centering darkness at its heart;
    But from the certitude of night depart
    Uncertain god nor eidolon less ghostly;
    But stronger grown with strength obtained from light
    That failed, and power lent by the stronger night,
    Perplex us with new mystery, and doubt
    If these our flames, that deathward toss and fall
    Be festal lights or lights funereal
    For mightier gods within the gulfs without,
    Phantoms more cryptical.

    New shadows from the wings of Time unfolding
    Across the depth and eminence of years,
    Fall deeplier with the broadening gloom of fears.
    Prophetic-eyed, with planet-hosts beholding
    The night take form upon the face of suns,
    We see (thus grief's vaticination runs -
    Presageful sorrow for our sister slain)
    A night wherein all sorrow shall be past,
    One with night's single mystery at last;
    Nor vocal sun nor singing world remain
    As Time's elegiast.