Ode On Imagination

    Imagination's eyes
    Outreach and distance far
    The vision of the greatest star
    That measures instantaneously -
    Enisled therein as in a sea -
    Its cincture of the system-laden skies.
    Abysses closed about with night
    A tribute yield
    To her retardless sight;
    And Matter's gates disclose the candent ores
    Rock-held in furnaces of planet-cores.
    She penetrates the sun's transplendent shield,
    And through the obstruction of his vestment dire,
    Pierces the centermost sublimity
    Of his terrific heart, whose gurge of fire
    Heaves upward like a monstrous sea,
    And inly riven by Titanic throes,
    Fills all his frame with outward cataract
    Of separate and immingling torrent streams.
    Her eyes exact
    From the Moon-Sphinx that wanes and grows
    In wastes celestial, alien dreams
    Brought down on wings of fleetest beams.
    Adown the clefts of under-space
    She rides, her steed a falling star,
    To seek, where void and vagueness are,
    Some mark or certainty of place.
    Upon their heavenly precipice
    The gathered suns shrink back aghast
    From that interminate abyss,
    And threat of sightless anarchs vast.

    She stands endued
    With supermundane crown, and vestitures
    Of emperies that include
    All under-worlds and over-worlds of dream -
    Kingdoms o'ercast, and eminent heights extreme
    Where moon-transcending light endures.
    She wanders in fantastic lands, where grow
    In scarce-discernèd fields and closes blind,
    Vague blossoms stirred by wings of eidolons;
    Or roves in forests where all sound is low:
    Each voice that shuns
    The noiseful day, and enters there to find
    Twilight that naught exalts nor grieves,
    Is quickly tuned to the susurrous leaves.

    Upon some supersensual eminence
    She hears the fragments of a thunder loud,
    Where lightnings of ulterior Truth intense
    Flame through the walls of hollow cloud.
    But these she may not wholly grasp
    With incomplete terrestrial clasp.
    Her eyes inevitably see,
    'Neath rounds and changes of exterior things,
    The movements of Essentiality -
    Of ageless principles - that alter not
    To temporal alterings -
    Unswerved by shattered worlds upbuilt once more.
    And stars no longer hot;
    Or broken constellations strewn
    Like coals about the heavenly floor,
    And rush of night upon the noon
    Of their lost worlds, unsphered restorelessly
    In icy deserts of the sky.
    From the beginning of the spheres,
    When systems nebulous out-thrown
    Drove back the brinks
    Of nullity with limitary marks,
    Till end of suns, and sunless death of years,
    To her are known
    The unevident inseparable links
    That bind all deeps, all suns, all days and darks.