Times change. Man's fortune prospers, or it falls.
Change harbors not in those
eternal halls
And
tranquilchamber where Tithonus lies.
But through his window there the eastern skies
Fall palely fair to the dim ocean's end.
There, in blue mist where air and ocean blend,
The lazy clouds that sail the wide world o'er
Falter and turn where they can sail no more.
There singing groves, there
spacious gardens blow --
Cedars and silver poplars, row on row,
Through whose black boughs on her appointed night,
Flooding his
chamber with enchanted light,
Lifts the full moon's immeasurable sphere,
Crimson and huge and
wonderfully near.
An Ode to Antares
At dusk, when lowlands where dark waters glide
Robe in gray mist, and through the greening hills
The hoot-owl calls his mate, and whippoorwills
Clamor from every copse and orchard-side,
I watched the red star rising in the East,
And while his fellows of the
flaming sign
From prisoning
daylight more and more released,
Lift their pale lamps, and, climbing higher, higher,
Out of their locks the waters of the Line
Shaking in clouds of phosphorescent fire,
Rose in the
splendor of their curving flight,
Their
dolphin leap across the austral night,
From windows
southwardopening on the sea
What eyes, I wondered, might be watching, too,
Orbed in some blossom-laden balcony.
Where, from the garden to the rail above,
As though a lover's greeting to his love
Should borrow body and form and hue
And tower in torrents of floral flame,
The
crimson bougainvillea grew,
What starlit brow uplifted to the same
Majestic regress of the summering sky,
What
ultimate thing -- hushed, holy, throned as high
Above the currents that tarnish and profane
As silver summits are whose pure repose
No curious eyes disclose
Nor any footfalls stain,
But round their beauty on azure evenings
Only the oreads go on gauzy wings,
Only the oreads troop with dance and song
And airy beings in
rainbow mists who throng
Out of those wonderful worlds that lie afar
Betwixt the o
utmost cloud and the nearest star.
Like the moon,
sanguine in the
orient night
Shines the red flower in her beautiful hair.
Her breasts are distant islands of delight
Upon a sea where all is soft and fair.
Those robes that make a
silken sheath
For each lithe attitude that flows beneath,
Shrouding in scented folds sweet warmths and tumid flowers,
Call them far clouds that half emerge
Beyond a
sunset ocean's
utmost verge,
Hiding in
purple shade and downpour of soft showers
Enchanted isles by
mortal foot untrod,
And there in humid dells
resplendent orchids nod;
There always from
serene horizons blow
Soul-easing gales and there all spice-trees grow
That Phoenix robbed to line his
fragrant nest
Each hundred years in Araby the Blest.
Star of the South that now through
orient mist
At
nightfall off Tampico or Belize
Greetest the sailor rising from those seas
Where first in me, a fond romanticist,
The
tropicsunset's bloom on cloudy piles
Cast out
industrious cares with dreams of
fabulous isles --
Thou lamp of the swart lover to his tryst,
O'er planted acres at the jungle's rim
Reeking with orange-flower and tuberose,