<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=386689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Phantasies</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I. Evening.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Rest, beauty, stillness: not a waif of a cloud<br>From gray-blue east sheer to the yellow west-<br>No film of mist the utmost slopes to shroud.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The earth lies grace, by quiet airs caressed,<br>And shepherdeth her shadows, but each stream,<br>Free to the sky, is by that glow possessed,<br>And traileth with the splendors of a dream<br>Athwart the dusky land. Uplift thine eyes!<br>Unbroken by a vapor or a gleam,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The vast clear reach of mild, wan twilight skies.<br>But look again, and lo, the evening star!<br>Against the pale tints black the slim elms rise,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The earth exhales sweet odors nigh and far,<br>And from the heavens fine influences fall.<br>Familiar things stand not for what they are:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What they suggest, foreshadow, or recall<br>The spirit is alert to apprehend,<br>Imparting somewhat of herself to all.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Labor and thought and care are at an end:<br>The soul is filled with gracious reveries,<br>And with her mood soft sounds and colors blend;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For simplest sounds ring forth like melodies<br>In this weird-lighted air-the monotone<br>Of some far bell, the distant farmyard cries,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A barking dog, the thin, persistent drone<br>Of crickets, and the lessening call of birds.<br>The apparition of yon star alone</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Breaks on the sense like music. Beyond word<br>The peace that floods the soul, for night is here,<br>And Beauty still is guide and harbinger.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>II. Aspiration.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Dark lies the earth, and bright with worlds the sky:<br>That soft, large, lustrous star, that first outshone,<br>Still holds us spelled with potent sorcery.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Dilating, shrinking, lightening, it hath won<br>Our spirit with its strange strong influence,<br>And sways it as the tides beneath the moon.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What impulse this, o'ermastering heart and sense?<br>Exalted, thrilled, the freed soul fain would soar<br>Unto that point of shining prominence,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Craving new fields and some unheard-of shore,<br>Yea, all the heavens, for her activity,<br>To mount with daring flight, to hover o'er</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Low hills of earth, flat meadows, level sea,<br>And earthly joy and trouble. In this hour<br>Of waning light and sound, of mystery,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Of shadowed love and beauty-veiled power,<br>She feels her wings: she yearns to grasp her own,<br>Knowing the utmost good to be her dower.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A dream! a dream! for at a touch 't is gone.<br>O mocking spirit! thy mere fools are we,<br>Unto the depths from heights celestial thrown.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From these blind gropings toward reality,<br>This thirst for truth, this most pathetic need<br>Of something to uplift, to justify,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To help and comfort while we faint and bleed,<br>May we not draw, wrung from the last despair,<br>Some argument of hope, some blessed creed,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">That we can trust the faith which whispers prayer,<br>The vanishings, the ecstasy, the gleam,<br>The nameless aspiration, and the dream?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>III. Wherefore?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Deep languor overcometh mind and frame:<br>A listless, drowsy, utter weariness,<br>A trance wherein no thought finds speech or name,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The overstrained spirit doth possess.<br>She sinks with drooping wing-poor unfledged bird,<br>That fain had flown!-in fluttering breathlessness.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To what end those high hopes that wildly stirred<br>The beating heart with aspirations vain?<br>Why proffer prayers unanswered and unheard</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To blank, deaf heavens that will not heed her pain?<br>Where lead these lofty, soaring tendencies,<br>That leap and fly and poise, to fall again,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet seem to link her with the utmost skies?<br>What mean these clinging loves that bind to earth,<br>And claim her with beseeching, wistful eyes?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This little resting-place 'twixt death and birth,<br>Why is it fretted with the ceaseless flow<br>Of flood and ebb, with overgrowth and dearth,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And vext with dreams, and clouded with strange woe?<br>Ah! she is tired of thought, she yearns for peace,<br>Seeing all things one equal end must know.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Wherefore this tangle of perplexities,<br>The trouble or the joy? the weary maze<br>Of narrow fears and hopes that may not cease?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A chill falls on her from the skyey ways,<br>Black with the night-tide, where is none to hear<br>The ancient cry, the Wherefore of our days.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>IV. Fancies.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The ceaseless whirr of crickets fills the ear<br>From underneath each hedge and bush and tree,<br>Deep in the dew-drenched grasses everywhere.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The simple sound dispels the fantasy<br>Of gloom and terror gathering round the mind.<br>It seems a pleasant thing to breathe, to be,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">To hear the many-voiced, soft summer wind<br>Lisp through the dark thick leafage overhead-<br>To see the rosy half-moon soar behind</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The black slim-branching elms. Sad thoughts have fled,<br>Trouble and doubt, and now strange reveries<br>And odd caprices fill us in their stead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From yonder broken disk the redness dies,<br>Like gold fruit through the leaves the half-sphere gleams,<br>Then over the hoar tree-tops climbs the skies,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Blanched ever more and more, until it beams<br>Whiter than crystal. Like a scroll unfurled,<br>And shadowy as a landscape seen in dreams,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Reveals itself the sleeping, quiet world,<br>Painted in tender grays and whites subdued-<br>The speckled stream with flakes of light impearled,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The wide, soft meadow and the massive wood.<br>Naught is too wild for our credulity<br>In this weird hour: our finest dreams hold good.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Quaint elves and frolic flower-sprites we see,<br>And fairies weaving rings of gossamer,<br>And angels floating through the filmy air.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>V. In the Night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Let us go in: the air is dank and chill<br>With dewy midnight, and the moon rides high<br>O'er ghostly fields, pale stream, and spectral hill.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This hour the dawn seems farthest from the sky<br>So weary long the space that lies between<br>That sacred joy and this dark mystery</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Of earth and heaven: no glimmering is seen,<br>In the star-sprinkled east, of coming day,<br>Nor, westward, of the splendor that hath been.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Strange fears beset us, nameless terrors sway<br>The brooding soul, that hungers for her rest,<br>Out worn with changing moods, vain hopes' delay,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">With conscious thought o'erburdened and oppressed.<br>The mystery and the shadow wax too deep;<br>She longs to merge both sense and thought in sleep.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>VI. Faerie.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From the oped lattice glance once more abroad<br>While the ethereal moontide bathes with light<br>Hill, stream, and garden, and white-winding road.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All gracious myths born of the shadowy night<br>Recur, and hover in fantastic guise,<br>Airy and vague, before the drowsy sight.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">On yonder soft gray hill Endymion lies<br>In rosy slumber, and the moonlit air<br>Breathes kisses on his cheeks and lips and eyes.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Twixt bush and bush gleam flower-white limbs, left bare,<br>Of huntress-nymphs, and flying raiment thin,<br>Vanishing faces, and bright floating hair.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The quaint midsummer fairies and their kin,<br>Gnomes, elves, and trolls, on blossom, branch, and grass<br>Gambol and dance, and winding out and in</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Leave circles of spun dew where'er they pass.<br>Through the blue ether the freed Ariel flies;<br>Enchantment holds the air; a swarming mass</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Of myriad dusky, gold-winged dreams arise,<br>Throng toward the gates of sense, and so possess<br>The soul, and lull it to forgetfulness.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>VII. Confused Dreams.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O strange, dim other-world revealed to us,<br>Beginning there where ends reality,<br>Lying 'twixt life and death, and populous</div><div style="margin:10px 0">With souls from either sphere! now enter we<br>Thy twisted paths. Barred is the silver gate,<br>But the wild-carven doors of ivory</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Spring noiselessly apart: between them straight<br>Flies forth a cloud of nameless shadowy things,<br>With harpies, imps, and monsters, small and great,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Blurring the thick air with darkening wings.<br>All humors of the blood and brain take shape,<br>And fright us with our own imaginings.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A trouble weighs upon us: no escape<br>From this unnatural region can there be.<br>Fixed eyes stare on us, wide mouths grin and gape,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Familiar faces out of reach we see.<br>Fain would we scream, to shatter with a cry<br>The tangled woof of hideous fantasy,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">When, lo! the air grows clear, a soft fair sky<br>Shines over head: sharp pain dissolves in peace;<br>Beneath the silver archway quietly</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We float away: all troublous visions cease.<br>By a strange sense of joy we are possessed,<br>Body and spirit soothed in perfect rest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>VIII. The End of the Song.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What dainty note of long-drawn melody<br>Athwart our dreamless sleep rings sweet and clear,<br>Till all the fumes of slumber are brushed by,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And with awakened consciousness we hear<br>The pipe of birds? Look forth! The sane, white day<br>Blesses the hilltops, and the sun is near.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All misty phantoms slowly roll away<br>With the night's vapors toward the western sky.<br>The Real enchants us, the fresh breath of hay</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Blows toward us; soft the meadow-grasses lie,<br>Bearded with dew; the air is a caress;<br>The sudden sun o'ertops the boundary</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Of eastern hills, the morning joyousness<br>Thrills tingling through the frame; life's pulse beats strong;<br>Night's fancies melt like dew. So ends the song!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Emma+Lazarus">Emma Lazarus</a><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=386689" data-title="Phantasies de Emma Lazarus" data-description="I. Evening. Rest, beauty, stillness: not a waif of a cloud From gray-blue east sheer to the yellow west- No film of mist the utmost slopes to shroud. The earth lies grace, by quiet airs caressed, And shepherdeth her shadows, but each stream, Fre..."></div> </div> </div>

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