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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=518812" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Hymns Of The Marshes.</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I. Sunrise.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain<br> Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main.<br>The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep;<br>Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range and of sweep,<br>Interwoven with waftures of wild sea-liberties, drifting,<br> Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting,<br> Came to the gates of sleep.<br>Then my thoughts, in the dark of the dungeon-keep<br>Of the Castle of Captives hid in the City of Sleep,<br>Upstarted, by twos and by threes assembling:<br> The gates of sleep fell a-trembling<br>Like as the lips of a lady that forth falter `Yes,'<br> Shaken with happiness:<br> The gates of sleep stood wide.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I have waked, I have come, my beloved! I might not abide:<br>I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks, to hide<br> In your gospelling glooms, -- to be<br>As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh and the sea my sea.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Tell me, sweet burly-bark'd, man-bodied Tree<br>That mine arms in the dark are embracing, dost know<br>From what fount are these tears at thy feet which flow?<br>They rise not from reason, but deeper inconsequent deeps.<br> Reason's not one that weeps.<br> What logic of greeting lies<br>Betwixt dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O cunning green leaves, little masters! like as ye gloss<br>All the dull-tissued dark with your luminous darks that emboss<br>The vague blackness of night into pattern and plan,<br> So,<br> (But would I could know, but would I could know,)<br>With your question embroid'ring the dark of the question of man, --<br>So, with your silences purfling this silence of man<br>While his cry to the dead for some knowledge is under the ban,<br> Under the ban, --<br> So, ye have wrought me<br>Designs on the night of our knowledge, -- yea, ye have taught me,<br> So,<br> That haply we know somewhat more than we know.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Ye lispers, whisperers, singers in storms,<br> Ye consciences murmuring faiths under forms,<br> Ye ministers meet for each passion that grieves,<br> Friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves,<br>Oh, rain me down from your darks that contain me<br>Wisdoms ye winnow from winds that pain me, --<br>Sift down tremors of sweet-within-sweet<br>That advise me of more than they bring, -- repeat<br>Me the woods-smell that swiftly but now brought breath<br>From the heaven-side bank of the river of death, --<br> Teach me the terms of silence, -- preach me<br> The passion of patience, -- sift me, -- impeach me, --<br> And there, oh there<br>As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air,<br> Pray me a myriad prayer.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> My gossip, the owl, -- is it thou<br>That out of the leaves of the low-hanging bough,<br> As I pass to the beach, art stirred?<br> Dumb woods, have ye uttered a bird?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> * * * * *</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Reverend Marsh, low-couched along the sea,<br> Old chemist, rapt in alchemy,<br> Distilling silence, -- lo,<br>That which our father-age had died to know --<br> The menstruum that dissolves all matter -- thou<br>Hast found it: for this silence, filling now<br>The globed clarity of receiving space,<br>This solves us all: man, matter, doubt, disgrace,<br>Death, love, sin, sanity,<br>Must in yon silence' clear solution lie.<br>Too clear! That crystal nothing who'll peruse?<br>The blackest night could bring us brighter news.<br>Yet precious qualities of silence haunt<br>Round these vast margins, ministrant.<br>Oh, if thy soul's at latter gasp for space,<br>With trying to breathe no bigger than thy race<br>Just to be fellow'd, when that thou hast found<br>No man with room, or grace enough of bound<br>To entertain that New thou tell'st, thou art, --<br>'Tis here, 'tis here thou canst unhand thy heart<br>And breathe it free, and breathe it free,<br>By rangy marsh, in lone sea-liberty.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The tide's at full: the marsh with flooded streams<br>Glimmers, a limpid labyrinth of dreams.<br>Each winding creek in grave entrancement lies<br>A rhapsody of morning-stars. The skies<br>Shine scant with one forked galaxy, --<br>The marsh brags ten: looped on his breast they lie.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oh, what if a sound should be made!<br>Oh, what if a bound should be laid<br>To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring, --<br>To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string!<br>I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam<br>Will break as a bubble o'er-blown in a dream, --<br>Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night,<br>Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light,<br>Over-sated with beauty and silence, will seem<br> But a bubble that broke in a dream,<br>If a bound of degree to this grace be laid,<br> Or a sound or a motion made.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But no: it is made: list! somewhere, -- mystery, where?<br> In the leaves? in the air?<br>In my heart? is a motion made:<br>'Tis a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on shade.<br>In the leaves 'tis palpable: low multitudinous stirring<br>Upwinds through the woods; the little ones, softly conferring,<br>Have settled my lord's to be looked for; so; they are still;<br>But the air and my heart and the earth are a-thrill, --<br>And look where the wild duck sails round the bend of the river, --<br> And look where a passionate shiver<br> Expectant is bending the blades<br>Of the marsh-grass in serial shimmers and shades, --<br>And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting,<br> Are beating<br>The dark overhead as my heart beats, -- and steady and free<br>Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea --<br> (Run home, little streams,<br> With your lapfulls of stars and dreams), --<br>And a sailor unseen is hoisting a-peak,<br>For list, down the inshore curve of the creek<br> How merrily flutters the sail, --<br>And lo, in the East! Will the East unveil?<br>The East is unveiled, the East hath confessed<br>A flush: 'tis dead; 'tis alive: 'tis dead, ere the West<br>Was aware of it: nay, 'tis abiding, 'tis unwithdrawn:<br> Have a care, sweet Heaven! 'Tis Dawn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now a dream of a flame through that dream of a flush is uprolled:<br> To the zenith ascending, a dome of undazzling gold<br>Is builded, in shape as a bee-hive, from out of the sea:<br>The hive is of gold undazzling, but oh, the Bee,<br> The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee,<br> Of dazzling gold is the great Sun-Bee<br>That shall flash from the hive-hole over the sea.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Yet now the dew-drop, now the morning gray,<br> Shall live their little lucid sober day<br> Ere with the sun their souls exhale away.<br>Now in each pettiest personal sphere of dew<br>The summ'd morn shines complete as in the blue<br>Big dew-drop of all heaven: with these lit shrines<br>O'er-silvered to the farthest sea-confines,<br>The sacramental marsh one pious plain<br>Of worship lies. Peace to the ante-reign<br>Of Mary Morning, blissful mother mild,<br>Minded of nought but peace, and of a child.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Not slower than Majesty moves, for a mean and a measure<br>Of motion, -- not faster than dateless Olympian leisure<br>Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure, --<br>The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling,<br> Forever revealing, revealing, revealing,<br>Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise, -- 'tis done!<br> Good-morrow, lord Sun!<br>With several voice, with ascription one,<br>The woods and the marsh and the sea and my soul<br>Unto thee, whence the glittering stream of all morrows doth roll,<br>Cry good and past-good and most heavenly morrow, lord Sun.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O Artisan born in the purple, -- Workman Heat, --<br>Parter of passionate atoms that travail to meet<br>And be mixed in the death-cold oneness, -- innermost Guest<br>At the marriage of elements, -- fellow of publicans, -- blest<br>King in the blouse of flame, that loiterest o'er<br>The idle skies yet laborest fast evermore, --<br>Thou, in the fine forge-thunder, thou, in the beat<br>Of the heart of a man, thou Motive, -- Laborer Heat:<br>Yea, Artist, thou, of whose art yon sea's all news,<br>With his inshore greens and manifold mid-sea blues,<br>Pearl-glint, shell-tint, ancientest perfectest hues<br>Ever shaming the maidens, -- lily and rose<br>Confess thee, and each mild flame that glows<br>In the clarified virginal bosoms of stones that shine,<br> It is thine, it is thine:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Thou chemist of storms, whether driving the winds a-swirl<br>Or a-flicker the subtiler essences polar that whirl<br>In the magnet earth, -- yea, thou with a storm for a heart,<br>Rent with debate, many-spotted with question, part<br>From part oft sundered, yet ever a globed light,<br>Yet ever the artist, ever more large and bright<br>Than the eye of a man may avail of: -- manifold One,<br>I must pass from thy face, I must pass from the face of the Sun:<br>Old Want is awake and agog, every wrinkle a-frown;<br>The worker must pass to his work in the terrible town:<br>But I fear not, nay, and I fear not the thing to be done;<br> I am strong with the strength of my lord the Sun:<br>How dark, how dark soever the race that must needs be run,<br> I am lit with the Sun.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas<br> Of traffic shall hide thee,<br>Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories<br> Hide thee,<br>Never the reek of the time's fen-politics<br> Hide thee,<br>And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee,<br>And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee,<br> Labor, at leisure, in art, -- till yonder beside thee<br> My soul shall float, friend Sun,<br> The day being done.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">____<br>Baltimore, December, 1880.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0"> II. Individuality.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Sail on, sail on, fair cousin Cloud:<br>Oh loiter hither from the sea.<br> Still-eyed and shadow-brow'd,<br>Steal off from yon far-drifting crowd,<br>And come and brood upon the marsh with me.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yon laboring low horizon-smoke,<br>Yon stringent sail, toil not for thee<br> Nor me; did heaven's stroke<br>The whole deep with drown'd commerce choke,<br>No pitiless tease of risk or bottomry</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Would to thy rainy office close<br>Thy will, or lock mine eyes from tears,<br> Part wept for traders'-woes,<br>Part for that ventures mean as those<br>In issue bind such sovereign hopes and fears.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">-- Lo, Cloud, thy downward countenance stares<br>Blank on the blank-faced marsh, and thou<br> Mindest of dark affairs;<br>Thy substance seems a warp of cares;<br>Like late wounds run the wrinkles on thy brow.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Well may'st thou pause, and gloom, and stare,<br>A visible conscience: I arraign<br> Thee, criminal Cloud, of rare<br>Contempts on Mercy, Right, and Prayer, --<br>Of murders, arsons, thefts, -- of nameless stain.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">(Yet though life's logic grow as gray<br>As thou, my soul's not in eclipse.)<br> Cold Cloud, but yesterday<br>Thy lightning slew a child at play,<br>And then a priest with prayers upon his lips</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For his enemies, and then a bright<br>Lady that did but ope the door<br> Upon the storming night<br>To let a beggar in, -- strange spite, --<br>And then thy sulky rain refused to pour</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Till thy quick torch a barn had burned<br>Where twelve months' store of victual lay,<br> A widow's sons had earned;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Which done, thy floods with winds returned, --<br>The river raped their little herd away.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What myriad righteous errands high<br>Thy flames MIGHT run on! In that hour<br> Thou slewest the child, oh why<br>Not rather slay Calamity,<br>Breeder of Pain and Doubt, infernal Power?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Or why not plunge thy blades about<br>Some maggot politician throng<br> Swarming to parcel out<br>The body of a land, and rout<br>The maw-conventicle, and ungorge Wrong?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> What the cloud doeth<br> The Lord knoweth,<br> The cloud knoweth not.<br> What the artist doeth,<br> The Lord knoweth;<br> Knoweth the artist not?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Well-answered! -- O dear artists, ye<br>-- Whether in forms of curve or hue<br> Or tone your gospels be --<br>Say wrong `This work is not of me,<br>But God:' it is not true, it is not true.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Awful is Art because 'tis free.<br>The artist trembles o'er his plan<br> Where men his Self must see.<br>Who made a song or picture, he<br>Did it, and not another, God nor man.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My Lord is large, my Lord is strong:<br>Giving, He gave: my me is mine.<br> How poor, how strange, how wrong,<br>To dream He wrote the little song<br>I made to Him with love's unforced design!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oh, not as clouds dim laws have plann'd<br>To strike down Good and fight for Ill, --<br> Oh, not as harps that stand<br>In the wind and sound the wind's command:<br>Each artist -- gift of terror! -- owns his will.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For thee, Cloud, -- if thou spend thine all<br>Upon the South's o'er-brimming sea<br> That needs thee not; or crawl<br>To the dry provinces, and fall<br>Till every convert clod shall give to thee</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Green worship; if thou grow or fade,<br>Bring on delight or misery,<br> Fly east or west, be made<br>Snow, hail, rain, wind, grass, rose, light, shade;<br>What matters it to thee? There is no thee.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Pass, kinsman Cloud, now fair and mild:<br>Discharge the will that's not thine own.<br> I work in freedom wild,<br>But work, as plays a little child,<br>Sure of the Father, Self, and Love, alone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">____<br>Baltimore, 1878-9.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0"> III. Marsh Song -- At Sunset.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Over the monstrous shambling sea,<br> Over the Caliban sea,<br>Bright Ariel-cloud, thou lingerest:<br>Oh wait, oh wait, in the warm red West, --<br> Thy Prospero I'll be.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Over the humped and fishy sea,<br> Over the Caliban sea<br>O cloud in the West, like a thought in the heart<br>Of pardon, loose thy wing, and start,<br> And do a grace for me.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Over the huge and huddling sea,<br> Over the Caliban sea,<br>Bring hither my brother Antonio, -- Man, --<br>My injurer: night breaks the ban;<br> Brother, I pardon thee.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">____<br>Baltimore, 1879-80.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0"> IV. The Marshes of Glynn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven<br>With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven<br> Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs, --<br> Emerald twilights, --<br> Virginal shy lights,<br>Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,<br>When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades<br>Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,<br> Of the heavenly woods and glades,<br>That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within<br> The wide sea-marshes of Glynn; --</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire, --<br>Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,<br>Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves, --<br>Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves,<br>Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood,<br>Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good; --</div><div style="margin:10px 0">O braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the vine,<br>While the riotous noon-day sun of the June-day long did shine<br>Ye held me fast in your heart and I held you fast in mine;<br>But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest,<br>And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West,<br>And the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem<br>Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream, --<br>Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,<br>And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke<br> Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,<br> And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,<br> And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,<br>That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn<br>Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore<br>When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,<br>And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain<br>Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain, --</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face<br> The vast sweet visage of space.<br>To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn,<br>Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,<br> For a mete and a mark<br> To the forest-dark: --<br> So:<br>Affable live-oak, leaning low, --<br>Thus -- with your favor -- soft, with a reverent hand,<br>(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)<br>Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand<br>On the firm-packed sand,<br> Free<br>By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band<br> Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land.<br>Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger and curl<br>As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows<br> the firm sweet limbs of a girl.<br>Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight,<br>Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of light.<br>And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stands high?<br>The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!<br>A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,<br>Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,<br>Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,<br>To the terminal blue of the main.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?<br> Somehow my soul seems suddenly free<br>From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,<br>By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free<br>Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!<br>Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,<br>Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won<br>God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain<br>And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,<br>Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:<br>I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies<br>In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies:<br>By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod<br>I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:<br>Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within<br>The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And the sea lends large, as the marsh: lo, out of his plenty the sea<br>Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be:<br>Look how the grace of the sea doth go<br>About and about through the intricate channels that flow<br> Here and there,<br> Everywhere,<br>Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,<br>And the marsh is meshed with a million veins,<br>That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow<br> In the rose-and-silver evening glow.<br> Farewell, my lord Sun!<br>The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run<br>'Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir;<br>Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr;<br>Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;<br>And the sea and the marsh are one.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">How still the plains of the waters be!<br>The tide is in his ecstasy.<br>The tide is at his highest height:<br> And it is night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep<br>Roll in on the souls of men,<br>But who will reveal to our waking ken<br>The forms that swim and the shapes that creep<br> Under the waters of sleep?<br>And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in<br>On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Sidney+Lanier">Sidney Lanier</a><div class=q>
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<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=518812" data-title="Hymns Of The Marshes. de Sidney Lanier" data-description="I. Sunrise.


In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain
 Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main.
The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep;
Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range and of sweep,
Interwoven with wa..."></div>
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