But who can wind that horn of might (The horn of dead Heliades) aright, -Straight Open for him shall roll the conscious gate;And light leap up from all the torches there, And life leap up in every torchbearer, And the stone faces kindle in the glow, And into the blank eyes the irids grow, And through the dawning irids ambushed meanings show.
Illumined this wise on, He threads securely the far intricacies, With brede from Heaven's wrought vesture overstrewn;Swift Tellus' purfled tunic, girt upon With the blown chlamys of her fluttering seas;And the freaked kirtle of the pearled moon:
Until he gain the structure's core, where stands -A toil of magic hands -
The unbodied spirit of the sorcerer, Most strangely rare, As is a vision remembered in the noon;Unbodied, yet to mortal seeing clear, Like sighs exhaled in eager atmosphere.
From human haps and mutabilities It rests exempt, beneath the edifice To which itself gave rise;Sustaining centre to the bubble of stone Which, breathed from it, exists by it alone.
Yea, ere Saturnian earth her child consumes, And I lie down with outworn ossuaries, Ere death's grim tongue anticipates the tomb's Siste viator, in this storied urn My living heart is laid to throb and burn, Till end be ended, and till ceasing cease.
And thou by whom this strain hath parentage;Wantoner between the yet untreacherous claws Of newly-whelped existence! ere he pause, What gift to thee can yield the archimage?
For coming seasons' frets What aids, what amulets, What softenings, or what brightenings?
As Thunder writhes the lash of his long lightnings About the growling heads of the brute main Foaming at mouth, until it wallow again In the scooped oozes of its bed of pain;So all the gnashing jaws, the leaping heads Of hungry menaces, and of ravening dreads, Of pangs Twitch-lipped, with quivering nostrils and immitigate fangs, I scourge beneath the torment of my charms That their repentless nature fear to work thee harms.
And as yon Apollonian harp-player, Yon wandering psalterist of the sky, With flickering strings which scatter melody, The silver-stoled damsels of the sea, Or lake, or fount, or stream, Enchants from their ancestral heaven of waters To Naiad it through the unfrothing air;My song enchants so out of undulous dream The glimmering shapes of its dim-tressed daughters, And missions each to be thy minister.