A Summer Night

In the deserted, moon-blanched street,How lonely rings the echo of my feet!Those windows, which I gaze at, frown,Silent and white, unopening down,Repellent as the world; but see,A break between the housetops showsThe moon! and lost behind her, fading dimInto the dewy dark obscurityDown at the far horizon’s rim,Doth a whole tract of heaven disclose!

And to my mind the thoughtIs on a sudden broughtOf a past night, and a far different scene.Headlands stood out into the moonlit deepAs clearly as at noon;The spring-tide’s brimming flowHeaved dazzlingly between;Houses, with long white sweep,Girdled the glistening bay;Behind, through the soft air,The blue haze-cradled mountains spread away.That night was far more fair--But the same restless pacings to and fro,And the same vainly throbbing heart was there,And the same bright, calm moon.

And the calm moonlight seems to say,--Hast thou, then, still the old unquiet breast,Which neither deadens into rest,Nor ever feels the fiery glowThat whirls the spirit from itself away,But fluctuates to and fro,Never by passion quite possessed,And never quite benumbed by the world’s sway?And I, I know not if to prayStill to be what I am, or yield, and beLike all the other men I see.

For most men in a brazen prison live,Where, in the sun’s hot eye,With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidlyTheir lives to some unmeaning task-work give,Dreaming of naught beyond their prison-wall.And as, year after year,Fresh products of their barren labor fallFrom their tired hands, and restNever yet comes more near,Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.And while they try to stemThe waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,Death in their prison reaches them,Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

And the rest, a few,Escape their prison, and departOn the wide ocean of life anew.There the freed prisoner, where’er his heartListeth, will sail;Nor doth he know how there prevail,Despotic on that sea,Trade-winds which cross it from eternity.Awhile he holds some false way, undebarredBy thwarting signs, and bravesThe freshening wind and blackening waves.And then the tempest strikes him; and betweenThe lightning-bursts is seenOnly a driving wreck,And the pale master on his spar-strewn deckWith anguished face and flying hair,Grasping the rudder hard,Still bent to make some port, he knows not where,Still standing for some false, impossible shore.And sterner comes the roarOf sea and wind; and through the deepening gloomFainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,And he too disappears, and comes no more.

Is there no life, but these alone?Madman or slave, must man be one?

Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain!Clearness divine!Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no signOf languor, though so calm, and though so greatAre yet untroubled and unpassionate;Who, though so noble, share in the world’s toil,And, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil!I will not say that your mild deeps retainA tinge, it may be, of their silent painWho have longed deeply once, and longed in vain;But I will rather say that you remainA world above man’s head, to let him seeHow boundless might his soul’s horizons be,How vast, yet of what clear transparency!How it were good to live there, and breathe free;How fair a lot to fillIs left to each man still!