Waking

Darkness had stretched its colour,Deep blue across the pane:No cloud to make night duller,No moon with its tarnish stain;But only here and there a star,One sharp point of frosty fire,Hanging infinitely farIn mockery of our life and deathAnd all our small desire.

Now in this hour of wakingFrom under brows of stone,A new pale day is breakingAnd the deep night is gone.Sordid now, and mean and smallThe daylight world is seen again,With only the veils of mist that fallDeaf and muffling over allTo hide its ugliness and pain.

But to-day this dawn of meannessShines in my eyes, as whenThe new world's brightness and cleannessBroke on the first of men.For the light that shows the huddled thingsOf this close-pressing earth,Shines also on your face and bringsAll its dear beauty back to meIn a new miracle of birth.

I see you asleep and unpassioned,White-faced in the dusk of your hair--Your beauty so fleetingly fashionedThat it filled me once with despairTo look on its exquisite transienceAnd think that our love and thought and laughterPuff out with the death of our flickering sense,While we pass ever on and awayTowards some blank hereafter.

But now I am happy, knowingThat swift time is our friend,And that our love's passionate glowing,Though it turn ash in the end,Is a rose of fire that must blossom its wayThrough temporal stuff, nor else could beMore than a nothing. Into dayThe boundless spaces of night contractAnd in your opening eyes I seeNight born in day, in time eternity.