Antinomies on a Railway Station

As I stand waiting in the rainFor the foggy hoot of the London train,Gazing at silent wall and lampAnd post and rail and platform damp,What is this power that comes to my sightThat I see a night without the night,That I see them clear, yet look them through,The silvery things and the darkly blue,That the solid wall seems soft as death,A wavering and unanchored wraith,And rails that shine and stones that streamUnsubstantial as a dream?What sudden door has opened so,What hand has passed, that I should knowThis moving vision not a tranceThat melts the globe of circumstance,This sight that marks not least or mostAnd makes a stone a passing ghost?Is it that a year agoI stood upon this self-same spot;Is it that since a year agoThe place and I have altered not;Is it that I half forgot,A year ago, and all despisedFor a space the things that I had prized:The race of life, the glittering show?Is it that now a year has passedIn vain pursuit of glittering things,In fruitless searching, shouting, running,And greedy lies and candour cunning,Here as I stand the year aboveSudden the heats and the strivings failAnd fall away, a fluctuant veil,And the fixed familiar stones restoreThe old appearance-buried core,The unmoving and essential me,The eternal personalityAlone enduring first and last?

No, this I have known in other ways,In other places, other days.Not only here, on this one peak,Do fixity and beauty speakOf the delusiveness of change,Of the transparency of form,The bootless stress of minds that range,The awful calm behind the storm.In many places, many days,The invaded soul receives the raysOf countries she was nurtured in,Speaks in her silent language strangeTo that beyond which is her kin.Even in peopled streets at timesA metaphysic arm is thrustThrough the partitioning fabric thin,And tears away the darkening pallCast by the bright phenomenal,And clears the obscured spirit's mirrorFrom shadows of deceptive error,And shows the bells and all their ringing,And all the crowds and all their singing,Carillons that are nothing's chimesAnd dust that is not even dust....

But rarely hold I converse thusWhere shapes are bright and clamorous,More often comes the word divineIn places motionless and far;Beneath the white peculiar shineOf sunless summer afternoons;At eventide on pale lagoonsWhere hangs reflected one pale star;Or deep in the green solitudesOf still erect entranced woods.

O, in the woods alone lying,Scarce a bough in the wind sighing,Gaze I long with fervid powerAt leaf and branch and grass and flower,Breathe I breaths of trembling sightShed from great urns of green delight,Take I draughts and drink them upPoured from many a stalk and cup.Now do I burn for nothing moreThan thus to gaze, thus to adoreThis exquisiteness of nature everIn silence....But with instant lightRends the film; with joy I quiverTo see with new celestial sightFlower and leaf and grass and tree,Doomed barks on an eternal sea,Flit phantom-like as transient smoke.Beauty herself her spell has broke,Beauty, the herald and the lure,Her message told, may not endure;Her portal opened, she has died,Supreme immortal suicide.Yes, sleepless nature soundless flingsInvisible grapples round the soul,Drawing her through the web of thingsTo the primal end of her journeyings,Her ultimate and constant pole.

For Beauty with her hands that beckonIs but the Prophet of a Higher,A flaming and ephemeral beacon,A Phoenix perishing by fire.Herself from us herself estranges,Herself her mighty tale doth kill,That all things change yet nothing changes.That all things move yet all are still.

I cannot sink, I cannot climb,Now that I see my ancient dwelling,The central orb untouched of time,And taste a peace all bliss excelling.Now I have broken Beauty's wall,Now that my kindred world I hold,I care not though the cities fallAnd the green earth go cold.