At Night

The sun is sinking over hill and sea, Its red light fires a spectral line of shore; Night droops upon our half-world mistily With sombre glory and ghost-haunted lore; The stars show dim and pallid in the sky, Vague, wraith-white glimmerings of volcanic spheres, And a slim crescent of the moon appears Like some young herald in the hours that die. Soon we who watch the fading of a day, Who feel the cool winds of the ocean blow Upon our dusk fields in sweet, vagrant way, Freshening earth’s arid spaces with their glow, Stand forth amid the infinite peace of night, An infinite peace for high and holy souls That strive to find their far, mysterious goals Beyond the horizon of their eager sight. At this sequestered hour when tender sleep Holds out to listless lives its precious boon, When men grow weary of the fruits they reap, Grow weary of recurrent dawn and noon, Peace dwells upon them for a little while, Like dew and shade upon the growing grass, And, mindless of uncounted hours that pass, They woo a deep oblivion and they smile. Yet I, whose nights are full of waking dreams, Sleep not—but watch the furtive moments drift Like sluggish waves, and watch the fire-bright gleam Of vibrant planets rolling straight and swift Along their orbit pathways, even as life Moves in its earthward orbit to the grave, Till I, an atom, doomed to weep and slave, Feel my fast kinship with celestial strife. For now I see the universe outspread Within my vision, as with close-shut lids One may read clear the history of the dead And stand with Pharaohs by the Pyramids, Or sit within some rare Athenian home; Yes, as the words and deeds of men are brought Into the widening circle of my thought, The stars grow real to me like deathless Rome.