I. The Victories

Masters of the known and found Singers of a world completed, All to a time and end ordained, Powers foredestined to their bound And truth immutably contained, A dominion mapped and meted,— Like as in Egyptian noon Gods of granite throned august Gaze on old realms round them strewn Far as the horizon dust,— All beneath that searching sky Gathered into wisdom’s eye! Prophets of the found and known, Chanters of the Laws unchanging, Comes not an hour that undoes all With a whispered homelessness, With a sudden touch estranging? Certainties you deemed your own, Housing with a friendly wall, Glide into a doubt and guess Swift as when, the low light going, Darkness on the wind comes flowing Out of nothing; and surmise, Dream, desire, are frontierless; And the unroofed mind has skies To breathe of, where a rumour sings Of other mind and vaster things Wooed to wilder destinies. Thought throbs: there a power entices (Like, on a wonder-night, all June In a draught of stolen spices) Not to stay, not to stay, But to embark for the outer dark. Only charms the untrodden way, Only the unspelt secret rune.

Conqueror with foot superb Planted on the last step won, Whom the trumpet-mouths proclaim Destiny’s accepted son, Robed in a resounding name, What profounder pangs disturb Something that’s unquarried yet In the deep soul? All the gain Weighs but as an ashy grain In the world those pangs beget. Fierce fruitions but betray And deliver to the hard Hope of things unhazarded. Where that world is, who shall say? Under western evening starred Black waves tempt to far-away Visioned walls of a wide shore, Lands the only-coveted, Gleaming as they gleamed before Alexander’s dying eyes In the tent at Babylon. Dumb his soldiers streamed beside him, Dumb’d with grief that only saw The pillar of the world undone, Nor guessed what potent visions gnaw The unsated mind with cruelties,— Ramparts where Time’s jealous spies, Sentinelled afar, deride him, Mocking all that passion willed With the frustrate and the unfulfilled. O the inexorable Lure Spur to the demon hearts of men! Ravening Genghis, hot Timour, And the empire-storming Saracen, Fate’s infuriate charioteers, Fly from a whisper in their ears (Earth before them, Time behind) Whispering, ‘Haste, ere blood be chill, Storm and scatter, work your will!’ Hunters hunted in the mind, Hunting what they cannot name, Thunder over earth, to find Nothing. Though the harvest black Be reaped in rue and curse and wrong, There’s a thing they cannot tame. Still they keep their torrent-track, Maddened by a shadowy song Sung beyond the reach of sense. What song is this which wastes the worth Of human things, and distastes earth, And fevers with magnificence Of swiftness trampling, ruin-crowned, Toward a goal that none has found? Is it the song the Adventurer stole Body-bound upon the mast For the enchantment of his soul? Over farthest foam of waves That are sailors’ restless graves, He heard exulting as he passed Perilous voices challenging The mortal heart of him, and fear Became a glory, so to hear Secure as an immortal, sing The Sirens.