Iii. 2

Be still! Wash out this dull roar from the ear That fevers Time; be emptied the hot brain Of clamorous, intricately-teasing toil. Let spiritual Silence brim again The mind’s well to a mirror virgin-clear; All these invented cares smoothe and uncoil.

Contemplate Silence; the wild Silence, ere Music or word was; waste, unshapen sound; Crying of wind; moaning of sea; stammer of storm; Gropings as for a being nowhere found; Mateless desires, frustrated throbs of air, Without home, without form.

They sought a lodge in haunted flesh, they sought The inward tingling sense’s touched accord; To be delivered, to be born perfect On shapes of lips, a breathed, a living word, A flower that seeds its riches, thought from thought, Incarnate sound, mysterious and elect.

Contemplate Silence! The unwithered womb Of all music infinite as desire; All words, releasing tears and bliss; all song, That wins at last a universe for choir, And there the enlarged spirit has full room, There its desires and its delights belong.

All speech, all song, all music still unborn, Waits there for its futurity of mind To become human; yet it holds some tone Drawn from a something vaster than mankind, As from profounder heart-strings torn, And yet complete in man alone;

As if behind him travailing, the whole Dark world were seeking in this eloquent flesh Some other self, and sighing here to be Born afresh, born afresh; To win a world yet undiscovered in the soul: ‘O Voice,’ it cries, ‘utter; O Hands, deliver me!’

With such a dark quest in desirous eyes, From the ancient East, as through a silent gate In the mind’s city and labyrinth of thought, Those Magian Kings, of knowledge satiate, Of riches satiate, and forlornly wise, Down desert gorges brought

Gifts for the Unknown: nay, but Earth from far In yearning sent them, her ambassadors. Rocks opened veins of gold, trees oozed their blood, Spices sighed, gems burned up from cavern-floors, The very Night had made Desire a star, That over against them, strange and certain, stood;

And thither laden with Earth’s hope and want, Her symbol’d sighs and riches of her pain, Down separate passes of the mountain streaming Wound onward each amid his marvelling train, Those sages drawn from towers of midnight haunt By their prophetic dreaming; And trumpet thrilled to trumpet thro’ the night, And torches told of glistering strange attire, Where met those three kings on one errand led. What image shaped they of the World’s Desire, What presence throned in majesty and might, As they went musing, deep in hope and dread,

And under vast cope of the wheeling skies Found but a naked child, a child new-born? Wisdom resigned the crown of her enthroning; All her impassioned question was forsworn: In wonder she saw all things with new eyes. Then, there were songs of joy; now, sound of a world groaning.