[BNP/E3, 31A – 63]

75

A Summer Ecstasy

Beside a summer's day

     I lay me down and dreamed.

The light from far away

x    In my withinned self gleamed,

An unreal true glow,

Spiritually somehow.

I saw the inner side

     Of summer, earth and morn.

I heard the rivers glide

     From Within. I was borne

To see, through mysteries,

How God everything is.

The motes of sun that dance

     Are audibly whispered.

All is an utterance.

     The sight may hear. I shed

Vision of things as things.

My thoughts are angels' wings.

The corpses of known hours

     In barks unsteered and left

Float, covered with mute flowers,

     Down my dream that is cleft

x Between two banks of Lie,[1]

This summer day and I.

Starts like a sudden flute

     Pastoral with tuneless notes

Out of my being[2] root

     Of all my being denotes

x On wave of this day knit 

With my seeing of it.[3]

|And lo! I am Another.

     My senses taste not-mine.

A hand my sight doth smother

     To a blind sight divine.

I am a lost tune, a mood

Of the finger-tips of God.

So, like a child-prince crowned,

     I fell new with fear-pride.

I am robed with sky and ground.

My inmost soul’s outside

Is sunlit seas and lands.

x My dreams are seraphs’ hands

                                Fernando Pessoa

 
[1] Between two banks of Lie, /(In banks of mystery ­-)\
[2] my being /the unseen\
[3] x On wave of this day knit /Spreads till I feel it not\

With my seeing of it. /O'er my lost sense of thought.\