[BNP/E3, 31A – 64-65]

75

A Summer Ecstasy

Beside a summer's day

     I lay me down and dreamed.

The light from far away

     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

In banks of mystery ­-

This summer day and I.

And something like a greed

     And yet unlike a wish,

The power to have a need

     Which doth not needing reach,

But is dissolved again

Ere its sad joy reach pain,

A shadowy lightness woven

     Of the day and of me,

Like sparkling water driven

     Never but where we see,

A gap, a pause, a dim

Looking over things' rim,

Starts like a sudden flute

     Pastoral with tuneless notes

Out of the unseen root

     Of all my being denotes,

Spreads, till I feel it not,

O'er my lost sense of thought.

[65r]

76

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‑king crowned,

     I feel new with fear‑pride.

I am robed with sky and ground.

     My inmost soul's outside

Is sunlit seas and lands.

My dreams are seraphs' hands.