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. l 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.

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.