THE SONS OF SLEEP
Now the wayfaring, now the restless earth,
Descrying on her dim and trackless verge
The dear, awaited dawning of the night,
Moves slowly in a languor of desire,
And drifts into the haven of her sleep.
Like dropping of the sweet and gradual rain,
Full flooding all the parchèd doors of growth,
The multitudinous lips of all the flowers,
The whispering insistence of dry leaves,
All cool and rill-like flowing, falls our sleep.
As the long thunderous surge of ocean waves
That lull eternally the listening shore,
Slow sweeping in from vast and caverned depths,
Comes the white tide that washes loose our souls,
To drown them tenderly in depths of sleep.
Soft stealing like the swathed and plumèd dusk,
Enwrapped in shadows, shod with silences,
Unceasing, unresisted, unobserved,
Embosoming the lapsed and languid earth,
Slips o’er the sons of men close-feathered sleep.
By day they walk diverse and isolate,
Sunken in self they skulk their separate ways,
Poor fugitives of fate, awhirl in time,
Groping for fellow-hands they dare not grasp,
Grudging the thriftless hours they yield to sleep.
But now, relaxed and drifting with that stream
Whereon they taste soft moments of the voyage
Whose unknown port no seaman of us all
Evaded ever, these swift, swarming souls
As one glad band of brothers sink in sleep.
Surely the great and tireless Heart of all,
Grievèd by day for their perversity,
Joys in them as they lie, breast soft on breast,
Hand locked in hand, a fathom deep in dreams,
And brims anew the cooling wells of sleep!