THE ABYSS

BETWEEN me and my consciousness
Is an abyss
At whose invisible botton runs
The noise of a stream far from (...)
Whose very sound is dark and cold –
Ay, on some skin of our soul's deeming,
Cold and dark and terribly old,
Itself, and not in its told seeming.

My hewing has become my seeing
Of that placelessly sunken stream.
Its noiseless noise is ever freeing
My thought from my thught's power to dream.
Some dread reality belongs
To that stream of mute obstruct songs
That speak of no reality
But of its going to no sea.
Lo! with the eyes of my dreamed hearing
I hear the unseen river bearing
Along to where it goes not to
All things my thought is made of – Thought
Itself, and the World, and God who
On that impossible stream float.

Ay, the ideas of God, of World,
Of Myself and of Mystery,
As from some unknown rampart hurled,
Go down with that strewn to that sea
It has not and shall never reach
And belong to its night-bound motion.
Yet oh for that sun on the beach
Of that unattainable ocean!