O what is it leads the way that they do not stray? What unimagined arm keeps their bodies from harm? What presence concealed lifts their little feet that yield Over dry ground and wet till their straining eyes are met With a thinning of the darkness? And the foremost faintly cries in awed surprise: And they one by one emerge from the gloom to the verge Of a small sunken vale full of moonlight pale. And they hang along the bank, clinging to the branches dank, A shadowy festoon out of sight of the moon; And they see in front of them, rising from the mud A single straight stem and a single pallid bud In that little lake of light from the moon's calm height.
A stem, a ghostly bud, on the moon-swept mud That shimmers like a pond; and over there beyond The guardian forest high, menacing and strange, Invades the empty sky with its wild black range.
And they watch hour by hour that small lonely flower In that deep forest place that hunter never found.
It shines without sound, as a star in space.
And the silence all around that solitary place Is like silence in a dream; till a sudden flashing gleam Down their dark faces flies; and their lips fall apart And their glimmering great eyes with excitement dart And their fingers, clutching the branches they were touching, Shake and arouse hissing leaves on the boughs.
And they whisper aswoon: Did it move in the moon? O it moved as it grew! It is moving, opening, with calm and gradual will, And their bodies where they cling are shadowed and still And with marvel they mark that the mud now is dark For the unfolding flower, like a goddess in her power, Challenges the moon with a light of her own, That lovelily grows as the petals unclose, Wider, more wide with an awful inward pride, Till the heart of it breaks, and stilled is their breath, For the radiance it makes is as wonderful as death.
The morning's crimson stain tinges their ashen brows As they part the last boughs and slowly step again On to the village grass, and chill and languid pass Into the huts to sleep. Brief slumber, yet so deep That, when they wake to day, darkness and splendour seem Broken and far away, a faint miraculous dream; And when those maidens rise they are as they ever were Save only for a rare shade of trouble in their eyes. And the surly thick-lipped men, as they sit about their huts Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then, Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin, Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony, Chip and grunt and do not see. But each mother, silently, Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut, For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air, A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies, And stare softly at the ember, and try to remember Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seen Like an early evening star when the sky is pale green: A quiet silver tower that climbed in an hour, Or a ghost like a flower, or a flower like a queen: Something holy in the past that came and did not last.