Do you hear it, do you hear it Soaring up to heaven, or somewhere near it? From the depths of life upheaving, Clouds of earth and sorrow cleaving, From despair and death retrieving, All triumphant blasts of sound Lift you at one rhythmic bound From the thraldom of the ground.
All the sweetness which the glowing Violets waft to west winds blowing, All the burning love-notes aching, Rills and thrills of rapture shaking Through the hearts that throb to breaking Of the little nightingales; Mellow murmuring waters streaming Lakeward in long silver trails, Crooning low while earth lies dreaming To the moonlight-tangled vales; Swish of rain on half-blown roses Hoarding close their rich perfume, Which the summer dawn uncloses Sparkling in their morning bloom; Convent peals o'er pastoral meadows, Swinging through hay-scented air When the velvet-footed shadows Call the hind to evening prayer. Yea, all notes of woods and highlands; Sea-fowls' screech round sphinx-like islands Couched among the Hebrides; Cuckoo calls through April showers, When the green fields froth with flowers And with bloom the orchard trees. Boom of surges with their hollow Refluent shock from cave to cave, As the maddening spring tides follow Moonstruck reeling wave o'er wave. Yea, all rhythms of air and ocean Married to the heart's emotion, To the intervolved emotion Of the heart for ever turning In a whirl of bliss and pain, Blending in symphonious strain All the vague, unearthly yearning Of the visionary brain.
All life's discords sweetly blending, Heights on heights of being ascending, Harmonies of confluent sound Lift you at one rhythmic bound From the thraldom of the ground; Loosen all your bonds of birth, Clogs of sense and weights of earth, Bear you in angelic legions High above terrestrial regions Into ampler ether, where Spirits breathe a finer air, Where upon world altitudes God-intoxicated moods Fill you with beatitudes; Till no longer cramped and bound By the narrow human round, All the body's barriers slide, Which with cold obstruction hide The supreme, undying, sole Spirit struggling through the whole, And no more a thing apart From the universal heart Liberated by the grace Of man's genius for a space, Human lives dissolve, enlace In a flaming world embrace.