kathleen raine
for posterity
infinite
All life, tumbled together in a storm
And the crags stand out clear in the lightning.
The wind, like a bolting horse, pounds down the valley,
The sheep, like vegetation, draw to earth,
And trees, like animate things, tear at their roots and groan.
That was in 1830. That storm long since was over.
So, my tempestuous love, closed in a quiet book,
And in a quiet grave, disturbs no heart but yours,
Reader, stretched on the summer grass
Waiting for tea-time, and shadows growing longer.
Like the sea-sounding blood that children hear
At night when the ear's shell is held to sleep,
Infinity flows round us with the dark,
And heaven hangs behind the window-curtain.
The infinite recedes beyond the farthest star
And here, no less remote, though I can gather it
(A hair's breadth of it is as wide as night),
Astral upon the grass in manifold it flowers.
It is the star whose light the eye takes in like love,
The flower that opens its star in the mind's eye
It is the eye within whose iris the star flowers.
It is that seed grown pregnant in the mind
Sprung from an earth alien as any star
That makes of thought a tree profound as night,
That makes the human scope the orbit of all suns
Where love the infinite eternal rose
Fills with its implicated whorls
The hierarchies of being with its petals.
peace of mind
If the pool were still
The reflected world
Of tottering houses,
The falling cities,
The quaking mountains
Would cohere on the surface
And stars invisible
To the troubled mind
Be seen in water
Drawn from the soul's
Bottomless well.