A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems

>The thunder muttering on the hills,
The song of birds, the babbling rills,
The painted flowers and stars,
This pageantry of earth did seem
The parcel of a timeless dream.
He lived beyond the bars.

It was to him a vague mirage
Or memory of a storied page
With only that appeal;
But oftentimes a sound or sight
Would bring to him his own delight
More subtle than the real.

And with his sense of entity
Half lost, he raised a vacant eye
Into the empyrean.
And as he lay upon his back
The pealing centuries rolled back....
He saw the blue Ægean.

And thus he dreamt: "My palace home
With minaret and marble dome
Upon the sapphire strait.
My garden full of nightingales,
One singing as the other fails
While evening groweth late.

"And from my watch-tower I behold
Beneath a sky of molten gold
My argosies return.
A homeward wind is in their sails,
Freighted are they with costly bales,
Vast fire