C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

The Unsleeping

From ‘Book of the Native’

I SOOTHE to unimagined sleep

The sunless bases of the deep;

And then I stir the aching tide

That gropes in its reluctant side.

I heave aloft the smoking hill;

To silent peace its throes I still.

But ever at its heart of fire

I lurk, an unassuaged desire.

I wrap me in the sightless germ

An instant or an endless term;

And still its atoms are my care,

Dispersed in ashes or in air.

I hush the comets one by one

To sleep for ages in the sun;

The sun resumes before my face

His circuit of the shores of space.

The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,

They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.

Time, like a flurry of wild rain,

Shall drip across the darkened pane.

Space in the dim predestined hour

Shall crumble like a ruined tower.

I only, with unfaltering eye,

Shall watch the dreams of God go by.