A poem by Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)

 

Darkness had stretched its colour,

Deep blue across the pane:

No cloud to make night duller,

No moon with its tarnish stain;

But only here and there a star,

One sharp point of frosty fire,

Hanging infinitely far

In mockery of our life and death

And all our small desire.

Now in this hour of waking

From under brows of stone,

A new pale day is breaking

And the deep night is gone.

Sordid now, and mean and small

The daylight world is seen again,

With only the veils of mist that fall

Deaf and muffling over all

To hide its ugliness and pain.

But to-day this dawn of meanness

Shines in my eyes, as when

The new world’s brightness and cleanness

Broke on the first of men.

For the light that shows the huddled things

Of this close-pressing earth,

Shines also on your face and brings

All its dear beauty back to me

In a new miracle of birth.

I see you asleep and unpassioned,

White-faced in the dusk of your hair–

Your beauty so fleetingly fashioned

That it filled me once with despair

To look on its exquisite transience

And think that our love and thought and laughter

Puff out with the death of our flickering sense,

While we pass ever on and away

Towards some blank hereafter.

But now I am happy, knowing

That swift time is our friend,

And that our love’s passionate glowing,

Though it turn ash in the end,

Is a rose of fire that must blossom its way

Through temporal stuff, nor else could be

More than a nothing. Into day

The boundless spaces of night contract

And in your opening eyes I see

Night born in day, in time eternity.

 

 

 

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