The Clouds

Mortals! we are the Clouds! look up and behold us!
The multiform Angels of God, in Protean forms we fold us.
With white wings we waft us about
     The deep-blue fields of summer ale,
And a murmurous wind is in our wings, like the song
     Of a love-born maiden.
    Now— with our golden hair
     Tossed back by the May’s breath laden
    With odors of budding sassafras,
     And the new tender grass— we crowd
Round the ear of the morning, and every straying curl
Is tinged with purple and rose, and a soft iridescent pearl.

Anon with a voice more loud—
The shout of the tempest-[??] calls
The panting hurricane out from the gloomy walls
     That round beleaguered heaven, we piled–
Into one dark form we crowd
Cloud upon thunder cloud,
     Gigantic and frantic, with wind
Wide-waving wings, that winnow a continued.
     And the cisterns of the ruin, the springs
Of the mighty deep are poured from every rest
Of our shattered walls, o’er the foodful plain.
     And the desert ocean’s hungry solitude.

But when the Day-god strikes his azure tent.
      And seeks dismal rest
    Behind the many-hued
Imperial curtains of the amber west.
And night comes stealing from the orient.
     Bannered with darkness— lo! we have because
Mountains of purple and bronze.
Dark, cavernous mountains — volcanoes with silver
     Of mad, gnashing Titans for lava!
Dim vaults for the conquered of Zeus, the home
Of many a fiery fiend, and sweltering, sooty gnome.
     And deep in our chambers the groans
Of their penal torture are heard, with mingled clamors
Of blow on blow of their ponderous hammers.
     Forging their captor’s thunder;
    And ye see, by the fitful wink
     Of their forge fires, the deep cells
Yawning under and under, sultry glimmering bells,
     And their own dark silhouettes, where they bend and toil and swink!

     Sing us, O poet! in our every changing mood,
Whether we sail the heavens like stately swans,
     Or as barques o’er the boundless flood,
Or scurry like sheep from the laving that send
    Across the flowery lawns;
Or yet when the brooding thunder bird is shaking her wings bronze.
And ye hear the first hoarse croak of her escaping brood!

     Paint us, O artist! with pencil dipt in the beams
Of sunrise, of noon and ere, and the dusky pool of night;
     Fringes of lavender, dove-purples softened with gleams
    Of a pearl-tinctured white;
And the deep, dun bases of cumuli, over-hung
     With crags, fire-listed from streams
    Of the sun-flames, down beheld
Our bastions of darkness! Paint us when the young
    Aurora leaps from the arms of her blind
Swan lover, old Night, and the heavens are ablaze
With saffron and amber, and molten chrysoprase,
And all the blue arch over us is deepened in her rays.
     And ye who have no pencil, nor gift of winged words,
Behold us and rejoice in your hearts of speechless praise,
     For the glories and gleams that go by 
     In the everchanging sky,
To gladden the souls of man and cheer the fields and herds!