MOONLIGHT IN THE PINES

by: George Sterling (1869-1926)

ULL-STARRED, seraphic Night arose,

Lifting the Pleiades' dim lyre

Above that solitude where glows

Rose-red Aldebaran's fire.

 

Mute, ere the darkness could forget

The crystal hour of evening's trance,

I felt the little winds that set

The mirrored stars a-dance.

 

On restless leaves I heard them pass

To touch the yellow vines that lay

Like paler pythons in the grass,

Beside a lonely way.

 

To forest glades at last it led,

By Silence chosen as her own:

The pines' soft sighing overhead

Seemed but her whispers flown.

 

Scarcely it seemed to cross the bound

Where she, aloof, stood sorceress--

That twilight where the feet of sound

Pass unto nothingness.

 

A little weary of the speech

Of burdened man and troubled sea,

I stood and dreamed that time would teach

Her dream of peace to me,

 

And, awed by the communing night,

Forgot the haggard world withdrawn,

Ere on my face there fell a light

As of a spectral dawn.

 

It gleamed beyond the barring pine--

That shattered silver of the moon--

The midnight's asphodels divine

On field and woodland strewn.

 

Among the lesser trees it lay

Like veiled and pallid ghosts that slept,

About whose forms, as in dismay,

The fearful shadows crept.

 

But o'er the dale where Silence stood,

With tranquil dews austerely crowned,

A wilder glory touched the wood,--

A sense of things profound.

 

And subtlier on the enchanted air

The moonlight's nacre seemed to melt,

While mosses like a witch's hair

Stirred to a wind unfelt.

 

And, like a messenger of night,

Mystical, ominous and slow,

A fragile moth, in purposed flight,

Went past on wings of snow.

 

It may have been that elder pow'rs

Stood, immaterial, in the glade;

Perchance the moon's phantasmal flow'rs

At shrines unseen were laid.

 

For in those isles it seemed there shone

Forsaken marbles, pure and cold--

The gleam of altars overthrown

And ghostly fanes of old.

 

And since that hour the night can thrill

With haunting chords by day unstirred,

And Beauty's lips, refusing still,

Move with a secret word.

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