Contrast
THE day is bitter. Through the hollow sky
Rolls the clear sun, inexorably bright,
Glares on the shrinking earth, a lidless eye,
Shedding no warmth, but floods of blinding light.
The hurricane roars loud. The facile sea
With passionate resentment writhes and raves
Beneath its maddening whip, and furiously
Responds with all the thunder of its waves.
The iron rock, ice-locked, snow-sheathed, lies still,
The centre of this devastated world,
Beaten and lashed by wind and sea at will,
Buried in spray by the fierce breakers hurled.
Cold, raging desolation! Out of it,
Swift-footed, eager, noiseless as the light,
Glides my adventurous thought, and lo, I sit
With Memnon and the desert in my sight.
Silence and breathless heat! A torrid land,
Unbroken to the vast horizon’s verge,
Save once, where from the waste of level sand
All motionless the clustered palms emerge.
Hot the wide earth and hot the blazing sky,
And still as death, unchanged since time began.
Far in the shimmering distance silently
Creeps like a snake the lessening caravan.
And on the great lips of the statue old
Broods silence, and no zephyr stirs the palm.
Nature forgets her tempests and her cold,
And breathes in peace. “There is no joy but calm.”
