The Apotheosis of Alexander

UPON a lake, His eye, the image of a bird
Drowsily moves among the clouds and calls.
He hardly hears its frantic note and word,
From so far away, so long ago, it falls.

Moving not He grows; valleys receive,
Hills lie under Him. His trees praise, His dust,
Rivers, cities, praise Him who can conceive
All things in pleasure without lust.

His heart, so slowly swelling, like a rose
Unfolds itself a century in Him
Who every moment is dying— to close
In Him who stirs the earth and leaps in limb.

For Him whose sleep is everywhere here,
India is not bed enough, nor is Earth;
Only the instant’s narrow cot can bear
His waking word, its infinite birth.

Whose body is a leaf in whose flame all things
Of earth and heaven burn themselves green;
No stone denies, no heart unsays, no kings
Forbid His coming: He shall be seen.

QUICK Alexander would be more than man:
Then must he make the world a single coal
To heat the steel of wings and claws, and fan
It with glory’s bellows of the great and small.
Since sleep, sleep and earth and love’s short death
He fears, his breast must be the anvil
Where his strict heart hammers out his breath.
I am! he cries, and makes the sky his swill.

In the infinite black lake of God’s eye
All things fulfill themselves, die, and near
The center. The flashing of His thought through that sky
Is an unending rain of seed; there,
Night by night the heavens turn and wheel down
And Alexander, dying in Babylon,
Must throw himself through the stars’ fiery crown
And make all Asia’s tongues of praise his own.

Since heavenly exile — babbling loneliness
And sick immortality — is prize of his passion,
A world is wasted to destroy the duress
Of being man. Yet even the evil are chosen:
Who leaps from God that moment falls to Him,
Plunging in His eye. See Alexander there!
From star to star he flings foot, face, limb,
Yet his furthest flight is but a falling near.

Fevered flying lias transformed his soul:
All strictness of body now is husk,
And within, a world’s seed desires the stars’ long fall
That it may hurl its dawn through earth’s dusk.
Faintly, within the husk’s immense horizon,
Bird leaf and stone constellate
Alexander through a sky begun,
Newly risen, and trembling toward his fate.

Such yearning, such desire, such sighing breath
To die: that boundless wedding: giving birth.
Being, he is all praise, and the crowning wreath
About his head is God’s coarse arm of earth.