Sunsets

Did your eyes watch the mystic sunset splendours
Through evenings of old summers, slow of parting,--
Wistful while loveliest gains and fair surrenders
Hallow’d the West,--till tremulous tears came starting?

Did your soul wing her way on noiseless pinion
Through lucid fields of air, and penetrated
With light and silence roam the wide dominion
Where Day and Dusk embrace,--serene, unmated?

And they are past the shining hours and tender,
And snows are fallen between, and winds are driven?
Nay, for I find across your face the splendour,
And in your wings the central winds of heaven.

They reach me, those lost sunsets. Undivining
Your own high mysteries you pause and ponder;
See, in my eyes the vanished light is shining,
Feel, through what spaces of clear heaven I wander!