As dreamers through their dreams surmise
The stealthy passage of the night,
We half-remember smoky skies
And city streets and hurrying flight,
Another world from this clear height
Whereon our starry altars rise.
Beneath our towering waste of stone
The fragile ships creep to and fro,
By tempest riven and overthrown,
The toys of these same tides that flow
Against our pillars far below
With faint, insistent monotone.
The snarling winds against our rocks
Hurl breakers in a fleecy mass,
Like wolves that chase stampeding flocks
Over the brink of a crevasse,
While thunders down the Alpine pass
The deluge of the equinox.
Lost in that stormy atmosphere,
Men chart their seas and trudge their roads;
Inviolate, we scorn to hear
Their shouted warning that forebodes
An end to these fair episodes
Of life beneath our tranquil sky;
Having sought only peace, then why
Should we go down to death with fear?