[Editor: This poem by “R.G.S.” — a pseudonym of John Neilson (1844-1922) — was published in The Border Watch (Mount Gambier, SA), 16 November 1878.]
The Cloud City.
In the deep bright blue of the evening skies,
When the sun’s half sunk in his ocean home,
Like some vast argosy on fire;
Burnt to the edge of the purple foam,
Tinging the waves that shorewards rolled,
Till they glowed like billows of molten gold:
There glorious tints in the glowing skies —
Silver and amber and sombre brown;
Away where the fading sunlight dies,
And the sober shadows are deepening down,
There are pillars of cloud and smoke and flame
That rest on the ocean’s azure plain.
Reflected bright in the glassy sea,
A city of tinted cloud appears
With its spiral columns and glittering domes
Rising o’er other, tier on tier;
Transient but beautiful, see, it stands
Like the “City of God, not made with hands!”
There are gates of pearl and streets of gold,
Where the shifting colors are mixed and blent,
And the star of eve peeps through a rift
In the cloudy city’s battlements,
Like a lamp hung out, with its silver glow
To win our thoughts from the earth below.
And towering away to the high mid heaven
There are peaks and crags and cliffs of cloud,
All dazzling white as the drift that’s driven
When the winter monarch calls aloud,
As he shakes the snow from the mountain pines
In the chilly months of the winter time.
The city we see in the sunset skies
Is passing away, though there yet remains
A lingering ray of the light that flies
That gilds the spires of the cloudy fanes,
While the bright stars pass oh their silent march,
With the lights that glimmer in the crystal arch.
The glorious vision has passed. How soon
Can the altered clouds wear a changed shape —
They are trailing across the crescent moon
Like mighty banners of sable crape,
While misty phantoms seem to rise
And stretch their hands to the darkening skies!
Yes; darkness is brooding with dusky wing
O’er land and sea, and we own its power,
But morning will come when the birds will sing;
There is joy and hope in the dawning hours,
When the stars grow pale and the morning waits
In the east, to open her purple gates.
R.G.S.
Penola.
Source:
The Border Watch (Mount Gambier, SA), 16 November 1878, p. 4
Editor’s notes:
argosy = a large ship, especially a richly-laden merchant ship; a fleet of large ships; a rich supply; derived from the Italian word “ragusea”, referring to a ship from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, in Croatia)
azure = the blue of a clear unclouded sky
blent = blended (past tense of “blend”)
City of God, not made with hands = a reference to 2 Corinthians 5, in the Bible, which says “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”
crag = a steep and rugged rocky structure (cliff, rock face, or section of a mountain) which rises above or sticks out from other structures in the surrounding area
fane = a church or temple
gild = to cover something with a thin layer of gold, gold leaf, or a gold-coloured substance, or to make something look that way (an archaic meaning is to make something bloody or red)
o’er = (archaic) over (pronounced the same as “oar”, “or”, and “ore”)
sable = a colour that is black, dark, or gloomy (“sables” was an archaic term for garments worn for mourning; “sable” in heraldry refers to black); arising from the colour of dark sable fur, as taken from a sable (a furry mammal, Martes zibellina, which is primarily found in Russia and northern East Asia, and noted for its fur which has traditionally been used for clothing); in the context of the Australian Aborigines or African Negroes, a reference to their skin colour as being black
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