The golden journey

There noon keeps just a twilight trace;

Twixt love and hate, and death and birth,

No man may choose; nor sobs nor mirth

May enter in that haunted place.

All day the fountain sphynx lets drip

Slow drops of silence from her lip.

To hold the porch-roof slender girls

Of milk-white marble stand arow;

Doubt never blurs a single brow,

And never the noon's faintness curls

From their expectant hush of pride

The lips the god has glorified.

But these things he will barely view,

Or if he stay to heed them, still

But as the lark the lights that spill

From out the sun it soars unto,

Where, past the splendors and the heats,

The sun's heart's self forever beats.