“Lovely seemed any object that should sweep / Away the vast, salt, dread, eternal deep.”

For Poetry Monday, an exception to my policy of no excerpts. Because this is grand enough:


opening of The Book of Earth, Alfred Noyes

I. The Grand Canyon

Let the stars fade. Open the Book of Earth.

Out of the Painted Desert, in broad noon,
Walking through pine-clad bluffs, in an air like wine,
I came to the dreadful brink.

I saw, with a swimming brain, the solid earth
Splitting apart, into two hemispheres,
Cleft, as though by the axe of an angry god.

On the brink of the Grand Canyon,
Over that reeling gulf of amethyst shadows,
From the edge of one sundered hemisphere I looked down,
Down from abyss to abyss,
Into the dreadful heart of the old earth dreaming
Like a slaked furnace of her far beginnings,
The inhuman ages, alien as the moon,
Æons unborn, and the unimagined end.
There, on the terrible brink, against the sky,
I saw a black speck on a boulder jutting
Over a hundred forests that dropped and dropped
Down to a tangle of red precipitous gorges
That dropped again and dropped, endlessly down.

A mile away, or ten, on its jutting rock,
The black speck moved. In that dry diamond light
It seemed so near me that my hand could touch it.
It stirred like a midge, cleaning its wings in the sun.
All measure was lost. It broke—into five black dots.
I looked, through the glass, and saw that these were men.

Beyond them, round them, under them, swam the abyss
Endlessly on.
                    Far down, as a cloud sailed over,
A sun-shaft struck, between forests and sandstone cliffs,
Down, endlessly down, to the naked and dusky granite,
Crystalline granite that still seemed to glow
With smouldering colours of those buried fires
Which formed it, long ago, in earth's deep womb.
And there, so far below that not a sound,
Even in that desert air, rose from its bed,
I saw the thin green thread of the Colorado,
The dragon of rivers, dwarfed to a vein of jade,
The Colorado that, out of the Rocky Mountains,
For fifteen hundred miles of glory and thunder,
Rolls to the broad Pacific.


---L.
Subject quote from Don Juan, Canto II, Byron