Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,

and fire made solid in the flinty stone,

thick-mass’d or scatter’d pebble, fire that fills

the breathless hour that lives in fire alone.

This valley, long ago the patient bed

of floods that carv’d its antient amplitude,

in stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread,

endures to drown in noon-days tyrant mood.

Behind the veil of burning silence bound,

vast life’s innumerous busy littleness

is hush’d in vague-conjectured blur of sound

that dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unless

some dazzling puncture let the stridence throng

in the cicada’s torture-point of song.