That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows / flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs / they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, / wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle in long / lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous / ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest's creases; / in pool and rutpeel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed / dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks / treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fueled, / nature's bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest / to her, her clearest-selved spark

Man, how fast his firedint, / his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig / nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, / death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time / beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, / joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. / Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; / world's wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.