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Uranus1

By Arthur Hugh Clough

Topics: classic

When on the primal peaceful blank profound,     Which in its still unknowing silence holds     All knowledge, ever by withholding holds,     When on that void (like footfalls in far rooms),     In faint pulsations from the whitening East     Articulate voices first were felt to stir,     And the great child, in dreaming grown to man,     Losing his dream to piece it up began;     Then Plato in me said,     Tis but the figured ceiling overhead,     With cunning diagrams bestarred, that shine     In all the three dimensions, are endowed     With motion too by skill mechanical,     That thou in height, and depth, and breadth, and power.     Schooled unto pure Mathesis, might proceed     To higher entities, whereof in us     Copies are seen, existent they themselves     In the sole kingdom of the Mind and God.     Mind not the stars, mind thou thy Mind and God.     By that supremer Word     Oermastered, deafly heard     Were hauntings dim of old astrologies;     Chaldean mumblings vast, with gossip light     From modern ologistic fancyings mixed,     Of suns and stars, by hypothetic men     Of other frame than ours inhabited,     Of lunar seas and lunar craters huge.     And was there atmosphere, or was there not?     And without oxygen could life subsist?     And was the world originally mist?     Talk they as talk they list,     I, in that ampler voice,     Unheeding, did rejoice.

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"When on the primal peaceful blank profound,..."

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"When on the primal peaceful blank profound,..." by Arthur Hugh Clough

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Arthur Hugh Clough

About Arthur Hugh Clough

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) was an English poet whose work explores Victorian doubt and moral uncertainty. His poems "Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth" and "The Latest Decalogue" are sharp, thoughtful, and still widely anthologized.

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"Cease, empty Faith, the Spectrum saith,     I was,..."

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