the roar in its wings!

Shadow of moon is the moon in the sky of it--
Wan as the face of a wizard, and far!
Never there shines from the firmament high of it
Grace of the planet or glory of star.
All the year round, in the place of white days on it--
All the year round where there never is night--
Lies a great sinister, bitter, blind haze on it:
Growth that is neither of darkness nor light!
Wild is the cry of the sea in the caves by it--
Sea that is smitten by spears of the snow;
Desolate songs are the songs of the waves by it--
Down in the south, where the ships never go.

Storm from the Pole is the singer that sings to it
Hymns of the land at the planet's grey verge.
Thunder discloses dark, wonderful things to it--
Thunder and rain, and the dolorous surge.
Hills with no hope of a wing or a leaf on them,
Scarred with the chronicles written by flame,
Stare, through the gloom of inscrutable grief on them,
Down on the horns of the gulfs without name.
Cliffs, with the records of fierce flying fires on them--
Loom over perilous pits of eclipse;
Alps, with anathema stamped in the spires on them--
Out by the wave with a curse on its lips.

Never is sign of soft, beautiful green on it--
Never the colour, the glory of rose!
Neither the fountain nor river is seen on it,
Naked its crags are, and barren its snows!
Blue as the face of the drowned is the shore of it--
Shore, with the capes of indefinite cave.
Strange is the voice of its wind, and the roar of it
Startles the mountain and hushes the wave.
Out to the south and away to the north of it,
Spectral and sad are the spaces untold!
All the year round a great cry goeth forth of it--
Sob of this leper of lands in the cold.

No man hath stood, all its bleak, bitter years on it--
Fall of a foot on its wastes is unknown:
Only the sound of the hurricane's spears on it
Breaks with the shout from the uttermost zone.
Blind are its bays with the shadow of bale on them;
Storms of the nadir their rocks have uphurled;
Earthquake hath registered deeply its tale on them--
Tale of distress from the dawn of the world!
_There_ are the gaps, with the surges that seethe in them--
Gaps in whose jaws is a menace that glares!
_There_ the wan reefs, with the merciless teeth in them,
Gleam on a chaos that startles and scar