Explore "The Heights of Silence" by Leigh Gordon Giltner on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
(Transcribed from "The Choir Invisible.")
Above the valleys, peopled, fair and warm, / Rise the bleak, silent uplands where abide / Wraiths of lost loves, love's recompense denied, / Unspoken, unconfessed, unsatisfied. / Cold, silent heights, engirt with zones of storm, / Where Love for aye unmated must abide.
The broad, sweet downward vistas of the flesh / Stretch fair and far; the calm white spirit-height / Is lone and chill; there dimly shines the light / Of sun and star that burns and beacons bright / Where Sin spreads still her guiling, glitt'ring mesh. / Ah, warm the valley! Lone and chill the height!
Yet he who wins the height's sublimity-- / The silent height where loves unlived abide, / Loves stainless, sublimated, purified-- / Shall glimpse that land, to grosser view denied, / Where love and longing infinite shall be / Or ever stilled--or ever satisfied.