This week’s poem is by Alfred Noyes, and its name is “Immortal Sails”. I chose it because I like Noyes’s poetry and the title appealed to me when I saw it.
Dear, when we part, at last, that sunset sky
Alfred Noyes (1880—1958)
Shall not be touched with deeper hues than this;
But we shall ride the lightning ere we die
And seize our brief infinitude of bliss,
Poem 355. Immortal Sails
Now, in a breath, we’ll burst those gates of gold,
And ransack heaven before our moment fails.
Now, in a breath, before we, too, grow old,
We’ll mount and sing and spread immortal sails.
It is not time that makes eternity.
Love and an hour may quite out-span the years,
And give us more to hear and more to see
Than life can wash away with all its tears.
Dear, when we part, at last, that sunset sky
Shall not be touched with deeper hues than this;
But we shall ride the lightning ere we die
And seize our brief infinitude of bliss,
With time to spare for all that heaven can tell,
While eyes meet eyes, and look their last farewell.
This sonnet seems to me to be about the moment when we realise that we love another and euphoria overwhelms us. We truly feel that the future holds incredible opportunities to share and nothing seems impossible. We could indeed “burst those gates of gold/And ransack Heaven” while our time together lasts and in that eternal moment no longer than a breath, we want to sing and set sail for Paradise.
Noyes reminds us that eternity is not a simple measure of time in hours, minutes and seconds; that feeling of being so absorbed in what we are doing that we cease to notice the passage of time, whether we are spending time with those we love or concentrating on some pastime or work. An hour spent in the company of our beloved may indeed seem endless and we may well feel that we have lived more between the chimes of the clock than in our whole life to that point.
When the inevitable moment comes and we are forced to live without the other, the sky may darken but cannot be more majestic than the love we feel and before that dreadful moment of parting arrives, we will seize the moment, “ride the lightning” and enjoy “our brief infinitude of bliss” that holds everything we could ever wish for as we gaze into each other’s eyes until the moment when we make our “last farewell.”
I like it because in fourteen lines, Noyes runs riot with the English language and coins some memorable phrases and expressions: “It is not time that makes eternity”, “Love and an hour may quite out-run the years”, “ride the lightning” (now an idiom meaning execution by electrocution, the subject of a Metallica song), and the title of the poem itself are all wonderful but I really like “brief infinitude” which suggests the huge scope of feelings wrapped up in an instant of time. Like several other poems I have covered, this urges us to seize the day—“Carpe diem!” and although Mrs. Ramsbottom from last week might disapprove of the Latin, the sentiment is sound.
It reminds me in a way of the opening of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
There are quite a few readings on YouTube but I like the one by Adalgisa Vitolo. The words have also been set to music by David W. Carroll and others. “Ride the Lightning” is also a song by Metallica, though unrelated to this poem.