Summer Noon

Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills, and fire made solid in the flinty stone, thick-massed or scattered pebble, fire that fills the breathless hour that lives in fire alone. This valley, long ago the patient bed of floods that carved its antient amplitude, in stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread, endures to drown in noon-day's tyrant mood. Behind the veil of burning silence bound, vast life's innumerous busy littleness is hushed in vague-conjectured blur of sound that dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unless some dazzling puncture let the stridence throng in the cicada's torture-point of song.