What was the secret Pan to Psyche told?

He showed her silent pools of mirrored things,

And down among his dreams of blue and gold,

The image of her own translucent wings.

Now has she flamed forth on her way alone,

Her sad voice cries no more in every storm,

Her wild wings waft her unto heights unknown,

And vibrant rhythms of Eternal Form.

Yet still life holds that dream–enthrallèd hour,

When a white hush empties the earth of pain,

Split sunlight slants athwart a gleaming shower,

And wingèd Psyche walks the world again.

Then sudden sapphires from the rainbow's arch

Fall flashing down amid wind–shaken reeds,

Faint laughter sways the new green of the larch,

And ripples whisper in the water–weeds.

What is the secret Psyche told to Pan

Among the dark–boughed pine trees green and tall?

‘Brother art thou,’ she said, ‘not slave of man’:

You could have heard the smallest fir–cone fall.

As Pan stood gasping at the river's edge,

All things seemed but to mock him, and her words

Strange as the wind that rustles in the sedge,

And idle as the empty songs of birds.

That night at midnight thus it came to pass,

As the moon rose white and the earth slept,

When Christ went sighing over the wet grass,

Pan cried out in his dream, and waked, and wept.