I climbed the cliff alone, and it was true:

The sky the night after the end of the world

Would look like this one, wild with falling rain.

The beaten grass would lie in the lightning so.

This was the marvel, and my neighbors' fear.

Torn heaven's everlasting black of wind

On the headland, when I stood there soaked and sore,

Threatened aloud my kind, and drowned in rain

My shout, and tasted salt in breath at the mouth.

That night I was the first man, or the last,

Under the sky over sea battering earth,

And the riding world was shaken. I was there.

But not at world's end yet. And down the cliff

I ran in rain, I ran with words to the wind

And local men, that both in their way would last,

And heaven do nothing final to their earth.

At dawn, on the headland, sun like even rain

Fell, and their marvel was one of nature's days;

A holiday morning; sea-day; warm at noon.

The four o'clock sunlight slanting not yet low,

But for the last time full across the room,

Caught color as it meant itself to show,

And warmed it into a high and homely bloom.

The unspeakable wonder was the roof and chair,

The table with silver calm, and supper soon.

The house-fire dulled the evening edge of chill,

The child slept, and the old stories in the books

Retold themselves to one another. Safe

As the inland sailor watching wind in vines,

I dreamed of gales and the savage weather gone.

But no one broke his knuckles on my door

To shout that the world was not about to end.

The walls in firelight said, and past the walls

It was there for the seeing in the grass and skies,

That weather over all, with stars and storms

Trying the house, was history to read,

And tomorrow's page a long way from the last.