Beyond a Mountain
Somewhere beyond a mountain lies
A lake the color of your eyes—
And I am mirrored like a flight
Of swallows in that evening-light.
Lovers eternal, side by side,
Closed in the elemental tide,
Nurture the root of every land—
So is my hand within your hand.
Somewhere beyond an island ships
Bear on their sails, as on your lips
You bear and tend it from the sun,
The blossom of oblivion.
Eternal lovers, in whom death
And reaching rains have mingled breath,
Are drawn by the same draught apart—
So is my heart upon your heart.
Somewhere beyond a desert rolls
An ocean that is both our souls—
Where we shall come, whatever be,
I unto you, you unto me.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 8, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Beyond a Mountain” by Witter Bynner appears in his poetry collection Grenstone Poems: A Sequence (Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1917). In his essay, “The Poetry of Witter Bynner,” poet and former Chancellor Richard Wilbur noted: “Bynner always wished his books to be unities, rather than mere accumulations. He best realized this wish in such a book as Indian Earth, where a new subject-matter and a fresh aesthetic discover their appropriate and sustainable form. We have the impulse at its most trivial in Book of Lyrics, where poems selected from many earlier books are sorted according to the four seasons. A poet of Bynner’s lyric temper is always, in danger of tidiness, a tidiness which will smother the incipient poem in a neat stanza-pattern full of graceful phrases and hill-rill rhymes. I think that I discover such a tidying urge in the too-elaborate organization of Grenstone Poems, which is divided into three titled sections, each divided in turn into many sub-sections having titles and two line mottoes.”
Witter Bynner
Witter Bynner was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1881. He graduated from Harvard University in 1902. After college, he worked as a newspaper reporter and, later, as the assistant editor of McClure’s magazine.