Sea, and bright wind, and heaven of ardent air,More dear than all things earth-born; O to meMother more dear than love's own longing, sea,More than love's eyes are, fair,Be with my spirit of song as wings to bear,As fire to feel and breathe and brighten; beA spirit of sense more deep of deity,A light of love, if love may be, more strongIn me than very song.For song I have loved with second love, but thee,Thee first, thee, mother; ere my songs had breath,That love of loves, whose bondage makes man free,Was in me strong as death.And seeing no slave may love thee, no, not oneThat loves not freedom more,And more for thy sake loves her, and for hersThee; or that hates not, on whate'er thy shoreOr what thy wave soever, all things doneOf man beneath the sunIn his despite and thine, to cross and curseYour light and song that as with lamp and verseGuide safe the strength of our sphered universe,Thy breath it was, thou knowest, and none but thine,That taught me love of one thing more divine.[Str.1.Ah, yet my youth was oldIts first years dead and coldAs last year's autumn's gold,And all my spirit of singing sick and sad and sere,Or ever I might beholdThe fairest of thy foldEngirt, enringed, enrolled,In all thy flower-sweet flock of islands dear and near.[Str.2.Yet in my heart I deemedThe fairest things, meseemed,Truth, dreaming, ever dreamed,Had made mine eyes already like a god's to see:Of all sea-things that wereClothed on with water and air,That none could live more fairThan thy sweet love long since had shown for love to me.[Ant.1.I knew not, mother of mine,That one birth more divineThan all births else of thineThat hang like flowers or jewels on thy deep soft breastWas left for me to shineAbove thy girdling lineOf bright and breathing brine,To take mine eyes with rapture and my sense with rest.[Ant.2.That this was left for me,Mother, to have of thee,To touch, to taste, to see,To feel as fire fulfilling all my blood and breath,As wine of living fireKeen as the heart's desireThat makes the heart its pyreAnd on its burning visions burns itself to death.For here of all thy waters, here of allThy windy ways the wildest, and besetAs some beleaguered city's war-breached wallWith deaths enmeshed all round it in deep net,Thick sown with rocks deadlier than steel, and fierceWith loud cross-countering currents, where the shipFlags, flickering like a wind-bewildered leaf,The densest weft of waves that prow may pierceCoils round the sharpest warp of shoals that dipSuddenly, scarce well under for one briefKeen breathing-space between the streams adverse,Scarce showing the fanged edge of one hungering lipOr one tooth lipless of the ravening reef;And midmost of the murderous water's webAll round it stretched and spun,Laughs, reckless of rough tide and raging ebb,The loveliest thing that shines against the sun.[Str.3.O flower of all wind-flowers and sea-flowers,Made lovelier by love of the seaThan thy golden own field-flowers, or tree-flowersLike foam of the sea-facing tree!No foot but the seamew's there settlesOn the spikes of thine anthers like horns,With snow-coloured spray for thy petals,Black rocks for thy thorns.[Ant.3.Was it here, in the waste of his waters,That the lordly north wind, when his loveOn the fairest of many king's daughtersBore down for a spoil from above,Chose forth of all farthest far islandsAs a haven to harbour her head,Of all lowlands on earth and all highlands,His bride-worthy bed?[Str.4.Or haply, my sea-flower, he found theeMade fast as with anchors to land,And broke, that his waves might be round thee,Thy fetters like rivets of sand?And afar by the blast of him driftedThy blossom of beauty was borne,As a lark by the heart in her liftedTo mix with the morn?[Ant.4.By what rapture of rage, by what visionOf a heavenlier heaven than above,Was he moved to devise thy divisionFrom the land as a rest for his love?As a nest when his wings would remeasureThe ways where of old they would be,As a bride-bed upbuilt for his pleasureBy sea-rock and sea?For in no deeps of midmost inland MayMore flowerbright flowers the hawthorn, or more sweetSwells the wild gold of the earth for wandering feet;For on no northland wayCrowds the close whin-bloom closer, set like theeWith thorns about for fangs of sea-rock shownThrough blithe lips of the bitter brine to lee;Nor blithelier landward comes the sea-wind blown,Nor blithelier leaps the land-wind back to sea:Nor louder springs the living song of birdsTo shame our sweetest words.And in the narrowest of thine hollowest holdFor joy thine aspens quiver as though for cold,And many a self-lit flower-illumined treeOutlaughs with snowbright or with rosebright gleeThe laughter of the fields whose laugh is gold.Yea, even from depth to height,Even thine own beauty with its own delightFulfils thine heart in thee an hundredfoldBeyond the larger hearts of islands brightWith less intense contraction of desireSelf-satiate, centred in its own deep fire;Of shores not self-enchanted and entrancedBy heavenly severance from all shadow of mirthOr mourning upon earth:As thou, by no similitude enhanced,By no fair foil made fairer, but aloneFair as could be no beauty save thine own,And wondrous as no world-beholden wonder:Throned, with the world's most perilous sea for throne,And praised from all its choral throats of thunder.[Str.5.Yet one praise hast thou, holierThan praise of theirs may be,To exalt thee, wert thou lowlierThan all that take the seaWith shores whence waves ebb slowlierThan these fall off from thee;[Ant.5.That One, whose name gives glory,One man whose life makes light,One crowned and throned in storyAbove all empire's height,Came, where thy straits run hoary,To hold thee fast in sight;[Str.6.With hallowing eyes to hold thee,With rapturous heart to read,To encompass and enfold theeWith love whence all men feed,To brighten and behold thee,Who is mightiest of man's seed:[Ant.6.More strong than strong disaster,For fate and fear too strong;Earth's friend, whose eyes look past her,Whose hands would purge of wrong;Our lord, our light, our master,Whose word sums up all song.[Str.7.Be it April or SeptemberThat plays his perfect part,Burn June or blow December,Thou canst not in thine heartBut rapturously remember,All heavenlike as thou art,[Ant.7.Whose footfall made thee fairer,Whose passage more divine,Whose hand, our thunder-bearer,Held fire that bade thee shineWith subtler glory and rarerThan thrills the sun's own shrine.Who knows how then his godlike banished gazeTurned haply from its goal of natural daysAnd homeward hunger for the clear French clime,Toward English earth, whereunder now the AccursedRots, in the hate of all men's hearts inhearsed,A carrion ranker to the sense of timeFor that sepulchral gift of stone and limeBy royal grace laid on it, less of weightThan the load laid by fate,Fate, misbegotten child of his own crime,Son of as foul a bastard-bearing birthAs even his own on earth;Less heavy than the load of cursing piledBy loyal grace of all souls undefiledOn one man's head, whose reeking soul made rottenThe loathed live corpse on earth once misbegotten?But when our Master's homeless feet were hereFrance yet was foul with joy more foul than fear,And slavery chosen, more vile by choice of chanceThan dull damnation of inheritanceFrom Russian year to yearAlas fair mother of men, alas my France,What ailed thee so to fall, that wert so dearFor all men's sake to all men, in such trance,Plague-stricken? Had the very Gods, that sawThy glory lighten on us for a law,Thy gospel go before us for a guide,Had these waxed envious of our love and awe,Or was it less their envy than thy prideThat bared thy breast for the obscene vulture-claw,High priestess, by whose mouth Love prophesiedThat fate should yet mean freedom? Howsoever,That hour, the helper of men's hearts, we praise,Which blots out of man's book of after daysThe name above all names abhorred for ever.And His name shall we praise not, whom these flowers,These rocks and ravening waters bound for girthRound this wild starry spanlong plot of earth,Beheld, the mightier for those heavier hoursThat bowed his heart not downNor marred one crowning blossom of his crown?For surely, might we say,Even from the dark deep sea-gate that makes wayThrough channelled darkness for the darkling dayHardly to let men's faltering footfall winThe sunless passage in,Where breaks a world aflower against the sun,A small sweet world of wave-encompassed wonderKept from the wearier landward world asunderWith violence of wild waters, and with thunderOf many winds as one,To where the keen sea-current grinds and fretsThe black bright sheer twin flameless AltarletsThat lack no live blood-sacrifice they craveOf shipwreck and the shrine-subservient wave,Having for priest the storm-wind, and for choirLightnings and clouds whose prayer and praise are fire,All the isle acclaimed him coming; she, the leastOf all things loveliest that the sea's love hidesFrom strange men's insult, walled about with tidesThat bid strange guests back from her flower-strewn feast,Set all her fields aflower, her flowers aflame,To applaud him that he came.Nor surely flashed not something of delightThrough that steep strait of rock whose twin-cliffed heightLinks crag with crag reiterate, land with land,By one sheer thread of narrowing precipiceBifront, that binds and sundersAbyss from hollower imminent abyssAnd wilder isle with island, blind for blissOf sea that lightens and of wind that thunders;Nor pealed not surely back from deep to steepReverberate acclamation, steep to deepInveterately reclaiming and replyingPraise, and response applausive; nor the sea,For all the sea-wind's crying,Knew not the song her sister, even as sheThundering, or like her confluent spring-tides brightening,And like her darkness lightening;The song that moved about him silent, nowBoth soundless wings refolded and refurledOn that Promethean brow,Then quivering as for flight that wakes the world.[Str.8.From the roots of the rocks underlying the gulfs that engird it aroundWas the isle not enkindled with light of him landing, or thrilled not with sound?Yea, surely the sea like a harper laid hand on the shore as a lyre,As the lyre in his own for a birthright of old that was given of his sire,And the hand of the child was put forth on the chords yet alive and aflameFrom the hand of the God that had wrought it in heaven; and the hand was the same.And the tongue of the child spake, singing; and never a note that he sang,But the strings made answer unstricken, as though for the God they rang.And the eyes of the child shone, lightening; and touched as by life at his nod,They shuddered with music, and quickened as though from the glance of the God.So trembled the heart of the hills and the rocks to receive him, and yearnedWith desirous delight of his presence and love that beholding him burned.Yea, down through the mighty twin hollows where never the sunlight shall be,Deep sunk under imminent earth, and subdued to the stress of the sea,That feel when the dim week changes by change of their tides in the dark,As the wave sinks under within them, reluctant, removed from its mark,Even there in the terror of twilight in bloom with its blossoms ablush,Did a sense of him touch not the gleam of their flowers with a fierier flush?Though the sun they behold not for ever, yet knew they not over them OneWhose soul was the soul of the morning, whose song was the song of the sun?But the secrets inviolate of sunlight in hollows untrodden of day,Shall he dream what are these who beholds not? or he that hath seen, shall he say?For the path is for passage of sea-mews; and he that hath glided and leaptOver sea-grass and sea-rock, alighting as one from a citadel creptThat his foemen beleaguer, descending by darkness and stealth, at the lastPeers under, and all is as hollow to hellward, agape and aghast.[Ant.8.But afloat and afar in the darkness a tremulous colour subsidesFrom the crimson high crest of the purple-peaked roof to the soft-coloured sidesThat brighten as ever they widen till downward the level is wonOf the soundless and colourless water that knows not the sense of the sun:From the crown of the culminant arch to the floor of the lakelet abloom,One infinite blossom of blossoms innumerable aflush through the gloom.All under the deeps of the darkness are glimmering; all over impendsAn immeasurable infinite flower of the dark that dilates and descends,That exults and expands in its breathless and blind efflorescence of heartAs it broadens and bows to the wave-ward, and breathes not, and hearkens apart.As a beaker inverse at a feast on Olympus, exhausted of wine,But inlaid as with rose from the lips of Dione that left it divine:From the lips everliving of laughter and love everlasting, that leaveIn the cleft of his heart who shall kiss them a snake to corrode it and cleave.So glimmers the gloom into glory, the glory recoils into gloom,That the eye of the sun could not kindle, the lip not of Love could relume.So darkens reverted the cup that the kiss of her mouth set on fire:So blackens a brand in his eyeshot asmoulder awhile from the pyre.For the beam from beneath and without it refrangent again from the waveStrikes up through the portal a ghostly reverse on the dome of the cave,On the depth of the dome ever darkling and dim to the crown of its arc:That the sun-coloured tapestry, sunless for ever, may soften the dark.But within through the side-seen archway a glimmer again from the rightIs the seal of the sea's tide set on the mouth of the mystery of night.And the seal on the seventh day breaks but a little, that man by its meanMay behold what the sun hath not looked on, the stars of the night have not seen.Even like that hollow-bosomed rose, inverseAnd infinite, the heaven of thy vast verse,Our Master, over all our souls impends,Imminent; we, with heart-enkindled eyesUpwondering, search the music-moulded skiesSphere by sweet sphere, concordant as it blendsLight of bright sound, sound of clear light, in one,As all the stars found utterance through the sun.And all that heaven is like a rose in bloom,Flower-coloured, where its own sun's fires illumeAs from one central and imperious heartThe whole sky's every part:But lightening still and darkling downward, loThe light and darkness of it,The leaping of the lamping levin afarBetween the full moon and the sunset star,The war-song of the sounding skies aglow,That have the herald thunder for their prophet:From north to south the lyric lights that leap,The tragic sundawns reddening east and westAs with bright blood from one Promethean breast,The peace of noon that strikes the sea to sleep,The wail over the world of all that weep,The peace of night when death brings life on rest.Goddess who gatherest all the herded wavesInto thy great sweet pastureless green fold,Even for our love of old,I pray thee by thy power that slays and saves,Take thou my song of this thy flower to keepWho hast my heart in hold;And from thine high place of thy garden-steep,Where one sheer terrace oversees thy deepFrom the utmost rock-reared heightDown even to thy dear depths of night and light,Take my song's salutation; and on meBreathe back the benediction of thy sea.
Sea, and bright wind, and heaven of ardent air,More dear than all things earth-born; O to meMother more dear than love's own longing, sea,More than love's eyes are, fair,Be with my spirit of song as wings to bear,As fire to feel and breathe and brighten; beA spirit of sense more deep of deity,A light of love, if love may be, more strongIn me than very song.For song I have loved with second love, but thee,Thee first, thee, mother; ere my songs had breath,That love of loves, whose bondage makes man free,Was in me strong as death.And seeing no slave may love thee, no, not oneThat loves not freedom more,And more for thy sake loves her, and for hersThee; or that hates not, on whate'er thy shoreOr what thy wave soever, all things doneOf man beneath the sunIn his despite and thine, to cross and curseYour light and song that as with lamp and verseGuide safe the strength of our sphered universe,Thy breath it was, thou knowest, and none but thine,That taught me love of one thing more divine.
[Str.1.Ah, yet my youth was oldIts first years dead and coldAs last year's autumn's gold,And all my spirit of singing sick and sad and sere,Or ever I might beholdThe fairest of thy foldEngirt, enringed, enrolled,In all thy flower-sweet flock of islands dear and near.
[Str.2.Yet in my heart I deemedThe fairest things, meseemed,Truth, dreaming, ever dreamed,Had made mine eyes already like a god's to see:Of all sea-things that wereClothed on with water and air,That none could live more fairThan thy sweet love long since had shown for love to me.
[Ant.1.I knew not, mother of mine,That one birth more divineThan all births else of thineThat hang like flowers or jewels on thy deep soft breastWas left for me to shineAbove thy girdling lineOf bright and breathing brine,To take mine eyes with rapture and my sense with rest.
[Ant.2.That this was left for me,Mother, to have of thee,To touch, to taste, to see,To feel as fire fulfilling all my blood and breath,As wine of living fireKeen as the heart's desireThat makes the heart its pyreAnd on its burning visions burns itself to death.
For here of all thy waters, here of allThy windy ways the wildest, and besetAs some beleaguered city's war-breached wallWith deaths enmeshed all round it in deep net,Thick sown with rocks deadlier than steel, and fierceWith loud cross-countering currents, where the shipFlags, flickering like a wind-bewildered leaf,The densest weft of waves that prow may pierceCoils round the sharpest warp of shoals that dipSuddenly, scarce well under for one briefKeen breathing-space between the streams adverse,Scarce showing the fanged edge of one hungering lipOr one tooth lipless of the ravening reef;And midmost of the murderous water's webAll round it stretched and spun,Laughs, reckless of rough tide and raging ebb,The loveliest thing that shines against the sun.
[Str.3.O flower of all wind-flowers and sea-flowers,Made lovelier by love of the seaThan thy golden own field-flowers, or tree-flowersLike foam of the sea-facing tree!No foot but the seamew's there settlesOn the spikes of thine anthers like horns,With snow-coloured spray for thy petals,Black rocks for thy thorns.
[Ant.3.Was it here, in the waste of his waters,That the lordly north wind, when his loveOn the fairest of many king's daughtersBore down for a spoil from above,Chose forth of all farthest far islandsAs a haven to harbour her head,Of all lowlands on earth and all highlands,His bride-worthy bed?
[Str.4.Or haply, my sea-flower, he found theeMade fast as with anchors to land,And broke, that his waves might be round thee,Thy fetters like rivets of sand?And afar by the blast of him driftedThy blossom of beauty was borne,As a lark by the heart in her liftedTo mix with the morn?
[Ant.4.By what rapture of rage, by what visionOf a heavenlier heaven than above,Was he moved to devise thy divisionFrom the land as a rest for his love?As a nest when his wings would remeasureThe ways where of old they would be,As a bride-bed upbuilt for his pleasureBy sea-rock and sea?
For in no deeps of midmost inland MayMore flowerbright flowers the hawthorn, or more sweetSwells the wild gold of the earth for wandering feet;For on no northland wayCrowds the close whin-bloom closer, set like theeWith thorns about for fangs of sea-rock shownThrough blithe lips of the bitter brine to lee;Nor blithelier landward comes the sea-wind blown,Nor blithelier leaps the land-wind back to sea:Nor louder springs the living song of birdsTo shame our sweetest words.And in the narrowest of thine hollowest holdFor joy thine aspens quiver as though for cold,And many a self-lit flower-illumined treeOutlaughs with snowbright or with rosebright gleeThe laughter of the fields whose laugh is gold.Yea, even from depth to height,Even thine own beauty with its own delightFulfils thine heart in thee an hundredfoldBeyond the larger hearts of islands brightWith less intense contraction of desireSelf-satiate, centred in its own deep fire;Of shores not self-enchanted and entrancedBy heavenly severance from all shadow of mirthOr mourning upon earth:As thou, by no similitude enhanced,By no fair foil made fairer, but aloneFair as could be no beauty save thine own,And wondrous as no world-beholden wonder:Throned, with the world's most perilous sea for throne,And praised from all its choral throats of thunder.
[Str.5.Yet one praise hast thou, holierThan praise of theirs may be,To exalt thee, wert thou lowlierThan all that take the seaWith shores whence waves ebb slowlierThan these fall off from thee;
[Ant.5.That One, whose name gives glory,One man whose life makes light,One crowned and throned in storyAbove all empire's height,Came, where thy straits run hoary,To hold thee fast in sight;
[Str.6.With hallowing eyes to hold thee,With rapturous heart to read,To encompass and enfold theeWith love whence all men feed,To brighten and behold thee,Who is mightiest of man's seed:
[Ant.6.More strong than strong disaster,For fate and fear too strong;Earth's friend, whose eyes look past her,Whose hands would purge of wrong;Our lord, our light, our master,Whose word sums up all song.
[Str.7.Be it April or SeptemberThat plays his perfect part,Burn June or blow December,Thou canst not in thine heartBut rapturously remember,All heavenlike as thou art,
[Ant.7.Whose footfall made thee fairer,Whose passage more divine,Whose hand, our thunder-bearer,Held fire that bade thee shineWith subtler glory and rarerThan thrills the sun's own shrine.
Who knows how then his godlike banished gazeTurned haply from its goal of natural daysAnd homeward hunger for the clear French clime,Toward English earth, whereunder now the AccursedRots, in the hate of all men's hearts inhearsed,A carrion ranker to the sense of timeFor that sepulchral gift of stone and limeBy royal grace laid on it, less of weightThan the load laid by fate,Fate, misbegotten child of his own crime,Son of as foul a bastard-bearing birthAs even his own on earth;Less heavy than the load of cursing piledBy loyal grace of all souls undefiledOn one man's head, whose reeking soul made rottenThe loathed live corpse on earth once misbegotten?But when our Master's homeless feet were hereFrance yet was foul with joy more foul than fear,And slavery chosen, more vile by choice of chanceThan dull damnation of inheritanceFrom Russian year to yearAlas fair mother of men, alas my France,What ailed thee so to fall, that wert so dearFor all men's sake to all men, in such trance,Plague-stricken? Had the very Gods, that sawThy glory lighten on us for a law,Thy gospel go before us for a guide,Had these waxed envious of our love and awe,Or was it less their envy than thy prideThat bared thy breast for the obscene vulture-claw,High priestess, by whose mouth Love prophesiedThat fate should yet mean freedom? Howsoever,That hour, the helper of men's hearts, we praise,Which blots out of man's book of after daysThe name above all names abhorred for ever.And His name shall we praise not, whom these flowers,These rocks and ravening waters bound for girthRound this wild starry spanlong plot of earth,Beheld, the mightier for those heavier hoursThat bowed his heart not downNor marred one crowning blossom of his crown?For surely, might we say,Even from the dark deep sea-gate that makes wayThrough channelled darkness for the darkling dayHardly to let men's faltering footfall winThe sunless passage in,Where breaks a world aflower against the sun,A small sweet world of wave-encompassed wonderKept from the wearier landward world asunderWith violence of wild waters, and with thunderOf many winds as one,To where the keen sea-current grinds and fretsThe black bright sheer twin flameless AltarletsThat lack no live blood-sacrifice they craveOf shipwreck and the shrine-subservient wave,Having for priest the storm-wind, and for choirLightnings and clouds whose prayer and praise are fire,All the isle acclaimed him coming; she, the leastOf all things loveliest that the sea's love hidesFrom strange men's insult, walled about with tidesThat bid strange guests back from her flower-strewn feast,Set all her fields aflower, her flowers aflame,To applaud him that he came.Nor surely flashed not something of delightThrough that steep strait of rock whose twin-cliffed heightLinks crag with crag reiterate, land with land,By one sheer thread of narrowing precipiceBifront, that binds and sundersAbyss from hollower imminent abyssAnd wilder isle with island, blind for blissOf sea that lightens and of wind that thunders;Nor pealed not surely back from deep to steepReverberate acclamation, steep to deepInveterately reclaiming and replyingPraise, and response applausive; nor the sea,For all the sea-wind's crying,Knew not the song her sister, even as sheThundering, or like her confluent spring-tides brightening,And like her darkness lightening;The song that moved about him silent, nowBoth soundless wings refolded and refurledOn that Promethean brow,Then quivering as for flight that wakes the world.
[Str.8.From the roots of the rocks underlying the gulfs that engird it aroundWas the isle not enkindled with light of him landing, or thrilled not with sound?Yea, surely the sea like a harper laid hand on the shore as a lyre,As the lyre in his own for a birthright of old that was given of his sire,And the hand of the child was put forth on the chords yet alive and aflameFrom the hand of the God that had wrought it in heaven; and the hand was the same.And the tongue of the child spake, singing; and never a note that he sang,But the strings made answer unstricken, as though for the God they rang.And the eyes of the child shone, lightening; and touched as by life at his nod,They shuddered with music, and quickened as though from the glance of the God.So trembled the heart of the hills and the rocks to receive him, and yearnedWith desirous delight of his presence and love that beholding him burned.Yea, down through the mighty twin hollows where never the sunlight shall be,Deep sunk under imminent earth, and subdued to the stress of the sea,That feel when the dim week changes by change of their tides in the dark,As the wave sinks under within them, reluctant, removed from its mark,Even there in the terror of twilight in bloom with its blossoms ablush,Did a sense of him touch not the gleam of their flowers with a fierier flush?Though the sun they behold not for ever, yet knew they not over them OneWhose soul was the soul of the morning, whose song was the song of the sun?But the secrets inviolate of sunlight in hollows untrodden of day,Shall he dream what are these who beholds not? or he that hath seen, shall he say?For the path is for passage of sea-mews; and he that hath glided and leaptOver sea-grass and sea-rock, alighting as one from a citadel creptThat his foemen beleaguer, descending by darkness and stealth, at the lastPeers under, and all is as hollow to hellward, agape and aghast.[Ant.8.But afloat and afar in the darkness a tremulous colour subsidesFrom the crimson high crest of the purple-peaked roof to the soft-coloured sidesThat brighten as ever they widen till downward the level is wonOf the soundless and colourless water that knows not the sense of the sun:From the crown of the culminant arch to the floor of the lakelet abloom,One infinite blossom of blossoms innumerable aflush through the gloom.All under the deeps of the darkness are glimmering; all over impendsAn immeasurable infinite flower of the dark that dilates and descends,That exults and expands in its breathless and blind efflorescence of heartAs it broadens and bows to the wave-ward, and breathes not, and hearkens apart.As a beaker inverse at a feast on Olympus, exhausted of wine,But inlaid as with rose from the lips of Dione that left it divine:From the lips everliving of laughter and love everlasting, that leaveIn the cleft of his heart who shall kiss them a snake to corrode it and cleave.So glimmers the gloom into glory, the glory recoils into gloom,That the eye of the sun could not kindle, the lip not of Love could relume.So darkens reverted the cup that the kiss of her mouth set on fire:So blackens a brand in his eyeshot asmoulder awhile from the pyre.For the beam from beneath and without it refrangent again from the waveStrikes up through the portal a ghostly reverse on the dome of the cave,On the depth of the dome ever darkling and dim to the crown of its arc:That the sun-coloured tapestry, sunless for ever, may soften the dark.But within through the side-seen archway a glimmer again from the rightIs the seal of the sea's tide set on the mouth of the mystery of night.And the seal on the seventh day breaks but a little, that man by its meanMay behold what the sun hath not looked on, the stars of the night have not seen.
Even like that hollow-bosomed rose, inverseAnd infinite, the heaven of thy vast verse,Our Master, over all our souls impends,Imminent; we, with heart-enkindled eyesUpwondering, search the music-moulded skiesSphere by sweet sphere, concordant as it blendsLight of bright sound, sound of clear light, in one,As all the stars found utterance through the sun.And all that heaven is like a rose in bloom,Flower-coloured, where its own sun's fires illumeAs from one central and imperious heartThe whole sky's every part:But lightening still and darkling downward, loThe light and darkness of it,The leaping of the lamping levin afarBetween the full moon and the sunset star,The war-song of the sounding skies aglow,That have the herald thunder for their prophet:From north to south the lyric lights that leap,The tragic sundawns reddening east and westAs with bright blood from one Promethean breast,The peace of noon that strikes the sea to sleep,The wail over the world of all that weep,The peace of night when death brings life on rest.
Goddess who gatherest all the herded wavesInto thy great sweet pastureless green fold,Even for our love of old,I pray thee by thy power that slays and saves,Take thou my song of this thy flower to keepWho hast my heart in hold;And from thine high place of thy garden-steep,Where one sheer terrace oversees thy deepFrom the utmost rock-reared heightDown even to thy dear depths of night and light,Take my song's salutation; and on meBreathe back the benediction of thy sea.
Between two seas the sea-bird's wing makes halt,Wind-weary; while with lifting head he waitsFor breath to reinspire him from the gatesThat open still toward sunrise on the vaultHigh-domed of morning, and in flight's defaultWith spreading sense of spirit anticipatesWhat new sea now may lure beyond the straitsHis wings exulting that her winds exaltAnd fill them full as sails to seaward spread,Fulfilled with fair speed's promise. Pass, my song,Forth to the haven of thy desire and dread,The presence of our lord, long loved and longFar off above beholden, who to theeWas as light kindling all a windy sea.
Between two seas the sea-bird's wing makes halt,Wind-weary; while with lifting head he waitsFor breath to reinspire him from the gatesThat open still toward sunrise on the vaultHigh-domed of morning, and in flight's defaultWith spreading sense of spirit anticipatesWhat new sea now may lure beyond the straitsHis wings exulting that her winds exaltAnd fill them full as sails to seaward spread,Fulfilled with fair speed's promise. Pass, my song,Forth to the haven of thy desire and dread,The presence of our lord, long loved and longFar off above beholden, who to theeWas as light kindling all a windy sea.
[Strophe1.Spring, born in heaven ere many a springtime flown,Dead spring that sawest on earthA babe of deathless birth,A flower of rosier flowerage than thine own,A glory of goodlier godhead; even this day,That floods the mist of February with May,And strikes death dead with sunlight, and the breathWhereby the deadly doers are done to death,They that in day's despite10Would crown the imperial night,And in deep hate of insubmissive springRethrone the royal winter for a king,This day that casts the days of darkness downLow as a broken crown,We call thee from the gulf of deeds and days,Deathless and dead, to hear us whom we praise.[Antistrophe1.A light of many lights about thine head,Lights manifold and one,Stars molten in a sun,20A sun of divers beams incorporated,Compact of confluent aureoles, each more fairThan man, save only at highest of man, may wear,So didst thou rise, when this our grey-grown ageHad trod two paces of his pilgrimage,Two paces through the gloomFrom his fierce father's tomb,Led by cross lights of lightnings, and the flameThat burned in darkness round one darkling name;So didst thou rise, nor knewest thy glory, O thou30Re-risen upon us now,The glory given thee for a grace to give,And take the praise of all men's hearts that live.[Epode1.First in the dewy rayEre dawn be slain of dayThe fresh crowned lilies of discrowned kings' primeSprang splendid as of oldWith moonlight-coloured goldAnd rays refract from the oldworld heaven of time;39Pale with proud light of stars decreasedIn westward wane reluctant from the conquering east.[Str.2.But even between their golden olden bloomStrange flowers of wildwood glory,With frost and moonshine hoary,Thrust up the new growths of their green-leaved gloom,Red buds of ballad blossom, where the dewBlushed as with bloodlike passion, and its hueWas as the life and love of hearts on flame,And fire from forth of each live chalice came:Young sprays of elder song,50Stem straight and petal strong,Bright foliage with dark frondage overlaid,And light the lovelier for its lordlier shade;And morn and even made loud in woodland loneWith cheer of clarions blown,And through the tournay's clash and clarion's cheerLaugh to laugh echoing, tear washed off by tear.[Ant.2.Then eastward far past northland lea and lawnBeneath a heavier lightOf stormier day and night60Began the music of the heaven of dawn;Bright sound of battle along the Grecian waves,Loud light of thunder above the Median graves,New strife, new song on Æschylean seas,Canaris risen above Themistocles;Old glory of warrior ghostsShed fresh on filial hosts,With dewfall redder than the dews of day,And earth-born lightnings out of bloodbright spray;Then through the flushed grey gloom on shadowy sheaves70Low flights of falling leaves;And choirs of birds transfiguring as they throngAll the world's twilight and the soul's to song.[Ep.2.Voices more dimly deepThan the inmost heart of sleep,And tenderer than the rose-mouthed morning's lips;And midmost of them heardThe viewless water's word,The sea's breath in the wind's wing and the ship's,79That bids one swell and sound and smiteAnd rend that other in sunder as with fangs by night.[Str.3.But ah! the glory of shadow and mingling ray,The story of morn and evenWhose tale was writ in heavenAnd had for scroll the night, for scribe the day!For scribe the prophet of the morning, farExalted over twilight and her star;For scroll beneath his Apollonian handThe dim twin wastes of sea and glimmering land.Hark, on the hill-wind, clear90For all men's hearts to hearSound like a stream at nightfall from the steepThat all time's depths might answer, deep to deep,With trumpet-measures of triumphal wailFrom windy vale to vale,The crying of one for love that strayed and sinnedWhose brain took madness of the mountain wind.[Ant.3.Between the birds of brighter and duskier wing,What mightier-moulded formsGirt with red clouds and storms100Mix their strong hearts with theirs that soar and sing?Before the storm-blast blown of death's dark hornThe marriage moonlight withers, that the mornFor two made one may find three made by deathOne ruin at the blasting of its breath:Clothed with heart's flame renewedAnd strange new maidenhood,Faith lightens on the lips that bloomed for hirePure as the lightning of love's first-born fire:Wide-eyed and patient ever, till the curse110Find where to fall and pierce,Keen expiation whets with edge more dreadA father's wrong to smite a father's head.[Ep.3.Borgia, supreme from birthAs loveliest born on earthSince earth bore ever women that were fair;Scarce known of her own houseIf daughter or sister or spouse;Who holds men's hearts yet helpless with her hair;The direst of divine things made,120Bows down her amorous aureole half suffused with shade.[Str.4.As red the fire-scathed royal northland bloom,That left our story a nameDyed through with blood and flameEre her life shrivelled from a fierier doomThan theirs her priests bade pass from earth in fireTo slake the thirst of God their Lord's desire:As keen the blast of love-enkindled fateThat burst the Paduan tyrant's guarded gate:As sad the softer moan130Made one with music's ownFor one whose feet made music as they fellOn ways by loveless love made hot from hell:But higher than these and all the song thereofThe perfect heart of love,The heart by fraud and hate once crucified,That, dying, gave thanks, and in thanksgiving died.[Ant.4.Above the windy walls that rule the RhineA noise of eagles' wingsAnd wintry war-time rings,140With roar of ravage trampling corn and vineAnd storm of wrathful wassail dashed with song,And under these the watch of wreakless wrong,With fire of eyes anhungered; and aboveThese, the light of the stricken eyes of love,The faint sweet eyes that followThe wind-outwinging swallow,And face athirst with young wan yearning mouthTurned after toward the unseen all-golden south,Hopeless to see the birds back ere life wane,150Or the leaves born again;And still the might and music mastering fateOf life more strong than death and love than hate.[Ep.4.In spectral strength biformStand the twin sons of stormTransfigured by transmission of one handThat gives the new-born timeTheir semblance more sublimeThan once it lightened over each man's land;159There Freedom's winged and wide-mouthed hound,And here our high Dictator, in his son discrowned.[Str.5.What strong-limbed shapes of kindred throng round theseBefore, between, behind,Sons born of one man's mind,Fed at his hands and fostered round his knees?Fear takes the spirit in thraldom at his nod,And pity makes it as the spirit of God,As his own soul that from her throne aboveSheds on all souls of men her showers of love,On all earth's evil and pain170Pours mercy forth as rainAnd comfort as the dewfall on dry land;And feeds with pity from a faultless handAll by their own fault stricken, all cast outBy all men's scorn or doubt,Or with their own hands wounded, or by fateBrought into bondage of men's fear or hate.[Ant.5.In violence of strange visions north and southConfronted, east and west,With frozen or fiery breast,180Eyes fixed or fevered, pale or bloodred mouth,Kept watch about his dawn-enkindled dreams;But ere high noon a light of nearer beamsMade his young heaven of manhood more benign,And love made soft his lips with spiritual wine,And left them fired, and fedWith sacramental bread,And sweet with honey of tenderer words than tearsTo feed men's hopes and fortify men's fears,And strong to silence with benignant breath190The lips that doom to death,And swift with speech like fire in fiery landsTo melt the steel's edge in the headsman's hands.[Ep.5.Higher than they rose of old,New builded now, behold,The live great likeness of Our Lady's towers;And round them like a doveWounded, and sick with love,One fair ghost moving, crowned with fateful flowers,199Watched yet with eyes of bloodred lustAnd eyes of love's heart broken and unbroken trust.[Str.6.But sadder always under shadowier skies,More pale and sad and clearWaxed always, drawn more near,The face of Duty lit with Love's own eyes;Till the awful hands that culled in rosier hoursFrom fairy-footed fields of wild old flowersAnd sorcerous woods of Rhineland, green and hoary,Young children's chaplets of enchanted story,The great kind hands that showed210Exile its homeward road,And, as man's helper made his foeman God,Of pity and mercy wrought themselves a rod,And opened for Napoleon's wandering kinFrance, and bade enter in,And threw for all the doors of refuge wide,Took to them lightning in the thunder-tide.[Ant.6.For storm on earth above had risen from under,Out of the hollow of hell,Such storm as never fellFrom darkest deeps of heaven distract with thunder;221A cloud of cursing, past all shape of thought,More foul than foulest dreams, and overfraughtWith all obscene things and obscure of birthThat ever made infection of man's earth;Having all hell for cloakWrapped round it as a smokeAnd in its womb such offspring so defiledAs earth bare never for her loathliest child,Rose, brooded, reddened, broke, and with its breath230Put France to poisonous death;Yea, far as heaven's red labouring eye could glance,France was not, save in men cast forth of France.[Ep.6.Then,—while the plague-sore grewTwo darkling decades through,And rankled in the festering flesh of time,—Where darkness binds and freesThe wildest of wild seasIn fierce mutations of the unslumbering clime,There, sleepless too, o'er shuddering wrong240One hand appointed shook the reddening scourge of song.[Str.7.And through the lightnings of the apparent wordDividing shame's dense nightSounds lovelier than the lightAnd light more sweet than song from night's own birdMixed each their hearts with other, till the gloomWas glorious as with all the stars in bloom,Sonorous as with all the spheres in chimeHeard far through flowering heaven: the sea, sublimeOnce only with its own250Old winds' and waters' tone,Sad only or glad with its own glory, and crownedWith its own light, and thrilled with its own sound,Learnt now their song, more sweet than heaven's may be,Who pass away by sea;The song that takes of old love's land farewell,With pulse of plangent water like a knell.[Ant.7.And louder ever and louder and yet more loudTill night be shamed of mornRings the Black Huntsman's horn260Through darkening deeps beneath the covering cloud,Till all the wild beasts of the darkness hear;Till the Czar quake, till Austria cower for fear,Till the king breathe not, till the priest wax pale,Till spies and slayers on seats of judgment quail,Till mitre and cowl bow downAnd crumble as a crown,Till Cæsar driven to lair and hounded PopeReel breathless and drop heartless out of hope,And one the uncleanest kinless beast of all270Lower than his fortune fall;The wolfish waif of casual empire, bornTo turn all hate and horror cold with scorn.[Ep.7.Yea, even at night's full noonLight's birth-song brake in tune,Spake, witnessing that with us one must be,God; naming so by nameThat priests have brought to shameThe strength whose scourge sounds on the smitten sea;The mystery manifold of might280Which bids the wind give back to night the things of night.[Str.8.Even God, the unknown of all time; force or thought,Nature or fate or will,Clothed round with good and ill,Veiled and revealed of all things and of nought,Hooded and helmed with mystery, girt and shodWith light and darkness, unapparent God.Him the high prophet o'er his wild work bentFound indivisible ever and immanentAt hidden heart of truth,290In forms of age and youthTransformed and transient ever; masked and crowned,From all bonds loosened and with all bonds bound,Diverse and one with all things; love and hate,Earth, and the starry stateOf heaven immeasurable, and years that fleeAs clouds and winds and rays across the sea.[Ant.8.But higher than stars and deeper than the wavesOf day and night and morrowThat roll for all time, sorrow300Keeps ageless watch over perpetual graves.From dawn to morning of the soul in flower,Through toils and dreams and visions, to that hourWhen all the deeps were opened, and one doomTook two sweet lives to embrace them and entomb,The strong song plies its wingThat makes the darkness ringAnd the deep light reverberate sound as deep;Song soft as flowers or grass more soft than sleep,Song bright as heaven above the mounting bird,310Song like a God's tears heardFalling, fulfilled of life and death and light,And all the stars and all the shadow of night.[Ep.8.Till, when its flight hath pastTime's loftiest mark and last,The goal where good kills evil with a kiss,And Darkness in God's sightGrows as his brother Light,And heaven and hell one heart whence all the abyssThrobs with love's music; from his trance320Love waking leads it home to her who stayed in France.[Str.9.But now from all the world-old winds of the airOne blast of record ringsAs from time's hidden springsWith roar of rushing wings and fires that bearToward north and south sonorous, east and west,Forth of the dark wherein its records rest,The story told of the ages, writ nor sungBy man's hand ever nor by mortal tongueTill, godlike with desire,330One tongue of man took fire,One hand laid hold upon the lightning, oneRose up to bear time witness what the sunHad seen, and what the moon and stars of nightBeholding lost not light:From dawn to dusk what ways man wandering trodEven through the twilight of the gods to God.[Ant.9.From dawn of man and woman twain and oneWhen the earliest dews impearledThe front of all the world340Ringed with aurorean aureole of the sun,To days that saw Christ's tears and hallowing breathPut life for love's sake in the lips of death,And years as waves whose brine was fire, whose foamBlood, and the ravage of Neronian Rome;And the eastern crescent's hornMightier awhile than morn;And knights whose lives were flights of eagles' wings,And lives like snakes' lives of engendering kings;And all the ravin of all the swords that reap350Lives cast as sheaves on heapFrom all the billowing harvest-fields of fight;And sounds of love-songs lovelier than the light.[Ep.9.The grim dim thrones of the eastSet for death's riotous feastRound the bright board where darkling centuries wait,And servile slaughter, mute,Feeds power with fresh red fruit,Glitter and groan with mortal food of fate;And throne and cup and lamp's bright breath360Bear witness to their lord of only night and death.[Str.10.Dead freedom by live empire lies defiled,And murder at his feetPlies lust with wine and meat,With offering of an old man and a child,With holy body and blood, inexpiableCommunion in the sacrament of hell,Till, reeking from their monstrous eucharist,The lips wax cold that murdered where they kissed,And empire in mid feast370Fall as a slaughtered beastHeadless, and ease men's hungering hearts of fearLest God were none in heaven, to see nor hear,And purge his own pollution with the floodPoured of his black base bloodSo first found healing, poisonous as it poured;And on the clouds the archangel cleanse his sword.[Ant.10.As at the word unutterable that madeOf day and night division,379From vision on to vision,From dream to dream, from darkness into shade,From sunshine into sunlight, moves and livesThe steersman's eye, the helming hand that givesLife to the wheels and wings that whirl alongThe immeasurable impulse of the sphere of songThrough all the eternal years,Beyond all stars and spheres,Beyond the washing of the waves of time,Beyond all heights where no thought else may climb,Beyond the darkling dust of suns that were,390Past height and depth of air;And in the abyss whence all things move that areFinds only living Love, the sovereign star.[Ep.10.Nor less the weight and worthFound even of love on earthTo wash all stain of tears and sins away,On dying lips alitThat living knew not it,In the winged shape of song with death to play:To warm young children with its wings,400And try with fire the heart elect for godlike things.[Str.11.For all worst wants of all most miserableWith divine hands to dealAll balms and herbs that heal,Among all woes whereunder poor men dwellOur Master sent his servant Love, to beOn earth his witness; but the strange deep sea,Mother of life and death inextricate,What work should Love do there, to war with fate?Yet there must Love too keep410At heart of the eyeless deepWatch, and wage war wide-eyed with all its wonders,Lower than the lightnings of its waves, and thundersOf seas less monstrous than the births they bred;Keep high there heart and head,And conquer: then for prize of all toils pastFeel the sea close them in again at last.[Ant.11.A day of direr doom arisen thereafterWith cloud and fire in strifeLightens and darkens life420Round one by man's hand masked with living laughter,A man by men bemonstered, but by love,Watched with blind eyes as of a wakeful dove,And wooed by lust, that in her rosy denAs fire on flesh feeds on the souls of men,To take the intense impureBurnt-offering of her lure,Divine and dark and bright and naked, strangeWith ravenous thirst of life reversed and change,As though the very heaven should shrivel and swell430With hunger after hell,Run mad for dear damnation, and desireTo feel its light thrilled through with stings of fire.[Ep.11.Above a windier sea,The glory of Ninety-threeFills heaven with blood-red and with rose-red beamsThat earth beholding growsHerself one burning roseFlagrant and fragrant with strange deeds and dreams,Dreams dyed as love's own flower, and deeds440Stained as with love's own life-blood, that for love's sake bleeds.[Str.12.And deeper than all deeps of seas and skiesWherein the shadows areCalled sun and moon and starThat rapt conjecture metes with mounting eyes,Loud with strange waves and lustrous with new spheres,Shines, masked at once and manifest of years,Shakespeare, a heaven of heavenly eyes beholden;And forward years as backward years grow goldenWith light of deeds and words450And flight of God's fleet birds,Angels of wrath and love and truth and pity;And higher on exiled eyes their natural cityDawns down the depths of vision, more sublimeThan all truths born of time;And eyes that wept above two dear sons deadGrow saving stars to guard one hopeless head.[Ant.12.Bright round the brows of banished age had shoneIn vision flushed with truth459The rosy glory of youthOn streets and woodlands where in days long goneSweet love sang light and loud and deep and dear:And far the trumpets of the dreadful yearHad pealed and wailed in darkness: last aroseThe song of children, kindling as a roseAt breath of sunrise, bornOf the red flower of mornWhose face perfumes deep heaven with odorous lightAnd thrills all through the wings of souls in flightClose as the press of children at His knee470Whom if the high priest see,Dreaming, as homeless on dark earth he trod,The lips that praise him shall not know for God.[Ep.12.O sovereign spirit, aboveAll offering but man's love,All praise and prayer and incense undefiled!The one thing stronger foundThan towers with iron bound;The one thing lovelier than a little child,479And deeper than the seas are deep,And tenderer than such tears of love as angels weep.[Str.13.Dante, the seer of all things evil and good,Beheld two ladies, BeautyAnd high life-hallowing Duty,That strove for sway upon his mind and moodAnd held him in alternating accordFast bound at feet of either: but our lord,The seer and singer of righteousness and wrongWho stands now master of all the keys of song,Sees both as dewdrops run490Together in the sun,For him not twain but one thing twice divine;Even as his speech and song are bread and wineFor all souls hungering and all hearts athirstAt best of days and worst,And both one sacrament of Love's great givingTo feed the spirit and sense of all souls living.[Ant.13.The seventh day in the wind's month, ten years goneSince heaven-espousing earthGave the Republic birth,500The mightiest soul put mortal raiment onThat came forth singing ever in man's earsOf all souls with us, and through all these yearsRings yet the lordliest, waxen yet more strong,That on our souls hath shed itself in song,Poured forth itself like rainOn souls like springing grainThat with its procreant beams and showers were fedFor living wine and sacramental bread;Given all itself as air gives life and light,510Utterly, as of right;The goodliest gift our age hath given, to beOurs, while the sun gives glory to the sea.[Ep.13.Our Father and Master and Lord,Who hast thy song for sword,For staff thy spirit, and our hearts for throne:As in past years of wrong,Take now my subject song,To no crowned head made humble but thine own;That on thy day of worldly birth520Gives thanks for all thou hast given past thanks of all on earth.
[Strophe1.Spring, born in heaven ere many a springtime flown,Dead spring that sawest on earthA babe of deathless birth,A flower of rosier flowerage than thine own,A glory of goodlier godhead; even this day,That floods the mist of February with May,And strikes death dead with sunlight, and the breathWhereby the deadly doers are done to death,They that in day's despite10Would crown the imperial night,And in deep hate of insubmissive springRethrone the royal winter for a king,This day that casts the days of darkness downLow as a broken crown,We call thee from the gulf of deeds and days,Deathless and dead, to hear us whom we praise.
[Antistrophe1.A light of many lights about thine head,Lights manifold and one,Stars molten in a sun,20A sun of divers beams incorporated,Compact of confluent aureoles, each more fairThan man, save only at highest of man, may wear,So didst thou rise, when this our grey-grown ageHad trod two paces of his pilgrimage,Two paces through the gloomFrom his fierce father's tomb,Led by cross lights of lightnings, and the flameThat burned in darkness round one darkling name;So didst thou rise, nor knewest thy glory, O thou30Re-risen upon us now,The glory given thee for a grace to give,And take the praise of all men's hearts that live.
[Epode1.First in the dewy rayEre dawn be slain of dayThe fresh crowned lilies of discrowned kings' primeSprang splendid as of oldWith moonlight-coloured goldAnd rays refract from the oldworld heaven of time;39Pale with proud light of stars decreasedIn westward wane reluctant from the conquering east.
[Str.2.But even between their golden olden bloomStrange flowers of wildwood glory,With frost and moonshine hoary,Thrust up the new growths of their green-leaved gloom,Red buds of ballad blossom, where the dewBlushed as with bloodlike passion, and its hueWas as the life and love of hearts on flame,And fire from forth of each live chalice came:Young sprays of elder song,50Stem straight and petal strong,Bright foliage with dark frondage overlaid,And light the lovelier for its lordlier shade;And morn and even made loud in woodland loneWith cheer of clarions blown,And through the tournay's clash and clarion's cheerLaugh to laugh echoing, tear washed off by tear.
[Ant.2.Then eastward far past northland lea and lawnBeneath a heavier lightOf stormier day and night60Began the music of the heaven of dawn;Bright sound of battle along the Grecian waves,Loud light of thunder above the Median graves,New strife, new song on Æschylean seas,Canaris risen above Themistocles;Old glory of warrior ghostsShed fresh on filial hosts,With dewfall redder than the dews of day,And earth-born lightnings out of bloodbright spray;Then through the flushed grey gloom on shadowy sheaves70Low flights of falling leaves;And choirs of birds transfiguring as they throngAll the world's twilight and the soul's to song.
[Ep.2.Voices more dimly deepThan the inmost heart of sleep,And tenderer than the rose-mouthed morning's lips;And midmost of them heardThe viewless water's word,The sea's breath in the wind's wing and the ship's,79That bids one swell and sound and smiteAnd rend that other in sunder as with fangs by night.
[Str.3.But ah! the glory of shadow and mingling ray,The story of morn and evenWhose tale was writ in heavenAnd had for scroll the night, for scribe the day!For scribe the prophet of the morning, farExalted over twilight and her star;For scroll beneath his Apollonian handThe dim twin wastes of sea and glimmering land.Hark, on the hill-wind, clear90For all men's hearts to hearSound like a stream at nightfall from the steepThat all time's depths might answer, deep to deep,With trumpet-measures of triumphal wailFrom windy vale to vale,The crying of one for love that strayed and sinnedWhose brain took madness of the mountain wind.
[Ant.3.Between the birds of brighter and duskier wing,What mightier-moulded formsGirt with red clouds and storms100Mix their strong hearts with theirs that soar and sing?Before the storm-blast blown of death's dark hornThe marriage moonlight withers, that the mornFor two made one may find three made by deathOne ruin at the blasting of its breath:Clothed with heart's flame renewedAnd strange new maidenhood,Faith lightens on the lips that bloomed for hirePure as the lightning of love's first-born fire:Wide-eyed and patient ever, till the curse110Find where to fall and pierce,Keen expiation whets with edge more dreadA father's wrong to smite a father's head.
[Ep.3.Borgia, supreme from birthAs loveliest born on earthSince earth bore ever women that were fair;Scarce known of her own houseIf daughter or sister or spouse;Who holds men's hearts yet helpless with her hair;The direst of divine things made,120Bows down her amorous aureole half suffused with shade.
[Str.4.As red the fire-scathed royal northland bloom,That left our story a nameDyed through with blood and flameEre her life shrivelled from a fierier doomThan theirs her priests bade pass from earth in fireTo slake the thirst of God their Lord's desire:As keen the blast of love-enkindled fateThat burst the Paduan tyrant's guarded gate:As sad the softer moan130Made one with music's ownFor one whose feet made music as they fellOn ways by loveless love made hot from hell:But higher than these and all the song thereofThe perfect heart of love,The heart by fraud and hate once crucified,That, dying, gave thanks, and in thanksgiving died.
[Ant.4.Above the windy walls that rule the RhineA noise of eagles' wingsAnd wintry war-time rings,140With roar of ravage trampling corn and vineAnd storm of wrathful wassail dashed with song,And under these the watch of wreakless wrong,With fire of eyes anhungered; and aboveThese, the light of the stricken eyes of love,The faint sweet eyes that followThe wind-outwinging swallow,And face athirst with young wan yearning mouthTurned after toward the unseen all-golden south,Hopeless to see the birds back ere life wane,150Or the leaves born again;And still the might and music mastering fateOf life more strong than death and love than hate.
[Ep.4.In spectral strength biformStand the twin sons of stormTransfigured by transmission of one handThat gives the new-born timeTheir semblance more sublimeThan once it lightened over each man's land;159There Freedom's winged and wide-mouthed hound,And here our high Dictator, in his son discrowned.
[Str.5.What strong-limbed shapes of kindred throng round theseBefore, between, behind,Sons born of one man's mind,Fed at his hands and fostered round his knees?Fear takes the spirit in thraldom at his nod,And pity makes it as the spirit of God,As his own soul that from her throne aboveSheds on all souls of men her showers of love,On all earth's evil and pain170Pours mercy forth as rainAnd comfort as the dewfall on dry land;And feeds with pity from a faultless handAll by their own fault stricken, all cast outBy all men's scorn or doubt,Or with their own hands wounded, or by fateBrought into bondage of men's fear or hate.
[Ant.5.In violence of strange visions north and southConfronted, east and west,With frozen or fiery breast,180Eyes fixed or fevered, pale or bloodred mouth,Kept watch about his dawn-enkindled dreams;But ere high noon a light of nearer beamsMade his young heaven of manhood more benign,And love made soft his lips with spiritual wine,And left them fired, and fedWith sacramental bread,And sweet with honey of tenderer words than tearsTo feed men's hopes and fortify men's fears,And strong to silence with benignant breath190The lips that doom to death,And swift with speech like fire in fiery landsTo melt the steel's edge in the headsman's hands.
[Ep.5.Higher than they rose of old,New builded now, behold,The live great likeness of Our Lady's towers;And round them like a doveWounded, and sick with love,One fair ghost moving, crowned with fateful flowers,199Watched yet with eyes of bloodred lustAnd eyes of love's heart broken and unbroken trust.
[Str.6.But sadder always under shadowier skies,More pale and sad and clearWaxed always, drawn more near,The face of Duty lit with Love's own eyes;Till the awful hands that culled in rosier hoursFrom fairy-footed fields of wild old flowersAnd sorcerous woods of Rhineland, green and hoary,Young children's chaplets of enchanted story,The great kind hands that showed210Exile its homeward road,And, as man's helper made his foeman God,Of pity and mercy wrought themselves a rod,And opened for Napoleon's wandering kinFrance, and bade enter in,And threw for all the doors of refuge wide,Took to them lightning in the thunder-tide.
[Ant.6.For storm on earth above had risen from under,Out of the hollow of hell,Such storm as never fellFrom darkest deeps of heaven distract with thunder;221A cloud of cursing, past all shape of thought,More foul than foulest dreams, and overfraughtWith all obscene things and obscure of birthThat ever made infection of man's earth;Having all hell for cloakWrapped round it as a smokeAnd in its womb such offspring so defiledAs earth bare never for her loathliest child,Rose, brooded, reddened, broke, and with its breath230Put France to poisonous death;Yea, far as heaven's red labouring eye could glance,France was not, save in men cast forth of France.
[Ep.6.Then,—while the plague-sore grewTwo darkling decades through,And rankled in the festering flesh of time,—Where darkness binds and freesThe wildest of wild seasIn fierce mutations of the unslumbering clime,There, sleepless too, o'er shuddering wrong240One hand appointed shook the reddening scourge of song.
[Str.7.And through the lightnings of the apparent wordDividing shame's dense nightSounds lovelier than the lightAnd light more sweet than song from night's own birdMixed each their hearts with other, till the gloomWas glorious as with all the stars in bloom,Sonorous as with all the spheres in chimeHeard far through flowering heaven: the sea, sublimeOnce only with its own250Old winds' and waters' tone,Sad only or glad with its own glory, and crownedWith its own light, and thrilled with its own sound,Learnt now their song, more sweet than heaven's may be,Who pass away by sea;The song that takes of old love's land farewell,With pulse of plangent water like a knell.
[Ant.7.And louder ever and louder and yet more loudTill night be shamed of mornRings the Black Huntsman's horn260Through darkening deeps beneath the covering cloud,Till all the wild beasts of the darkness hear;Till the Czar quake, till Austria cower for fear,Till the king breathe not, till the priest wax pale,Till spies and slayers on seats of judgment quail,Till mitre and cowl bow downAnd crumble as a crown,Till Cæsar driven to lair and hounded PopeReel breathless and drop heartless out of hope,And one the uncleanest kinless beast of all270Lower than his fortune fall;The wolfish waif of casual empire, bornTo turn all hate and horror cold with scorn.
[Ep.7.Yea, even at night's full noonLight's birth-song brake in tune,Spake, witnessing that with us one must be,God; naming so by nameThat priests have brought to shameThe strength whose scourge sounds on the smitten sea;The mystery manifold of might280Which bids the wind give back to night the things of night.
[Str.8.Even God, the unknown of all time; force or thought,Nature or fate or will,Clothed round with good and ill,Veiled and revealed of all things and of nought,Hooded and helmed with mystery, girt and shodWith light and darkness, unapparent God.Him the high prophet o'er his wild work bentFound indivisible ever and immanentAt hidden heart of truth,290In forms of age and youthTransformed and transient ever; masked and crowned,From all bonds loosened and with all bonds bound,Diverse and one with all things; love and hate,Earth, and the starry stateOf heaven immeasurable, and years that fleeAs clouds and winds and rays across the sea.
[Ant.8.But higher than stars and deeper than the wavesOf day and night and morrowThat roll for all time, sorrow300Keeps ageless watch over perpetual graves.From dawn to morning of the soul in flower,Through toils and dreams and visions, to that hourWhen all the deeps were opened, and one doomTook two sweet lives to embrace them and entomb,The strong song plies its wingThat makes the darkness ringAnd the deep light reverberate sound as deep;Song soft as flowers or grass more soft than sleep,Song bright as heaven above the mounting bird,310Song like a God's tears heardFalling, fulfilled of life and death and light,And all the stars and all the shadow of night.
[Ep.8.Till, when its flight hath pastTime's loftiest mark and last,The goal where good kills evil with a kiss,And Darkness in God's sightGrows as his brother Light,And heaven and hell one heart whence all the abyssThrobs with love's music; from his trance320Love waking leads it home to her who stayed in France.
[Str.9.But now from all the world-old winds of the airOne blast of record ringsAs from time's hidden springsWith roar of rushing wings and fires that bearToward north and south sonorous, east and west,Forth of the dark wherein its records rest,The story told of the ages, writ nor sungBy man's hand ever nor by mortal tongueTill, godlike with desire,330One tongue of man took fire,One hand laid hold upon the lightning, oneRose up to bear time witness what the sunHad seen, and what the moon and stars of nightBeholding lost not light:From dawn to dusk what ways man wandering trodEven through the twilight of the gods to God.
[Ant.9.From dawn of man and woman twain and oneWhen the earliest dews impearledThe front of all the world340Ringed with aurorean aureole of the sun,To days that saw Christ's tears and hallowing breathPut life for love's sake in the lips of death,And years as waves whose brine was fire, whose foamBlood, and the ravage of Neronian Rome;And the eastern crescent's hornMightier awhile than morn;And knights whose lives were flights of eagles' wings,And lives like snakes' lives of engendering kings;And all the ravin of all the swords that reap350Lives cast as sheaves on heapFrom all the billowing harvest-fields of fight;And sounds of love-songs lovelier than the light.
[Ep.9.The grim dim thrones of the eastSet for death's riotous feastRound the bright board where darkling centuries wait,And servile slaughter, mute,Feeds power with fresh red fruit,Glitter and groan with mortal food of fate;And throne and cup and lamp's bright breath360Bear witness to their lord of only night and death.
[Str.10.Dead freedom by live empire lies defiled,And murder at his feetPlies lust with wine and meat,With offering of an old man and a child,With holy body and blood, inexpiableCommunion in the sacrament of hell,Till, reeking from their monstrous eucharist,The lips wax cold that murdered where they kissed,And empire in mid feast370Fall as a slaughtered beastHeadless, and ease men's hungering hearts of fearLest God were none in heaven, to see nor hear,And purge his own pollution with the floodPoured of his black base bloodSo first found healing, poisonous as it poured;And on the clouds the archangel cleanse his sword.
[Ant.10.As at the word unutterable that madeOf day and night division,379From vision on to vision,From dream to dream, from darkness into shade,From sunshine into sunlight, moves and livesThe steersman's eye, the helming hand that givesLife to the wheels and wings that whirl alongThe immeasurable impulse of the sphere of songThrough all the eternal years,Beyond all stars and spheres,Beyond the washing of the waves of time,Beyond all heights where no thought else may climb,Beyond the darkling dust of suns that were,390Past height and depth of air;And in the abyss whence all things move that areFinds only living Love, the sovereign star.
[Ep.10.Nor less the weight and worthFound even of love on earthTo wash all stain of tears and sins away,On dying lips alitThat living knew not it,In the winged shape of song with death to play:To warm young children with its wings,400And try with fire the heart elect for godlike things.
[Str.11.For all worst wants of all most miserableWith divine hands to dealAll balms and herbs that heal,Among all woes whereunder poor men dwellOur Master sent his servant Love, to beOn earth his witness; but the strange deep sea,Mother of life and death inextricate,What work should Love do there, to war with fate?Yet there must Love too keep410At heart of the eyeless deepWatch, and wage war wide-eyed with all its wonders,Lower than the lightnings of its waves, and thundersOf seas less monstrous than the births they bred;Keep high there heart and head,And conquer: then for prize of all toils pastFeel the sea close them in again at last.
[Ant.11.A day of direr doom arisen thereafterWith cloud and fire in strifeLightens and darkens life420Round one by man's hand masked with living laughter,A man by men bemonstered, but by love,Watched with blind eyes as of a wakeful dove,And wooed by lust, that in her rosy denAs fire on flesh feeds on the souls of men,To take the intense impureBurnt-offering of her lure,Divine and dark and bright and naked, strangeWith ravenous thirst of life reversed and change,As though the very heaven should shrivel and swell430With hunger after hell,Run mad for dear damnation, and desireTo feel its light thrilled through with stings of fire.
[Ep.11.Above a windier sea,The glory of Ninety-threeFills heaven with blood-red and with rose-red beamsThat earth beholding growsHerself one burning roseFlagrant and fragrant with strange deeds and dreams,Dreams dyed as love's own flower, and deeds440Stained as with love's own life-blood, that for love's sake bleeds.
[Str.12.And deeper than all deeps of seas and skiesWherein the shadows areCalled sun and moon and starThat rapt conjecture metes with mounting eyes,Loud with strange waves and lustrous with new spheres,Shines, masked at once and manifest of years,Shakespeare, a heaven of heavenly eyes beholden;And forward years as backward years grow goldenWith light of deeds and words450And flight of God's fleet birds,Angels of wrath and love and truth and pity;And higher on exiled eyes their natural cityDawns down the depths of vision, more sublimeThan all truths born of time;And eyes that wept above two dear sons deadGrow saving stars to guard one hopeless head.
[Ant.12.Bright round the brows of banished age had shoneIn vision flushed with truth459The rosy glory of youthOn streets and woodlands where in days long goneSweet love sang light and loud and deep and dear:And far the trumpets of the dreadful yearHad pealed and wailed in darkness: last aroseThe song of children, kindling as a roseAt breath of sunrise, bornOf the red flower of mornWhose face perfumes deep heaven with odorous lightAnd thrills all through the wings of souls in flightClose as the press of children at His knee470Whom if the high priest see,Dreaming, as homeless on dark earth he trod,The lips that praise him shall not know for God.
[Ep.12.O sovereign spirit, aboveAll offering but man's love,All praise and prayer and incense undefiled!The one thing stronger foundThan towers with iron bound;The one thing lovelier than a little child,479And deeper than the seas are deep,And tenderer than such tears of love as angels weep.
[Str.13.Dante, the seer of all things evil and good,Beheld two ladies, BeautyAnd high life-hallowing Duty,That strove for sway upon his mind and moodAnd held him in alternating accordFast bound at feet of either: but our lord,The seer and singer of righteousness and wrongWho stands now master of all the keys of song,Sees both as dewdrops run490Together in the sun,For him not twain but one thing twice divine;Even as his speech and song are bread and wineFor all souls hungering and all hearts athirstAt best of days and worst,And both one sacrament of Love's great givingTo feed the spirit and sense of all souls living.
[Ant.13.The seventh day in the wind's month, ten years goneSince heaven-espousing earthGave the Republic birth,500The mightiest soul put mortal raiment onThat came forth singing ever in man's earsOf all souls with us, and through all these yearsRings yet the lordliest, waxen yet more strong,That on our souls hath shed itself in song,Poured forth itself like rainOn souls like springing grainThat with its procreant beams and showers were fedFor living wine and sacramental bread;Given all itself as air gives life and light,510Utterly, as of right;The goodliest gift our age hath given, to beOurs, while the sun gives glory to the sea.
[Ep.13.Our Father and Master and Lord,Who hast thy song for sword,For staff thy spirit, and our hearts for throne:As in past years of wrong,Take now my subject song,To no crowned head made humble but thine own;That on thy day of worldly birth520Gives thanks for all thou hast given past thanks of all on earth.