I
I saw the Muses, in august assize,
Standing before the Planetary Norns,
Their faces lit with calm, victorious eyes,
Weird as the beauty shed on starry morns.
I heard a voice cry from the Judgment Seat:
“Declare unto the Rulers of the Spheres
The story of the triumph and defeat,
The story of The Mighty Hundred Years.”
And then the Muses, bearing in their hands
High sibylline scrolls, sang to the Sceptered Powers:
“The sun ascends in man, the sky expands;
Into the Comrade-Future climb the Hours.
“The dawn was loud with thunders, white with levin,
Walled by the whirlwind, dark with agèd wrong;
Then came the bright steps of the Lyric Seven,
And heights and depths grew resonant with song.
“Above the dead the circling music sprang—
Dead custom, dead religion, dead desire;
Down the keen wind of dawn the rapture rang,
White with new dream and shot with Shelley’s fire.
“Out of the whirlwind Truth that came on France,
Rose the young Titaness, Democracy,
Superb in gesture, with the godlike glance;
Now stirred, now still with dream of things to be.
“She drew all faces as a lighted tower,
Strong mother of men, molded of lion race;
And all men’s hearts were shaken by her power,
The strange, disturbing beauty of her face.
“New seeing came upon the eyes of men,
New life ran pulsing in the veins of Earth:
It was a sifting of the souls again,
The weighing of the ages and their worth.