A CHILD BEFORE THE CRIB
We came on Christmas Day Within the church to pray And lit by candle-ray I Mary saw And Joseph and the mild Ox and that little Child With open arms who smiled Amid the straw.
Behind a press of folk We knelt and no one spoke, Our Lady in her cloak Made not less noise, With folded fingers, than Each silent kneeling man, And sweet small girls who can Be still, and boys.
But for that Babe divine, His cot compared to mine, There in the candle-shine Was poor and hard. Yet did He never cry, Laid on such stems of rye As we see blowing by The stable yard.
And I who lie and wail, Pent by the polished rail Of my white cot while pale The night-light gleams, Who spurn my sheets and stain The patchwork counterpane With tears, then sink again Into my dreams,
Must mind me of His lot Whose mother poor had got No whitely pillowed cot To ease His head, But was at pains to shake The straws up for His sake And did a manger make Into His bed.
Sweet Jesus let me wear My swaddling-bands of care Smiling, and still forbear To be so nice; That thus I may behold Thy True Face, being old, Where straws are turned to gold In Paradise.
TO MASS AT DAWN
“EX UMBRIS ET IMAGINIBUS IN VERITATEM”
On the high frosty fields afoot at dawn I start:—with rarest mist the vale below Brims like a milky cup, the elm-tops show As floating islets, not a sound is borne Up from the river, shadowy on the lawn Two monstrous pheasants fight and strangely low The white sun peers between a spectral row Of quicksets spanned by spider-webs untorn. And the return:—the high sun over-head, The fair sleek fallows spread before my sight, The garrulous clear waters in their bed Of greenest sedge, the multitudinous flight Of little wings—O miracle of light— The self-same track, with all the shadows fled.