Flushed of the glamor and gleam
Caught from a dream;
Stained of the struggle and toil,
Stained of the soil,
Ally of God in the end—
Helper and friend—
Hero and prophet and priest
Out of the beast!
THE NOBLER LESSON
CHRIST was of virgin birth, and, being slain,
The creedists say, He rose from death again.
Oh, futile age-long talk of death and birth!—
His life, that is the one thing wonder-worth;
Not how He came, but how He lived on earth.
For if gods stoop, and with quaint jugglery
Mock nature's laws, how shall that profit thee?—
The nobler lesson is that mortals can
Grow godlike through this baffled front of man!
AT LAST
EACH race has died and lived and fought for the
"true" gods of that poor race,
Unconsciously, divinest thought of each race
gilding its god's face.
And every race that lives and dies shall make itself
some other gods,
Shall build, with mingled truth and lies, new icons
from the world-old clods.
Through all the tangled creeds and dreams and
shifting shibboleths men hold
The false-and-true, inwoven, gleams: a matted
mass of dross and gold.
Prove, then, thy gods in thine own soul; all others'
gods, for thee, are vain;
Nor swerved be, struggling for the goal, by bribe
of joy nor threat of pain.
As skulls grow broader, so do faiths; as old tongues
die, old gods die, too,
And only ghosts of gods and wraiths may meet
the backward-gazer's view.
Where, where the faiths of yesterday? Ah,
whither vanished, whither gone?
Say, what Apollos drive to-day adown the flaming
slopes of dawn?
Oh, does the blank past hide from view forgotten
Christs, to be reborn,
The future tremble where some new Messiah-Memnon
sings the morn?
Of all the worlds, say any earth, like dust
wind-harried to and fro,
Shall give the next Prometheus birth; but say—at
last—you do not know.