When in the even ways of life
The old world jogs along,
Our little coloured flags we flaunt:
Our little separate selves we vaunt:
Each pipes his native song.
And jealousy and greed and pride
Join their ungodly hands,
And this round lovely world divide
Into opposing lands.
But let some crucial hour of pain
Sound from the tower of time,
Then consciousness of brotherhood
Wakes in each heart the latent good,
And men become sublime.
As swarming insects of the night,
Fly when the sun bursts in,
Self fades, before love’s radiant light,
And all the world is kin.
God, what a place this earth would be
If that uplifting thought,
Born of some vast world accident,
Into our daily lives were blent,
And in each action wrought.
But while we let the old sins flock
Back to our hearts again,
In flame, and flood, and earthquake shock,
Thy voice must speak to men.
‘THE TAVERN OF LAST TIMES’
(AT BOX HILL, SURREY)
A modern hour from London (as we spin
Into a silver thread the miles of space
Between us and our goal), there is a place
Apart from city traffic, dust, and din,
Green with great trees, where hides a quiet Inn.
Here Nelson last looked on the lovely face
Which made his world; and by its magic grace
Trailed rosy clouds across each early sin.
And, leaning lawnward, is the room where Keats
Wrote the last one of those immortal songs
(Called by the critics of his day ‘mere rhymes’).
A lark, high in the boxwood bough repeats
Those lyric strains, to idle passing throngs,
There by the little Tavern-of-Last-Times.
THE TWO AGES
On a great cathedral window I have seen
A Summer sunset swoon and sink away,
Lost in the splendours of immortal art.
Angels and saints and all the heavenly hosts,
With smiles undimmed by half a thousand years,
From wall and niche have met my lifted gale.
Sculpture and carving and illumined page,
And the fair, lofty dreams of architects,
That speak of beauty to the centuries—
All these have fed me with divine repasts.
Yet in my mouth is left a bitter taste,
The taste of blood that stained that age of art.
Those glorious windows shine upon the black
And hideous structure of the guillotine;
Beside the haloed countenance of saints
There hangs the multiple and knotted lash.
The Christ of love, benign and beautiful,
Looks at the torture-rack, by hate conceived
And bigotry sustained. The prison cell,
With blood-stained walls, where starving men went mad,
Lies under turrets matchless in their grace.
God, what an age! How was it that You let
Colossal genius and colossal crime
Walk for a hundred years across the earth,
Like giant twins? How was it then that men,
Conceiving such vast beauty for the world,
And such large hopes of heaven, could entertain
Such hellish projects for their human kin?
How could the hand that, with consummate skill
And loving patience, limned the luminous page,
Drop pen and brush, and seize the branding-rod,
To scourge a brother for his differing faith?
Not great this age in beauty or in art;
Nothing is wrought to-day that shall endure
For earth’s adornment, through long centuries;
Not ours the fervid worship of a God
That wastes its splendid opulence on glass,
Leaving but hate for hungry human hearts.
Yet great this age; its mighty work is man
Knowing himself the universal life.
And great our faith, which shows itself in works
For human freedom and for racial good.
The true religion lies in being kind.
No age is greater than its faith is broad.
Through liberty and love men climb to God.