“Strange, piteous, futile thing!
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught” (He said),
“And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited—
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come.”
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.”
A JUDGMENT IN HEAVEN. [55]
Athwart the sod which is treading for God * the poet paced with his splendid eyes;
Paradise-verdure he stately passes * to win to the Father of Paradise,
Through the conscious and palpitant grasses * of inter-tangled relucent dyes.
The angels a-play on its fields of Summer * (their wild wings rustled his guides’ cymars)
Looked up from disport at the passing comer, * as they pelted each other with handfuls of stars;
And the warden-spirits with startled feet rose, * hand on sword, by their tethered cars.
With plumes night-tinctured englobed and cinctured, * of Saints, his guided steps held on
To where on the far crystálline pale * of that transtellar Heaven there shone
The immutable crocean dawn * effusing from the Father’s Throne.
Through the reverberant Eden-ways * the bruit of his great advent driven,
Back from the fulgent justle and press * with mighty echoing so was given,
As when the surly thunder smites * upon the clangèd gates of Heaven.
Over the bickering gonfalons, * far-ranged as for Tartarean wars,
Went a waver of ribbèd fire *—as night-seas on phosphoric bars
Like a flame-plumed fan shake slowly out * their ridgy reach of crumbling stars.
At length to where on His fretted Throne * sat in the heart of His aged dominions
The great Triune, and Mary nigh, * lit round with spears of their hauberked minions,
The poet drew, in the thunderous blue * involvèd dread of those mounted pinions.
As in a secret and tenebrous cloud * the watcher from the disquiet earth
At momentary intervals * beholds from its raggèd rifts break forth
The flash of a golden perturbation, * the travelling threat of a witchèd birth;