The Breath of Light
From the cool and dark-lipped furrows
breathes a dim delight
Aureoles of joy encircle
every blade of grass
Where the dew-fed creatures silent
and enraptured pass:
And the restless ploughman pauses,
turns, and wondering
Deep beneath his rustic habit
finds himself a king;
For a fiery moment looking
with the eyes of God
Over fields a slave at morning
bowed him to the sod.
Blind and dense with revelation
every moment flies,
And unto the Mighty Mother
gay, eternal, rise
All the hopes we hold, the gladness,
dreams of things to be.
One of all they generations,
Mother, hails to thee!
Hail! and hail! and hail for ever:
though I turn again
For they joy unto the human
vestures of pain.
I, thy child, who went forth radiant
in the golden prime
Find thee still the mother-hearted
through my night in time;
Find in thee the old enchantment,
there behind the veil
Where the Gods my brothers linger,
Hail! for ever, Hail!
—May 15, 1895
The Free
They bathed in the fire-flooded fountains;
Life girdled them round and about;
They slept in the clefts of the mountains:
The stars called them forth with a shout.
They prayed, but their worship was only
The wonder at nights and at days,
As still as the lips of the lonely
Though burning with dumbness of praise.
No sadness of earth ever captured
Their spirits who bowed at the shrine;
They fled to the Lonely enraptured
And hid in the Darkness Divine.
At twilight as children may gather
They met at the doorway of death,
The smile of the dark hidden Father
The Mother with magical breath.
Untold of in song or in story,
In days long forgotten of men,
Their eyes were yet blind with a glory
Time will not remember again.
—November 15, 1895