“Yea, listen! If you build a cell, at last,
Turned to the wood,
Your fall is near, your safety over-past;
And if you plant a tree beside your door
Your fall is there beside it, and no more
The solitude is frank and good.
“For trees must have soft dampness for their growth,
And interfold
Their boughs and leaves into a screen, not loath
To hide soft, tempting creatures at their play,
That, playing timbrels and bright shawms, delay,
And wear one’s spirit old.
“Smoothly such numberless distractions come—
Impertinence
Of multiplicity, salute and hum.
Away with solitude of leafy shade,
Mustering coy birds and beasts, and men waylaid,
Tingling each hooded sense!
“Did not God call out of a covert-wood
Adam and Eve,
Where, cowering under earliest sin, they stood,
The hugged green-leaves in bunches round their den?
Himself God called them out—so lost are men
Whom forest-haunts receive!”
PASCHAL’S MASS
THE sheep still in dew, but the sky
In sun, the far river in sun;
And the incense of flowers steeped bright—
Their smell as sweet light;
And the shepherd-boy tethered on high
To his flock and his day’s work begun.
The bees in the wind of the dawn;
The larks not yet climbing aloft
As high as the Aragon Hills ...
What bell-ringing thrills
Through the bell-wether’s pastoral lorn?
From the valley a bell clear and soft.
The shepherd-boy kneeling in dew;
The bell of his wether rung sharp;
Below him the tinkle and sway,
From far, far away,
Of the sacring-bell, clear as a harp
In its chime of God lifted anew.
For his God, in the vale, on the height
He weeps; while the morning-larks rise.
Lo, in chasuble, living and rich
Golden rays cross-stitch,
Foreshown by magnificent light—
Lo, an angel grows firm on his eyes!
As an altar of marvellous stone
Before him the mountain hath blazed,
Round the angel, who lifts in the air
A Sun that is there:
To the sheep and the shepherd-boy shown,
With the ringing of larks, God is raised.