BLESSED with joy, as daybreak under cloud—
Tender light of youth in the old face—
Blessed with joy beneath the weight and shroud
Of the years before this day of Grace,
Simeon blesses God and praises Him,
As a little child and mother slim
With first girlhood come their way
Toward his face, and night becometh day.
Prophet, joy for thee and for thy land!
Wide the welcome and the peace of joy!
But he takes the infant on his hand,
Graciously receives the milking boy
From the mother’s bosom, from her heart,
While she stands in reverence apart.
Lo, the old man’s countenance,
In a wave of anguish breaks from trance!
All the features lift with power, and sink,
As if sudden earthquake heaved and rolled
Through them, from a sudden thought they think.
Can a child of but a few weeks old
So confuse with terror an old man?
Yea, this child, laid on his fingers’ span,
Is for the ruin or the rise
Of the generations, Simeon cries.
Yea, a child, a tender handful, sleek
As a pearl—and the dire earthquake’s power
In his little body set, to wreak
Dread requital on the souls that cower
Mad with desolation, naked, lost,
Or uplifted wild from a dead host:
For the rise and ruin set
Of so many—but not yet, not yet!
Shattered by the Child, the Prophet turns
To the slender Mother, bright and bowed.
Woe again! A flawless lightning burns
Through his eyes and his weak voice rings loud,
How a sword shall pierce her heart alone
That out of many hearts their thoughts be shown.
Simeon, terror masks all joy
In this Mother and her milking Boy!
LOOKING UPON JESUS AS HE WALKED
WHAT is it thou hast seen,
O desert prophet, hung with camel’s hair, and lean?
What makes thine eyes so wide?
Not the huge desert where the camel-owners ride;
But One, who comes along,
So humble in His steps, and yet to Him belong
Thy days in their surcease,
Because He must increase as thou must now decrease.
Behold thy God, whose strength
Is as the coiling-in of thy life’s length!
Thou of wide eyes, wide soul,
Thy heart-blood as He comes to thee heaves on its goal!
Saint of the sinner, John,
Those whom thy lustral water hath been poured upon,
Those who have kept thy fast
With locusts and wild honey and long hours have passed
In penance, when they see
Christ coming toward them, young and fair with what shall be,
And giving God delight,
They know, by very doom of that remorseless sight,
That they, as they have been,
Will fade away, diminish and no more be seen:
They must, O desert saint,
Bow them to certain death and yet they must not faint,
And yet they must proclaim
The obliterating flourish of their Slayer’s name.
A DANCE OF DEATH
HOW lovely is a silver winter-day
Of sturdy ice.
That clogs the hidden river’s tiniest bay
With diamond-stone of price
To make an empress cast her dazzling stones
Upon its light as hail—
So little its effulgency condones
Her diamonds’ denser trail
Of radiance on the air!
How strange this ice, so motionless and still,
Yet calling as with music to our feet,
So that they chafe and dare
Their swiftest motion to repeat
These harmonies of challenge, sounds that fill
The floor of ice, as the crystalline sphere
Around the heavens is filled with such a song
That, when they hear,
The stars, each in their heaven, are drawn along!