Tears fight with Peter’s breath—
He roves a field of grass,
At eventide ... a mass
Of faded flower of grass, grown grey,
Cut from sap and clinging into death,
And bowed one way.
Alone amid the darkness soon to be
Deep midnight, Peter mourneth bitterly
Christ buried, the sunk day, the flower of grass.
Yet he had hailed Him Christ....
The straw and clover feel
Sudden a lifted heel,
And, rudely whirled aside, are left
By the stranger’s feet, they had enticed
Beneath their weft.
But he is on the rock, the narrow way,
As if he talked with something he would say,
As if he would conceive as he could feel.
He stands thus in sweet dark,
The hay upon the air,
His feet on bare rock bare,
Set as a statue’s, waiting on....
Is it a trumpet raised and sounded? Hark,
Hath a torch shone?
The cock crows and the sun appears! Yet dry
Is Peter’s face, although the dawn-bird cry,
As the first Easter Day assumes the air.
FEAR NOT
A LITTLE chamber, shadowed, still
As cave within a marble hill—
O Virgin Mother, thou dost fill
The little space, bent down in prayer!
Sudden, through tears, thou art aware
How One is standing at thy door,
As stood, some thirty years before,
The Angel when thy fear was sore.
O Virgin—Virgin-Mother now,
No creature half so still as thou,
With the black wimple round thy brow,
For He hath entered: very white
His body, lovely as first light.
Thou tremblest ... Mother, thou dost hear
An Ave stealing through thy fear,
As He who entered draweth near!
“Jesus?”—She quickly hid in dread
The name that through her being spread
Its lustre, for her Son was dead....
And yet her arms rise up, her eyes
Raised as at morning sacrifice:
For blessèd is she in this dower
Beyond the Holy Ghost’s, that hour
When He encompassed her in power.
RECOGNITION
BREATH from the water, breath down from the moon,
A trembling influence between, so mild,
The water-hen makes tempest if she croon,
And fishers from the ship look forth beguiled:
They look on, careless of the reeds aswim,
And know not why they watch the shoreway dim;
Why watch the single form that moves along,
So dark in nobleness of solitude,
By the lake-side, and gathers from among
The rushes fallen rush as fuel rude.
One from the ship bows forwards in the night....
What makes that fisher’s face so gaily white?