Ay, thy gleaming spear is ours;
Ours thy fearless, golden bow;
And our shining arrows go
From thy bright untaken towers.
Thou art what we will to be,
Sceptre, star, and wingèd cloud;
We are blood and brawn of thee,
Glowing up through sod and stone,
Burning through thy rended shroud,
Moving with thee, chainless, on,
Till the world, a quickened whole,
Truth-delivered, naked, free,
Once again hath found its deathless soul.
MAGDALEN TO HER POET
Take back thy song; or let me hear what thou
Heardst anciently from me,
The woman; now
This wassail drift on boughless shores;
Once lyre-veined leading thee
To singing doors
Out of the coiling dark;
Teaching thee hark
Earth's virgin candours, blossomed wonderings,
And sanctities inaudible till strings
Of lyric gentleness
Wooed Heaven to confess
Her world, and I was near,
The earliest listener,
Who of my bosom then made Arcady,
And drew thy forest feet to Castaly.
Take back thy pity. Is it not from man
Who made that world his own?
As barbican
Sends out its darts, and after flings
A dole of myrrh where groan
Is loudest, sings
Thy grace to me, me thus
Unbeauteous
By thee. Uneased thy covenanted bit
From Levite ark till now. Thy judges sit,
Gods ruminant, to keep
Earth pure for dulcet sleep
Of babe and mother. Ay,
Drones yet the lulling lie,
Whilst I, Disease uncinctured, darkly mate
With guard and sentry of thy hierarchate.
Thine ages, are they fair? Shall they yet draw
Child-homage from our eyes?
The woman awe
As her own babe? Far stretch the avid spans
Of fame-drunk emperies,
And all are man's;
But from what tower of praise
Does Justice gaze?
Art is thy boast? "See how we garland her,
The goddess of our hands?" Yea, yea, but where
Is Truth, save by whose breath
Art is a laurelled death?
"Our churches these, and this
Our Holy Writ; there wis
Our altars high, and sanctuarised sod!"
But what, care-taking soul, hast done with God?
The bairning time I knew, the whispering breast,
But in thy world no place
Was for my nest,
Fragrant for perilous brooding pause.
Thou went'st thy pace;
My gathered straws
And grasses cast to dust
To make thy lust
A wayside couch. Deep from the nation's root,
The bower-tree where homes are nesting fruit,
Thy blight creeps up unseen
On bitten way to the green,
Till no hope-banneret
Makes Spring in windy fret
Of flagellant boughs that whip my fingers bare,
Too chill at last to build, to bleed, to care.
Must surge so late with Nature's spawning ruse?
Her stintless passioning
Lest she should lose
The younglet of her dearest pang?
To thee, her tenderling,
She gave lust-fang
To run the jungle's harm;
Now strives thee to disarm,
And fend Life from that weapon lent thy wear
Till thou, forsaking dust, mightst capture her.
What need now of the blood
Whose wasteful plenitude
Swept thee through hostile slime
To shores of light and time,
Man-minim safe mid frost and poison dews
Where naught could live that had not life to lose?
Yet dost thou foster it as thy veinèd sun;
Thy Heaven and Holy Rood
Build toppling on
Its strifeful hell; root there thy art,
Thy dreams of tenderest bud;
Gaze on the heart
Of its fetidity,
This wreck of me,
And sing. O God, what death, in eyes so bound,
They see Life's beauty in her draining wound!
Lay thou the blind thing down
With saurian tusk and bone,
With dust of sworded maw
And peril's fossil claw,
Lest sexton Earth even Man inter, nor trover
Of after-law untomb for Love her Lover!