But oh! did kindly Heaven not bless
Our lives with more than loveliness,
When, cast on every sapling-rod,
Was seen the motley of our God;
When having picked our way with craft
Up cliffs to hear Him when He laughed,
We felt, uplifted on the wind,
His folly blown into our mind?
What doubt can touch us? We have heard
The baby laughter of the Word!
We mingle with solemnity
A Catholic note of revelry
In hypostatic union.
From love’s carved choir-stalls we con
The plain-song of the Breviary
Illumined by hilarity.
For as each cleansing sacrament
To our soul’s comforting was sent
(Through water and oil and wheat and wine,
Bringing to human the divine),
So shall we find on lovers’ lips
The splendour of apocalypse,
And through the body’s five gates come
To all the good of Christendom.
We have no fear that we shall lose
This joyous Gospel of good news,
For our symbolic love has stood
By virtue of its fortitude—
Knowing a bitter Lenten fast,
Satan discomforted at last,
A bowed back scalding with great scars,
Gethsemane of tears and stars,
A journey of the cross, and ah,
Its part and lot in Golgotha!
We know—let the marvellous thing be said!—
Love’s resurrection from the dead ...
For as Magdalen came with cinnamon
And aloes to smear Love’s limbs upon,
But met alone on the Easter grass
Life’s Lord, though she wist not Who He was—
So we, till He spoke as He spoke to her,
Mistook Him for the gardener.
April 14th, 1918.
NOTE
This edition of Theodore Maynard’s poems represents the author’s own selection of such of his published verse as he wishes included in a permanent collection. With few omissions, it represents the contents of the three volumes issued in Great Britain under the titles, “Laughs and Whifts of Song,” 1915; “Drums of Defeat,” 1917; “Folly,” 1918, none of which has hitherto been published in this country.