The fates shall never bow the head
That irony hath comforted,
Nor thrust him down with shameful scars
Who towers above the reeling stars.
Thus God, Who shaketh roof and rafter
Of highest heaven with holy laughter;
Who made fantastic, foolish trees
Shadow the floors of tropic seas,
Where finny gargoyles, goggle-eyed,
Grin monstrously beneath the tide;
Who made for some titanic joke
Out of the acorn grow the oak;
From buried seed and riven rocks,
Brings death and life—a paradox!
Who breaks great Kingdoms, and their Kings,
Upon the knees of helpless things....
So flesh the Word was made Who gave
His body to a human grave,
While devils gnashed their teeth at loss
To see Him triumph on the cross....
Thus God, Who shaketh roof and rafter
Of highest heaven with holy laughter!
VOCATION
THOUGH God has put me in the world to praise
Each beetle’s burnished wing, each blade of grass,
To track the manifold and marvellous ways
Whereon His bright creative footsteps pass;
To glory in the poplars’ summer green,
To guard the sunset’s glittering hoard of gold,
To gladden when the fallen leaves careen
On fairy keels upon the windy wold.
For this, for this, my eager mornings broke,
For this came sunshine and the lonely rain,
For this the stiff and sleepy woods awoke
And every hawthorn hedge along the lane.
For this God gave me all my joy of verse
That I might shout beneath exultant skies,
And meet, as one delivered from a curse,
The pardon and the pity in your eyes.