But we may turn and find within our hands
Our souls’ strange bread and wine,
The gathered meanings of thy starry lands
Where mystic roses shine.
Heaven’s air might grow for us too cold and tense,
Her towers far and faint,
Did we not know thy sorrowful innocence,
Or soldier, singer, saint,
Earth’s heroes with earth’s poor not kneel and tell
Their full hearts’ burdenings
To those dear eyes before which Gabriel
Bent low with folded wings.
The soldier shall remember whose the heel
That crushed the serpent’s head,
How mighty in thy hand hath been the steel
That dyed thy bosom red.
The singer weave for thee a cloak of light
Where earth’s wild colours run,
As God hath crowned thee with the stars of night
And clothed thee with the sun.
The saint who in a cloister cool and dim
His difficult road hath kept
Shall think of thee whose body cloistered Him
When in thy womb He slept.
And thou shalt call to thee the poor of earth
To share thy joy with them,
And fill them with thy magnitude and mirth
In many a Bethlehem.
THE BOASTER
IF the last blissful star should fade and wither,
If one by one
Orion and the Pleiades Crash and Crumble;
The lordly sun