The Coming of Green
Here like flame and there like water leaping
Green life breaks out again; in sunlight gleaming,
Small bright emerald flames through grey twigs creeping,
Little freshets of leafage shyly streaming
Among dark tangles. And sunlight grows serener
Daily, and wider extends the leafy awning,
And the green undying lawn beneath grows greener—
Greener and lovelier with lights and shadows dawning
Alternate, many-toned, born of the trooping
Of clouds o'er sun. Assembled Planes are bending
Long festoons high-hung and heavily drooping
From domes of luminous greenness. Willows are sending
Their fountains live and many-shafted swooping
Skyward, and lazily backward coolly showering.
Like tongues of flame, like water showering, dripping,
Green life slides down the branch, from bushes shaking
A verdant dew, or, out on a long curve slipping,
At the far extreme to a shivering soft foam breaking.
A spring in the desert, a fire in the darkness leaping,
Greenness comes transparently roofing and walling
Garden ways with an indolent downward-sweeping,
Or mounded high ... aspiring ... airily falling,
Or leaning fan over fan. A green and golden
Lucent cave enfolds us, cunningly vaulted,
With delicate-screened high chambers to embolden
Birds to flutter and sing or nest exalted
In swaying sanctuaries, and the lime-tree's clustering
Flowers to blow that the leafy ways be fragrant.
A dancing flood, a wild fire strengthening, mustering,
Over the gardens the young green life runs vagrant.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG
The Modern Hippolytus
Not, like poor monks, with fasting and the rod
To mortify the flesh for fear of God:
Not, like Sir Galahad, to run to waste
In sentimental worship of the chaste:
Not, like the Puritan, to hug disgust
And feast on others' sins to quench his lust:
Not, like the saint, with dreams of future bliss,
Lost in a fancied world, this world to miss.
But, like Hippolytus, in pride to make
The body servant for the body's sake;
Spurning the Cytheræan's toils, who craves
With servile heart the passion of her slaves,
Freely to render homage unto Her
Who, being free, desires no worshipper:
To render soul for soul, without pretence,
Not wooing sense through soul, nor soul through sense:
To shun the twilight of the world's mistrust
Where Lust for Love's mistaken, Love for Lust,
And seek Diana's cold and hueless light
That knows no difference save of dark and bright:—
There lay the man's will: but the unborn child
Cried in the darkness, and the old world smiled.
KENWORTH RUSHBY