  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. 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; 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, 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? 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! Her lover yet uncarnate; of thy race To be; long-dreamÈd mate Of her embrace; Whose godling fruit, too prized, too dear For bandit breath, shall wait The Garnerer. Dumb in law's gyves, Shall shrink to mother a soul-famined brood,— Unbudding sentiencies of flowerhood, Shut miracles no wand May touch, that from the hand Of Toil, the reaver, fall To dust, their grudgÈd pall, Leaving imperial web to those who wear That woof of blood and tears as gossamer. Not then! Where now the wailing way o'erteems, And baffled starvelings bar The way of dreams; Pouring to Want, grey-veined Disease, To Greed, and lurking War,— Brute goblinries With horde-lip sateless on God-food dust-thrown,— Lover and Love shall pass, each babe of theirs, Darling of Life, born for the higher wars Where knights of spirit sway, Summoned to holiest fray To clodded vision. There, Shriven and sure, the sun-dipped lance shall leap Till Dream uncorselet clay and put off sleep. For me one rift! Through this sepultural blight A breath runs living, new; Unburdening light As when the flame-borne prophet on The Syrian ploughman threw A people's dawn. The world is Heaven worth, The cradle earth Casts orphanhood, a Bethlehem God-swung From crimson grapple with his lyric young. Here triumph I, so low, |
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