THOU art in the early youth
Of Thy mission, Thou the Truth:
Thy young eyes behold the glory
Of the lilies’ burnished story
That the lovely dress they don
Vaunts it over Solomon.
Fields of lilies and of corn
Thou dost tarry through at dawn,
Seeing in their life a spell,
Drawing it as grace to dwell
In Thy first disciples’ eyes.
We of far-off centuries
See Thee on the cornfields’ sod,
Mid the lily-heads, a God
Young and dumb as yet of grief.
Lo, although the time is brief,
All the heavenly things, Thou must
Suffer, because Love is just
To a perfect building’s measure,
Thou hast buried under pleasure
Of Thy heart incarnate mid
Youths Thou call’st and forces hid
With fresh flowers and stems of gold.
Yet Thy vision, waxing bold
Through the Truth, amid the light
Of this world’s green, gold and white,
Sees a desert stretch away,
Stretched on its upheavals gray,
Round a serpent lifted high
In untarnishable sky.
Thou dost see that serpent high
In untarnishable sky:
And with ruddy lips dost say
How the Son of Man one day
Must be lifted for Love’s sake.
Thy bright eyes, so clear awake,
See Thy Body lifted high
As a serpent’s in the sky.
Day by day Thou see’st Thy Cross—
Yet the cornfields are not dross;
Nor the lilies, kinglike clad,
Grave-clothes of a weaving sad.
Life for lily-flowers too fair—
No sustaining corn may share—
Thou dost hail for those who gaze
On the serpent’s lifted maze.
Feeder among Lilies, Bread
To Thy multitudes outspread,
Let me love Thy pasture, all
Bliss that round my life may fall,
Though my eyes and voice, as Thine,
Witness the raised serpent’s twine.