A Channel Passage and Other Poems | Page 8

endure as a man and abide?The doom of the will of the Lord of the loud world's tide, Whom thunders utter, and tempest and darkness hide,?With larger light than flamed from the peak whereon?Prometheus, bound as the sun to the world's wheel, shone, A presence passed and abode but on earth a span,?And love's own light as a river before him ran,?And the name of God for awhile upon earth was man.
O star that wast not and wast for the world a sun,?O light that was quenched of priests, and its work undone, O Word that wast not as man's or as God's, if God?Be Lord but of hosts whose tread was as death's that trod On souls that felt but his wrath as an unseen rod,?What word, what praise, what passion of hopeless prayer, May now rise up to thee, loud as in years that were,?From years that gaze on the works of thy servants wrought While strength was in them to satiate the lust of thought That craved in thy name for blood as the quest it sought?
From the dark high places of Rome?Far over the westward foam
God's heaven and the sun saw swell
The fires of the high priest's hell,
And shrank as they curled and clomb
And revelled and ravaged and fell.
IV
Yet was not the work of thy word all withered with wasting flame By the sons of the priests that had slain thee, whose evil was
wrought in thy name.?From the blood-sodden soil that was blasted with fires of the
Church and her creed?Sprang rarely but surely, by grace of thy spirit, a flower for a
weed.?Thy spirit, unfelt of thy priests who blasphemed thee, enthralled
and enticed?To deathward a child that was even as the child we behold in
Christ.?The Moors, they told her, beyond bright Spain and the strait brief
sea,?Dwelt blind in the light that for them was as darkness, and knew
not thee.?But the blood of the martyrs whose mission was witness for God,
they said,?Might raise to redemption the souls that were here, in the sun's
sight, dead.?And the child rose up in the night, when the stars were as friends
that smiled,?And sought her brother, and wakened the younger and tenderer child. From the heaven of a child's glad sleep to the heaven of the sight
of her eyes?He woke, and brightened and hearkened, and kindled as stars that
rise.?And forth they fared together to die for the stranger's sake, For the souls of the slayers that should slay them, and turn from
their sins, and wake.?And the light of the love that lit them awhile on a brief blind
quest?Shines yet on the tear-lit smile that salutes them, belated and
blest.
And the girl, full-grown to the stature of godhead in womanhood,
spake?The word that sweetens and lightens her creed for her great love's
sake.?From the godlike heart of Theresa the prayer above all prayers
heard,?The cry as of God made woman, a sweet blind wonderful word, Sprang sudden as flame, and kindled the darkness of faith with
love,?And the hollow of hell from beneath shone, quickened of heaven from
above.?Yea, hell at her word grew heaven, as she prayed that if God
thought well?She there might stand in the gateway, that none might pass into
hell.?Not Hermes, guardian and guide, God, herald, and comforter, shed Such lustre of hope from the life of his light on the night of the
dead.?Not Pallas, wiser and mightier in mercy than Rome's God shone, Wore ever such raiment of love as the soul of a saint put on. So blooms as a flower of the darkness a star of the midnight born, Of the midnight's womb and the blackness of darkness, and flames
like morn.?Nor yet may the dawn extinguish or hide it, when churches and
creeds?Are withered and blasted with sunlight as poisonous and blossomless
weeds.?So springs and strives through the soil that the legions of
darkness have trod,?From the root that is man, from the soul in the body, the flower
that is God.
V
Ages and creeds that drift
Through change and cloud uplift
The soul that soars and seeks her sovereign shrine,
Her faith's veiled altar, there
To find, when praise and prayer
Fall baffled, if the darkness be divine.?Lights change and shift through star and