A Channel Passage and Other Poems | Page 9

sun:?Night, clothed with might of immemorial years, is one.
Day, born and slain of night,
Hath hardly life in sight
As she that bears and slays him and survives,
And gives us back for one
Cloud-thwarted fiery sun
The myriad mysteries of the lambent lives?Whose starry soundless music saith?That light and life wax perfect even through night and death.
In vain had darkness heard
Light speak the lustrous word
That cast out faith in all save truth and love:
In vain death's quickening rod
Bade man rise up as God,
Touched as with life unknown in heaven above:?Fear turned his light of love to fire?That wasted earth, yet might not slay the soul's desire.
Though death seem life, and night
Bid fear call darkness light,
Time, faith, and hope keep trust, through sorrow and shame,
Till Christ, by Paul cast out,
Return, and all the rout
Of raging slaves whose prayer defiles his name?Rush headlong to the deep, and die,?And leave no sign to say that faith once heard them lie.
VI
Since man, with a child's pride proud, and abashed as a child and
afraid,?Made God in his likeness, and bowed him to worship the Maker he
made,?No faith more dire hath enticed man's trust than the saint's whose
creed?Made Caiaphas one with Christ, that worms on the cross might feed. Priests gazed upon God in the eyes of a babe new-born, and therein Beheld not heaven, and the wise glad secret of love, but sin. Accursed of heaven, and baptized with the baptism of hatred and
hell,?They spat on the name they despised and adored as a sign and a
spell.?"Lord Christ, thou art God, and a liar: they were children of
wrath, not of grace,?Unbaptized, unredeemed from the fire they were born for, who smiled
in thy face."?Of such is the kingdom--he said it--of heaven: and the heavenly
word?Shall live when religion is dead, and when falsehood is dumb shall
be heard.?And the message of James and of John was as Christ's and as love's
own call:?But wrath passed sentence thereon when Annas replied in Paul. The dark old God who had slain him grew one with the Christ he
slew,?And poison was rank in the grain that with growth of his gospel
grew.?And the blackness of darkness brightened: and red in the heart of
the flame?Shone down, as a blessing that lightened, the curse of a new God's
name.?Through centuries of burning and trembling belief as a signal it
shone,?Till man, soul-sick of dissembling, bade fear and her frauds
begone.?God Cerberus yelps from his throats triune: but his day, which was
night,?Is quenched, with its stars and the notes of its night-birds, in
silence and light.?The flames of its fires and the psalms of their psalmists are
darkened and dumb:?Strong winter has withered the palms of his angels, and stricken
them numb.?God, father of lies, God, son of perdition, God, spirit of ill, Thy will that for ages was done is undone as a dead God's will. Not Mahomet's sword could slay thee, nor Borgia's or Calvin's
praise:?But the scales of the spirit that weigh thee are weighted with
truth, and it slays.?The song of the day of thy fury, when nature and death shall quail, Rings now as the thunders of Jewry, the ghost of a dead world's
tale.?That day and its doom foreseen and foreshadowed on earth, when
thou,?Lord God, wast lord of the keen dark season, are sport for us now. Thy claws were clipped and thy fangs plucked out by the hands that
slew?Men, lovers of man, whose pangs bore witness if truth were true. Man crucified rose again from the sepulchre builded to be No grave for the souls of the men who denied thee, but, Lord, for
thee.
When Bruno's spirit aspired from the flames that thy servants fed, The