A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems | Page 6

fair as heaven, ere change and time set odds?Between them, light and darkness know not when,?And fear, grown strong through panic periods,?Crouched, a crowned worm, in faith's Lernean fen,?And love lay bound, and hope was scourged with rods,?And death cried out from desert and from den,?Seeing all the heaven above him dark with gods?And all the world about him marred of men.
Cities that nought might purge?Save the sea's whelming surge?From all the pent pollutions in their pen
Deep death drank down, and wrought,?With wreck of all things, nought,?That none might live of all their names again,?Nor aught of all whose life is breath?Serve any God whose likeness was not like to death.
VII.
Till by the lips and eyes of one live nation?The blind mute world found grace to see and speak,?And light watched rise a more divine creation?At that more godlike utterance of the Greek,?Let there be freedom. Kings whose orient station?Made pale the morn, and all her presage bleak,?Girt each with strengths of all his generation,?Dim tribes of shamefaced soul and sun-swart cheek,
Twice, urged with one desire,?Son following hard on sire,?With all the wrath of all a world to wreak,
And all the rage of night?Afire against the light?Whose weakness makes her strong-winged empire weak,?Stood up to unsay that saying, and fell?Too far for song, though song were thousand-tongued, to tell.
VIII.
From those deep echoes of the loud ?gean?That rolled response whereat false fear was chid?By songs of joy sublime and Sophoclean,?Fresh notes reverberate westward rose to bid?All wearier times take comfort from the p?an?That tells the night what deeds the sunrise did,?Even till the lawns and torrents Pyrenean?Ring answer from the records of the Cid.
But never force of fountains?From sunniest hearts of mountains?Wherein the soul of hidden June was hid
Poured forth so pure and strong?Springs of reiterate song,?Loud as the streams his fame was reared amid,?More sweet than flowers they feed, and fair?With grace of lordlier sunshine and more lambent air.
IX.
A star more prosperous than the storm-clothed east's?Clothed all the warm south-west with light like spring's, When hands of strong men spread the wolves their feasts?And from snake-spirited princes plucked the stings;?Ere earth, grown all one den of hurtling beasts,?Had for her sunshine and her watersprings?The fire of hell that warmed the hearts of priests,?The wells of blood that slaked the lips of kings.
The shadow of night made stone?Stood populous and alone,?Dense with its dead and loathed of living things
That draw not life from death,?And as with hell's own breath?And clangour of immitigable wings?Vexed the fair face of Paris, made?Foul in its murderous imminence of sound and shade.
X.
And all these things were parcels of the vision?That moved a cloud before his eyes, or stood?A tower half shattered by the strong collision?Of spirit and spirit, of evil gods with good;?A ruinous wall rent through with grim division,?Where time had marked his every monstrous mood?Of scorn and strength and pride and self-derision:?The Tower of Things, that felt upon it brood
Night, and about it cast?The storm of all the past?Now mute and forceless as a fire subdued:
Yet through the rifted years?And centuries veiled with tears?And ages as with very death imbrued?Freedom, whence hope and faith grow strong,?Smiles, and firm love sustains the indissoluble song.
XI.
Above the cloudy coil of days deceased,?Its might of flight, with mists and storms beset,?Burns heavenward, as with heart and hope increased,?For all the change of tempests, all the fret?Of frost or fire, keen fraud or force released,?Wherewith the world once wasted knows not yet?If evil or good lit all the darkling east?From the ardent moon of sovereign Mahomet.
Sublime in work and will?The song sublimer still?Salutes him, ere the splendour shrink and set;
Then with imperious eye?And wing that sounds the sky?Soars and sees risen as ghosts in concourse met?The old world's seven elder wonders, firm?As dust and fixed as shadows, weaker than the worm.
XII.
High witness borne of knights high-souled and hoary?Before death's face and empire's rings and glows?Even from the dust their life poured forth left gory,?As the eagle's cry rings after from the snows?Supreme rebuke of shame clothed round with glory?And hosts whose track the false crowned eagle shows;?More loud than sounds through stormiest song and story?The laugh of slayers whose names the sea-wind knows;
More loud than peals on land?In many a red wet hand?The clash of gold and cymbals as they close;
Loud as the blast that meets?The might of marshalled fleets?And sheds it into shipwreck, like a rose?Blown from a child's light grasp in sign?That earth's high lords are lords not over breeze and brine.
XIII.
Above the dust and mire of man's dejection?The wide-winged spirit of song resurgent sees?His wingless and long-labouring resurrection?Up the arduous heaven, by sore and strange degrees?Mount, and with splendour of the soul's reflection?Strike heaven's dark sovereign down upon his knees,?Pale in the light of orient insurrection,?And dumb before the almightier lord's decrees
Who bade him be of