A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems | Page 6

cloud-sundering trumpet rings,
And bid strong death for
judgment rise,
And life bow down for judgment of his awless eyes.
IV.
And death, soul-stricken in his strength, resigned
The keeping of the
sepulchres to song;
And life was humbled, and his height of mind

Brought lower than lies a grave-stone fallen along;
And like a ghost
and like a God mankind
Rose clad with light and darkness; weak and
strong,
Clean and unclean, with eyes afire and blind,
Wounded and
whole, fast bound with cord and thong,
Free; fair and foul, sin-stained,
And sinless; crowned and chained;

Fleet-limbed, and halting all his lifetime long;
Glad of deep shame, and sad
For shame's sake; wise, and mad;
Girt
round with love and hate of right and wrong;
Armed and disarmed for
sleep and strife;
Proud, and sore fear made havoc of his pride of life.
V.
Shadows and shapes of fable and storied sooth
Rose glorious as with
gleam of gold unpriced;
Eve, clothed with heavenly nakedness and
youth
That matched the morning's; Cain, self-sacrificed
On crime's
first altar: legends wise as truth,
And truth in legends deep embalmed
and spiced;
The stars that saw the starlike eyes of Ruth,
The grave
that heard the clarion call of Christ.
And higher than sorrow and mirth
The heavenly song of earth

Sprang, in such notes as might have well sufficed

To still the storms of time
And sin's contentious clime
With peace
renewed of life reparadised:
Earth, scarred not yet with temporal
scars;
Goddess of gods, our mother, chosen among the stars.
VI.
Earth 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 Ægean
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 pæan
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