Songs before Sunrise | Page 6

face with deathless eyes and withered hair,
Fostress of obscure lands,?Whose multiplying hands?Wove the world's web with divers races fair
And cast it waif-wise on the stream,?The waters of the centuries, where thou sat'st to dream;
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O many-minded mother and visionary,
Asia, that sawest their westering waters sweep?With all the ships and spoils of time to carry
And all the fears and hopes of life to keep,?Thy vesture wrought of ages legendary
Hides usward thine impenetrable sleep,?And thy veiled head, night's oldest tributary,
We know not if it speak or smile or weep.
But where for us began?The first live light of man?And first-born fire of deeds to burn and leap,
The first war fair as peace?To shine and lighten Greece,?And the first freedom moved upon the deep,
God's breath upon the face of time?Moving, a present spirit, seen of men sublime;
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There where our east looks always to thy west,
Our mornings to thine evenings, Greece to thee,?These lights that catch the mountains crest by crest,
Are they of stars or beacons that we see??Taygetus takes here the winds abreast,
And there the sun resumes Thermopylae;?The light is Athens where those remnants rest,
And Salamis the sea-wall of that sea.
The grass men tread upon?Is very Marathon,?The leaves are of that time-unstricken tree
That storm nor sun can fret?Nor wind, since she that set?Made it her sign to men whose shield was she;
Here, as dead time his deathless things,?Eurotas and Cephisus keep their sleepless springs.
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O hills of Crete, are these things dead? O waves,
O many-mouthed streams, are these springs dry??Earth, dost thou feed and hide now none but slaves?
Heaven, hast thou heard of men that would not die??Is the land thick with only such men's graves
As were ashamed to look upon the sky??Ye dead, whose name outfaces and outbraves
Death, is the seed of such as you gone by?
Sea, have thy ports not heard?Some Marathonian word?Rise up to landward and to Godward fly?
No thunder, that the skies?Sent not upon us, rise?With fire and earthquake and a cleaving cry?
Nay, light is here, and shall be light,?Though all the face of the hour be overborne with night.
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I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.
The night is broken northward; the pale plains?And footless fields of sun-forgotten snow
Feel through their creviced lips and iron veins?Such quick breath labour and such clean blood flow
As summer-stricken spring feels in her pains?When dying May bears June, too young to know
The fruit that waxes from the flower that wanes;
Strange tyrannies and vast,?Tribes frost-bound to their past,?Lands that are loud all through their length with chains,
Wastes where the wind's wings break,?Displumed by daylong ache?And anguish of blind snows and rack-blown rains,
And ice that seals the White Sea's lips,?Whose monstrous weights crush flat the sides of shrieking ships;
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Horrible sights and sounds of the unreached pole,
And shrill fierce climes of inconsolable air,?Shining below the beamless aureole
That hangs about the north-wind's hurtling hair,?A comet-lighted lamp, sublime and sole
Dawn of the dayless heaven where suns despair;?Earth, skies, and waters, smitten into soul,
Feel the hard veil that iron centuries wear
Rent as with hands in sunder,?Such hands as make the thunder?And clothe with form all substance and strip bare;
Shapes, shadows, sounds and lights?Of their dead days and nights?Take soul of life too keen for death to bear;
Life, conscience, forethought, will, desire,?Flood men's inanimate eyes and dry-drawn hearts with fire.
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Light, light, and light! to break and melt in sunder
All clouds and chains that in one bondage bind?Eyes, hands, and spirits, forged by fear and wonder
And sleek fierce fraud with hidden knife behind;?There goes no fire from heaven before their thunder,
Nor are the links not malleable that wind?Round the snared limbs and souls that ache thereunder;
The hands are mighty, were the head not blind.
Priest is the staff of king,?And chains and clouds one thing,?And fettered flesh with devastated mind.
Open thy soul to see,?Slave, and thy feet are free;?Thy bonds and thy beliefs are one in kind,
And of thy fears thine irons wrought?Hang weights upon thee fashioned out of thine own thought.
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O soul, O God, O glory of liberty,
To night and day their lightning and their light!?With heat of heart thou kindlest the quick sea,
And the dead earth takes spirit from thy sight;?The natural body of things is warm with thee,
And the world's weakness parcel of thy might;?Thou seest us feeble and forceless, fit to be
Slaves of the years that drive us left and right,
Drowned under hours like waves?Wherethrough we row like slaves;?But if thy finger touch us, these take flight.
If but one sovereign word?Of thy live lips be heard,?What man shall stop us, and what God shall smite?
Do thou but look in our dead eyes,?They are stars that light each other till thy sundawn rise.
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Thou art the eye of this blind body of man,
The tongue of this dumb people; shalt thou not?See, shalt thou speak not for them?
Time is wan And hope is weak with waiting, and swift thought Hath lost the wings