Studies in Song | Page 6

the extreme azure of all its cloudless cope?With starless horror: nor the God's own eye?Whose doom bade smite, whose ordinance bade hope,?Might well endure to see the adulteress die,
The husband-slayer fordone?By swordstroke of her son,?Unutterable, unimaginable on high,
On earth abhorrent, fell?Beyond all scourge of hell,?Yet righteous as redemption: Love stood nigh,?Mute, sister-like, and closer clung?Than all fierce forms of threatening coil and maddening tongue.
31.
All these things heard and seen and sung of old,?He heard and saw and sang them. Once again?Might foot of man tread, eye of man behold?Things unbeholden save of ancient men,?Ways save by gods untrodden. In his hold?The staff that stayed through some ?tnean glen?The steps of the most highest, most awful-souled?And mightiest-mouthed of singers, even as then
Became a prophet's rod,?A lyre on fire of God,?Being still the staff of exile: yea, as when
The voice poured forth on us?Was even of ?schylus,?And his one word great as the crying of ten,?Crying in men's ears of wrath toward wrong,?Of love toward right immortal, sanctified with song.
32.
Him too whom none save one before him ever?Beheld, nor since hath man again beholden,?Whom Dante seeing him saw not, nor the giver?Of all gifts back to man by time withholden,?Shakespeare--him too, whom sea-like ages sever,?As waves divide men's eyes from lights upholden?To landward, from our songs that find him never,?Seeking, though memory fire and hope embolden--
Him too this one song found,?And raised at its sole sound?Up from the dust of darkling dreams and olden
Legends forlorn of breath,?Up from the deeps of death,?Ulysses: him whose name turns all songs golden,?The wise divine strong soul, whom fate?Could make no less than change and chance beheld him great.
33.
Nor stands the seer who raised him less august?Before us, nor in judgment frail and rathe,?Less constant or less loving or less just,?But fruitful-ripe and full of tender faith,?Holding all high and gentle names in trust?Of time for honour; so his quickening breath?Called from the darkness of their martyred dust?Our sweet Saints Alice and Elizabeth,
Revived and reinspired?With speech from heavenward fired?By love to say what Love the Archangel saith
Only, nor may such word?Save by such ears be heard?As hear the tongues of angels after death?Descending on them like a dove?Has taken all earthly sense of thought away but love.
34.
All sweet, all sacred, all heroic things,?All generous names and loyal, and all wise,?With all his heart in all its wayfarings?He sought, and worshipped, seeing them with his eyes?In very present glory, clothed with wings?Of words and deeds and dreams immortal, rise?Visible more than living slaves and kings,?Audible more than actual vows and lies:
These, with scorn's fieriest rod,?These and the Lord their God,?The Lord their likeness, tyrant of the skies
As they Lord Gods of earth,?These with a rage of mirth?He mocked and scourged and spat on, in such wise?That none might stand before his rod,?And these being slain the Spirit alone be lord or God.
35.
For of all souls for all time glorious none?Loved Freedom better, of all who have loved her best,?Than he who wrote that scripture of the sun?Writ as with fire and light on heaven's own crest,?Of all words heard on earth the noblest one?That ever spake for souls and left them blest:?GLADLY WE SHOULD REST EVER, HAD WE WON?FREEDOM: WE HAVE LOST, AND VERY GLADLY REST.
O poet hero, lord?And father, we record?Deep in the burning tablets of the breast
Thankfully those divine?And living words of thine?For faith and comfort in our hearts imprest?With strokes engraven past hurt of years?And lines inured with fire of immemorial tears.
36.
But who being less than thou shall sing of thee?Words worthy of more than pity or less than scorn??Who sing the golden garland woven of three,?Thy daughters, Graces mightier than the morn,?More godlike than the graven gods men see?Made all but all immortal, human born?And heavenly natured? With the first came He,?Led by the living hand, who left forlorn
Life by his death, and time?More by his life sublime?Than by the lives of all whom all men mourn,
And even for mourning praise?Heaven, as for all those days?These dead men's lives clothed round with glories worn?By memory till all time lie dead,?And higher than all behold the bay round Shakespeare's head.
37.
Then, fairer than the fairest Grace of ours,?Came girt with Grecian gold the second Grace,?And verier daughter of his most perfect hours?Than any of latter time or alien place?Named, or with hair inwoven of English flowers?Only, nor wearing on her statelier face?The lordlier light of Athens. All the Powers?That graced and guarded round that holiest race,
That heavenliest and most high?Time hath seen live and die,?Poured all their power upon him to retrace
The erased immortal roll?Of Love's most sovereign scroll?And Wisdom's warm from Freedom's wide embrace,?The scroll that on Aspasia's knees?Laid once made manifest the Olympian Pericles.
38.
Clothed on with tenderest weft of Tuscan air,?Came laughing like Etrurian spring the third,?With green Valdelsa's hill-flowers in her hair?Deep-drenched