Studies in Song | Page 6

All the sweet strife and strange
With fervid counterchange
Till one
fierce wail through many a glade and grove
Rang, and its breath made shiver
The reeds of many a river,
And
the warm airs waxed wintry that it clove,
Keen-edged as
ice-retempered brand;
Nor might god's hurt find healing save of
godlike hand.

30.
As when the jarring gates of thunder ope
Like earthquake felt in
heaven, so dire a cry,
So fearful and so fierce--'Give the sword
scope!'--
Rang from a daughter's lips, darkening the sky
To 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 Ætnean
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 Æschylus,
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