Part 14 (2/2)

The neck of G.o.d.

_From_ ”THE VICTORIAN ODE”

_Written for the Queen's Golden Jubilee Day_, 1897

Lo, in this day we keep the yesterdays, And those great dead of the Victorian line.[D]

They pa.s.sed, they pa.s.sed, but cannot pa.s.s away, For England feels them in her blood like wine.

She was their mother, and she is their daughter, This lady of the water, And from their loins she draws the greatness which they were.

And still their wisdom sways, Their power lives in her.

Their thews it is, England, that lift thy sword, They are the splendour, England, in thy song, They sit unbidden at thy council-board, Their fame doth compa.s.s all thy coasts from wrong, And in thy sinews they are strong.

Their absence is a presence and a guest In this day's feast; This living feast is also of the dead, And this, O England, is thine All Souls' Day.

And when thy cities flake the night with flames, Thy proudest torches yet shall be their names.

Come hither, proud and ancient East, Gather ye to this Lady of the North, And sit down with her at her solemn feast, Upon this culminant day of all her days; For ye have heard the thunder of her goings-forth, And wonder of her large imperial ways.

Let India send her turbans, and j.a.pan Her pictured vests from that remotest isle Seated in the antechambers of the Sun: And let her Western sisters for a while Remit long envy and disunion, And take in peace Her hand behind the buckler of her seas, 'Gainst which their wrath has splintered; come, for she Her hand ungauntlets in mild amity.

Victoria! Queen, whose name is victory, Whose woman's nature sorteth best with peace, Bid thou the cloud of war to cease Which ever round thy wide-girt empery Fumes, like to smoke about a burning brand, Telling the energies which keep within The light unquenched, as England's light shall be; And let this day hear only peaceful din.

For, queenly woman, thou art more than woman; Thy name the often-struck barbarian shuns: Thou art the fear of England to her foemen, The love of England to her sons.

And this thy glorious day is England's; who Can separate the two?

Now unto thee The plenitude of the glories thou didst sow Is garnered up in prosperous memory; And, for the perfect evening of thy day, An untumultuous bliss, serenely gay, Sweetened with silence of the after-glow.

Nor does the joyous shout Which all our lips give out Jar on that quietude; more than may do A radiant childish crew, With well-accordant discord fretting the soft hour, Whose hair is yellowed by the sinking blaze Over a low-mouthed sea. Exult, yet be not twirled, England, by gusts of mere Blind and insensate lightness; neither fear The vastness of thy shadow on the world.

If in the East Still strains against its leash the unglutted beast Of war; if yet the cannon's lip be warm; Thou, whom these portents warn but not alarm, Feastest, but with thine hand upon the sword, As fits a warrior race.

Not like the Saxon fools of olden days, With the mead dripping from the hairy mouth, While all the South Filled with the shaven faces of the Norman horde.

[D] Who had pa.s.sed before him in ghostly procession--the ”holy poets,”

the soldiers, sailors, and men of science.

ST MONICA

At the Cross thy station keeping With the mournful mother weeping, Thou, unto the sinless Son, Weepest for thy sinful one.

Blood and water from His side Gush; in thee the streams divide: From thine eyes the one doth start, But the other from thy heart.

Mary, for thy sinner, see, To her Sinless mourns with thee: Could that Son the son not heed, For whom two such mothers plead?

So thy child had baptism twice, And the whitest from thine eyes.

The floods lift up, lift up their voice, With a many-watered noise!

Down the centuries fall those sweet Sobbing waters to our feet, And our laden air still keeps Murmur of a Saint that weeps.

Teach us but, to grace our prayers, Such divinity of tears,-- Earth should be l.u.s.trate again With contrition of that rain: Till celestial floods o'er rise The high tops of Paradise.

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