Volume Iii Part 9 (2/2)
A City clothed in snow and soot, With lamps for day in ghostly rows, Breaks to the scene of hosts afoot, The river that reflective flows: And there did fog down crypts of street Play spectre upon eye and mouth:- Their faces are a gla.s.s to greet This magic of the whirl for South.
A burly joy each creature swells With sound of its own hungry quest; Earth has to fill her empty wells, And speed the service of the nest; The phantom of the snow-wreath melt, That haunts the farmer's look abroad, Who sees what tomb a white night built, Where flocks now bleat and sprouts the clod.
For iron Winter held her firm; Across her sky he laid his hand; And bird he starved, he stiffened worm; A sightless heaven, a shaven land.
Her s.h.i.+vering Spring feigned fast asleep, The bitten buds dared not unfold: We raced on roads and ice to keep Thought of the girl we love from cold.
But now the North wind ceases, The warm South-west awakes, The heavens are out in fleeces, And earth's green banner shakes.
THE LABOURER
For a Heracles in his fighting ire there is never the glory that follows When ashen he lies and the poets arise to sing of the work he has done.
But to vision alive under shallows of sight, lo, the Labourer's crown is Apollo's, While stands he yet in his grime and sweat--to wrestle for fruits of the Sun.
Can an enemy wither his cheer? Not you, ye fair yellow-flowering ladies, Who join with your lords to jar the chords of a bosom heroic, and clog.
'Tis the faltering friend, an inanimate land, may drag a great soul to their Hades, And plunge him far from a beam of star till he hears the deep bay of the Dog.
Apparition is then of a monster-task, in a policy carving new fas.h.i.+ons: The winninger course than the rule of force, and the springs lured to run in a stream: He would bend tough oak, he would stiffen the reed, point Reason to swallow the pa.s.sions, Bid Britons awake two steps to take where one is a trouble extreme!
Not the less is he nerved with the Labourer's resolute hope: that by him shall be written, To honour his race, this deed of grace, for the weak from the strong made just: That her sons over seas in a rally of praise may behold a thrice vitalised Britain, As.h.i.+ne with the light of the doing of right: at the gates of the Future in trust.
FORESIGHT AND PATIENCE
Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain, Are they who point our pathway and sustain.
They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.
When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.
To see Life's formless offspring and subdue Desire of times unripe, we have these two, Whose union is right reason: join they hands, The world shall know itself and where it stands; What cowering angel and what upright beast Make man, behold, nor count the low the least, Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.
When these two meet, a point of time is ours.
As in a land of waterfalls, that flow Smooth for the leap on their great voice below, Some eddies near the brink borne swift along Will capture hearing with the liquid song, So, while the headlong world's imperious force Resounded under, heard I these discourse.
First words, where down my woodland walk she led, To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:
- Your faith in me appals, to shake my own, When still I find you in this mire alone.
- The few steps taken at a funeral pace By men had slain me but for those you trace.
- Look I once back, a broken pinion I: Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!
- Needs must you drink of me while here you live, And make me rich in feeling I can give.
- A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow: Yet must I read my sister for the How.
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