V.
Shadows and shapes of fable and storied sooth
Rose glorious as with gleam of gold unpriced;
Eve, clothed with heavenly nakedness and youth
That matched the morning’s; Cain,
self-sacrificed
On crime’s first altar: legends wise as
truth,
And truth in legends deep embalmed and
spiced;
The stars that saw the starlike eyes of Ruth,
The grave that heard the clarion call
of Christ.
And higher than
sorrow and mirth
The heavenly song
of earth
Sprang, in such notes as might have well
sufficed
To still the storms
of time
And sin’s
contentious clime
With peace renewed of life reparadised:
Earth, scarred not yet with
temporal scars;
Goddess of gods, our mother, chosen among the stars.
VI.
Earth fair as heaven, ere change and time set odds
Between them, light and darkness know
not when,
And fear, grown strong through panic periods,
Crouched, a crowned worm, in faith’s
Lernean fen,
And love lay bound, and hope was scourged with rods,
And death cried out from desert and from
den,
Seeing all the heaven above him dark with gods
And all the world about him marred of
men.
Cities that nought
might purge
Save the sea’s
whelming surge
From all the pent pollutions in their
pen
Deep death drank
down, and wrought,
With wreck of
all things, nought,
That none might live of all their names
again,
Nor aught of all whose life
is breath
Serve any God whose likeness was not like to death.
VII.
Till by the lips and eyes of one live nation
The blind mute world found grace to see
and speak,
And light watched rise a more divine creation
At that more godlike utterance of the
Greek,
Let there be freedom. Kings whose orient station
Made pale the morn, and all her presage
bleak,
Girt each with strengths of all his generation,
Dim tribes of shamefaced soul and sun-swart
cheek,
Twice, urged with
one desire,
Son following
hard on sire,
With all the wrath of all a world to wreak,
And all the rage
of night
Afire against
the light
Whose weakness makes her strong-winged
empire weak,
Stood up to unsay that saying,
and fell
Too far for song, though song were thousand-tongued,
to tell.
VIII.
From those deep echoes of the loud AEgean
That rolled response whereat false fear
was chid
By songs of joy sublime and Sophoclean,
Fresh notes reverberate westward rose
to bid
All wearier times take comfort from the paean
That tells the night what deeds the sunrise
did,
Even till the lawns and torrents Pyrenean