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