In footing, the stately of stem;
     Unshaken though elements lour;
     A warrior heart unquelled;
     Mirror of Earth, and guide
     To the Holies from sense withheld: 
     Reason, man’s germinant fruit. 
     She wrestles with our old worm
     Self in the narrow and wide: 
     Relentless quencher of lies,
     With laughter she pierces the brute;
     And hear we her laughter peal,
     ’Tis Light in us dancing to scour
     The loathed recess of his dens;
     Scatter his monstrous bed,
     And hound him to harrow and plough. 
     She is the world’s one prize;
     Our champion, rightfully head;
     The vessel whose piloted prow,
     Though Folly froth round, hiss and hoot,
     Leaves legible print at the keel. 
     Nor least is the service she does,
     That service to her may cleanse
     The well of the Sorrows in us;
     For a common delight will drain
     The rank individual fens
     Of a wound refusing to heal
     While the old worm slavers its root.

     I bowed as a leaf in rain;
     As a tree when the leaf is shed
     To winds in the season at wane: 
     And when from my soul I said,
     May the worm be trampled:  smite,
     Sacred Reality! power
     Filled me to front it aright. 
     I had come of my faith’s ordeal.

     It is not to stand on a tower
     And see the flat universe reel;
     Our mortal sublimities drop
     Like raiment by glisterlings worn,
     At a sweep of the scythe for the crop. 
     Wisdom is won of its fight,
     The combat incessant; and dries
     To mummywrap perching a height. 
     It chews the contemplative cud
     In peril of isolate scorn,
     Unfed of the onward flood. 
     Nor view we a different morn
     If we gaze with the deeper sight,
     With the deeper thought forewise: 
     The world is the same, seen through;
     The features of men are the same. 
     But let their historian new
     In the language of nakedness write,
     Rejoice we to know not shame,
     Not a dread, not a doubt:  to have done
     With the tortures of thought in the throes,
     Our animal tangle, and grasp
     Very sap of the vital in this: 
     That from flesh unto spirit man grows
     Even here on the sod under sun: 
     That she of the wanton’s kiss,
     Broken through with the bite of an asp,
     Is Mother of simple truth,
     Relentless quencher of lies;
     Eternal in thought; discerned
     In thought mid-ferry between
     The Life and the Death, which are one,
     As our breath in and out, joy or teen. 
     She gives the rich vision to youth,
     If we will, of her prompting wise;
     Or men by the lash made lean,
     Who in harness the mind subserve,
     Their title to read