Balm of a sound Earth’s primary heart at its active beat:
The motive, yet servant, of energy; simple as morn and eve;
Treasureless, fetterless; free of the bonds of a great conceit:
Unwounded even by cruel blows on a body that writhes;
Nor whimpering under misfortune; elusive of obstacles; prompt
To quit any threatened familiar domain seen doomed by the scythes;
Its day’s hard business done, the score to the good accompt.
Creatures of forest and mead, Earth’s essays in being, all kinds
Bound by the navel-knot to the Mother, never astray,
They in the ear upon ground will pour their intuitive minds,
Cut man’s tangles for Earth’s first broad rectilinear way:
Admonishing loftier reaches, the rich adventurous shoots,
Pushes of tentative curves, embryonic upwreathings in air;
Not always the sprouts of Earth’s root-Laws preserving her brutes;
Oft but our primitive hungers licentious in fine and fair.
Yet the like aerial
growths may chance be the delicate sprays,
Infant of Earth’s
most urgent in sap, her fierier zeal
For entry on Life’s
upper fields: and soul thus flourishing pays
The martyr’s penance,
mark for brutish in man to heel.
Her, from a nerveless
well among stagnant pools of the dry,
Through her good aim
at divine, shall commune with Earth remake;
Fraternal unto sororial,
her, where abashed she may lie,
Divinest of man shall
clasp; a world out of darkness awake,
As it were with the
Resurrection’s eyelids uplifted, to see
Honour in shame, in
substance the spirit, in that dry fount
Jets of the songful
ascending silvery-bright water-tree
Spout, with our Earth’s
unbaffled resurgent desire for the mount,
Though broken at intervals,
clipped, and barren in seeming it be.
For this at our nature
arises rejuvenescent from Earth,
However respersive the
blow and nigh on infernal the fall,
The chastisement drawn
down on us merited: are we of worth
Amid our satanic excrescences,
this, for the less than a call,
Will Earth reprime,
man cherish; the God who is in us and round,
Consenting, the God
there seen. Impiety speaks despair;
Religion the virtue
of serving as things of the furrowy ground,
Debtors for breath while
breath with our fellows in service we
share.
Not such of the crowned
discrowned
Can Earth or humanity
spare;
Such not the God let
die.
III
Eastward of Paris morn
is high;
And darkness on that
Eastward side
The heart of France
beholds: a thorn
Is in her frame where
shines the morn:
A rigid wave usurps
her sky,
With eagle crest and
eagle-eyed
To scan what wormy wrinkles


