Poems. Volume 3

‘LOVE IS WINGED FOR TWO’

   Love is winged for two,   In the worst he weathers,   When their hearts are tied;   But if they divide,   O too true!Cracks a globe, and feathers, feathers,Feathers all the ground bestrew.I was breast of morning sea,Rosy plume on forest dun,I the laugh in rainy fleeces,   While with me   She made one.Now must we pick up our pieces,For that then so winged were we.

‘ASK, IS LOVE DIVINE’

Ask, is Love divine,Voices all are, ay.Question for the sign,There’s a common sigh.Would we, through our years,Love forego,Quit of scars and tears?Ah, but no, no, no!

‘JOY IS FLEET’

Joy is fleet,Sorrow slow.Love, so sweet,Sorrow will sow.Love, that has flownEre day’s decline,Love to have known,Sorrow, be mine!

THE LESSON OF GRIEF

Not ere the bitter herb we taste,Which ages thought of happy times,To plant us in a weeping waste,Rings with our fellows this one heart            Accordant chimes.When I had shed my glad year’s leaf,I did believe I stood alone,Till that great company of GriefTaught me to know this craving heart      For not my own.

WIND ON THE LYRE

That was the chirp of ArielYou heard, as overhead it flew,The farther going more to dwell,And wing our green to wed our blue;But whether note of joy or knell,Not his own Father-singer knew;Nor yet can any mortal tell,Save only how it shivers through;The breast of us a sounded shell,The blood of us a lighted dew.

THE YOUTHFUL QUEST

His Lady queen of woods to meet,   He wanders day and night:The leaves have whisperings discreet,   The mossy ways invite.Across a lustrous ring of space,   By covert hoods and caves,Is promise of her secret face   In film that onward waves.For darkness is the light astrain,   Astrain for light the dark.A grey moth down a larches’ lane   Unwinds a ghostly spark.Her lamp he sees, and young desire   Is fed while cloaked she flies.She quivers shot of violet fire   To ash at look of eyes.

THE EMPTY PURSE

A SERMON TO OUR LATER PRODIGAL SONThou, run to the dry on this wayside bank,Too plainly of all the propellers bereft!   Quenched youth, and is that thy purse?Even such limp slough as the snake has leftSlack to the gale upon spikes of whin,For cast-off coat of a life gone blank,In its frame of a grin at the seeker, is thine;   And thine to crave and to curse   The sweet thing once within.Accuse him: some devil committed the theft,   Which leaves of the portly a skin,   No more; of the weighty a whine.Pursue him: and first, to be sure of his track,Over devious ways that have led to this,   In the stream’s consecutive line,   Let memory lead thee backTo where waves Morning her fleur-de-lys,Unflushed at the front of the roseate doorUnopened yet: never shadow there   Of a Tartarus lighted by Dis   For souls whose cry is, alack!An ivory cradle rocks, apeepThrough his eyelashes’ laugh, a breathing pearl.There the young chief of the animals woreA likeness to heavenly hosts, unawareOf his love of himself; with the hours at leap.In a dingle away from a rutted highroad,Around him the earliest throstle and merle,Our human smile between milk and sleep,   Effervescent of Nature he crowed.Fair was that season; furl over furlThe banners of blossom; a dancing floorThis earth; very angels the clouds; and fairThou on the tablets of forehead and breast:Careless, a centre of vigilant care.Thy mother kisses an infant curl.The room of the toys was a boundless nest,   A kingdom the field of the games,   Till entered the craving for more,   And the worshipped small body had aims.A good little idol, as records attest,When they tell of him lightly appeased in a screamBy sweets and caresses: he gave but signThat the heir of a purse-plumped dominant race,Accustomed to plenty, not dumb would pine.Almost magician, his earliest dream   Was lord of the unpossessed   For a look; himself and his chase,   As on puffs of a wind at whirl,   Made one in the wink of a gleam.   She kisses a locket curl,She conjures to vision a cherub face,   When her butterfly counted his day   All meadow and flowers, mishap   Derided, and taken for play   The fling of an urchin’s cap.When her butterfly showed him an eaglet born,   For preying too heedlessly bred,   What a heart clapped in thee then!   With what fuller colours of morn!And high to the uttermost heavens it flew,   Swift as on poet’s pen.   It flew to be wedded, to wed   The mystery scented around:   Issue of flower and dew,   Issue of light and sound:   Thinner than either; a thread   Spun of the dream they threw   To kindle, allure, evade.It ran the sea-wave, the garden’s dance,To the forest’s dark heart down a dappled glade;   Led on by a perishing glance,   By a twinkle’s eternal waylaid.Woman, the name was, when she took form;Sheaf of the wonders of life.  She fled,Close imaged; she neared, far seen.  How she madePalpitate earth of the living and dead!Did she not show thee the world designedSolely for loveliness?  Nested warm,The day was the morrow in flight.  And for thee,She muted the discords, tuned, refined;Drowned sharp edges beneath her cloak.Eye of the waters, and throb of the tree,Sliding on radiance, winging from shade,With her witch-whisper o’er ruins, in reeds,She sang low the song of her promise delayed;Beckoned and died, as a finger of smokeAstream over woodland.  And was not sheHistory’s heroines white on storm?Remember her summons to valorous deeds.Shone she a lure of the honey-bag swarm,Most was her beam on the knightly: she ledFor the honours of manhood more than the prize;   Waved her magnetical yoke   Whither the warrior bled,   Ere to the bower of sighs.And shy of her secrets she was; under deepsPlunged at the breath of a thirst that wokeThe dream in the cave where the Dreaded sleeps.Away over heaven the young heart flew,And caught many lustres, till some one said(Or was it the thought into hearing grew?),   Not thou as commoner men!   Thy stature puffed and it swayed,   It stiffened to royal-erect;   A brassy trumpet brayed;   A whirling seized thy head;   The vision of beauty was flecked.   Note well the how and the when,   The thing that prompted and sped.   Thereanon the keen passions clapped wing,   Fixed eye, and the world was prey.No simple world of thy greenblade Spring,   Nor world of thy flowerful prime   On the topmost Orient peak   Above a yet vaporous day.   Flesh was it, breast to beak:A four-walled windowless world without ray,Only darkening jets on a river of slime,Where harsh over music as woodland jay,   A voice chants, Woe to the weak!   And along an insatiate feast,   Women and men are one   In the cup transforming to beast.Magian worship they paid to their sun,Lord of the Purse!  Behold him climb.   Stalked ever such figure of funFor monarch in great-grin pantomime?See now the heart dwindle, the frame distend;The soul to its anchorite cavern retreat,From a life that reeks of the rotted end;While he—is he pictureable? replete,Gourd-like swells of the rank of the soil,   Hollow, more hollow at core.   And for him did the hundreds toil   Despised; in the cold and heat,   This image ridiculous bore   On their shoulders for morsels of meat!Gross, with the fumes of incense full,With parasites tickled, with slaves begirt,He strutted, a cock, he bellowed, a bull,   He rolled him, a dog, in dirt.And dog, bull, cook, was he, fanged, horned, plumed;Original man, as philosophers vouch;Carnivorous, cannibal; length-long exhumed,Frightfully living and armed to devour;The primitive weapons of prey in his pouch;   The bait, the line and the hook:   To feed on his fellows intent.   God of the Danaé shower,   He had but to follow his bent.He battened on fowl not safely hutched,   On sheep astray from the crook;   A lure for the foolish in fold:To carrion turning what flesh he touched.   And O the grace of his air,   As he at the goblet sips,   A centre of girdles loosed,   With their grisly label, Sold!Credulous hears the fidelity swear,Which has roving eyes over yielded lips:To-morrow will fancy himself the seduced,   The stuck in a treacherous slough,Because of his faith in a purchased pair,   False to a vinous vow.In his glory of banquet strip him bare,   And what is the creature we view?Our pursy Apollo Apollyon’s tool;   A small one, still of the crew   By serpent Apollyon blest:His plea in apology, blindfold Fool.A fool surcharged, propelled, unwarned;   Not viler, you hear him protest:Of a popular countenance not incorrect.But deeds are the picture in essence, deeds   Paint him the hooved and homed,   Despite the poor pother he pleads,   And his look of a nation’s elect.   We have him, our quarry confessed!   And scan him: the features inspect   Of that bestial multiform: cry,Corroborate I, O Samian Sage!   The book of thy wisdom, proved   On me, its last hieroglyph page,   Alive in the horned and hooved?   Thou! will he make reply.   Thus has the plenary purse   Done often: to do will engageAnew upon all of thy like, or worse.   And now is thy deepest regret   To be man, clean rescued from beast:   From the grip of the Sorcerer, Gold,   Celestially released.   But now from his cavernous hold,   Free may thy soul be set,As a child of the Death and the Life, to learn,   Refreshed by some bodily sweat,   The meaning of either in turn,   What issue may come of the two:—A morn beyond mornings, beyond all reachOf emotional arms at the stretch to enfold:A firmament passing our visible blue.To those having nought to reflect it, ’tis nought;To those who are misty, ’tis mist on the beachFrom the billow withdrawing; to those who see   Earth, our mother, in thought,   Her spirit it is, our key.Ay, the Life and the Death are her words to us here,Of one significance, pricking the blind.This is thy gain now the surface is clear:To read with a soul in the mirror of mindIs man’s chief lesson.—Thou smilest!  I preach!   Acid smiling, my friend, revealsAbysses within; frigid preaching a street   Paved unconcernedly smooth   For the lecturer straight on his heels,   Up and down a policeman’s beat;   Bearing tonics not labelled to soothe.Thou hast a disgust of the sermon in rhyme.It is not attractive in being too chaste.The popular tale of adventure and crimeWould equally sicken an overdone taste.So, then, onward.  Philosophy, thoughtless to soothe,Lifts, if thou wilt, or there leaves thee supine.Thy condition, good sooth, has no seeming of sweet;It walks our first crags, it is flint for the tooth,   For the thirsts of our nature brine.But manful has met it, manful will meet.And think of thy privilege: supple with youth,   To have sight of the headlong swine,   Once fouling thee, jumping the dips!   As the coin of thy purse poured out:   An animal’s holiday past:And free of them thou, to begin a new bout;To start a fresh hunt on a resolute blast:No more an imp-ridden to bournes of eclipse:Having knowledge to spur thee, a gift to compare;Rubbing shoulder to shoulder, as only the bookOf the world can be read, by necessity urged.For witness, what blinkers are they who lookFrom the state of the prince or the millionnaire!   They see but the fish they attract,   The hungers on them converged;And never the thought in the shell of the act,   Nor ever life’s fangless mirth.But first, that the poisonous of thee be purged,   Go into thyself, strike Earth.She is there, she is felt in a blow struck hard.Thou findest a pugilist countering quick,Cunning at drives where thy shutters are barred;Not, after the studied professional trick,Blue-sealing; she brightens the sight.  Strike Earth,Antaeus, young giant, whom fortune trips!   And thou com’st on a saving fact,   To nourish thy planted worth.Be it clay, flint, mud, or the rubble of chips,Thy roots have grasp in the stern-exact:The redemption of sinners deluded! the last   Dry handful, that bruises and saves.To the common big heart are we bound right fast,   When our Mother admonishing nips   At the nakedness bare of a clout,   And we crave what the commonest craves.   This wealth was a fortress-wall,Under which grew our grim little beast-god stout;Self-worshipped, the foe, in division from all;With crowds of illogical Christians, no doubt;   Till the rescuing earthquake cracked.   Thus are we man made firm;   Made warm by the numbers compact.We follow no longer a trumpet-snout,   At a trot where the hog is tracked,   Nor wriggle the way of the worm.   Thou wilt spare us the cynical poutAt humanity: sign of a nature bechurled.   No stenchy anathemas cast   Upon Providence, women, the world.Distinguish thy tempers and trim thy wits.The purchased are things of the mart, not classedAmong resonant types that have freely grown.Thy knowledge of women might be surpassed:As any sad dog’s of sweet flesh when he quits   The wayside wandering bone!No revilings of comrades as ingrates: theeThe tempter, misleader, and criminal (screened   By laws yet barbarous) own.If some one performed Fiend’s deputy,   He was for awhile the Fiend.   Still, nursing a passion to speak,As the punch-bowl does, in the moral vein,   When the ladle has finished its leak,And the vessel is loquent of nature’s inane,   Hie where the demagogues roarLike a Phalaris bull, with the victim’s force:   Hurrah to their jolly attack   On a City that smokes of the Plain;   A city of sin’s death-dyes,   Holding revel of worms in a corse;   A city of malady sore,   Over-ripe for the big doom’s crack:   A city of hymnical snore;   Connubial truths and lies   Demanding an instant divorce,   Clean as the bright from the black.It were well for thy system to sermonize.There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack.   Then up stand thou in the midst:   Thy good grain out of thee thresh,   Hand upon heart: relate   What things thou legally didst   For the Archseducer of flesh.Omitting the murmurs of women and fate,   Confess thee an instrument armed   To be snare of our wanton, our weak,   Of all by the sensual charmed.For once shall repentance be done by the tongue:   Speak, though execrate, speak   A word on grandmotherly Laws   Giving rivers of gold to our young,In the days of their hungers impure;To furnish them beak and claws,And make them a banquet’s lure.   Thou the example, savedMiraculously by this poor skin!   Thereat let the Purse be waved:The snake-slough sick of the snaky sin:A devil, if devil as devil behavedEver, thou knowest, look thou but in,Where he shivers, a culprit fettered and shaved;O a bird stripped of feather, a fish clipped of fin!And commend for a washing the torrents of wrath,   Which hurl at the foe of the dearest men prizeRough-rolling boulders and froth.Gigantical enginery they can command,For the crushing of enemies not of great size:   But hold to thy desperate stand.Men’s right of bequeathing their all to their own(With little regard for the creatures they squeezed);Their mill and mill-water and nether mill-stoneTied fast to their infant; lo, this is the lastOf their hungers, by prudent devices appeased.The law they decree is their ultimate slave;Wherein we perceive old Voracity glassed.It works from their dust, and it reeks of their grave.Point them to greener, though Journals be guns;To brotherly fields under fatherly skies;Where the savage still primitive learns of a debtHe has owed since he drummed on his belly for war;And how for his giving, the more will he get;For trusting his fellows, leave friends round his sons:Till they see, with the gape of a startled surprise,Their adored tyrant-monster a brute to abhor,The sun of their system a father of flies!So, for such good hope, take their scourge unashamed;’Tis the portion of them who civilize,   Who speak the word novel and true:How the brutish antique of our springs may be tamed,Without loss of the strength that should push us to flower;How the God of old time will act Satan of new,If we keep him not straight at the higher God aimed;For whose habitation within us we scourThis house of our life; where our bitterest painsAre those to eject the Infernal, who heapsMire on the soul.  Take stripes or chains;   Grip at thy standard reviled.And what if our body be dashed from the steeps?   Our spoken in protest remains.   A young generation reaps.The young generation! ah, there is the childOf our souls down the Ages! to bleed for it, proofThat souls we have, with our senses filed,   Our shuttles at thread of the woof.   May it be braver than ours,To encounter the rattle of hostile bolts,To look on the rising of Stranger Powers.May it know how the mind in expansion revoltsFrom a nursery Past with dead letters aloof,And the piping to stupor of Precedents shun,In a field where the forefather print of the hoofIs not yet overgrassed by the watering hours,And should prompt us to Change, as to promise of sun,   Till brain-rule splendidly towers.For that large light we have laboured and trampedThorough forests and bogland, still to perceive   Our animate morning stamped   With the lines of a sombre eve.A timorous thing ran the innocent hind,When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood,   The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve,   And the lion effulgently ramped.Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood,   By right of the better in kind.But now will it breed yon bestial broodThree-fold thrice over, if bent to bind,   As the healthy in chains with the sick,Unto despot usage our issuing mind.It signifies battle or death’s dull knell.Precedents icily written on highChallenge the Tentatives hot to rebel.Our Mother, who speeds her bloomful quickFor the march, reads which the impediment well.She smiles when of sapience is their boast.O loose of the tug between blood run dryAnd blood running flame may our offspring run!May brain democratic be king of the host!Less then shall the volumes of History tellOf the stop in progression, the slip in relapse,That counts us a sand-slack inch hard wonBeneath an oppressive incumbent perhaps.Let the senile lords in a parchment sky,And the generous turbulents drunken of morn,   Their battle of instincts put by,   A moment examine this field:On a Roman street cast thoughtful eye,Along to the mounts from the bog-forest weald.It merits a glance at our history’s maps,To see across Britain’s old shaggy unshorn,Through the Parties in strife internecine, footThe ruler’s close-reckoned direct to the mark.From the head ran the vanquisher’s orderly route,In the stride of his forts through the tangle and dark.From the head runs the paved firm way for advance,And we shoulder, we wrangle!  The light on us shedShows dense beetle blackness in swarm, lurid Chance,The Goddess of gamblers, above.  From the head,Then when it worked for the birth of a starFraternal with heaven’s in beauty and ray,Sprang the Acropolis.  Ask what crownComes of our tides of the blood at war,For men to bequeath generations down!And ask what thou wast when the Purse was brimmed:What high-bounding ball for the Gods at play:A Conservative youth! who the cream-bowl skimmed,Desiring affairs to be left as they are.So, thou takest Youth’s natural place in the fray,   As a Tentative, combating Peace,   Our lullaby word for decay.—   There will come an immediate decreeIn thy mind for the opposite party’s decease,   If he bends not an instant knee.Expunge it: extinguishing counts poor gain.   And accept a mild word of police:—   Be mannerly, measured; refrainFrom the puffings of him of the bagpipe cheeks.Our political, even as the merchant main,   A temperate gale requires   For the ship that haven seeks;Neither God of the winds nor his bellowsy squires.   Then observe the antagonist, conHis reasons for rocking the lullaby word.You stand on a different stage of the stairs.He fought certain battles, yon senile lord.In the strength of thee, feel his bequest to his heirs.We are now on his inches of ground hard won,For a perch to a flight o’er his resting fence.Does it knock too hard at thy head if I say,   That Time is both father and son?Tough lesson, when senses are floods over sense!—   Discern the paternal of Now   As the Then of thy present tense.   You may pull as you will either way,   You can never be other than one.   So, be filial.  Giants to slay   Demand knowing eyes in their Jack.There are those whom we push from the path with respect.Bow to that elder, though seeing him bowTo the backward as well, for a thunderous backUpon thee.  In his day he was not all wrong.Unto some foundered zenith he strove, and was wrecked.He scrambled to shore with a worship of shore.The Future he sees as the slippery murk;The Past as his doctrinal library lore.He stands now the rock to the wave’s wild wash.Yet thy lumpish antagonist once did work   Heroical, one of our strong.His gold to retain and his dross reject,Engage him, but humour, not aiming to quash.   Detest the dead squat of the Turk,   And suffice it to move him along.   Drink of faith in the brains a full draught   Before the oration: beware   Lest rhetoric moonily waft   Whither horrid activities snare.   Rhetoric, juice for the mob   Despising more luminous grape,   Oft at its fount has it laughed   In the cataracts rolling for rape   Of a Reason left single to sob!’Tis known how the permanent never is writIn blood of the passions: mercurial they,Shifty their issue: stir not that pit   To the game our brutes best play.But with rhetoric loose, can we check man’s brute?Assemblies of men on their legs invokeExcitement for wholesome diversion: there shootElectrical sparks between their dry thatchAnd thy waved torch, more to kindle than light.’Tis instant between you: the trick of a catch   (To match a Batrachian croak)Will thump them a frenzy or fun in their veins.Then may it be rather the well-worn jokeThou repeatest, to stop conflagration, and writePenance for rhetoric.  Strange will it seem,When thou readest that form of thy homage to brains!   For the secret why demagogues fail,Though they carry hot mobs to the red extreme,   And knock out or knock in the nail   (We will rank them as flatly sincere,   Devoutly detesting a wrong,Engines o’ercharged with our human steam),Question thee, seething amid the throng.And ask, whether Wisdom is born of blood-heat;Or of other than Wisdom comes victory here;—Aught more than the banquet and roundelay,That is closed with a terrible terminal wail,   A retributive black ding-dong?And ask of thyself: This furious Yea   Of a speech I thump to repeat,   In the cause I would have prevail,   For seed of a nourishing wheat,   Is it accepted of Song?   Does it sound to the mind through the ear,Right sober, pure sane? has it disciplined feet?   Thou wilt find it a test severe;   Unerring whatever the theme.Rings it for Reason a melody clear,   We have bidden old Chaos retreat;   We have called on Creation to hear;All forces that make us are one full stream.Simple islander! thus may the spirit in verse,Showing its practical value and weight,Pipe to thee clear from the Empty Purse,Lead thee aloft to that high estate.—   The test is conclusive, I deem:   It embraces or mortally bites.   We have then the key-note for debate:   A Senate that sits on the heights   Over discords, to shape and amend.   And no singer is needed to serve   The musical God, my friend.Needs only his law on a sensible nerve:   A law that to Measure invites,   Forbidding the passions contend.   Is it accepted of Song?   And if then the blunt answer be Nay,Dislink thee sharp from the ramping horde,Slaves of the Goddess of hoar-old sway,   The Queen of delirious rites,Queen of those issueless mobs, that rendFor frenzy the strings of a fruitful accord,Pursuing insensate, seething in throng,Their wild idea to its ashen end.Off to their Phrygia, shriek and gong,Shorn from their fellows, behold them wend!   But thou, should the answer ring Ay,   Hast warrant of seed for thy word:   The musical God is nighTo inspirit and temper, tune it, and steer   Through the shoals: is it worthy of Song,   There are souls all woman to hear,   Woman to bear and renew.For he is the Master of Measure, and weighs,   Broad as the arms of his blue,   Fine as the web of his rays,Justice, whose voice is a melody clear,The one sure life for the numbered long,   From him are the brutal and vain,   The vile, the excessive, out-thrust:He points to the God on the upmost throne:   He is the saver of grain,   The sifter of spirit from dust.He, Harmony, tells how to Measure pertain   The virilities: Measure alone   Has votaries rich in the male:   Fathers embracing no cloud,   Sowing no harvestless main:Alike by the flesh and the spirit endowedTo create, to perpetuate; woo, win, wed;Send progeny streaming, have earth for their own,Over-run the insensates, disperse with a puff   Simulacra, though solid they sail,   And seem such imperial stuff:   Yes, the living divide off the dead.   Then thou with thy furies outgrown,Not as Cybele’s beast will thy head lash tailSo præter-determinedly thermonous,   Nor thy cause be an Attis far fled.   Thou under stress of the strife   Shalt hear for sustainment supreme   The cry of the conscience of Life:   Keep the young generations in hail,   And bequeath them no tumbled house!   There hast thou the sacred theme,   Therein the inveterate spur,   Of the Innermost.  See her one blink   In vision past eyeballs.  Not thee   She cares for, but us.  Follow her.   Follow her, and thou wilt not sink.   With thy soul the Life espouse:This Life of the visible, audible, ringWith thy love tight about; and no death will be;   The name be an empty thing,   And woe a forgotten old trick:And battle will come as a challenge to drink;As a warrior’s wound each transient sting.She leads to the Uppermost link by link;Exacts but vision, desires not vows.Above us the singular number to see;The plural warm round us; ourself in the thick,A dot or a stop: that is our task;Her lesson in figured arithmetic,For the letters of Life behind its mask;Her flower-like look under fearful brows.As for thy special case, O my friend, one must thinkMassilia’s victim, who held the carouse   For the length of a carnival year,Knew worse: but the wretch had his opening choice.For thee, by our law, no alternatives were:Thy fall was assured ere thou camest to a voice.   He cancelled the ravaging Plague,   With the roll of his fat off the cliff.Do thou with thy lean as the weapon of ink,Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague   And catches the not too pink,Attack one as murderous, knowing thy causeIs the cause of community.  Iterate,Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite:Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff:Yet always in measure, with bearing polite:The manner of one that would expiate   His share in grandmotherly Laws,   Which do the dark thing to destroy,Under aspect of water so guilelessly whiteFor the general use, by the devils befouled.   Enough, poor prodigal boy!Thou hast listened with patience; another had howled.Repentance is proved, forgiveness is earned.And ’tis bony: denied thee thy succulent halfOf the parable’s blessing, to swineherd returned:A Sermon thy slice of the Scriptural calf!   By my faith, there is feasting to come,   Not the less, when our Earth we have seenBeneath and on surface, her deeds and designs:Who gives us the man-loving Nazarene,The martyrs, the poets, the corn and the vines.By my faith in the head, she has wonders in loom;Revelations, delights.  I can hear a faint crowOf the cock of fresh mornings, far, far, yet distinct;   As down the new shafting of mines,   A cry of the metally gnome.   When our Earth we have seen, and have linkedWith the home of the Spirit to whom we unfold,Imprisoned humanity open will throwIts fortress gates, and the rivers of gold   For the congregate friendliness flow.Then the meaning of Earth in her children behold:Glad eyes, frank hands, and a fellowship real:And laughter on lips, as the birds’ outburstAt the flooding of light.  No robbery thenThe feast, nor a robber’s abode the home,For a furnished model of our first den!   Nor Life as a stationed wheel;Nor History written in blood or in foam,For vendetta of Parties in cursing accursed.The God in the conscience of multitudes feel,   And we feel deep to Earth at her heart,   We have her communion with men,   New ground, new skies for appeal.Yield into harness thy best and thy worst;Away on the trot of thy servitude start,Through the rigours and joys and sustainments of air.If courage should falter, ’tis wholesome to kneel.Remember that well, for the secret with some,Who pray for no gift, but have cleansing in prayer,And free from impurities tower-like stand.I promise not more, save that feasting will comeTo a mind and a body no longer inversed:The sense of large charity over the land,Earth’s wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough,And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal   Through the active machine: lean fare,But it carries a sparkle!  And now enough,   And part we as comrades part,To meet again never or some day or soon.Our season of drought is reminder rude:—   No later than yesternoon,   I looked on the horse of a cart,   By the wayside water-trough.How at every draught of his bride of thirstHis nostrils widened!  The sight was good:   Food for us, food, such as first   Drew our thoughts to earth’s lowly for food.