Degenerate heirs belie the master-month.
And yet the purse of glory is not stinted;
In scarlet goes the year and Sidon-tinted,
And golden-lacquered like the melolonth.
Bright burns the dawn, and long the daylight burns:
Ay me, but not so long as yesterday;
The Sun he smiles and smiles in the old way,
And yet averse his inmost purpose turns.
Oh is there human sorrow tongue can say —
Pain and the loss of friends and breach of loves, —
Unsymbolized when every morrow moves
A little narrowed from his yesterday?
Is it the year grown old, or Death in prime
Flames in the piled beech-hanger on the down?
Death (flaked with blood and fevered is his crown)
Keeps heyday here, a prince in pantomime.
Of old magnificences garnered up
He draws the sluice and sinks the world with store;
And yet a little one thing less or more
Makes poison or ambrosia of the cup.
The Earth has gemm'd herself and 'tired and farded,
And long the sun lay captive in her lap,
For every sense a darling-baited trap:
What has she done to be so disregarded?
Her grain and grape are turned to bread and wine,
Her lovelinesses overcharged and stale;
A secret worm of anguish lean and pale
With her heartstrings begins to intertwine.
And still the Sun smiles kindly on her noon,
But where the morning solitary rambles
He sees the anguish beaded on the brambles,
And in the afternoon Too soon, too soon
Too soon is all the burden of the woods,
And echoing to his footfall in the stubble
Not yet, not yet , a whispered voice of trouble,
And tears are in the eye which evening hoods.
A milky pallor films the wistful skies,
And all the countryside is tense and mute:
Dully the nursing leaf outlives the fruit.
Sad in his wisdom, and in sadness wise.
The year turns slowly homeward to his grave:
Weary and disabused, he sighs for glory
Quick-won, quick-lost, and pleasure transitory,
Fall'n Emperor gathered to the slaves a slave.
Nay, rather, with a coat upon his shoulder
More bravely painted than a pursuivant's
He does his public penance, and recants
The flourished hopes and vaunts when youth was bolder.
Death buried in his charnel, overlaid
With webs of grass and blossom-broidered woof,
Breathes thro' the close pall of his plague-pit roof,
And stirs against the leaf his black crusade.
Slapping in air a somersault, a fish
Stirs the darkly lustrous pane of the pond;
The wrinkle opens wide — beyond — beyond —
And breaks against the margin with a swish.
Thro' sallow reeds a-tremble. Mutely drift
Dead leaves on dead Autumnal waters brown
Where midges dancing in a wayward crown
Fear no invasion from the banished swift.
A golden-green profusion tessellates
The sliding floor of rivers melancholy:
And sad perpetual mail of box and holly
Glowers on the tattered flimsy of their mates.
The world awaits, arrested in a pause;
And sound is no more sound but silence jarr'd:
For lamentation there are hurts too hard,
Sorrows a sigh would mock like rude applause.
The Year knows every leaf a drop of blood
Ebbed from his faint complexion; leaflets pale
Which no slant April musketries of hail,
No fiery droughts disheartened — how they stud
And cloak and heap the dank self-coloured loam!
A pause! And in the chilly pause of life
The spirit drives a trebly whetted knife
Through the fine mesh of man's illusion, home
To prick the vital sensitive despair.
Look, for the veil has fallen: Death's about.
Listen along the countryside: he's out.
Smell: he is poignant in the windless air.
Look, every leaflet whispering his name
Faints toward annihilation in his arms;
Listen, for not a swallow round the farms
Twitters against him. Silence, like the shame
Of lovely youth for beauty and for strength
Wanton'd away, benumbs the haggard field,
His voice, a fount of poison, hums unsealed
Pouring across the land a wicked length
Of envious corruption, hums perceived
Huge in the silence by the subtler sense
Which hangs in fear and misery snapping-tense
O'er sallow lawn, swol'n brook, and oak disleaved.
This is the end, or sadder than the end,
Defeat foretasted and the prisoner's hour
Whose last appeal falls dumb on the ears of power
Tho' by the very muse of anguish penned.
Come forth, condemned! The earth's a scaffold drest
With dreary skies and sullen-coloured lands.
Wasted and gray and naked, there he stands,
And tearless Time beside him, axe addressed.
The winds he knew have changed their bland applause
To hissing murder in the elm-tree tops;
He bows his head and listens in the copse
The roaring overthrow of his mild laws.
Stoop windward on the storm-bewildered cliff,
Look on the sea, and if you read not there
Brooding the visible image of Despair
Read me no sign in Nature's hieroglyph!
The wolfish seas a lean sou'wester whips
Leap high and howl; the dingy strangling wrack
Athwart the white-stone-dotted coastguard track
Rolls inland, cold as kiss of Vampire lips.
Fugitive gesture of the ash-tree stunt,
A tattered cripple on the dun down's edge!
Sobb'd whistle in the salt-bitten elder hedge
Leaned agonizing landward from the brunt!
Pale-wing'd Alastors toss and shriek and pine
Where grisly wave and air self-coloured meet,
And loud the giant wind with hammer feet
Tramples his murky vintage in the brine.
O Earth in persecution seared and torn,
Thy martyr's blood takes wings on every wind.
Sleep well till throes of death are anodyned,
And faith repaired in better worlds reborn.
Take heart, for death is but a landlord's balk
Which overlook'd is lightly overleapt:
At birth unbroke our thread of life we kept:
Strange if a quickset hedge could bar my walk!
Let life replenish all her secret springs
After a droughty garish wasteful stage:
Over her shell the rain and wind may rage,
But Earth lies lapp'd in white imaginings.
She lies withdrawn, such meditation keeping
As theirs who when the Temple Veil was rent
Trembled what sudden beam of wonderment
Sever'd the oozy ages o'er them creeping.
The Autumn-havock of the ancient day
Twitch'd and awakened into glance and gesture;
And lo! the spinning of a new-year's vesture
For each advised soul that knew the Ray:
Who thro' three turns of upper day's complexion
The Labyrinth of Expectation trod,
Then rose; and in the rising wake of God
Suspired th' innumerable Resurrection. —
So, deep in the intervital hollows, deep,
Amid the treasure-house of seeds in thrall
Rises the starry Stature, softly fall
The feet of Christ along the floors of Sleep.
A silent Presence felt in darkness, heard
Above the secular silence, in the curl'd
Root-riddled alleys moist of the underworld:
And all the looms of herb and tree are stirred.
Meekly towards the courts of light they crave.
Wreak, bitter wind, thy rapine overhead:
Pastime of opiate music for the dead
Whose ears are touched to seize the opening grave!
Degenerate heirs belie the master-month.
And yet the purse of glory is not stinted;
In scarlet goes the year and Sidon-tinted,
And golden-lacquered like the melolonth.
Bright burns the dawn, and long the daylight burns:
Ay me, but not so long as yesterday;
The Sun he smiles and smiles in the old way,
And yet averse his inmost purpose turns.
Oh is there human sorrow tongue can say —
Pain and the loss of friends and breach of loves, —
Unsymbolized when every morrow moves
A little narrowed from his yesterday?
Is it the year grown old, or Death in prime
Flames in the piled beech-hanger on the down?
Death (flaked with blood and fevered is his crown)
Keeps heyday here, a prince in pantomime.
Of old magnificences garnered up
He draws the sluice and sinks the world with store;
And yet a little one thing less or more
Makes poison or ambrosia of the cup.
The Earth has gemm'd herself and 'tired and farded,
And long the sun lay captive in her lap,
For every sense a darling-baited trap:
What has she done to be so disregarded?
Her grain and grape are turned to bread and wine,
Her lovelinesses overcharged and stale;
A secret worm of anguish lean and pale
With her heartstrings begins to intertwine.
And still the Sun smiles kindly on her noon,
But where the morning solitary rambles
He sees the anguish beaded on the brambles,
And in the afternoon Too soon, too soon
Too soon is all the burden of the woods,
And echoing to his footfall in the stubble
Not yet, not yet , a whispered voice of trouble,
And tears are in the eye which evening hoods.
A milky pallor films the wistful skies,
And all the countryside is tense and mute:
Dully the nursing leaf outlives the fruit.
Sad in his wisdom, and in sadness wise.
The year turns slowly homeward to his grave:
Weary and disabused, he sighs for glory
Quick-won, quick-lost, and pleasure transitory,
Fall'n Emperor gathered to the slaves a slave.
Nay, rather, with a coat upon his shoulder
More bravely painted than a pursuivant's
He does his public penance, and recants
The flourished hopes and vaunts when youth was bolder.
Death buried in his charnel, overlaid
With webs of grass and blossom-broidered woof,
Breathes thro' the close pall of his plague-pit roof,
And stirs against the leaf his black crusade.
Slapping in air a somersault, a fish
Stirs the darkly lustrous pane of the pond;
The wrinkle opens wide — beyond — beyond —
And breaks against the margin with a swish.
Thro' sallow reeds a-tremble. Mutely drift
Dead leaves on dead Autumnal waters brown
Where midges dancing in a wayward crown
Fear no invasion from the banished swift.
A golden-green profusion tessellates
The sliding floor of rivers melancholy:
And sad perpetual mail of box and holly
Glowers on the tattered flimsy of their mates.
The world awaits, arrested in a pause;
And sound is no more sound but silence jarr'd:
For lamentation there are hurts too hard,
Sorrows a sigh would mock like rude applause.
The Year knows every leaf a drop of blood
Ebbed from his faint complexion; leaflets pale
Which no slant April musketries of hail,
No fiery droughts disheartened — how they stud
And cloak and heap the dank self-coloured loam!
A pause! And in the chilly pause of life
The spirit drives a trebly whetted knife
Through the fine mesh of man's illusion, home
To prick the vital sensitive despair.
Look, for the veil has fallen: Death's about.
Listen along the countryside: he's out.
Smell: he is poignant in the windless air.
Look, every leaflet whispering his name
Faints toward annihilation in his arms;
Listen, for not a swallow round the farms
Twitters against him. Silence, like the shame
Of lovely youth for beauty and for strength
Wanton'd away, benumbs the haggard field,
His voice, a fount of poison, hums unsealed
Pouring across the land a wicked length
Of envious corruption, hums perceived
Huge in the silence by the subtler sense
Which hangs in fear and misery snapping-tense
O'er sallow lawn, swol'n brook, and oak disleaved.
This is the end, or sadder than the end,
Defeat foretasted and the prisoner's hour
Whose last appeal falls dumb on the ears of power
Tho' by the very muse of anguish penned.
Come forth, condemned! The earth's a scaffold drest
With dreary skies and sullen-coloured lands.
Wasted and gray and naked, there he stands,
And tearless Time beside him, axe addressed.
The winds he knew have changed their bland applause
To hissing murder in the elm-tree tops;
He bows his head and listens in the copse
The roaring overthrow of his mild laws.
Stoop windward on the storm-bewildered cliff,
Look on the sea, and if you read not there
Brooding the visible image of Despair
Read me no sign in Nature's hieroglyph!
The wolfish seas a lean sou'wester whips
Leap high and howl; the dingy strangling wrack
Athwart the white-stone-dotted coastguard track
Rolls inland, cold as kiss of Vampire lips.
Fugitive gesture of the ash-tree stunt,
A tattered cripple on the dun down's edge!
Sobb'd whistle in the salt-bitten elder hedge
Leaned agonizing landward from the brunt!
Pale-wing'd Alastors toss and shriek and pine
Where grisly wave and air self-coloured meet,
And loud the giant wind with hammer feet
Tramples his murky vintage in the brine.
O Earth in persecution seared and torn,
Thy martyr's blood takes wings on every wind.
Sleep well till throes of death are anodyned,
And faith repaired in better worlds reborn.
Take heart, for death is but a landlord's balk
Which overlook'd is lightly overleapt:
At birth unbroke our thread of life we kept:
Strange if a quickset hedge could bar my walk!
Let life replenish all her secret springs
After a droughty garish wasteful stage:
Over her shell the rain and wind may rage,
But Earth lies lapp'd in white imaginings.
She lies withdrawn, such meditation keeping
As theirs who when the Temple Veil was rent
Trembled what sudden beam of wonderment
Sever'd the oozy ages o'er them creeping.
The Autumn-havock of the ancient day
Twitch'd and awakened into glance and gesture;
And lo! the spinning of a new-year's vesture
For each advised soul that knew the Ray:
Who thro' three turns of upper day's complexion
The Labyrinth of Expectation trod,
Then rose; and in the rising wake of God
Suspired th' innumerable Resurrection. —
So, deep in the intervital hollows, deep,
Amid the treasure-house of seeds in thrall
Rises the starry Stature, softly fall
The feet of Christ along the floors of Sleep.
A silent Presence felt in darkness, heard
Above the secular silence, in the curl'd
Root-riddled alleys moist of the underworld:
And all the looms of herb and tree are stirred.
Meekly towards the courts of light they crave.
Wreak, bitter wind, thy rapine overhead:
Pastime of opiate music for the dead
Whose ears are touched to seize the opening grave!
And yet the purse of glory is not stinted;
In scarlet goes the year and Sidon-tinted,
And golden-lacquered like the melolonth.
Bright burns the dawn, and long the daylight burns:
Ay me, but not so long as yesterday;
The Sun he smiles and smiles in the old way,
And yet averse his inmost purpose turns.
Oh is there human sorrow tongue can say —
Pain and the loss of friends and breach of loves, —
Unsymbolized when every morrow moves
A little narrowed from his yesterday?
Is it the year grown old, or Death in prime
Flames in the piled beech-hanger on the down?
Death (flaked with blood and fevered is his crown)
Keeps heyday here, a prince in pantomime.
Of old magnificences garnered up
He draws the sluice and sinks the world with store;
And yet a little one thing less or more
Makes poison or ambrosia of the cup.
The Earth has gemm'd herself and 'tired and farded,
And long the sun lay captive in her lap,
For every sense a darling-baited trap:
What has she done to be so disregarded?
Her grain and grape are turned to bread and wine,
Her lovelinesses overcharged and stale;
A secret worm of anguish lean and pale
With her heartstrings begins to intertwine.
And still the Sun smiles kindly on her noon,
But where the morning solitary rambles
He sees the anguish beaded on the brambles,
And in the afternoon Too soon, too soon
Too soon is all the burden of the woods,
And echoing to his footfall in the stubble
Not yet, not yet , a whispered voice of trouble,
And tears are in the eye which evening hoods.
A milky pallor films the wistful skies,
And all the countryside is tense and mute:
Dully the nursing leaf outlives the fruit.
Sad in his wisdom, and in sadness wise.
The year turns slowly homeward to his grave:
Weary and disabused, he sighs for glory
Quick-won, quick-lost, and pleasure transitory,
Fall'n Emperor gathered to the slaves a slave.
Nay, rather, with a coat upon his shoulder
More bravely painted than a pursuivant's
He does his public penance, and recants
The flourished hopes and vaunts when youth was bolder.
Death buried in his charnel, overlaid
With webs of grass and blossom-broidered woof,
Breathes thro' the close pall of his plague-pit roof,
And stirs against the leaf his black crusade.
Slapping in air a somersault, a fish
Stirs the darkly lustrous pane of the pond;
The wrinkle opens wide — beyond — beyond —
And breaks against the margin with a swish.
Thro' sallow reeds a-tremble. Mutely drift
Dead leaves on dead Autumnal waters brown
Where midges dancing in a wayward crown
Fear no invasion from the banished swift.
A golden-green profusion tessellates
The sliding floor of rivers melancholy:
And sad perpetual mail of box and holly
Glowers on the tattered flimsy of their mates.
The world awaits, arrested in a pause;
And sound is no more sound but silence jarr'd:
For lamentation there are hurts too hard,
Sorrows a sigh would mock like rude applause.
The Year knows every leaf a drop of blood
Ebbed from his faint complexion; leaflets pale
Which no slant April musketries of hail,
No fiery droughts disheartened — how they stud
And cloak and heap the dank self-coloured loam!
A pause! And in the chilly pause of life
The spirit drives a trebly whetted knife
Through the fine mesh of man's illusion, home
To prick the vital sensitive despair.
Look, for the veil has fallen: Death's about.
Listen along the countryside: he's out.
Smell: he is poignant in the windless air.
Look, every leaflet whispering his name
Faints toward annihilation in his arms;
Listen, for not a swallow round the farms
Twitters against him. Silence, like the shame
Of lovely youth for beauty and for strength
Wanton'd away, benumbs the haggard field,
His voice, a fount of poison, hums unsealed
Pouring across the land a wicked length
Of envious corruption, hums perceived
Huge in the silence by the subtler sense
Which hangs in fear and misery snapping-tense
O'er sallow lawn, swol'n brook, and oak disleaved.
This is the end, or sadder than the end,
Defeat foretasted and the prisoner's hour
Whose last appeal falls dumb on the ears of power
Tho' by the very muse of anguish penned.
Come forth, condemned! The earth's a scaffold drest
With dreary skies and sullen-coloured lands.
Wasted and gray and naked, there he stands,
And tearless Time beside him, axe addressed.
The winds he knew have changed their bland applause
To hissing murder in the elm-tree tops;
He bows his head and listens in the copse
The roaring overthrow of his mild laws.
Stoop windward on the storm-bewildered cliff,
Look on the sea, and if you read not there
Brooding the visible image of Despair
Read me no sign in Nature's hieroglyph!
The wolfish seas a lean sou'wester whips
Leap high and howl; the dingy strangling wrack
Athwart the white-stone-dotted coastguard track
Rolls inland, cold as kiss of Vampire lips.
Fugitive gesture of the ash-tree stunt,
A tattered cripple on the dun down's edge!
Sobb'd whistle in the salt-bitten elder hedge
Leaned agonizing landward from the brunt!
Pale-wing'd Alastors toss and shriek and pine
Where grisly wave and air self-coloured meet,
And loud the giant wind with hammer feet
Tramples his murky vintage in the brine.
O Earth in persecution seared and torn,
Thy martyr's blood takes wings on every wind.
Sleep well till throes of death are anodyned,
And faith repaired in better worlds reborn.
Take heart, for death is but a landlord's balk
Which overlook'd is lightly overleapt:
At birth unbroke our thread of life we kept:
Strange if a quickset hedge could bar my walk!
Let life replenish all her secret springs
After a droughty garish wasteful stage:
Over her shell the rain and wind may rage,
But Earth lies lapp'd in white imaginings.
She lies withdrawn, such meditation keeping
As theirs who when the Temple Veil was rent
Trembled what sudden beam of wonderment
Sever'd the oozy ages o'er them creeping.
The Autumn-havock of the ancient day
Twitch'd and awakened into glance and gesture;
And lo! the spinning of a new-year's vesture
For each advised soul that knew the Ray:
Who thro' three turns of upper day's complexion
The Labyrinth of Expectation trod,
Then rose; and in the rising wake of God
Suspired th' innumerable Resurrection. —
So, deep in the intervital hollows, deep,
Amid the treasure-house of seeds in thrall
Rises the starry Stature, softly fall
The feet of Christ along the floors of Sleep.
A silent Presence felt in darkness, heard
Above the secular silence, in the curl'd
Root-riddled alleys moist of the underworld:
And all the looms of herb and tree are stirred.
Meekly towards the courts of light they crave.
Wreak, bitter wind, thy rapine overhead:
Pastime of opiate music for the dead
Whose ears are touched to seize the opening grave!
Degenerate heirs belie the master-month.
And yet the purse of glory is not stinted;
In scarlet goes the year and Sidon-tinted,
And golden-lacquered like the melolonth.
Bright burns the dawn, and long the daylight burns:
Ay me, but not so long as yesterday;
The Sun he smiles and smiles in the old way,
And yet averse his inmost purpose turns.
Oh is there human sorrow tongue can say —
Pain and the loss of friends and breach of loves, —
Unsymbolized when every morrow moves
A little narrowed from his yesterday?
Is it the year grown old, or Death in prime
Flames in the piled beech-hanger on the down?
Death (flaked with blood and fevered is his crown)
Keeps heyday here, a prince in pantomime.
Of old magnificences garnered up
He draws the sluice and sinks the world with store;
And yet a little one thing less or more
Makes poison or ambrosia of the cup.
The Earth has gemm'd herself and 'tired and farded,
And long the sun lay captive in her lap,
For every sense a darling-baited trap:
What has she done to be so disregarded?
Her grain and grape are turned to bread and wine,
Her lovelinesses overcharged and stale;
A secret worm of anguish lean and pale
With her heartstrings begins to intertwine.
And still the Sun smiles kindly on her noon,
But where the morning solitary rambles
He sees the anguish beaded on the brambles,
And in the afternoon Too soon, too soon
Too soon is all the burden of the woods,
And echoing to his footfall in the stubble
Not yet, not yet , a whispered voice of trouble,
And tears are in the eye which evening hoods.
A milky pallor films the wistful skies,
And all the countryside is tense and mute:
Dully the nursing leaf outlives the fruit.
Sad in his wisdom, and in sadness wise.
The year turns slowly homeward to his grave:
Weary and disabused, he sighs for glory
Quick-won, quick-lost, and pleasure transitory,
Fall'n Emperor gathered to the slaves a slave.
Nay, rather, with a coat upon his shoulder
More bravely painted than a pursuivant's
He does his public penance, and recants
The flourished hopes and vaunts when youth was bolder.
Death buried in his charnel, overlaid
With webs of grass and blossom-broidered woof,
Breathes thro' the close pall of his plague-pit roof,
And stirs against the leaf his black crusade.
Slapping in air a somersault, a fish
Stirs the darkly lustrous pane of the pond;
The wrinkle opens wide — beyond — beyond —
And breaks against the margin with a swish.
Thro' sallow reeds a-tremble. Mutely drift
Dead leaves on dead Autumnal waters brown
Where midges dancing in a wayward crown
Fear no invasion from the banished swift.
A golden-green profusion tessellates
The sliding floor of rivers melancholy:
And sad perpetual mail of box and holly
Glowers on the tattered flimsy of their mates.
The world awaits, arrested in a pause;
And sound is no more sound but silence jarr'd:
For lamentation there are hurts too hard,
Sorrows a sigh would mock like rude applause.
The Year knows every leaf a drop of blood
Ebbed from his faint complexion; leaflets pale
Which no slant April musketries of hail,
No fiery droughts disheartened — how they stud
And cloak and heap the dank self-coloured loam!
A pause! And in the chilly pause of life
The spirit drives a trebly whetted knife
Through the fine mesh of man's illusion, home
To prick the vital sensitive despair.
Look, for the veil has fallen: Death's about.
Listen along the countryside: he's out.
Smell: he is poignant in the windless air.
Look, every leaflet whispering his name
Faints toward annihilation in his arms;
Listen, for not a swallow round the farms
Twitters against him. Silence, like the shame
Of lovely youth for beauty and for strength
Wanton'd away, benumbs the haggard field,
His voice, a fount of poison, hums unsealed
Pouring across the land a wicked length
Of envious corruption, hums perceived
Huge in the silence by the subtler sense
Which hangs in fear and misery snapping-tense
O'er sallow lawn, swol'n brook, and oak disleaved.
This is the end, or sadder than the end,
Defeat foretasted and the prisoner's hour
Whose last appeal falls dumb on the ears of power
Tho' by the very muse of anguish penned.
Come forth, condemned! The earth's a scaffold drest
With dreary skies and sullen-coloured lands.
Wasted and gray and naked, there he stands,
And tearless Time beside him, axe addressed.
The winds he knew have changed their bland applause
To hissing murder in the elm-tree tops;
He bows his head and listens in the copse
The roaring overthrow of his mild laws.
Stoop windward on the storm-bewildered cliff,
Look on the sea, and if you read not there
Brooding the visible image of Despair
Read me no sign in Nature's hieroglyph!
The wolfish seas a lean sou'wester whips
Leap high and howl; the dingy strangling wrack
Athwart the white-stone-dotted coastguard track
Rolls inland, cold as kiss of Vampire lips.
Fugitive gesture of the ash-tree stunt,
A tattered cripple on the dun down's edge!
Sobb'd whistle in the salt-bitten elder hedge
Leaned agonizing landward from the brunt!
Pale-wing'd Alastors toss and shriek and pine
Where grisly wave and air self-coloured meet,
And loud the giant wind with hammer feet
Tramples his murky vintage in the brine.
O Earth in persecution seared and torn,
Thy martyr's blood takes wings on every wind.
Sleep well till throes of death are anodyned,
And faith repaired in better worlds reborn.
Take heart, for death is but a landlord's balk
Which overlook'd is lightly overleapt:
At birth unbroke our thread of life we kept:
Strange if a quickset hedge could bar my walk!
Let life replenish all her secret springs
After a droughty garish wasteful stage:
Over her shell the rain and wind may rage,
But Earth lies lapp'd in white imaginings.
She lies withdrawn, such meditation keeping
As theirs who when the Temple Veil was rent
Trembled what sudden beam of wonderment
Sever'd the oozy ages o'er them creeping.
The Autumn-havock of the ancient day
Twitch'd and awakened into glance and gesture;
And lo! the spinning of a new-year's vesture
For each advised soul that knew the Ray:
Who thro' three turns of upper day's complexion
The Labyrinth of Expectation trod,
Then rose; and in the rising wake of God
Suspired th' innumerable Resurrection. —
So, deep in the intervital hollows, deep,
Amid the treasure-house of seeds in thrall
Rises the starry Stature, softly fall
The feet of Christ along the floors of Sleep.
A silent Presence felt in darkness, heard
Above the secular silence, in the curl'd
Root-riddled alleys moist of the underworld:
And all the looms of herb and tree are stirred.
Meekly towards the courts of light they crave.
Wreak, bitter wind, thy rapine overhead:
Pastime of opiate music for the dead
Whose ears are touched to seize the opening grave!