Classic Poem

In the ancient Christian ages, while a dreamy faith and wonder
Lingered, like the mystic glamour of the star of Bethlehem,
Dwelt a monk that loved the sea-birds as they wheeled about his chapel,
Loved the dog-rose and the heath-flower as they brushed his garment hem;

Did not claim a ruthless knowledge of the bounds of grace eternal,
Did not say, “Thus far, not further, God has set the hopes of life.”
Only knew that heaven had sent him weaker lives in earth's communion,
Bade him dwell and work amongst them, not in anger nor in strife.

Aye, though far and faint the story, his the tale of mercy's triumph,
Through the dimmest convent casements men have seen the stars above;
Dark the age and stern the dogma, yet the kind hearts are not cruel,
Still the true souls rise resistless to a larger world of love.

Is there not a question rises from his word of “brother, sister,”
Cometh from that lonely dreamer what today we shrink to find?
Shall the lives that moved our brethren leave us at the gates of darkness,
What were heaven if ought we cherished shall be wholly left behind?

Is it God's bright house we dwell in, or a vault of dark confusion,
Yonder sunlit April meadows, with the singing brooks at play,
With God's daisies clustering wide-eyed o'er the breezy fields of morning,
And God's skylarks whirring westward to the cloudless deeps of day?
Laugh aloud, O death and darkness, grin the skulls of crypt and charnel,
All God's glorious flowers of being flame and fade upon a tomb;
Mystic woods and aureoled blossoms, spirit-birds and goblin lizards,
All that faerie-world goes downward, sloping darkly into doom.

Is it so, one half of nature choked beneath the breath of ruin,
Does death tread at last a victor on the lives we loved so well?
Take us, too, devouring chaos, hide us from the vast injustice,
Dust to dust be ours for ever, with the world wherein we dwell.

While the flush of kindred feeling at the cursed wrong and violence,
Done amid our human brothers, on the helpless and infirm,
Throbs, though fainter, to our being, down the cycles of creation,
For the shrivelling of the night-moth and the writhing of the worm.

While from things of field and forest, eyes of tenderness and trusting
Look to ours and link them to us, as we journey side by side
Shall we lift a blind denial to the brotherhood of nature,
Shall we break the bonds of kinship in the madness of our pride?

Shall not rather hope be with us: noble, broadened, undefined,
Since all life is as a riddle, since all faith is but a guess:
Hope that every life that liveth has a nobler way before it,
Has a deathless purpose founded on the everlasting yes.

He that in his mighty gardens shakes the meanest seed of nature,
Soweth with the seed a promise whence no power can make him free,
He that on his lonely summits feeds the narrowest stream of being,
Dooms its way through fields and forests on its eternal sea.