Oh, what is worth this lore of age If time shall never bring us back Our battle with the gods to wage Reeling along the starry track. The battle rapture here goes by In warring upon things that die.
Let be the tale of him whose love Was sighed between white Deirdre's breasts, It will not lift the heart above The sodden clay on which it rests. Love once had power the gods to bring All rapt on its wild wandering.
We shiver in the falling dew, And seek a shelter from the storm: When man these elder brothers knew He found the mother nature warm, A hearth fire blazing through it all, A home without a circling wall.
We dwindle down beneath the skies, And from ourselves we pass away: The paradise of memories Grows ever fainter day by day. The shepherd stars have shrunk within, The world's great night will soon begin.
Will no one, ere it is too late, Ere fades the last memorial gleam, Recall for us our earlier state? For nothing but so vast a dream That it would scale the steeps of air Could rouse us from so vast despair.
The power is ours to make or mar Our fate as on the earliest morn, The Darkness and the Radiance are Creatures within the spirit born. Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might Forget how we imagined light.
Not yet are fixed the prison bars; The hidden light the spirit owns If blown to flame would dim the stars And they who rule them from their thrones: And the proud sceptred spirits thence Would bow to pay us reverence.
Oh, while the glory sinks within Let us not wait on earth behind, But follow where it flies, and win The glow again, and we may find Beyond the Gateways of the Day Dominion and ancestral sway.
Burning our hearts out with longing The daylight passed: Millions and millions together, The stars at last!
Purple the woods where the dewdrops, Pearly and grey, Wash in the cool from our faces The flame of day.
Glory and shadow grow one in The hazel wood: Laughter and peace in the stillness Together brood.
Hopes all unearthly are thronging In hearts of earth: Tongues of the starlight are calling Our souls to birth.
Down from the heaven its secrets Drop one by one; Where time is for ever beginning And time is done.
There light eternal is over Chaos and night: Singing with dawn lips for ever, "Let there be light!"