With hallowing eyes to hold thee, [_Str._ 6. With rapturous heart to read, To encompass and enfold thee With love whence all men feed, To brighten and behold thee, Who is mightiest of man's seed:
More strong than strong disaster, [_Ant._ 6. For fate and fear too strong; Earth's friend, whose eyes look past her, Whose hands would purge of wrong; Our lord, our light, our master, Whose word sums up all song.
Be it April or September [_Str._ 7. That plays his perfect part, Burn June or blow December, Thou canst not in thine heart But rapturously remember, All heavenlike as thou art,
Whose footfall made thee fairer, [_Ant._ 7. Whose passage more divine, Whose hand, our thunder-bearer, Held fire that bade thee shine With subtler glory and rarer Than thrills the sun's own shrine.
Who knows how then his godlike banished gaze Turned haply from its goal of natural days And homeward hunger for the clear French clime, Toward English earth, whereunder now the Accursed Rots, in the hate of all men's hearts inhearsed, A carrion ranker to the sense of time For that sepulchral gift of stone and lime By royal grace laid on it, less of weight Than the load laid by fate, Fate, misbegotten child of his own crime, Son of as foul a bastard-bearing birth As even his own on earth; Less heavy than the load of cursing piled By loyal grace of all souls undefiled On one man's head, whose reeking soul made rotten The loathed live corpse on earth once misbegotten? But when our Master's homeless feet were here France yet was foul with joy more foul than fear, And slavery chosen, more vile by choice of chance Than dull damnation of inheritance From Russian year to year Alas fair mother of men, alas my France, What ailed thee so to fall, that wert so dear For all men's sake to all men, in such trance, Plague-stricken? Had the very Gods, that saw Thy glory lighten on us for a law, Thy gospel go before us for a guide, Had these waxed envious of our love and awe, Or was it less their envy than thy pride That bared thy breast for the obscene vulture-claw, High priestess, by whose mouth Love prophesied That fate should yet mean freedom? Howsoever, That hour, the helper of men's hearts, we praise, Which blots out of man's book of after days The name above all names abhorred for ever. And His name shall we praise not, whom these flowers, These rocks and ravening waters bound for girth Round this wild starry spanlong plot of earth, Beheld, the mightier for those heavier hours That bowed his heart not down Nor marred one crowning blossom of his crown? For surely, might we say, Even from the dark deep sea-gate that makes way Through channelled darkness for the darkling day Hardly to let men's faltering footfall win The sunless passage in, Where breaks a world aflower against the sun, A small sweet world of wave-encompassed wonder Kept from the wearier landward world asunder With violence of wild waters, and with thunder Of many winds as one, To where the keen sea-current grinds and frets The black bright sheer twin flameless Altarlets That lack no live blood-sacrifice they crave Of shipwreck and the shrine-subservient wave, Having for priest the storm-wind, and for choir Lightnings and clouds whose prayer and praise are fire, All the isle acclaimed him coming; she, the least Of all things loveliest that the sea's love hides From strange men's insult, walled about with tides That bid strange guests back from her flower-strewn feast, Set all her fields aflower, her flowers aflame, To applaud him that he came. Nor surely flashed not something of delight Through that steep strait of rock whose twin-cliffed height Links crag with crag reiterate, land with land, By one sheer thread of narrowing precipice Bifront, that binds and sunders Abyss from hollower imminent abyss And wilder isle with island, blind for bliss Of sea that lightens and of wind that thunders; Nor pealed not surely back from deep to steep Reverberate acclamation, steep to deep Inveterately reclaiming and replying Praise, and response applausive; nor the sea, For all the sea-wind's crying, Knew not the song her sister, even as she Thundering, or like her confluent spring-tides brightening, And like her darkness lightening; The song that moved about him silent, now Both soundless wings refolded and refurled On that Promethean brow, Then quivering as for flight that wakes the world.