The graves of souls born worms and creeds grown carrion Thy blast of judgment fills with fires of death. Thou art the player whose organ-keys are thunders, Thou art the ray whereat the rent night sunders, I shall burn up before thee, pass and perish, But thou from dawn to sunsetting shalt cherish The thoughts that led and souls that lighted mine. Reared between night and noon and truth and error, Each twilight-travelling bird that trills and screams Sickens at midday, nor can face for terror The imperious heaven's inevitable extremes. I have no spirit of skill with equal fingers I am thy storm-thrush of the days that darken, My song is in the mist that hides thy morning, My cry is up before the day for thee; I have heard thee and beheld thee and give warning, Before thy wheels divide the sky and sea. Birds shall wake with thee voiced and feathered fairer, To see in summer what I see in spring; I have eyes and heart to endure thee, O thunder-bearer, I have love at least, and have not fear, and part not Darkness to daylight shall lift up thy pæan, And Sappho singing in the nightingale. Sung to by mighty sons of dawn and daughters, Come, though all heaven again be fire above thee; Let us but see in his thy face who love thee; FROM "HERTHA" The tree many-rooted That swells to the sky The life-tree am I ; In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves: ye shall live and not die. But the Gods of your fashion That take and that give, In their pity and passion That scourge and forgive, They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall die and not live. My own blood is what stanches Make day of the dark, And are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires as a spark. Where dead ages hide under The live roots of the tree, In my darkness the thunder Makes utterance of me; In the clash of my boughs with each other ye hear the waves sound of the sea. That noise is of Time, As his feathers are spread And his feet set to climb Through the boughs overhead, And my foliage rings round him and rustles, and branches are bent with his tread. The storm-winds of ages Blow through me and cease, The war-wind that rages, The spring-wind of peace, Ere the breath of them roughen my tresses, ere one of my blossoms increase. All sounds of all changes, All shadows and lights On the world's mountain-ranges And stream-riven heights, Whose tongue is the wind's tongue and language of storm-clouds on earth-shaking nights; All forms of all faces, All works of all hands In unsearchable places Of time-stricken lands, All death and all life, and all reigns and all ruins, drop through me as sands. Though sore be my burden And more than ye know, And my growth have no guerdon But only to grow, Yet I fail not of growing for lightnings above me or deathworms below. These too have their part in me, As I too in these; Such fire is at heart in me, Such sap is this tree's, Which hath in it all sounds and all secrets of infinite lands and of seas. In the spring-coloured hours By centuries of days, Strong blossoms with perfume of manhood, shot out from my spirit as rays. And the sound of them springing And smell of their shoots |