flamed
Bade France and the world be wise, faith saw thee naked and shamed.
When wisdom deeper and sweeter than Rabelais veiled and revealed
Found utterance diviner and meeter for truth whence anguish is
healed,
Whence fear and hate and belief in thee, fed by thy grace from
above,
Fall stricken, and utmost grief takes light from the lustre of
love,
When Shakespeare shone into birth, and the world he beheld grew
bright,
Thy kingdom was ended on earth, and the darkness it shed was light.
In him all truth and the glory thereof and the power and the pride,
The song of the soul and her story, bore witness that fear had
lied.
All hope, all wonder, all trust, all doubt that knows not of fear,
The love of the body, the lust of the spirit to see and to hear,
All womanhood, fairer than love could conceive or desire or adore,
All manhood, radiant above all heights that it held of yore,
Lived by the life of his breath, with the speech of his soul's will
spake,
And the light lit darkness to death whence never the dead shall
wake.
For the light that lived in the sound of the song of his speech was
one
With the light of the wisdom that found earth's tune in the song of
the sun;
His word with the word of the lord most high of us all on earth,
Whose soul was a lyre and a sword, whose death was a deathless
birth.
Him too we praise as we praise our own who as he stand strong;
Him, AEschylus, ancient of days, whose word is the perfect song.
When Caucasus showed to the sun and the sea what a God could
endure,
When wisdom and light were one, and the hands of the matricide
pure,
A song too subtle for psalmist or prophet of Jewry to know,
Elate and profound as the calmest or stormiest of waters that flow,
A word whose echoes were wonder and music of fears overcome,
Bade Sinai bow, and the thunder of godhead on Horeb be dumb.
The childless children of night, strong daughters of doom and
dread,
The thoughts and the fears that smite the soul, and its life lies
dead,
Stood still and were quelled by the sound of his word and the light
of his thought,
And the God that in man lay bound was unbound from the bonds he had