where
Is Truth, save by whose breath
Art is a laurelled death?
"Our churches these, and this
Our Holy Writ; there wis
Our altars high, and sanctuarised sod!"
But what, care-taking soul, hast done with God?

The bairning time I knew, the whispering breast,
But in thy world no place
Was for my nest,
Fragrant for perilous brooding pause.
Thou went'st thy pace;
My gathered straws
And grasses cast to dust
To make thy lust
A wayside couch. Deep from the nation's root,
The bower-tree where homes are nesting fruit,
Thy blight creeps up unseen
On bitten way to the green,
Till no hope-banneret
Makes Spring in windy fret
Of flagellant boughs that whip my fingers bare,
Too chill at last to build, to bleed, to care.

Must surge so late with Nature's spawning ruse?
Her stintless passioning
Lest she should lose
The younglet of her dearest pang?
To thee, her tenderling,
She gave lust-fang
To run the jungle's harm;
Now strives thee to disarm,
And fend Life from that weapon lent thy wear
Till thou, forsaking dust, mightst capture her.
What need now of the blood
Whose wasteful plenitude
Swept thee through hostile slime
To shores of light and time,
Man-minim safe mid frost and poison dews
Where naught could live that had not life to lose?

Yet dost thou foster it as thy veined sun;
Thy Heaven and Holy Rood
Build toppling on
Its strifeful hell; root there thy art,
Thy dreams of tenderest bud;
Gaze on the heart
Of its fetidity,
This wreck of me,
And sing. O God, what death, in eyes so bound,
They see Life's beauty in her draining wound!
Lay thou the blind thing down
With saurian tusk and bone,
With dust of sworded maw
And peril's fossil claw,
Lest sexton Earth even Man inter, nor trover
Of after-law untomb for Love her Lover!

Her lover yet uncarnate; of thy race
To be; long-dreamed mate
Of her embrace;
Whose godling fruit, too prized, too dear
For bandit breath, shall wait
The Garnerer.
Not then mute, anguished wives,
Dumb in law's gyves,
Shall shrink to mother a soul-famine