Page:A midsummer holiday and other poems (IA midsummerholiday00swin).pdf/56

 Earth fair as heaven, ere change and time set odds Between them, light and darkness know not when, And fear, grown strong through panic periods, Crouched, a crowned worm, in faith's Lernean fen, And love lay bound, and hope was scourged with rods, And death cried out from desert and from den, Seeing all the heaven above him dark with gods And all the world about him marred of men. Cities that nought might purge Save the sea's whelming surge From all the pent pollutions in their pen Deep death drank down, and wrought, With wreck of all things, nought, That none might live of all their names again, Nor aught of all whose life is breath Serve any God whose likeness was not like to death.