Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/141

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Their hatred god-begotten as their love,

Reverberations of eternal strife?

For all that fury breathed in human life,

Are ye not guilty, ye above?

Ah, no, the circle of the heavenly ones,

That ring of burning, grave, inflexible powers,

Array in harmony amid the deep

The shining legionaries of the suns,

That through their day from dawn to twilight keep

The peace of heaven, and have no feuds like ours.

The Morning Stars their labours of the dawn

Close at the advent of the Solar Kings,

And these with joy their sceptres yield, withdrawn

When the still Evening Stars begin their reign,

And twilight time is thrilled with homing wings

To the All-Father being turned again.

No, not on high begin divergent ways,

The galaxies of interlinkèd lights

Rejoicing on each other's beauty gaze,

'Tis we who do make errant all the rays

That stream upon us from the astral heights.

Love in our thickened air too redly burns;

And unto vanity our beauty turns;

Widsom, that softly whispers us to part

From evil, swells to hatred in the heart.

Dark is the shadow of invisible things

On us who look not up, whose vision fails.

The glorious shining of the heavenly kings

To mould us to their image naught avails,

They weave a robe of many-coloured fire

To garb the spirits moving in the deep,

And in the upper air its splendours keep

Pure and unsullied, but below it trails

Darkling and glimmering in our earthly mire.

Our eyes are ever earthwards. We are swayed

But by the shadows of invisible light,

And shadow against shadow is arrayed

So that one dark may dominate the night.