Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/14

 Was in its voice; no power on earth

Could halt that tempest for the briefest space,

Nor cool that mighty furnace, nor reach down

To guard the myriad souls within its blast.

Gazing upon that scene, it seemed there boiled

Red lava from the ground, some mouth of hell

Gaping, and smoking horror to the skies;

Or that some molten tide of death swept down

Beating relentlessly against the fields,

The summer fields that would not be submerged.

And I have seen, or thought I saw, the gods

(Mayhap the saints and devils of our faith)

Gather like planing eagles in the dusk

Above the battle and direct its course,

Clashing in mid-air, sweeping in great troops

To new reliefs and warring in the sky,

Whose immanence translated the dark hour

And sublimized the drama till it seemed

A war of genii and a spectre strife,

Enveloped in an Æschylean shade.

The dead are gone and we are left alive

And those incredible and awful days

Are now no more. Nay, e'en their memory

Grows faded, and the fates that gave us them

Seem jealous that we should retain so much

As of forbidden knowledge. For no doubt

In those days there moved giants on the earth,

And it were better that these secrets lie

Unhinted at to those who never knew

Lest they find faith too easy. It were bad

Were a dull generation born for trade

To know that genii showed themselves those months

Often, scaling horizons, bent on tasks

Out of proportion to these times of peace, 8