Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/31

 To Whom all depths and distances are known;

And in the latter day

The tissue of the centuries that we

In part survey

But lose there where it falls

Beyond the world's horizons and the walls

And parapets of sense,

That panorama'd tapestry in all magnificence

One day all souls shall see

Perfected, from their stand in immortality.

4.

Inscrutable Love, how Thy millennial plan

Escapes the momentary glimpse of man

That in the span

Of Thy o'erarching care such havoc finds a place!

'Tis past believing

That Thy beneficent ends

So great a holocaust can yet embrace.

Surely Thy thought transcends

All our aghast conceiving

If it have guerdons that can make amends

For such terrestrial cataclysm;

Indifferent to the wrack of worlds, and schism

In the set frame of things,

The extinction of the suns, and systems' vanishings.

What unimagined solace waits the sons of men

Flung from the wheel of time to fall on sleep

In green oblivious coverts past our ken

Far from the roar of suns and heaven's azure steep.

What realms of colour, what demesnes of rainbow-light,

What vista'd slopes purpureal and shimmering to their gaze,

What gauze-like prospects rare, what irised cloud-lands bright,

Shall make atonement for the outrageous days.

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