Page:Canadian poems of the great war.djvu/209

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��Richard Scrace

On the rim of the shining cup To fealty pledged, our lips are set: Scarce hath the ancient music ceased Ere love must pay the ancient debt. England, my dreamland !

VENICE

To Ruskin and Others

AN it be heaven where you have gone?

Can you maintain supernal peace whilst here below

The place God smiled on waits a final blow?

You, who loved Venice, in the days

When, floating on her waterways

You drowsed in mist of sunlit dawn;

Or when the moon, above the square,

Made shadowed shafts and traceries where

Earlier fluttered friendly birds?

Comes not to you as in a fateful dream,

A picture of islands in a sea of glass,

Whose reeds give way as fishers pass,

Disturbed not yet by destiny,

Whilst dark within the quarry lay

The marble in its soulless mass?

(They ponder, they who vigil keep.)

Then came the simple fishers; men

Who built their shrine beside the fen ;

They worked with love and faith and trust,

And raised a glory from the dus.t.

They gave to arch and dome and tower

The tint and outline of a flower.

Within the temple shone again

The lichens melancholy gold;

They wrought, in marvels manifold,

The green and violet of the plain.

The acanthus leaf curled round the stone

As by a whirlwind blown.

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