Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/198

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Yearning for Beauty, not to be for ever baulked.

What of you then, who when the dreamers dreamed

Sang praise of Hell; who your true treasures hawked

For coined dust, and all your days blasphemed?

For all else dies

But what is beautiful; the eternal dark,

Wherein nor moon nor star doth ever rise,

Bends o'er imperial Carthage, but the spark

That lit the soul of Hellas glows unquenched still.

Fast runs the world, and soon the massy gold

Casts from her, but her hungering mind doth fill

With all the loveliness e'er dreamed of old.

Little we know

Of Beauty who do never face to face

Speak with her now in all the ways we go;

She hath, we say, the wanton's swooning grace

And luscious tempting wiles the idle fool to snare.

So we divorce her who has been man's wife,

And hound with insults her who still would share

And lift his struggle and exalt his life.

Suffer us not

Longer to clutch our drifting lies unsure;

Lady, forgive us, who so soon forgot

The true incredible Thou—strong, eager, pure

As fits a thought God thinks throughout His endless day—

The something always singing overhead,

The vision man takes with him far away,

Most radiant then when all things else lie dead.