Page:Lollingdon Downs and other poems, Masefield, 1917.djvu/33

Rh For all my pain I am only used

To make the props for daily labor;

I burn, I am beaten like a tabor

To make men tools; I am abused.

Deep in the white heat where I gasp

I see the unmastered finer powers,

Iron by cunning wrought to flowers,

File-worked, not tortured by the rasp.

Deep in this fire-tortured mind

Thought bends the bar in subtler ways,

It glows into the mass, its rays

Purge, till the iron is refined.

Then, as the full moon draws the tide

Out of the vague uncaptained sea,

Some moon power there ought to be

To work on ore; it should be tried.

By this fierce fire in which I ache

I see new fires not yet begun,

A blacksmith smithying with the sun,

At unmade things man ought to make.