Page:Songs before sunrise (IA beforesunrisongs00swinrich).pdf/27

 No thunder, that the skies Sent not upon us, rise With fire and earthquake and a cleaving cry? Nay, light is here, and shall be light, Though all the face of the hour be overborne with night.

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow. The night is broken northward; the pale plains And footless fields of sun-forgotten snow Feel through their creviced lips and iron veins Such quick breath labour and such clean blood flow As summer-stricken spring feels in her pains When dying May bears June, too young to know The fruit that waxes from the flower that wanes; Strange tyrannies and vast, Tribes frost-bound to their past, Lands that are loud all through their length with chains, Wastes where the wind's wings break, Displumed by daylong ache And anguish of blind snows and rack-blown rains, And ice that seals the White Sea's lips, Whose monstrous weights crush flat the sides of shrieking ships;