A NOVELTY

Why should I care for the Ages
  Because they are old and grey? 
To me, like sudden laughter,
  The stars are fresh and gay;
The world is a daring fancy,
  And finished yesterday.

Why should I bow to the Ages
  Because they were drear and dry? 
Slow trees and ripening meadows
  For me go roaring by,
A living charge, a struggle
  To escalade the sky.

The eternal suns and systems,
  Solid and silent all,
To me are stars of an instant,
  Only the fires that fall
From God’s good rocket, rising
  On this night of carnival.

ULTIMATE

The vision of a haloed host
  That weep around an empty throne;
And, aureoles dark and angels dead,
  Man with his own life stands alone.

‘I am,’ he says his bankrupt creed: 
  ‘I am,’ and is again a clod: 
The sparrow starts, the grasses stir,
  For he has said the name of God.

THE DONKEY

When fishes flew and forests walked
  And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
  Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry
  And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
  On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
  Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me:  I am dumb,
  I keep my secret still.

Fools!  For I also had my hour;
  One far fierce hour and sweet: 
There was a shout about my ears,
  And palms before my feet.

THE BEATIFIC VISION

Through what fierce incarnations, furled
  In fire and darkness, did I go,
Ere I was worthy in the world
  To see a dandelion grow?

Well, if in any woes or wars
  I bought my naked right to be,
Grew worthy of the grass, nor gave
  The wren, my brother, shame for me.

But what shall God not ask of him
  In the last time when all is told,
Who saw her stand beside the hearth,
  The firelight garbing her in gold?

THE HOPE OF THE STREETS

The still sweet meadows shimmered:  and I stood
  And cursed them, bloom of hedge and bird of tree,
And bright and high beyond the hunch-backed wood
  The thunder and the splendour of the sea.

Give back the Babylon where I was born,
  The lips that gape give back, the hands that grope,
And noise and blood and suffocating scorn
  An eddy of fierce faces—­and a hope

That ’mid those myriad heads one head find place,
  With brown hair curled like breakers of the sea,
And two eyes set so strangely in the face
  That all things else are nothing suddenly.