High things the high song taught him; how the breath
Too frail for life may be more strong than death;
And this poor flash of sense in life, that gleams
As a ghost’s glory in dreams,
More stabile than the world’s own heart’s root seems,
By that strong faith of lordliest love which gives
To death’s own sightless-seeming eyes a light
Clearer, to death’s bare bones a verier might,
Than shines or strikes from any man that lives. 
How he that loves life overmuch shall die
The dog’s death, utterly: 
And he that much less loves it than he hates
All wrongdoing that is done
Anywhere always underneath the sun
Shall live a mightier life than time’s or fate’s. 
One fairer thing he shewed him, and in might
More strong than day and night
Whose strengths build up time’s towering period: 
Yea, one thing stronger and more high than God,
Which if man had not, then should God not be: 
And that was Liberty. 
And gladly should man die to gain, he said,
Freedom; and gladlier, having lost, lie dead. 
For man’s earth was not, nor the sweet sea-waves
His, nor his own land, nor its very graves,
Except they bred not, bore not, hid not slaves: 
But all of all that is,
Were one man free in body and soul, were his.

And the song softened, even as heaven by night
Softens, from sunnier down to starrier light,
And with its moonbright breath
Blessed life for death’s sake, and for life’s sake death. 
Till as the moon’s own beam and breath confuse
In one clear hueless haze of glimmering hues
The sea’s line and the land’s line and the sky’s,
And light for love of darkness almost dies,
As darkness only lives for light’s dear love,
Whose hands the web of night is woven of,
So in that heaven of wondrous words were life
And death brought out of strife;
Yea, by that strong spell of serene increase
Brought out of strife to peace.

And the song lightened, as the wind at morn
Flashes, and even with lightning of the wind
Night’s thick-spun web is thinned
And all its weft unwoven and overworn
Shrinks, as might love from scorn. 
And as when wind and light on water and land
Leap as twin gods from heavenward hand in hand,
And with the sound and splendour of their leap
Strike darkness dead, and daunt the spirit of sleep,
And burn it up with fire;
So with the light that lightened from the lyre
Was all the bright heat in the child’s heart stirred
And blown with blasts of music into flame
Till even his sense became
Fire, as the sense that fires the singing bird
Whose song calls night by name. 
And in the soul within the sense began
The manlike passion of a godlike man,
And in the sense within the soul again
Thoughts that make men of gods and gods of men.