| |
I IN silence, solitude and stern surmise | |
| His faith was tried and proved commensurate | |
| With life and death. The stone-blind eyes of Fate | |
| Perpetually stared into his eyes, | |
| Yet to the hazard of the enterprise | 5 |
| He brought his soul, expectant and elate, | |
| And challenged, like a champion at the Gate, | |
| Death’s undissuadable austerities. | |
| And thus, full-armed in all that Truth reprieves | |
| From dissolution, he beheld the breath | 10 |
| Of daybreak flush his thought’s exalted ways, | |
| While, like Dodona’s sad, prophetic leaves, | |
| Round him the scant, supreme, momentous days | |
| Trembled and murmured in the wind of Death. | |
| |
II There moved a Presence always by his side, | 15 |
| With eyes of pleasure and passion and wild tears, | |
| And on her lips the murmur of many years, | |
| And in her hair the chaplets of a bride; | |
| And with him, hour by hour, came one beside, | |
| Scatheless of Time and Time’s vicissitude, | 20 |
| Whose lips, perforce of endless solitude, | |
| Were silent and whose eyes were blind and wide. | |
| But when he died came One who wore a wreath | |
| Of star-light, and with fingers calm and bland | |
| Smoothed from his brows the trace of mortal pain; | 25 |
| And of the two who stood on either hand, | |
| “This one is Life,” he said, “And this is Death, | |
| And I am Love and Lord over these twain!” | |
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