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(From Christus: A Mystery)
MANAHEM WELCOME, O wilderness, and welcome, night | |
| And solitude, and ye swift-flying stars | |
| That drift with golden sands the barren heavens, | |
| Welcome once more! The Angels of the wind | |
| Hasten across the desert to receive me; | 5 |
| And sweeter than men’s voices are to me | |
| The voices of these solitudes; the sound | |
| Of unseen rivulets, and the far-off cry | |
| Of bitterns in the reeds of water-pools. | |
| And lo! above me, like the Prophet’s arrow | 10 |
| Shot from the eastern window, high in air | |
| The clamorous cranes go singing through the night. | |
| O ye mysterious pilgrims of the air, | |
| Would I had wings that I might follow you! | |
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| I look forth from these mountains, and behold | 15 |
| The omnipotent and omnipresent night, | |
| Mysterious as the future and the fate | |
| That hangs o’er all men’s lives! I see beneath me | |
| The desert stretching to the Dead Sea shore, | |
| And westward, faint and far away, the glimmer | 20 |
| Of torches on Mount Olivet, announcing | |
| The rising of the Moon of Passover. | |
| Like a great cross it seems, on which suspended, | |
| With head bowed down in agony, I see | |
| A human figure! Hide, O merciful heaven, | 25 |
| The awful apparition from my sight! | |
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| And thou, Machærus, lifting high and black | |
| Thy dreadful walls against the rising moon, | |
| Haunted by demons and by apparitions, | |
| Lilith, and Jezerhara, and Bedargon, | 30 |
| How grim thou showest in the uncertain light, | |
| A palace and a prison, where King Herod | |
| Feasts with Herodias, while the Baptist John | |
| Fasts, and consumes his unavailing life! | |
| And in thy courtyard grows the untithed rue, | 35 |
| Huge as the olives of Gethsemane, | |
| And ancient as the terebinth of Hebron, | |
| Coeval with the world. Would that its leaves | |
| Medicinal could purge thee of the demons | |
| That now possess thee, and the cunning fox | 40 |
| That burrows in thy walls, contriving mischief! | |
Music is heard from within. Angels of God! Sandalphon, thou that weavest | |
| The prayers of men into immortal garlands, | |
| And thou, Metatron, who dost gather up | |
| Their songs, and bear them to the gates of heaven, | 45 |
| Now gather up together in your hands | |
| The prayers that fill this prison, and the songs | |
| That echo from the ceiling of this palace, | |
| And lay them side by side before God’s feet! | |
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