Works

Clerks.

We have shut the doors behind us, and the velvet flowers of night
Lean about us scattering their pollen grains of golden light.

Now at last we lift our faces, and our faces come aflower...

Perish! Almighty Justice cried,
And struck the avenging blow,
And Europe shouts from side to side,
The tyrant is laid low!
Said not his heart, More blood shall stream
Around my sovereign throne?...

Thou dwellest not, O Lord of all
In temples which thy children raise;
Our work to thine is mean and small,
And brief to thy eternal days.

Forgive the weakness and the pride,...

Amidst these glorious works of Thine,
The solemn minarets of the pine,
And awful Shasta's icy shrine,

Where swell Thy hymns from wave and gale,
And organ-thunders never fail,...

Newly Translated Into English Verse By R. Martin Pope is below this original.

HYMNUS IEIUNANTIUM



O Nazarene, lux Bethlem, verbum Patris,
quem partus alvi virginalis protulit,...

Hear, Father, hear thy faint afflicted flock
Cry to thee, from the desert and the rock;
While those, who seek to slay thy children, hold
Blasphemous worship under roofs of gold;...

Angel of love, for every grief
Its soothing balm thy mercy brings,
For every pang its healing leaf,
For homeless want, thine outspread, wings.

Enough for thee the pleading eye,...

(by supposition)

An Hymn set forth to be sung by the Great Assembly at Newtown, [Mass.] Mo. 12. 1. 1636.
...

From every quarter we,
Who bent the trembling knee
And cowered or grovelled prostrate day and night,
Now come once more to sing
A dirge before thee, King,
Once more with earnest heart to do thee right....

God of the battle, hear our prayer!
By the lifted falchion's glare;
By the uncouth fane sublime,
Marked with many a Runic rhyme;
By the "weird sisters"[1] dread,
That, posting through the battle red,...

Where may zeal due succour find,
Man, for thy unguarded mind?
To shield thee, when temptations reign,
From folly's snare, and vice's bane?

The law of God, a Saviour's law,...

How glad it makes me feel at night,
When sitting on my mother's knee,
To hear her whisper "You've done right,
And tried my gentle child to be."

But then I feel ashamed and sad...

I am he that aches with amorous love;
Does the earth gravitate? Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?
So the Body of me, to all I meet, or know.

I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask no eye would mourn
I never caused a thought of gloom
A smile of joy since I was born

In secret pleasure, secret tears...

Thou art the Way.
Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,
I cannot say
If Thou hadst ever met my soul.

I cannot see -
I, child of process - if there lies
An end for me,...

I am the song, that rests upon the cloud;
I am the sun:
I am the dawn, the day, the hiding shroud,
When dusk is done.

I am the changing colours of the tree;
The flower uncurled:...

We are accused of terrorism:
if we defended rose and woman
and the mighty verse...
and the blueness of sky...
A dominion... nothing left therein...
No water, no air...
No tent, no camel,...

I bring an unaccustomed wine
To lips long parching, next to mine,
And summon them to drink.

Crackling with fever, they essay;
I turn my brimming eyes away,
And come next hour to look.
...

I cannot forget with what fervid devotion
I worshipped the vision of verse and of fame.
Each gaze at the glories of earth, sky, and ocean,
To my kindled emotions, was wind over flame.
...

I conquer the world with words,
conquer the mother tongue,
verbs, nouns, syntax.
I sweep away the beginning of things
and with a new language
that has the music of water the message of fire...