Poems 1905-1908

Second Best

Day that I Have Loved

Sleeping Out: Full Moon

In Examination

Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening

Wagner

The Vision of the Archangels

Seaside

On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus-Goddess

The Song of the Pilgrims

The Song of the Beasts

Failure

Ante Aram

Dawn

The Call

The Wayfarers

The Beginning

 

The Vision of the Archangels

Slowly up silent peaks, the white edge of the world,
   Trod four archangels, clear against the unheeding sky,
Bearing, with quiet even steps, and great wings furled,
   A little dingy coffin; where a child must lie,
It was so tiny. (Yet, you had fancied, God could never
   Have bidden a child turn from the spring and the sunlight,
And shut him in that lonely shell, to drop for ever
   Into the emptiness and silence, into the night. . . .)

They then from the sheer summit cast, and watched it fall,
   Through unknown glooms, that frail black coffin -- and therein
   God's little pitiful Body lying, worn and thin,
And curled up like some crumpled, lonely flower-petal --
Till it was no more visible; then turned again
With sorrowful quiet faces downward to the plain.

December 1906.