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
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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.
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