Читать книгу Oxford Poetry 1917-1921 - Various Authors - Страница 26

RUSSELL GREEN
(QUEEN'S)

Table of Contents

DE MUNDO

Table of Contents

... And then arose the vision of the world

Immense, a tangle of dark ravelled time,

Twisted and knotted by a surge of men:

Vast sombre tribes forth from the old abyss

Clambering, travailed, hated, fought and fell.

The slow tower, stone upon laborious stone,

Compacting men and clans, cities and states,

Aspired through ages to the unknown god:

Adventurers with the guidance of no star,

Discovering all, rich isle and barren shore,

And ever seas beyond the indolent seas

Rounding known courses with uncharted doubt:

A people wandering in the wilderness,

So vague a cloud, so dim a pillar of fire

They blindly followed to a promised land

Flowing with rivers of perennial truth—

And they the chosen vessel,—who of old

Knew not wherefore they broke their bonds and fled.

Yet in the end a desolation came

And the golden bowl was broken....

I saw men, symbols of humanity,—

Immortal longings bound in mortal clay,—

Wayfaring still upon the ancient road

Winding away to the invisible hills.

Still on the visionary scaffolding

The players played the old Morality,—

The pilgrim Life waylaid by cruel Despair,

Wealth dowering Evil and maltreating Good,

And Pain and Care tormenting Body and Soul,

And Giant Sin bestriding hill and dale,

Building his shrines for men to worship him;

Corruption, too, with serpents in his hair,

And next, obscene Ungodliness, whose eyes

Vacant and dull, bent ever on the earth.

Then, last of all, Humanum Genus came

Bearing a scroll with the Apostle's words—

"Having no hope and without God in the world."

So from the seat of vision I arose

Trembling, appalled, and went upon my way

Sadly, for all my vision ended in this—

Piercing of heart, reason's bewilderment—

"We've come from mystery and to mystery go."

What shall be said when all things have been said?

What shall be said when this is pondered on—

"Either He lives not who created man,

Or man for sin is cast forth from His grace;

Yea, between Him and man a gulf is set"?

This poem originally appeared in The Westminster Gazette.