Classic Poem

In the old land the Christ was sent to death,
And in old land and new the Christs have preceded and followed each other to the same cross.
The story is often retold, the count again and again is made.
But here were thousands of Christs for one Christ,
Here were Christs in battalions given to save the earth from wreck,
Here were Christs in black and white, Christs in childhood and old age, offered as tribute to the shaken globe:
Christs who stood before menace and took the blow, Christs evil and good who shared the single sacrifice,
Here quickened in one deed to poise the reeling sphere,
In stranger ways, in an untoward hour, going to crosses like any Christ supreme,
Spending sweet blood as good from lavish veins.
You have worshiped the old Christs—you have told wonderful tales about them,
But here are Christs round whose ascension tales fully as wonderful must be told.
All has been said about the great Christs: but here are Christs little, greater than the greatest
And the Christs do not surprise me: they come without eclat or call: it seems so natural for them to arise:
The Christs without degree or exception—the Christs of the loom and mine: and babes, Christs also, who starve to verify our sins.
Saint Pierre! a cross nearby my heart!
On your aureoled square twenty thousand bodies are outstretched:
Withdrawn from Judea, withdrawn from everywhere else, here the cross resumed its mission:
Here the soul was addressed from the bush and the flame once more:
In this strange horror transfixed, the faces of martyrs were radiant with benign love:
The men and women withdrawn from their toil to the cross—the children from their play:
Dead here that I might live: quickened and transfigured to shield the common crowds.
You have hurried to accuse God: I accuse no one:
You have hastened to pardon God: I pardon no one:
Do you think I needed to wait for this event to account for god or devil?
Do you think I could regard without fear the sorrows of living and then shrink like a craven before the blast of death?
Do you think that if I doubted God in this shadowing fire I could mix God again in the red of any joy?
All is accursed or nothing is accursed: all is rescued or all is lost:
And God is not evil to me in evil who is not evil to me in good:
For back of Saint Pierre is all life again: back of Pelee is a higher crest than its own:
Behind all fires that consume is a fire that saves.
With faith now final I lift my cup of comforting water to the lips of this fevered crater:
For if I doubted this demonstration of God I would lose all touch with the universe:
And I see nothing more that means death at the mouth of a volcano than at the most placid bedside:
And I am no more willing to concede you cruelty here than when hands and eyes meet in love and all is peace:
For somehow I can feel even in all this murk and in these darting fangs of flame and in the light upshot and lost and in the suffocating gases,
The impact of the same presence that smoothes your pain away—
The look of the same eyes that lead your ways of compensating salvation:
Here the same, here at the crater's mouth,
Here with Christ reshriven where riot is made of law,
The smile of Christ in all the din and black
In restoring calm unfaltered.