Classic Poem

With treading of Night as a vintage
Half-reddened, half-ruin
With a rending of Night as a quarry
Half cleared and half-won
We gather, the workers, the makers
The brave who can feel
God fashioned the sun for a furnace
The world for a wheel.

This old earth where all labour and longing
Grow heavy with guilt
Is it not as a morning half-broken
A city half-built
This old earth where our faiths grow unequal
Our faces afraid
Is it not a creation half-finished
An Eden half-made?

With binding of Night as a harvest,
For granaries dim
With feeling of Night as a forest
Trunk, tangle and limb
We answer the makers who learn,
— Amid thicket and brier,
God reared to us forest for fuel
And fuel for fire.

As the glebe crieth out to the plowman
For team and for share,
As the harvest cries out to the reapers
To smite and not spare,
With cries from the void of the shapeless
Of shapes that shall be.
With a mightier cry than perfection
The world cries to me.

With searching of night as an orchard
Its fruitage to claim
With dredging of night as an ocean
For things without name
We answer, the makers who know
In the bramble and wood
God laid to us upland for fallow
— And fallow for food.

What praise to the gates of the forest
The domes of the hill
What hymns for the cloudland — what honour
For mead and for rill
The shaping of ship out of pine-trunk
Of pot out of clay
The changing of all into other
— Of dawn into day.

With spelling of Night as a book
Hieroglyphic with Moons
With touching of Night as a lyre
To a shadow of tunes
We answer, the makers, who learn
From below, from above,
God gave to us matter for living
— And living for love.

With the rising of mind and of stratum
In smoke and in steel
With the triumph of labour that passes
With engine and wheel
With the changing of fair out of fallen
— Of new out of old
Lo: Man, a beginning, an outline
— A grey before gold.