Classic Poem

"The shrines are dust, the gods are dead,"
They cried in ancient Rome!
"Ah yet, the Idalian rose is red,
And bright the Paphian foam:
For all your Galilæan tears
We turn to her," men say ...
But we, we hasten thro' the years
To our own yesterday.

Thro' all the thousand years ye need
To make the lost so fair,
Before ye can award His meed
Of perfect praise and prayer!
Ye liberated souls, the crown
Is yours; and yet, some few
Can hail, as this great Cross goes down
Its distant triumph, too.

Poor scornful Lilliputian souls,
And are ye still too proud
To risk your little aureoles
By kneeling with the crowd?
Do ye still dream ye "stand alone"
So fearless and so strong?
To-day we claim the rebels' throne
And leave you with the throng.

Yes, He has conquered! You at least
The "van-guard" leaves behind
To croon old tales of king and priest
In the ingles of mankind:
The breast of Aphrodite glows,
Apollo's face is fair;
But O, the world's wide anguish knows
No Apollonian prayer.

Not ours to scorn the first white gleam
Of beauty on this earth,
The clouds of dawn, the nectarous dream,
The gods of simpler birth;
But, as ye praise them, your own cry
Is fraught with deeper pain,
And the Compassionate ye deny
Returns, returns again.

O, worshippers of the beautiful,
Is this the end then, this,--
That ye can only see the skull
Beneath the face of bliss?
No monk in the dark years ye scorn
So barren a pathway trod
As ye who, ceasing not to mourn,
Deny the mourner's God.

And, while ye scoff, on every side
Great hints of Him go by,--
Souls that are hourly crucified
On some new Calvary!
O, tortured faces, white and meek,
Half seen amidst the crowd,
Grey suffering lips that never speak,
The Glory in the Cloud!

In flower and dust, in chaff and grain,
He binds Himself and dies!
We live by His eternal pain,
His hourly sacrifice;
The limits of our mortal life
Are His. The whisper thrills
Under the sea's perpetual strife,
And through the sunburnt hills.

Darkly, as in a glass, our sight
Still gropes thro' Time and Space:
We cannot see the Light of Light
With angels, face to face:
Only the tale His martyrs tell
Around the dark earth rings
He died and He went down to hell
And lives--the King of Kings!

And, while ye scoff, from shore to shore,
From sea to moaning sea,
Eloi, Eloi, goes up once more
Lama sabacthani!
The heavens are like a scroll unfurled,
The writing flames above--
This is the King of all the world
Upon His Cross of Love.