Classic Poem

Unlock the gates. The ancient paths are ended;
On, to the high roads of a larger dream!
Hurl the grim past, unpraised and undefended,
Upon the mercy of that silent stream
That bears our yesterdays to lethean shores
While life, with new expansion, sunward soars.

Our God has dreamed a wondrous consummation—
A brighter world, of wisdom, truth and power;
Of art and beauty, joy and inspiration,
And we are living in that fateful hour
When from the East He flames His central beam—
Himself the sun—from the Mirror of His dream.

O radiant Woman, from your first dominion
Where Sappho sang to each harmonious star,
Mortals have heard the drum-beat of your pinion
Along those skies where all your treasures are:
Ithuriel's spear shall touch once more your lids
And make you wiser than the pyramids.

But ink would clot, the golden pen corroding,
Should it depict the brute tyrannic flame
That crushed your soul in cruel thraldom, boding
Its curse of insincerity and shame;
Degraded you with subtlety and lust,
And blurred your image in the loathsome dust.

Your love, the clinging ivy, pride you flattered,
Insidious as the snake's elusive track;
You conquered mighty strongholds, empires shattered,
Led man, half blind and captive, forth and back;
You fed his vanity, each lightest whim:
A selfish hypocrite, you humoured him.

You sold yourself for maintenance and pleasure
To be his mistress with the right to roam
Under convention's eye—that was your measure—
Within four walls unblushingly called ‘home’.
You deemed your bruisèd sister base and vile,
But gave her temper your most winsome smile.

So came your progeny unsought to being,
An earth-born, sensual, unwelcome brood,
Low-browed, false-hearted, boastful, but unseeing,
By base desires and evil thoughts pursued;
They saw no more God's lily in the vale,
Nor heard His music in the roaring gale.

In all the murk of veiling sense and blindness
That hid the beauty of the inner light;
What wonder if they missed the roads of kindness
And stumbled often when they most were right?
Then fell the horror of a baleful star,
The blood-red beak of that mad demon, War.

Man's rule had made the earth a reeking shamble,
The church, too oft, a grafter's paradise.
Commerce a random plunge, a selfish gamble,
And education—his who had the price;
Manhood was cheap; wealth was the highest trust,
And Womanhood was trampled in the dust.

In those dark days I heard a woman praying,
Fearful for self, more for her unborn child;
These were the broken words I heard her saying:
(How great her terror, breathing words so wild!)