Back to the bewildering vision
And the border-land of birth;
Back into the looming wonder,
The companionship of earth;
Back unto the simple kindred—
Childlike fingers, childlike eyes,
Working, waiting, comprehending,
Now in patience, now surprise;
Back unto the faithful healing
And the candor of the sod—
Scent of mould and moisture stirring
At the secret touch of God;
Back into the ancient stillness
Where the wise enchanter weaves,
To the twine of questing tree-root,
The expectancy of leaves;
Back to hear the hushed consulting
Over bud and blade and germ,
As the Mother’s mood apportions
Each its pattern, each its term;
Back into the grave beginnings
Where all wonder-tales are true,
Strong enchantments, strange successions,
Mysteries of old and new;
Back to knowledge and renewal,
Faith to fashion and reveal,
Take me, Mother—in compassion
All thy hurt ones fain to heal.
Back to wisdom take me, Mother;
Comfort me with kindred hands;
Tell me tales the world’s forgetting,
Till my spirit understands.
Tell me how some sightless impulse,
Working out a hidden plan,
God for kin and clay for fellow,
Wakes to find itself a man.
Tell me how the life of mortal,
Wavering from breath to breath,
Like a web of scarlet pattern
Hurtles from the loom of death.
How the caged bright bird, desire,
Which the hands of God deliver,
Beats aloft to drop unheeded
At the confines of forever:
Faints unheeded for a season,
Then outwings the furthest star,
To the wisdom and the stillness
Where thy consummations are.
Out of the dreams that heap
The hollow hand of sleep—
Out of the dark sublime,
The echoing deeps of time—
From the averted Face
Beyond the bournes of space.
Into the sudden sun
We journey, one by one.
Out of the hidden shade
Wherein desire is made—
Out of the pregnant stir
Where death and life confer—
The dark and mystic heat
Where soul and matter meet—
The enigmatic Will—
We start, and then are still.
Inexorably decreed
By the ancestral deed,
The puppets of our sires,
We work out blind desires,
And for our sons ordain,
The blessing or the bane.
In ignorance we stand
With fate on either hand,
And question stars and earth
Of life, and death, and birth.
With wonder in our eyes
We scan the kindred skies,
While through the common grass
Our atoms mix and pass.
We feel the sap go free
When spring comes to the tree;
And in our blood is stirred
What warms the brooding bird.
The vital fire we breathe
That bud and blade bequeathe,
And strength of native clay
In our full veins hath sway.
But in the urge intense
And fellowship of sense,
Suddenly comes a word
In other ages heard.
On a great wind our souls
Are borne to unknown goals,
And past the bournes of space
To the unaverted Face.
Sang the sunrise on an amber morn—
“Earth, be glad! An April day is born.
“Winter’s done, and April’s in the skies.
Earth, look up with laughter in your eyes!”
Putting off her dumb dismay of snow,
Earth bade all her unseen children grow.
Then the sound of growing in the air
Rose to God a liturgy of prayer;
And the thronged succession of the days
Uttered up to God a psalm of praise.
Laughed the running sap in every vein,
Laughed the running flurries of warm rain,
Laughed the life in every wandering root,
Laughed the tingling cells of bud and shoot.
God in all the concord of their mirth
Heard the adoration-song of Earth.