Dimly men see it menacing apace To overthrow, perchance uproot the race.
Within, without, they are a field of tares:
Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares, And wherefore warrior service they must yield, Shines visible as life on either field.
That is my comfort, following shock on shock, Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.
Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night, Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight, Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect, The human and Satanic intellect, Determined for their uses to control What forces on the earth and under roll, Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.
They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:
Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.
- My sister, as I read them in my glass, Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.
How waken them that have not any bent Save browsing - the concrete indifferent!
Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:
They fear not for the race when full the trough.
They have much fear of giving up the ghost;And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.
- If I could see with you, and did not faint In beating wing, the future I would paint.
Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:
Now meanwhile is another mass awake, Once denser than the grunters of the sty.
If I could see with you! Could I but fly!
- The length of days that you with them have housed, An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.
- O true, they have a cause, and woe for us, While still they have a cause too piteous!
Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined, They walk no longer with a stumbler blind, And quicken in the virtue of their cause, To think me a poor mouther of old saws!
I wait the issue of a battling Age;
The toilers with your "troughsters" now engage;Instructing them through their acutest sense, How close the dangers of indifference!
Already have my people shown their worth, More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.
That love to love of labour leads: thence love Of humankind - earth's incense flung above.
- Admit some other features: Faithless, mean;Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;And if I bid it face what I observe, Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!
- Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil, Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:
Disowned them as the unholiest of Time, Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.
Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:
As little as Time's earliest knew the sky.
Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flame At intervals, in proof of whom they came.
To strengthen our foundations is the task Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask, Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.
My sister sees no round beyond her mood;
To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.
Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves, It moves: O much for me to say it moves!
