The Secret Splendour

1

Majestic master of the immutable Light,

Love like a universe thronged within your heart:

Brooding in silence across lonely years

On secret heavens a-dream in infinite hells,

You found the hammer to break the Dragon's sleep

And free from burying black the fallen stars.

But for each throb of God kindled in earth

You flung a human heart-beat out of Time:

You shortened your sovereign life to greaten the dust

Your body, dropped from your spirit's hold on high,

Lays the foundation of a clay-built sky!

2

Always the Light came down from the limitless blue,

Gold gushing through the head to a heart God-drunk

Now from the soil's sleep rose one dazzling wave,

Uttering a secret of eternity! locked

In caves dumbfounded with a vast black bliss.

It sang how sheer divinity grew dust,

The miracled Love which left the heart of the sun

And crouched with folded fires below Time's feet

To give huge wings to the atom's reverie.

The surge of light lifted our bodies up

As though, in laughing answer to heaven's leap down

Into the prisoning space of bone and flesh,

Earth now was ready to enter infinitude.

A blind snake that had swallowed all the stars

Unrolled a boundless mystery flecked with flame

And undulated shining centimes.

But none riding the rapture and the glow

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Saw the still King of the new life's luminous realm,

Tamer and charmer of mortality s night—

One Heart whose deep on gold-dense deep of love

 Measured the abyss whose cry is the whole world's death!

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