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(After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith)
Vicisti, Galilæe. I HAVE lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end; | |
| Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend. | |
| Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep; | |
| For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep. | |
| Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove; | 5 |
| But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love. | |
| Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold, | |
| A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold? | |
| I am sick of singing: the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain | |
| To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain. | 10 |
| For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath, | |
| We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death. | |
| O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day! | |
| From your wrath is the world released, redeem’d from your chains, men say. | |
| New Gods are crown’d in the city; their flowers have broken your rods; | 15 |
| They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods. | |
| But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare; | |
| Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were. | |
| Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof, | |
| Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love. | 20 |
| I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace, | |
| Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease. | |
| Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take, | |
| The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake; | |
| Breasts more soft than a dove’s, that tremble with tenderer breath; | 25 |
| And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death; | |
| All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre, | |
| Dropp’d and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire. | |
| More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things? | |
| Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. | 30 |
| A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may? | |
| For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day. | |
| And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears: | |
| Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years? | |
| Thou hast conquer’d, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; | 35 |
| We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. | |
| Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day; | |
| But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May. | |
| Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end; | |
| For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend. | 40 |
| Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides; | |
| But her ears are vex’d with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides. | |
| O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods! | |
| O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods! | |
| Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend, | 45 |
| I kneel not, neither adore you, but standing, look to the end. | |
| All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast | |
| Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past: | |
| Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates, | |
| Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits: | 50 |
| Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings, | |
| And impell’d of invisible tides, and fulfill’d of unspeakable things, | |
| White-eyed and poisonous-finn’d, shark-tooth’d and serpentine-curl’d, | |
| Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world. | |
| The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away; | 55 |
| In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey; | |
| In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men’s tears; | |
| With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years: | |
| With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour; | |
| And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour: | 60 |
| And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be; | |
| And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea: | |
| And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air: | |
| And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare. | |
| Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods? | 65 |
| Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods? | |
| All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past; | |
| Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last. | |
| In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things, | |
| Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings. | 70 |
| Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod, | |
| Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God, | |
| Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head, | |
| Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead. | |
| Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around; | 75 |
| Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crown’d. | |
| Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these. | |
| Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas, | |
| Clothed round with the world’s desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam, | |
| And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome. | 80 |
| For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours, | |
| Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers, | |
| White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame, | |
| Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name. | |
| For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she | 85 |
| Came flush’d from the full-flush’d wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea. | |
| And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways, | |
| And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays. | |
| Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wist that ye should not fall. | |
| Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all. | 90 |
| But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end; | |
| Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend. | |
| O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth, | |
| I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth. | |
| In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art, | 95 |
| Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart, | |
| Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white, | |
| And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night, | |
| And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar | |
| Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star, | 100 |
| In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun, | |
| Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone. | |
| Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath; | |
| For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death. | |
| Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know | 105 |
| I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so. | |
| For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span; | |
| A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man. | |
| So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep. | |
| For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep. | 110 |
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