God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He him. GENESIS.

BOWED by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?

Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed

More filled with signs and portents for the soul

More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades ? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;

Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,

Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-
quenched?

How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the
light;

Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands, How will the Future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?

How will it be with kingdoms and with kings

With those who shaped him to the thing

he is

When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,

After the silence of the centuries?

MY COMRADE

I NEVER build a song by night or day, Of breaking ocean or of blowing whin, But in some wondrous unexpected way,

Like light upon a road, my Love comes in.

And when I go at night upon the hill,

My heart is lifted on mysterious wings: My Love is there to strengthen and to still, For she can take away the dread of things.

POETRY

SHE comes like the hush and beauty of the night,

And sees too deep for laughter; Her touch is a vibration and a light From worlds before and after.

A LOOK INTO THE GULF

I LOOKED one night, and there Semiramis, With all her mourning doves about her head,

Sat rocking on an ancient road of Hell, Withered and eyeless, chanting to the moon Snatches of song they sang to her of old Upon the lighted roofs of Nineveh.

And then her voice rang out with rattling laugh:

"The bugles! they are crying back againBugles that broke the nights of Babylon, And then went crying on through Nineveh. Stand back, ye trembling messengers of ill Women, let go my hair: I am the Queen,

TO SHAKESPEARE

THOU, who didst lay all other bosoms bare,

Impenetrable shade didst round thee throw; And of the ready tears thou makest flow,

Monarch of tears, thou hast not any share.

Sad Petrarch, sadder Byron their despair Unlocked, their dismal theatres of woe Unclosed: thou showest Hamlet, Romeo, And maddened Lear, with tempest on his hair.

Hadst thou no suffering men's tears could suage?

No comedy of thine own life, shut in ?
No lurid tragedy — perhaps of sin
That walked with muffled steps its curtained
stage?

Confession troubles ne'er thy godlike look ;

Thou art, thyself, thy one unopened book.

THE SHAMROCK

WHEN April rains make flowers bloom
And Johnny-jump-ups come to light,
And clouds of color and perfume

Float from the orchards pink and white, I see my shamrock in the rain,

An emerald spray with raindrops set, Like jewels on Spring's coronet,

So fair, and yet it breathes of pain.

The shamrock on an older shore

Sprang from a rich and sacred soil Where saint and hero lived of yore,

And where their sons in sorrow toil; And here, transplanted, it to me

Seems weeping for the soil it left: The diamonds that all others see

Are tears drawn from its heart bereft.