Gloria Mundi

(On reading: the last chapter of Wells's History of the World.)

'Praised be the time a heaven of concrete streets
Is built on earth, wherein all faces fade
Unto one lineament, wherein the race
Stands silent in a scentless Aready,
Perfect as a machine. Then shall all men
Stand widowed of their passion, oxen-eyed—
No fear of fear, nor care of care, nor e'en
The hope of rest, for rest shall be on all,
Fixed for the ages, voiceless, motionless!'

Ay, and if then the heart should lose her stir,
The eye be dull and widowed of her change,
Great utterance shaken in a nerveless world?
If men should lose their eagerness, like sheep
Grazing upon a dull and flattened time?
A shadowless earth is graceless to the eye,
And pain and motion still have fathered manhood,
And still I think the world will shred herself
In ever wider patterns, parcel out
Into infinities of joyous strength.
Think you the source and ruler of all light
Is so poor-minded, so bereft of power
He cannot make but one perfection?
That hath made all lands after their own kind,
That built the Stars in scheme of infinite change,
And myriad-faced wrought the spirit of time?
Since the stars sang in heaven, the world's fair face
Is Cleopatra's, not Antigone's,
Chanting all manhood with a siren-song
Of changing beauties; when he tires of her
In sick-brained pettishness, she like the sun
That sets in various beauty, fires a death
Of far-seen conflagration, and stands up
Showing a face new-born in phoenix-fire.

And then shalt thou hear trumpets in her voice,
Pealing the first cold morn of a new day
That bathes the sinews of o'er-wearied men,
Saddened of nothingness; then is her hair
A banner in the sky, and all things take
A nameless glory of her. Then shall the race
Start as the Dane from out a sleep like death,
And wrench his length of beard from the knotted oak
Of worn-out custom labouring in old dreams—
No longer wrestling with a sickened heart,
Find sunlight in the beams of that hale dawn,
And all things made shout in one ecstasy.

E.L.P.