Charles Hamilton Musgrove

This is the story of Moses,
    The earliest scribe that we keep:
Void was the earth and formless,
    And dark was the face of the deep,
Till God's word flashed in lightning,
    Beautiful, bountiful, bright,
And night was the name of the darkness,
    And day was the name of the light.

This is the story of Moses--
    (Doubt it, if ever you can)--
The world was too good to begin with,
    So God made Adam, the man;
And for Adam He made the woman,
    And He gave them laws to obey;
And, lastly, He sent the serpent
    To follow and tempt and betray.

This is the story of Moses--
    Eve got a man from the Lord,
And his name was Cain, and another
    Called Abel, the evil-starred;
And the brothers quarreled at their worship,

God let me fall from His hand
One day at His forge when the elemental world
Was shaping. I am but a breath from His great bellows,
But here among the workshops of mankind
I am a fateful scourge.

I tear red strips from the proud cities of men;
I name my passage the Highway of Instant Death;
I splinter world-old forests with my laugh,
And whirl the ancient snows of Hecla sheer into Orion's eyes.
I dance on the deep under the big Indian stars,
And wrap the water spout about my sinuous hips
As a dancer winds her girdle. The ocean's horrid crew,
The octopus, the serpent, and the shark, with the heart of a coward,
Plunge downward when they hear my feet above on the sea-floor,
And hide in their slimy coverts. Brave men pray upon the straining decks
Till comes my moo...

You have builded your ships in the sun-lands,
    And launched them with song and wine;
They are boweled with your stanchest engines,
    And masted with bravest pine;
You have met in your closet councils,
    With your plans and your prayers to God
For a fortunate wind to waft you
    Where never a foot has trod.

And now you follow the polar star
    To the seat of the old Norse Kings,
Past the death-white halls of Valhalla,
    Where the Norn to the tempest sings--
Follow the steady needle
    That cleaves to its steady star
To the uttermost realms of Odin
    And the warlike thunderer, Thor.

Far through the icy silence,
    Where the glacier's teeth hang white,
And even the sun-god Baldur,
    Looks down in vague affright,
Yo...

Unweariedly he watches for the sign,
    The sign I promised from the farthest goal,
My lover of a world no longer mine,
    My human lover with his human soul.

Unweariedly he waits from day to day,
    Nor knows, as I know now, that when we meet,
'Twill be as dewdrop on the hawthorn spray,--
    The ultimate of God at last complete.

He still remembers that my eyes were blue,
    Still dreams the autumn russet of my hair;
"In God's own time," he said, "I'll come to you;
    You will be waiting; I will find you there!"

But now I know that he must never hear
    The message that I promised to impart,
For should I breathe the secret in his ear
    His soul would hearken--but 'twould break his heart!

What will I say when face to face with God
My naked soul shall come, seared with the stain
That men call sin? Why, God will understand;
He knew my pitiful story long before
My frail dust quickened with the breath of life;
He knew the mystery of that day of days
When, thrilled with virgin wonder, I should come
Bearing the lily of my stainless love
To plant upon the desert of desire.
I do not fear His judgment; He knows all.

I do not fear His judgment lest it be
That I shall look no more upon his face
Who taught my heart to love; and, surely, One
Who wrought a perfect note from these poor strings
Will not condemn to discord when the strain
Has reached the fullness of its harmony.

I do not fear His judgment, but I weep
For him who slew the lily w...

(Oscar Wilde.)


I gazed upon thee desolate and heard
    Thine anguished cry when fell the iron gin
That all but broke thy soul, yet gave thy word
    The strength to ask forgiveness of thy sin.

I saw thee fleeing from the cruel light
    Of thine own fame; I saw thee hide thy face
In alien dust to cover up the blight
    Upon thy brow that time may yet erase.

I knew thy creed, although thy lips were mute;
    I knew the gods thou didst not dare to own;
I knew the Upas poison at the root
    Of thy last flower of song, in prison blown.

And out of all thy woe there came to me
    This miracle of dogma, like a cry:
"No law but freedom for the vagrant bee--
    No love but summer for the butterfly."

Earthquake.

I am a memory of cosmogony,
That first great hour of travail when the voice
Of God called suns and systems from the void;
I am the dream He dreams of that last day
When mountains by the roots shall be plucked up
And headlong flung into the raging sea!


Hurricane.

I am the breath that fills the organ pipes
When through the vast cathedral of the world
Death's stormy threnody sweeps, wave on wave,
The symboled note that one day will be blown
By a great angel standing in the sun,
At which the heaven and earth shall pass away!


Fire.

I am the letters of that fateful word
Writ with a flaming sword above the gates
Of Eden when God spelled the doom of man;
I am the wrath that on the jud...

(Written during the hostilities in the Far East in 1900.)


Hard by the gates of Eden,
    Where God first walked with man,
In the light of the new creation,
    Ere the race of Cain began,
The world-wide hosts have gathered,
    And their swords are drawn to slay:
God was with man in Eden,
    But where is God today?

From the ice-bound steppes of the Cossack;
    From the home of the fleur-de-lis,
From the vineyards that crown the Rhineland
    To the shores of the phosphor sea,
The clans have gathered for battle,
    And each for the signal waits,
While a million swords are flaming
    At Eden's Eastern gates.

By the sign of the yellow dragon,
    By the tri-color's bars of light;
By the double-throated eagle
    Tha...

I.

The light of a new day was on his brow,
The faith of a great dawn was on his tongue;
Out of the dark he raised his voice and sung
The high Messiah who should overthrow
The gods that Superstition crowned with might
And set above the world,--the coming Christ
Whose unshed blood should be the holy tryst
'Twixt man and his lost Eden, washing white
From his rebellious soul the serpent's blight.


II.

The fire that on the Magi's altars glowed
Spake to his soul in symbols and expressed
The immortal purity that without rest
Strives with the mortal grossness whose abode
Is in the heart. Their symboled fire showed One
Whose spirit on the altar of the world
Burns ceaselessly,--where, if all vice be hurled,
It shall be purged with fire t...