Roses are beauty, but I never see Those blood drops from the burning heart of June Glowing like thought upon the living tree, Without a pity that they die so soon, Die into petals, like those roses old, Those women, who were summer in men's hearts Before the smile upon the Sphinx was cold, Or sand had hid the Syrian and his arts. O myriad dust of beauty that lies thick Under our feet that not a single grain But stirred and moved in beauty and was quick For one brief moon and died nor lived again; But when the moon rose lay upon the grass Pasture to living beauty, life that was. Over the church's door they moved a stone And there, unguessed, forgotten, mortared up, Lay the priest's cell where he had lived alone; There was his ashy hearth, his drinking cup; There was the window whence he saw the host, The god whose beauty quickened bread and wine, The skeleton of a religion lost, The ghostless bones of what had been divine. O many a time the dusty masons come, Knocking their trowels in the stony brain, To cells where perished priests had once a home, Or where devout brows pressed the window pane, Watching the thing made God, the god whose bones Bind underground our soul's foundation stones. I never see the red rose crown the year, Nor feel the young grass underneath my tread, Without the thought "This living beauty here Is earth's remembrance of a beauty dead. Surely where all this glory is displayed Love has been quick, like fire, to high ends, Here, in this grass, an altar has been made For some white joy, some sacrifice of friends; Here, where I stand, some leap of human brains Has touched immortal things and left its trace, The earth is happy here, the gleam remains; Beauty is here, the spirit of the place, I touch the faith which nothing can destroy, The earth, the living church of ancient joy." Out of the clouds come torrents, from the earth Fire and quakings, from the shrieking air Tempests that harry half the planet's girth. Death's unseen seeds are scattered everywhere. Yet in his iron cage the mind of man Measures and braves the terrors of all these, The blindest fury and the subtlest plan He turns, or tames, or shows in their degrees. Yet in himself are forces of like power, Untamed, unreckoned; seeds that brain to brain Pass across oceans bringing thought to flower, New worlds, new selves, where he can live again, Eternal beauty's everlasting rose Which casts this world as shadow as it goes.