The root of the growth of man: And the senses must traverse it fresh With a love that no scourge shall abate, To reach the lone heights where we scan In the mind’s rarer vision this flesh; In the charge of the Mother our fate; Her law as the one common weal. We, whom the view benumbs, We, quivering upward, each hour Know battle in air and in ground For the breath that goes as it comes, For the choice between sweet and sour, For the smallest grain of our worth: And he who the reckoning sums Finds nought in his hand save Earth. Of Earth are we stripped or crowned. The fleeting Present we crave, Barter our best to wed, In hope of a cushioned bower, What is it but Future and Past Like wind and tide at a wave! Idea of the senses, bred For the senses to snap and devour: Thin as the shell of a sound In delivery, withered in light. Cry we for permanence fast, Permanence hangs by the grave; Sits on the grave green-grassed, On the roll of the heaved grave-mound. By Death, as by Life, are we fed: The two are one spring; our bond With the numbers; with whom to unite Here feathers wings for beyond: Only they can waft us in flight. For they are Reality’s flower. Of them, and the contact with them, Issues Earth’s dearest daughter, the firm In footing, the stately of stem; Unshaken though elements lour; A warrior heart unquelled; Mirror of Earth, and guide To the Holies from sense withheld: Reason, man’s germinant fruit. She wrestles with our old worm Self in the narrow and wide: Relentless quencher of lies, With laughter she pierces the brute; And hear we her laughter peal, ’Tis Light in us dancing to scour The loathed recess of his dens; Scatter his monstrous bed, And hound him to harrow and plough. She is the world’s one prize; Our champion, rightfully head; The vessel whose piloted prow, Though Folly froth round, hiss and hoot, Leaves legible print at the keel. Nor least is the service she does, That service to her may cleanse The well of the Sorrows in us; For a common delight will drain The rank individual fens Of a wound refusing to heal While the old worm slavers its root. I bowed as a leaf in rain; As a tree when the leaf is shed To winds in the season at wane: And when from my soul I said, May the worm be trampled: smite, Sacred Reality! power Filled me to front it aright. I had come of my faith’s ordeal.