Oh light, light, light! Oh Sun your light is good. You stir the sap of garden, field and wood, Of men and ages. And your deeds are fair, And by this light, is God’s love understood. So let us think upon Creation’s days And Great Jehovah Moses came to praise:-- The God the Hebrews said excelled the sun, To whom all psalms are due, who made the ways The sun shall follow till he burns no more Till he is cold and clinkered to the core. Praise God, and not the sun too much, my soul, The God behind the sun we must adore. III Oh Sun, that yet will my spring thoughts astound, How often this lone mendicant you found Stripped in your presence of all earthly things. A happy dervish whirling round and round. You were his tree of incense and his feast, You were his wagon and his harnessed beast, His singing brother, yet his tyrant hard, With whip and spur and shout that never ceased. He thought of Freedom that rides round with you Healing the nations with a crystal dew, The comrade of your car, with Science there, Making the ways of men forever new. Would we might lift a mighty battle-cry. Nations and mendicants, and shake your sky: Would that you caught us singing as one man That song I sang when begging days began Hearing it in every beam on high: “Man’s spirit-darkness shall forever die.” DANTE Would we were lean and grim, and shaken with hate Like Dante, fugitive, o’er-wrought with cares, And climbing bitterly the stranger’s stairs, Yet Love, Love, Love, divining: finding still Beyond dark Hell the penitential hill, And blessed Beatrice beyond the grave. Jehovah lead us through the wilderness: God make our wandering brave. THE COMET OF PROPHECY I had hold of the comet’s mane A-clinging like grim death. I passed the dearest star of all, The one with violet breath: The blue-gold-silver Venus star, And almost lost my hold.... Again I ride the chaos-tide, Again the winds are cold. I look ahead, I look above, I look on either hand. I cannot sight the fields I seek, The holy No-Man’s-Land. And yet my heart is full of faith. My comet splits the gloom, His red mane slaps across my face, His eyes like bonfires loom. My comet smells the far off grass Of valleys richly green. My comet sights strange continents My sad eyes have not seen, We gallop through the whirling mist. My good steed cannot fail. And we shall reach that flowery shore, And wisdom’s mountain scale. And I shall find my wizard cloak Beneath that alien sky And touching black soil to my lips Begin to prophesy. While chaos sleet and chaos rain Beat on an Indian Drum There in tomorrow’s moon I stand And speak the age to come.