This temple is a house not made with hands But born of man’s incorrigible need For permanence and beauty in the scud And wreckage of mortality—as though Great thoughts, communing in the noise of towns With inward isolation and deep peace, And dreams gold-paven for celestial feet, Had wrought the sudden wonder; and behold, The sky, the hills, the awful colonnade, And, night-long woven through the fane’s august Intercolumniations, all the stars Processionally wheeling— Then it was That, having reared their wonder, it would seem The makers feared their God might prove less great Than man’s heart dreaming on him—and so left The shafts unroofed, untenanted the shrine. THE TRYST [1914] I said to the woman: Whence do you come, With your bundle in your hand? She said: In the North I made my home, Where slow streams fatten the fruitful loam, And the endless wheat-fields run like foam To the edge of the endless sand. I said: What look have your houses there, And the rivers that glass your sky? Do the steeples that call your people to prayer Lift fretted fronts to the silver air, And the stones of your streets, are they washed and fair When the Sunday folk go by? My house is ill to find, she said, For it has no roof but the sky; The tongue is torn from the steeple-head, The streets are foul with the slime of the dead, And all the rivers run poison-red With the bodies drifting by. I said: Is there none to come at your call In all this throng astray? They shot my husband against a wall, And my child (she said), too little to crawl, Held up its hands to catch the ball When the gun-muzzle turned its way. I said: There are countries far from here Where the friendly church-bells call, And fields where the rivers run cool and clear, And streets where the weary may walk without fear, And a quiet bed, with a green tree near, To sleep at the end of it all. She answered: Your land is too remote, And what if I chanced to roam When the bells fly back to the steeples’ throat, And the sky with banners is all afloat, And the streets of my city rock like a boat With the tramp of her men come home?