In moments of encouragement he can sing: I’ll weep no more. My sorrow I will fetter In chains of strongest steel. My people are still burdened with their fetters Their wounds their woes reveal. And all my soul I show forth with their wounds. I’ll sing no more. And nightly in the struggle The iron swords sing loud. The swords cut deep into the people’s vitals And call a race uncowed. Then let my sword Sing for me in the strife. Or again Oles with his eye upon nature and the same hope in his breast will sing: Thou marvelous and wondrous night! Just yesterday a coverlet of snow was sifting down, And now to-day a change ... so warm and bright, With here and there a pushing upward from the frozen ground. Know this: ’twill be the same with man.... Such miracles there be!... Upon a certain day Men everywhere, free and of equal rank shall stand And seize the visions dreamed along the way. So too with his confidence in man’s power to gain his goal by fighting and denying even the powers of nature that endeavor to stop him.... Make sport of us, ye winds, and mock us, thunder, Unswerving we tread a beckoning pathway, Our young breasts we raise to defy the wind’s power, Thunder we deafen with paeans of victory. Only he wins his goal who, unmoved, presses forward, Who burns with a passion that never consumes. Life’s carpet spread out lures his youthful steps onward, The crown Death shall weave him immortally blooms. More faith in our cause! Raise higher our banner! Tears, groans, and misgivings ... begone from the fray! Life rides a winged charger, Spreading flowers on our way. (Translated by A. P. Coleman) In his early poems as _Anxiety and Joy Embraced_, Oles harps on that theme which was so dear to the early symbolistic authors in all European countries that sorrow and joy are closely connected, that in nature the extremes meet and that it is the duty of the individual to embrace both as parts of the great existence of the universe. In moments of depression he returns to the same theme with an almost pantheistic interpretation of nature as but an external manifestation of what is within the human heart. It was an age of symbolism. In Russian literature it was the time of Aleksander Blok with his symbolic dramas and of Leonid Andreyev with such grim and disillusioning plays as _The Life of Man and Anathema_ where the characters are universal types as man and woman. Oles follows in the same traditions and produced many lyrical and symbolistic plays as _On the Road to a Legend_ and the _Tragedy of the Heart_. They are really literary dramas better suited to be read than produced.