Of war's last flame-stricken field,
Till godlike, equal with time,
It stand in the sun sublime,

In the godhead of man revealed.

Round your people and over them
Light like raiment is drawn,
Close as a garment to cover them
Wrought not of mail nor of lawn:
Here, with hope hardly to wear,
Naked nations and bare

Swim, sink, strike out for the dawn.

Chains are here, and a prison,

Kings, and subjects, and shame:
If the God upon you be arisen,
How should our songs be the same?
How in confusion of change,
How shall we sing, in a strange
Land songs praising his name?

God is buried and dead to us,
Even the spirit of earth,
Freedom: so have they said to us,
Some with mocking and mirth,
Some with heartbreak and tears:
And a God without eyes, without ears,
Who shall sing of him, dead in the
birth?

The earth-god Freedom, the lonely

Face lightening, the footprint unshod. Not as one man crucified only

Nor scourged with but one life's rod : The soul that is substance of nations, Reincarnate with fresh generations; The great god Man, which is God.

But in weariest of years and obscurest Doth it live not at heart of all things The one God and one spirit, a purest

Life, fed from unstañchable springs? Within love, within hatred it is, And its seed in the stripe as the kiss, And in slaves is the germ, and in

kings.

Freedom we call it, for holier

Name of the soul's there is none; Surelier it labors, if slowlier,

Than the metres of star or of sun; Slowlier than life unto breath, Surelier than time unto death,

It moves till its labor be done.

Till the motion be done and the measure Circling through season and clime, Slumber and sorrow and pleasure, Vision of virtue and crime;

Till consummate with conquering eyes,

A soul disembodied, it rise

From the body transfigured of time. Till it rise and remain and take station With the stars of the world that re

joice;

Till the voice of its heart's exultation
Be as theirs an invariable voice,
By no discord of evil estranged,
By no pause, by no breach in it changed,
By no clash in the chord of its choice.

It is one with the world's generations, With the spirit, the star, and the sod: With the kingless and king-stricken nations,

With the cross, and the chain, and the rod;

The most high, the most secret, most lonely,

The earth-soul Freedom, that only
Lives, and that only is God. 1871.

FROM MATER TRIUMPHALIS
[TO LIBERTY]

I am thine harp between thine hands,
O mother!

All my strong chords are strained with love of thee.

We grapple in love and wrestle, as each with other

Wrestle the wind and the unreluctant

sea.

I am no courtier of thee sober-suited,
Who loves a little for a little pay.
Me not thy winds and storms, nor
thrones disrooted,

Nor molten crowns, nor thine own sins, dismay.

Sinned hast thou sometime, therefore art thou sinless;

Stained hast thou been, who art there

fore without stain;

Even as man's soul is kin to thee, but kinless

Thou, in whose womb Time sows the all-various grain.

I do not bid thee spare me, O dreadful mother!

I pray thee that thou spare not, of thy grace.

How were it with me then, if ever another

Should come to stand before thee in this my place?