V

She sprang from dust to drink of earth’s cool dew, The breath of swaying grasses share, Mankind embrace, their weaklings rear, At wrestle with the tyrannic strong; Her forehead clear to her mate, virgin anew, As immortals may be in the mortal sphere. Read through her launching heart, who had lain long With Earth and heard till it became her own Our good Great Mother’s eve and matin song: The humming burden of Earth’s toil to feed Her creatures all, her task to speed their growth, Her aim to lead them up her pathways, shown Between the Pains and Pleasures; warned of both, Of either aided on their hard ascent. Now when she looked, with love’s benign delight After great ecstasy, along the plains, What foulest impregnation of her sight Transformed the scene to multitudinous troops Of human sketches, quaver-figures, bent, As were they winter sedges, broken hoops, Dry udder, vineless poles, worm-eaten posts, With features like the flowers defaced by deluge rains? Recked she that some perverting devil had limned Earth’s proudest to spout scorn of the Maker’s hand, Who could a day behold these deathly hosts, And see, decked, graced, and delicately trimmed, A ribanded and gemmed elected few, Sanctioned, of milk and honey starve the land:— Like melody in flesh, its pleasant game Olympianwise perform, cloak but the shame: Beautiful statures; hideous, By Christian contrast; pranked with golden chains, And flexile where is manhood straight; Mortuaries where warm should beat The brotherhood that keeps blood sweet: Who dared in cantique impious Proclaim the Just, to whom was due Cathedral gratitude in the pomp of state, For that on those lean outcasts hung the sucker Pains, On these elect the swelling Pleasures grew. Surely a devil’s land when that meant death for each! Fresh from the breast of Earth, not thus, With all the body’s life to plump the leech, Is Nature’s way, she knew. The abominable scene Spat at the skies; and through her veins, To cloud celestially sown, Ran venom of what nourishment Her dark sustainer subterrene Supplied her, stretched supine on the rack, Alive in the shrewd nerves, the seething brains, Under derisive revels, prone As one clamped fast, with the interminable senseless blent.