The Immortal Hour

I. SEMI-CHORUS:

We have no tears, who are the source of weeping, and what is laughter to us, whose laughter first of laughter woke in the man the sweet unsleeping hunger and thirst? We are the words the poets hear and fail of, we are the note beyond the fiddle’s cry, we for all lovers of beauty are a tale of beauty that passes by.

II. SEMI-CHORUS:

Cried a ghost-king by night “Divine Augustus, you tread the ends of the world only to find that the long roads of dreams go sweeping past us into a world behind. A fleeting throne, a shadow godhead these are, whose symbol is the axes and the rod,” saying “There is another kingdom, Caesar, a further heaven, God.”

I. SEMI-CHORUS:

We walk with the wind’s feet, and do not rest, we walk between the leaves in the high meadows, our hair with their green wings of light, our breast stained with the soft green shadows. Fleeter than the heart’s desire, one by one we leave delights that are well spoken of, and far behind us echo, as we run, the tired feet of love.

II. SEMI-CHORUS:

We are impatient of truth, that is no more than finite stain upon the infinite, a fading seamark on a distant shore and we have gone from it, whose lips, though grave, are not too grave to smile at the heart of man crying in his vext youth: “What is the truth?” and to make answer “Pilate, we are the truth.”

BOWLING GREEN PRESS, NEW YORK AND BY ERNEST BENN, LTD., LONDON