Virginalia ; or, songs of my summer nights :: :: University of Virginia Library

At the dawn she stood debating
With the angels at the door
Of Christ's sepulchre, in waiting
For his body evermore.
Pure as white-robed Faith to Sorrow,
Pointing back to Heaven above—
(Happy Day for every morrow)—
Was the Bright New Moon of Love.

Nun-like, chaste in her devotion,
All the stars in heaven on high,
With their radiant, rhythmic motion,
Chimed in with her from the sky.
Sweeter far than day when breaking,
Angel-like, in heaven above,
On the traveler lost, when waking,
Was the Bright New Moon of Love.

Thus she glorified all sweetness
With the angel-light she shed
From her soul in such completeness,
That she beautified the dead.
When an Angel, sent on duty
From his Father's throne above,
Saw the heaven-surpassing beauty
Of this Bright New Moon of Love.

For the Truth she loved was Beauty,
Because Beauty was her Truth;
And to love her was his duty,
Such as Boaz owed to Ruth.
God had set his seal upon her,
Her divinity to prove,
And this Angel wooed her—won her—
Won the Bright New Moon of Love.

Thus the Mission of True Woman
She did act out in this life—
Showed the Divine in the Human,
In her duties of the Wife.
For the Heaven that he had taken,
Was so much like that above,
That the Heaven he had forsaken,
Was the Bright New Moon of Love.

For the kingdom of Christ's glory,
Angel-chanted at her birth,
Is the theme now of the story
Which I warble through the earth.
And because this fallen Angel
Took her home to heaven above,
I now write this New Evangel
Of the Bright New Moon of Love.