The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Despite their outward fret and jar
Their mutual ministrations are,
Some shine on history's earlier page;
Some prop the world's declining age:
One, one reserves her buried bloom
To flower—perchance on Winter's tomb.

II.

Greece, weak of Will but strong in Thought,
To Rome her arts and science brought:
Rome, strong yet barbarous gained from her
A staff, but, like Saint Christopher,
Knew not for whom his strength to use,
What yoke to bear, what master choose.
His neck the giant bent!—thereon
The Babe of Bethlehem sat! Anon
That staff his prop, that sacred freight
His guide, he waded through the strait,
And entered at a new world's gate.

III.

On that new stage were played once more
The parts in Greece rehearsed before:
Round fame's Olympic stadium vast
The new-born, emulous Nations raced;
Now Spain, now France the headship won,
Unrisen the Russian Macedon:
But naught, O Ireland, like to thee
Hath been! A Sphinx-like mystery,
At the world's feast thou sat'st death-pale;
And blood-stains tinged thy sable veil.

329

IV.

Apostle, first, of worlds unseen!
For ages, then, deject and mean:
Be sure, sad land, a concord lay
Between thy darkness and thy day!
Thy hand, had temporal gifts been thine,
Had lost, perchance, the things divine.
Truth's witness sole! The insurgent North
Gave way when error's flood went forth:
On the scarred coasts deformed and cleft
Thou, like the Church's Rock, wert left!

V.

That Tudor tyranny which stood
'Mid wrecks of Faith, was quenched in blood
When Charles, its child and victim, lay
The Rebel-Prophet's bleeding prey.
Once more the destined wheel goes round!
Heads royal long are half discrowned:
Ancestral rights decline and die:
Thus Despotism and Anarchy
Alternate each the other chase,
Twin Bacchantes wreathed around one vase.

VI.

The future sleeps in night: but thou
O Island of the branded brow,
Her flatteries scorn who reared by Seine
Fraternity's ensanguined reign,
And for a sceptre twice abhorred
Twice welcomed the Cæsarian sword!

330

Thy past, thy hopes, are thine alone!
Though crushed around thee and o'erthrown,
The majesty of civil might
The hierarchy of social right
Firm state in thee for ever hold!
Religion was their life and mould.

VII.

The vulgar, dog-like eye can see
Only the ignobler traits in thee;
Quaint follies of a fleeting time;
Dark reliques of the oppressor's crime.
The Seer—what sees he? What the West
Hath seldom save in thee possessed;
The childlike Faith, the Will like fate,
And that Theistic Instinct great
New worlds that summons from the abyss
‘The balance to redress of this.’

VIII.

Wait thou the end; and spurn the while
False Freedom's meretricious smile!
Stoop not thy front to anticipate
A triumph certain! Watch and wait!
The schismatic, by birth akin
To Socialist and Jacobin,
Will claim, when shift the scales of power,
His natural place. Be thine that hour
With good his evil to requite;
To save him in his own despite;
And backward scare the brood of night!

University of Virginia Library

TO IRELAND.

AGAINST FALSE FREEDOM.

I.

II.

III.

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VII.

VIII.