University of Virginia Library

THE PACT OF THE TWIN GODS.

I.

NOW Life and Death had striven many a day
Which should have mastery
Over all things that be
Upon the earth and in the hollow deep;
And for their endless strife
The world was all perplexed
And all the ordered harmonies of Life
Ceased from the accustomed course of night and day,
Being so vexed
And worn with shock of battle and duresse.
For whiles on all things lay,
Living and dead, the sleep
Of Death, when he sometime had brief success;
And whiles the hollow breast
Of the cold grave gaped wide
And all the things which therewithin did bide
Came forth and knew
The passionate unrest
Of life once more,
When, in the course of war,
The frank fair God from the funereal wight
Did wrest
The palm of fight.
So that by turns there blew
The icy blasts of death and the sweet soft
Zephyrs of life
About the world and there was endless strife
Twixt God and God. The night,
Erst sacred unto death, was filled and rife
With birth and fluttering
Of newborn life;
And many a goodly thing,
Glad with the joy of being, bloomed aloft
Above the outraged portals of the grave.
Death could no longer save
The dead from stress and resonance of being
And the pale ghosts, a-fleeing
From out the tombs, uptorn
By the swift God, to seek
Some refuge in the crannies of the rock
Or in the hill-caves bleak,
Were caught up by the blast
Of Life imperious and born
Into new shapes of life and love and beauty
And the old rack
And whirl of earthly duty
Claimed them again in yet another shape,
Although the grave did gape
To take their tired souls back
To its cold breast
And in the dim and stirless peace of death
To give them their last rest.
And in his turn did Death usurp the day
And all the things Life had
Of power and symbol, 'neath the risen sun;
For he did glide,
With his cold breath
And frosted gaze,
Across the meadows wide
And the fair woodland ways,
And touching all the things that had begun
To open to the light
Their buds and petals glad
With the new morn, did slay
The spirit of joy within their bosoms bright.
Wherefore their hues did fail;
The corn-sheaves' glitterance faded into gray;
The woodbirds' delicate notes
Did faint for fear
And all sweet sounds, that rise,
Under the flower-blue skies,
From feathered throats,
For the young day to hear,
When the stern God swept darkling o'er the plain,
Were fain
To leave their life and wander, phantom-wise,
Ghosts of themselves, droning sad songs of death.
The heavens grew grey and drear;
The very sun turned pale;
The clouds put on a veil
And fled across the gray
Of the young blighted day,
Like ghosts of Titans driven o'er the white
Of the pale Infinite
By the doom-angel's breath.
Beneath the heaven's shroud,
Men knew not if they died
And had no joy in being, if allowed
To live; for still a wraith
Of death was over life
And a gold gleam of life did blazon death.
One great grave was the earth;
The grave was full of birth:
Even in the birth was rife
The ghastliness of dying
And the delight of mirth,
Of being and its gladness,
Blent with the ghosts' shrill sighing
And the death-sadness.
So was there endless strife,
By land and sea,
Twixt the Gods Death and Life;
And unto neither fell the mastery.

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