The Poetical Works of George Barlow :: :: University of Virginia Library

The sun has strength to fill the far untrodden places
With flowers, and force to fold in infinite embraces
Through all the centuries long
Mead after mead, and hill on hill, and valley on valley:
Can ye forbid his fiery love-shafts forth to sally?
Can one monopolise the solar song?

Can one flower quite usurp the bounty of Apollo?
The garden of roses first: but then the green deep hollow
His rays with violets fill.
He kisses the bright sea whose whole face gleams to meet him:
Then, next, the lordly mounts with sheeny spears entreat him;
And next he kisses the brown moorland rill.

139

The sun is like to God,—of infinite compassion
And full of awful might of universal passion
And full of force supreme.
The pale star loves but one. The sun loves where he listeth:
Yea whatsoever sweet and fragrant thing existeth,—
In far green valley or by fair blue stream.

The pale star loves but one. The strong fierce fiery solar
Sublime bright endless rays from southern unto polar
Strange regions dart their flame.
What flower of all the flowers within the world resisteth
Or deeplier in the grass its pliant soft stem twisteth,
Sad at his advent? Unto each he came.

Godlike and full of God, the amazing sun hath crowned us
And poured his ceaseless flame of golden bounty round us—
Resistless, endless, great.
Hath yonder sweet and fair soft lily of the valley
Strength into one to bind his red spears when they sally
Forth through the awestruck morn's columnar gate?

140

The armies of the sun march forth in endless legions
And flowers they find and win from infinite far regions
And lead in triumph home.
Not one blue hyacinth the great sun into glory
Of azure tints doth kiss, but each,—and all the hoary
Wild wind-spread masses of the wandering foam.

The cold moon loveth little. But can ye bind Apollo,—
Unto the fiery god prescribe what path to follow?
Haply he tires to-day
Of English chill-lipped loves, and seeks in southern places
New flower-lips sweet to kiss and new soft flower-embraces;
Who hath the power the sun-god's course to stay?

Chain ye your stars and moons. The sun not God's hand chaineth.
The sun hath will like God and every chain disdaineth
And all your ropes and bars.
As is God than the sun, so is the sun supremer
In fiery might of deed than every planet-dreamer,—
Than all your thin-lipped hosts of moons and stars.

141

What hand can touch the sun? What power lay down a limit
To his own fiery force, or reach his flame to dim it
Or hinder on its way
The cataract of his rays that pours in endless torrent
Down airy void vast steeps, a burning golden current,—
Who shall the sun's impassioned will gainsay?

Before the earth was born the great sun loved the flowers
On other hills than these,—in other vales than ours:
And, when the earth is dead,
The sun will still illume his pathway wintry and vernal
And pour forth still the same vast loving light eternal
And still lift Godward his gold fearless head.

God and the sun.—If none were left but these two only
Still would they each pursue their silent pathway lonely;
The sun would, Godlike, shine,
And God would, sunlike, still rule o'er the empty spaces
Though never more his eyes met answering human faces
Nor, more, his nostrils smelt the rose or pine.

142

These two, and these alone, have power of life undying
Within them, fiery sun to fiery God replying;
These: and these two are one.
Love is the spirit that pours its fountains fierce and deathless
Through the vast solar flame. Though all things else lay breathless,
Still would these two abide: God and the sun.

April, 1883.