The poetical works of Robert Stephen Hawker Edited from the original manuscripts and annotated copies together with a prefatory notice and bibliography by Alfred Wallis |
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THE SOUTHERN CROSS. |
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 | The poetical works of Robert Stephen Hawker |  |
THE SOUTHERN CROSS.
With awful wonder stand:
A voice had called them from their grave,
In some far Eastern land.
When the old waters swelled,
The Ark, that womb of second birth,
Their house and lineage held.
Bright Sem sweet incense brings,
And Cham the myrrh his fingers hold:
Lo! the three Orient Kings.
The signal's starry frame;
Shuddering with second life, they quailed
At the Child Jesu's Name.
And this their parting sigh:
“Our eyes have seen the living God,
And now—once more to die.”
The Southern Cross. It is chronicled in an old Armenian myth, that the Wise Men of the East were none other than the three sons of Noe, and that they were raised from the dead to represent, and to do homage for all mankind, in the cave of Bethlehem. Other legends are also told: one that these patriarch princes of the flood did not ever die, but were rapt away alive into Enoch's paradise, and were then recalled to begin the solemn gesture of world-wide worship to the King-born Child. Another saying holds, that when their days were full, these Arkite fathers fell asleep, and were laid at rest in a cavern of Ararat, until Messias was born, and that then an angel aroused them from the slumber of ages to bow down and to hail as the heralds of many nations the Awful Child. Be this as it may, whether the Mystic Magi were Sem, Cham, and Japhet, in their first or second existence, under their own names, or those of other men; or whether they were three long-descended and royal sages from the loins or the land of Balaam—one thing has been delivered for very record, that supernatural shape of clustering orbs, which was embodied suddenly from surrounding light, and framed to be the beacon of their westward way, was and is the Southern Cross. It was not a solitary signal-fire, but a miraculous constellation: a pentacle of stars whereof two shone for the Transome, and three for the Stock, and which went above and before the travellers day and night radiantly, until it came and stood over where the young Child lay. And then! what then? must these faithful orbs dissolve and die? shall the gleaming trophy fall? Nay—not so. When it had fulfilled the piety of its first-born office, it arose, and amid the vassalage of every stellar and material law, it moved onward and on, obedient to the impulse of God the Trinity, journeying evermore towards the South, until that starry image arrived in the predestined sphere of future and perpetual abode: to bend, as to this day it bends, above the Peaceful Sea, in everlasting memorial of the Child Jesus—The Southern Cross.
| The poetical works of Robert Stephen Hawker | |