University of Virginia Library

THE CRIME OF CREATION.

Alas,
That I being God should greatly sin
And let a world of woe begin,
That shall not lightly pass!
Oh I repent me
In framing but the mockery of man,
I so unbent me
From the grand purpose of my glorious plan
As to delight in something less than All,
And dabble with the incomplete and sport
With such creation;
Which only was foredoomed to fall
From its first brightness, and come short
And find damnation.
Yea, I have sinnèd sorely, and through Time
Must bear the burden of my grievous crime
And fatal error,
In toil and terror;
To expiate, on an unceasing Cross
And by the torment of a daily death
Which cannot die,
And in the shadow of a lonely loss
Which cannot lose,
The evil which will never be atoned,
Till man with God at last has been enthroned.
I must draw on the insufferable breath,
Because I choose
To be Divinity
And cannot 'scape the horror of Infinity,
Nor one small drop of that wherein I drown,
Which is alike My bitter curse and crown.
Alas,
That I may not undo the wrong
Wrought on the clay that issued from My moulding
And pictured Me though in a broken glass,
With fragments of the heavenly song;
Which could not bear the folding
Of iron arms and evils,
And met with all-unequal front
Legions of dooms and devils,
Intextured in the web of hourly wont.
And could that fragile being,
When darkness was its seeing,
Cope with the crushing weight of sleepless foes
For ever camped round his unarmoured walls,
Temptations which were leagued with native lust
Rooted in dust,
And bearing fruit of fatal woes
Or falls?
In other tracks and times
And with a loftier making
Man might have stood against the storm
Of clouded climes,
And reared erect a stainless form
With no necessity of breaking;
He might have gathered sweeter grace
And in the grandeur of his godlike serving,
Undimmed by swerving,
Shown some bright shadows of My own fair Face.
Alas,
That now the creature thing and the Creator
Should have reversed their portions quite,
And man is the real educator
With Me a pupil in his class;
If I may, through æonian pain,
Somehow regain
The old lost Beauty infinite!
For he, in sorrows vast and various
And death vicarious,
Atones for Me and on My Cross
For ever hangs
In mortal pangs,
That purging from him all the dross
He might redeem Me from the station
Of guilty grief,
And bring in turn the ripe relief
Of full salvation.
For he whom I threw lightly out
From sheer exuberance of Strength,
Into a Kosmos dark with doubt
And rank with every shape of trial,
As helpless as a babe new-born,
Shall be at length
My rescuer from a fate forlorn
By his denial;
And I the Potter,
When it has gone the weary way
Through the red furnace heated seven times hotter,
Shall be re-fashioned by the clay
And issue from this awful cerement,
Saved by the love of man my lost experiment.
My cup is now already sweeter,
Though I must drink it to the bottom lees
In utter shame
And feel My Name
But a reproach, from which God flees
Yet hides not, and thus grows completer.
They deem I died once only,
But God is always dying
And always sad and lonely;
Yea, in the wounded creature's sobs My Voice,
And even the baby's crying
Re-echoes from my lips and through My Heart
So haunted yet apart.
And man, who could not have a virile choice
In his own dim creation,
Consigned at first to weakness,
Still greatly has forgiven
His Maker now the Made
And now no more unshriven;
Till, as from waters of regeneration
And by the path of meekness,
I shall arise with Him from winter shade,
Unto new glories vernal;
And man shall reign with Me upon the Throne,
No longer God alone,
Co-equal, co-eternal.