University of Virginia Library

THE LAUGHTER OF THE LORD.

“He that sitteth in the Heavens shall laugh—the Lord.”
We are going up or downward at a headlong heedless pace,
And the Lord can only tell
When He rings the judgment bell,
What must be the final ending of this helter skelter race
And the blind and brute contending for the spoils and gilded space—
If it shall be heaven or hell.
We are drifting with new teraphs to an unfamiliar shape,
And it may be form of seraphs and it may be form of ape;
As we ramble on and scramble
In a most ungodly speed,
Changing every day our creed,
Hanging crowns upon the bramble
And neglecting flower for weed;
While we flirt and lie and gamble
(But do little unless fee'd)
For the loaves and for the fishes
And the larger cups and dishes,
Though in nothing else agreed;
And with only our good wishes,
For the fools who don't succeed.
O we feast among the dying and we dance upon the dead,
And with tears of orphans crying do we butter all our bread
And the souls of women sighing are our silken dresses' thread;
As we hurry on and scurry
Through the welter and the worry,
For the scarlet robes and honours
Or the new antique Madonnas;
While on breaking hearts and broken china heedlessly we tread,
And the sneer is gaily spoken and the snare of falsehood spread
By our rulers with each token of morality but dread;
As with merry song and zither
Which have lightly brought us hither
We are hastening, none knows whither,
From the darkness to its double and the riddle yet unread
And the triumph or the trouble—though the Lord is overhead,
Though the Lord is overhead.
When the serpent Silence hisses and the tempest now is near,
Between kissing and the kisses, between weeping and the tear,
When the wise owl on the rafter
Of the belfry holds his tongue,
Where the iron throats are hung
As he looks before and after—
Then I seem between the moonrise and the moon at times to hear
When the night is at its noonrise, like faint thunder in my ear,
Far away the awful Laughter
Of the laughing of the Lord,
As he whets His judgment sword
Ere He rides on high abroad,
Thronèd on the winds His chariot
In the clouds above Him solemn,
Like a white cathedral column
And the clouds beneath that cling,
With his doom for each Iscariot
Who is traitor to his King.
In the pauses of the battle, in the respite of the lost,
When the death-bolts do not rattle on the breastplates torn and tost
With the buffets of the victors, ere the flaming doors are slammed
By the mute infernal lictors on the wretches doomed and damned;
In the lull between the shadow and the glinting of the shine
When the grasses of the meadow have the ruddy look of wine,
While the passion of the praying is not bodied forth in prayer
And the hand that would be slaying has not fallen as a slayer,
As the maiden with relenting of ripe lips and heaving breast
Will not yield the full consenting to the feared and longed-for rest;
In the sweet and sudden capture of the moment ethical
And the sacred secret rapture under fast and funeral,
In all interludes and breathing-spaces of the day and night,
Ere the thought has found its wreathing word or deed has leapt to light;
O I hear before and after
Every intertwined repose,
As eternities unclose,
The divine and dreadful Laughter
Of the laughing of the Lord,
As if on the sky's blue rafter
It recoiled and re-arose
At the laughing of the Lord;
O I hear beyond the leasing of our utmost life in joy,
And in sadness never-ceasing round all time as though a toy,
Inextinguishable numbers long and slow and soft and sweet
Mingled as with fires and slumbers and the snow's white wingèd feet,
In a musical emotion beyond melody and still
With a calling to devotion of an awful iron Will,
An infinity of throbbings as upon a thousand chords
Out of love's impassioned sobbings and the muffled clash of swords,
In unutterable pity and unutterable power
Dew to toilers of the city and to blighted hopes a flower,
But most terrible and holy in the murmur of the marts,
With a lifting for the lowly and a healing to sore hearts.
Rolling down the endless ages, and for all with tender pleas
Through the sternest of the stages like the wash of far-off seas.
We are always upward going
To the stars, or storming back
Down to the forbidden track;
While we hurry on in flurry,
And but little care or know,
With the gnawing tooth of worry,
Save that yet we forward go
To new issues and new tissues,
Which for ever form and flow,
In our polities and flesh
And the makings and the breakings
As we rise and fall afresh.
And it may be that the finding in our learning and our schools
Still is nothing but the binding of the sacrificial cord
To the altar and the axes that are sharpening for the fools,
At the taking of His taxes by the judgment of the Lord;
And the pearls of splendid fancies that deceive the deaf and blind
Are the froth of false romances from a dark distempered mind,
And a curse is on the heaping of the wise or wealthy hoard
Which will crumble at the reaping of the judgment of the Lord.
When I see the sin and folly
And the crowned and conquering fault,
But the Christ hid in the holly,
And the feasting like a vault—
When I see the sin and folly,
Then I wonder that in thunder
Flashes not the final “Halt!”
And between the lavish courses of fair women and red wine,
The delights of Heaven and horses and the swilling as of swine,
And the garbage of divorces and the crowding of the shrine,
In the little hesitations for the penance or the lust
And the dainty calculations where the trimmings vie with trust
Or artistic expectations from the ethics of the dust;
Lo, upon the painted rafter I perceive the hanging sword
And the sentence that comes after and reverses our award,
And I hear the awful Laughter of the laughing of the Lord.