The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

The picture which suggested this poem is in the Church of the Sacred Heart, at Bournemouth, to which it was presented by the late Count de Torre Diaz. To his memory this poem is inscribed.

‘A sign was seen in heaven: a Woman stood;
Beneath her feet the Moon.’ That waning moon
'Neath yonder pictured Apparition curved
Is Time there dying with his dying months:
The Spirit shewed that vision to Saint John
Exiled in Patmos Isle. The best beloved
Deserved such solace best.

She stands in Heaven:
Not yet the utmost mountain-peaks of earth
Forth from the hoary deep unlifted still
Have felt her foot's pure touch. A cloud from God
On streaming like a tide thus far hath borne her
To the threshold only of the House of Man:
Angelic heads and wings beneath her gleam
And lily and rose and palm. Her knee is bent:
Her moon-like face is tearful with great awe:
Her universe is God and other none;
Piercing all worlds her gaze is fixed on Him:
She waits His Will supreme.

Men of good-will
Draw near in faith honouring the Mystery!
The sunrise of your wondrous world of Faith

411

Was when the Angel spake and at his word
Mary believed. Its noon was Pentecost
Then when the Church of God stood up sun-clad
By Him, the ascended Sun of Righteousness.
This is nor noon, nor sunrise. This is dawn,
The aurora of those spiritual heavens and earth
Decreed, Man's spiritual portion yet to come.
For them alone material worlds shall be;
Their glory shall but be this pledge fulfilled;
Their loveliness shall be but hers writ large;
Their fruitfulness the type of hers: her life
When time is ripe shall be a music-strain
Tuning all harmonies of Time; itself
An echo through the centuries prolonged
Yea to the gate-ways of Eternity
From this first bird-note clear!

That painter's hand
Wrought well. Yon Virgin's robe, a pearl of dawn,
Glitters; yon scarf blown back by her advance
Is dark with dews and shades of vanquished night!
The raised hands upward pointing from that breast
Are matutinal with some heavenlier beam
Than streaks our East. That sunless mist behind her
Wins but from her its glow.

O young fair face—
For, though that Form to Maiden-graciousness
Hath reached the face is maiden less than child
Or, both in one, an earlier mystery
Precursor of that Maiden-Motherhood
Which blends two gifts divine. Child-Prophet soft—
What thoughts are hers? He only knows who sends them!

412

From Him they come; to Him once more ascend.
Child-Prophet sad; feels she the destined weight
Of crowns and sceptres and the wide earth's praise
Honouring earth's humblest? She that would be nought,
Was nought with them compared, a crowned Dependance.
Must she be Queen of all?

Not yet; not yet;
Ere comes that day she must be Queen of Woes:
This, this is the beginning not the end;
A world redeemed must be a world sin-marred:
That world as yet exists not. This is She
Through whom, though man had never fallen, his God
Then too had dwelt with Man—so taught the Seer —
Not Victim, but Triumphant. Sleep, O Eve,
Thy Daughter's foot—yon picture veils yet shews it—
Thy Daughter's foot, ‘the Woman's,’ the Foretold,
Whose sacred Seed, ‘the Woman's Seed,’ through her
Shall bruise the serpent's head not yet subdues it:
Not yet yon waning moon hath gazed on guilt:
Transience is not transgression. High in spheres
No autumn ever touched, the Tree of Life
Stands; and close by, as pure, the Tree of Knowledge:
The twain commix their lights; the twain are one:
All yet is archetypal: all is healing:
Not yet the fruit is plucked: not yet God's frown
Makes Eden dark.

I raise mine eyes once more:
That breeze which onward wafts her sucked the flowers

413

That pave the summits of the Hills of God.
The ‘Hills of God!’ He sang them well, that bard
Great-hearted, who for love of Christ preferred
The priestly vestment to the singing robe;
Whose monument this day stands consummate.
Thus sang he, God's Decrees his arduous theme:
Thus sang he—song severe, not winged by verse—
‘High on the summits of the Hills of God
There spreads a table-land immeasurable;
Not cherub's eye can grasp it: seraph's flight
Reach its remoter verge. Across it moves
Alone the ordered march of God's Decrees
From infinite distance on to infinite:
Their birth-place no man knows.’ Methinks I see them,
A cloudy pageant dim yet crowned by fire,
A cloudy pageant of advancing Gods,
With feet which tread that shadowy stage, nor less
With vans outstretched winnowing the air. A breath
Strikes on my brow; and strains I hear like sighs
Of seas round coasts far distant.

Child of Heaven,
The First-born, save thy Son, in those Decrees,
The Elect, the Immaculate, the Full of grace
Which, for that Son's sake, fenced thee from His Foe;
Foam-born from seas of Sanctity alone
The seas of all the Sanctities of God,
And borne—that Six Days' work as yet unwrought—
Above the heaving crests of things to be,

414

A Gift predestined, yet a Gift reserved;
Say, must that foot which treads yon waning orb
Tread later earth, our earth? It will not catch
Her taint; but where it treads, those other feet
Will leave ensanguined prints—the Feet of God.

Scotus.

Father Faber of the Oratory.

The Church of the London Oratory.

This thought is to be found in one of Father Faber's prose works.

University of Virginia Library

MURILLO'S PICTURE, ‘THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION’.