King Alfred's Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Why ever your mind will ye trouble with hate,
As the icy-cold sea when it rears
Its billows waked-up by the wind?
Why make such an out-cry against your weird fate,
That she cannot keep you from fears,
Nor save you from sorrows assign'd?

Why cannot ye now the due bitterness bide
Of death, (as the Lord hath decreed,)
That hurries to-you-ward each day?
Now can ye not see him still tracking beside
Each thing that is born of earth's breed,
The birds and the beasts, as ye may?

106

Death also for man in like manner tracks out
Dread hunter! this middle earth through,
And bites as he runs evermore;
He will not forsake, when he searches about,
His prey, till he catches it too
And finds what he sought for before.

A sad thing it is, if we cannot await
His bidding, poor burghers of earth,
But wilfully strive with him still;
Like birds or wild beasts, when they haste in their hate
To rage with each other in wrath
And wrestle to quell and to kill.

But he that would hate in the deep of his heart
Another, unrighteous is he,
And worse then a bird or a beast;
But best is the man who would freely impart
To a brother, whoever he be,
Full worth for his work at the least:

That is, he should love all the good at his best,
And tenderly think of the bad,
As we have spoken before;
The Man he should love with his soul—for the rest
His sins he should hate, and be glad
To see them cut off evermore.