The Poetical Works of George Barlow :: :: University of Virginia Library

I retain these Sonnets, written in 1881, as accurately expressing the sadness felt at that time by thoughtful minds, overshadowed by the gloomy suggestions of Positivism and materialistic science. To-day, I need hardly say, the universe, far from seeming Godless and material, appears to me to be simply saturated with God and spiritual potency. G. B. August, 1902.

I.

Love is worth having: this we know and preach.
Though heartless, mindless, soulless, Nature be,
And all the voices of her wild white sea
Have nought of loving helpful God to teach;
Though, piercing far beyond the stars, we reach
More stars,—but no high heaven of sacred glee;
Though summer laughing in the dense green tree
Hath but a mocking restless helpless speech;
Though this be so, yet love is passing fair
And more than ever do we seek her face,
And seek her breast, and nestle in her hair,
And dream of her delight in every place.
What have we left to do, now God is gone,
Save just to love and weep and labour on?

II.

And yet the sadness! All the flowers are dead.
The blue skies bend above us,—but no more
They fill with strange glad light the laughing shore,
Nor buoyant swings the lily's orange head,
Nor smiles the moss-rose, large and sweet and red:
Hushed are the joyous sounds we heard of yore;
The planet's sweet spring-days of love are o'er;
The planet's summer-jocund days have fled.

We know, and knowing, cease to love and feel:—
O great God, art thou dead,—canst thou not be?
May we no more adore thy face and kneel?
Grim is our triumph, and forlorn are we.
Mournful the silvery moonrays round us steal,
And very mournful shines the Godless sea.

III.

Have we been loving, when we fondly dreamed
God loved,—and watched and guarded us and held?
Is the swift world by soulless wings impelled
And hath the sun for ever heartless gleamed?
Are the blue depths just blue and nothing more
That once with countless habitations teemed
And steps o'er which great armies used to pour
And walls that with the eternal glory beamed?

O simple sweet world hanging in the void
Of tremulous ether, terribly alone
Thou art,—by thine own innate forces buoyed
And through the air's dense populous eddies thrown
With pale Chance at the helm. O world forlorn,
Better it had been hadst thou ne'er been born!

IV.

And is the Christ who rose with heaven-bright wings
Dead, dead for ever? Did he never rise
And cleave with helm and plume the shadowy skies?
What is this message that our sad age brings?
Oh, weird the low disastrous whisper rings
And fast around the darkening planet flies:
“Man stands alone; all former creeds were lies;
Truth open every heavenly doorway flings!”

The doors are open, and we gaze in dread
Thinking perchance some living God to see,—
Great eyes that burn from some divine vast head,
Or golden sceptre flaming terribly:
But our own shadow we behold instead,
And but for that the rooms would empty be!

V.

Something is left: to love and wrestle on
Beneath the soulless glaring loveless sky;
To toil and bleed and suffer, till we die
When the swift circle of our years hath gone.
Sweet selfless love at least is not a lie;
Love hath its own eternal Godhead still,
And we may live as Gods through might of will
And mix our souls with all thoughts pure and high.

Strength is in Man, if Man created God
And through his own thought wove the awful Name
And reared God's great grand palace on earth's sod
And ringed it round with hell's red guardian flame:—
Strength is in Man,—and he with fire is shod
And he the earth's wide fruitful fields may claim.