Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.
By rose-hung river and light-foot rill
   There are who rest not; who think long
Till they discern as from a hill
   At the sun’s hour of morning song,
Known of souls only, and those souls free,
The sacred spaces of the sea.

THE EVE OF REVOLUTION

1

The trumpets of the four winds of the world
   From the ends of the earth blow battle; the night heaves,
With breasts palpitating and wings refurled,
   With passion of couched limbs, as one who grieves
Sleeping, and in her sleep she sees uncurled
   Dreams serpent-shapen, such as sickness weaves,
Down the wild wind of vision caught and whirled,
   Dead leaves of sleep, thicker than autumn leaves,
         Shadows of storm-shaped things,
         Flights of dim tribes of kings,
   The reaping men that reap men for their sheaves,
         And, without grain to yield,
         Their scythe-swept harvest-field
   Thronged thick with men pursuing and fugitives,
      Dead foliage of the tree of sleep,
Leaves blood-coloured and golden, blown from deep to deep.

2

I hear the midnight on the mountains cry
   With many tongues of thunders, and I hear
Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky
   With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,
And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,
   Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear,
A sound sublimer than the heavens are high,
   A voice more instant than the winds are clear,
         Say to my spirit, “Take
         Thy trumpet too, and make
   A rallying music in the void night’s ear,
         Till the storm lose its track,
         And all the night go back;
   Till, as through sleep false life knows true life near,
      Thou know the morning through the night,
And through the thunder silence, and through darkness light.”

3

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.
   The height of night is shaken, the skies break,
The winds and stars and waters come and go
   By fits of breath and light and sound, that wake
As out of sleep, and perish as the show
   Built up of sleep, when all her strengths forsake
The sense-compelling spirit; the depths glow,
   The heights flash, and the roots and summits shake
         Of earth in all her mountains,
         And the inner foamless fountains
   And wellsprings of her fast-bound forces quake;
         Yea, the whole air of life
         Is set on fire of strife,
   Till change unmake things made and love remake;
      Reason and love, whose names are one,
Seeing reason is the sunlight shed from love the sun.

4

The night is broken eastward; is it day,
   Or but the watchfires trembling here and there,
Like hopes on memory’s devastated way,
   In moonless wastes of planet-stricken air?
O many-childed mother great and grey,
   O multitudinous bosom, and breasts that bare
Our fathers’ generations, whereat lay
   The weanling peoples and the tribes that were,
         Whose new-born mouths long dead
         Those ninefold nipples fed,
   Dim face with deathless eyes and withered hair,
         Fostress of obscure lands,
         Whose multiplying hands
   Wove the world’s web with divers races fair
      And cast it waif-wise on the stream,
The waters of the centuries, where thou sat’st to dream;

5

O many-minded mother and visionary,
   Asia, that sawest their westering waters sweep
With all the ships and spoils of time to carry
   And all the fears and hopes of life to keep,
Thy vesture wrought of ages legendary
   Hides usward thine impenetrable sleep,
And thy veiled head, night’s oldest tributary,
   We know not if it speak or smile or weep.
         But where for us began
         The first live light of man
   And first-born fire of deeds to burn and leap,
         The first war fair as peace
         To shine and lighten Greece,
   And the first freedom moved upon the deep,
      God’s breath upon the face of time
Moving, a present spirit, seen of men sublime;

6

There where our east looks always to thy west,
   Our mornings to thine evenings, Greece to thee,
These lights that catch the mountains crest by crest,
   Are they of stars or beacons that we see?
Taygetus takes here the winds abreast,
   And there the sun resumes Thermopylæ;
The light is Athens where those remnants rest,
   And Salamis the sea-wall of that sea.
         The grass men tread upon
         Is very Marathon,
   The leaves are of that time-unstricken tree
         That storm nor sun can fret
         Nor wind, since she that set
   Made it her sign to men whose shield was she;
      Here, as dead time his deathless things,
Eurotas and Cephisus keep their sleepless springs.

7

O hills of Crete, are these things dead?  O waves,
   O many-mouthed streams, are these springs dry?
Earth, dost thou feed and hide now none but slaves?
   Heaven, hast thou heard of men that would not die?
Is the land thick with only such men’s graves
   As were ashamed to look upon the sky?
Ye dead, whose name outfaces and outbraves
   Death, is the seed of such as you gone by?
         Sea, have thy ports not heard
         Some Marathonian word
   Rise up to landward and to Godward fly?
         No thunder, that the skies
         Sent not upon us, rise
   With fire and earthquake and a cleaving cry?
      Nay, light is here, and shall be light,
Though all the face of the hour be overborne with night.

8

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.
   The night is broken northward; the pale plains
And footless fields of sun-forgotten snow
   Feel through their creviced lips and iron veins
Such quick breath labour and such clean blood flow
   As summer-stricken spring feels in her pains
When dying May bears June, too young to know
   The fruit that waxes from the flower that wanes;
         Strange tyrannies and vast,
         Tribes frost-bound to their past,
   Lands that are loud all through their length with chains,
         Wastes where the wind’s wings break,
         Displumed by daylong ache
   And anguish of blind snows and rack-blown rains,
      And ice that seals the White Sea’s lips,
Whose monstrous weights crush flat the sides of shrieking ships;

9

Horrible sights and sounds of the unreached pole,