The Ballad of St. Barbara and other verses/For Four Guilds
FOR FOUR GUILDS:
I. The Glass-Stainers
To every Man his Mystery,A trade and only one:The masons make the hives of men,The domes of grey or dun,But we have wrought in rose and goldThe houses of the sun.
The shipwrights build the houses high,Whose green foundations swayAlive with fish like little flames,When the wind goes out to slay.But we abide with painted sailsThe cyclone of the day.
The weavers make the clothes of menAnd coats for everyone;They walk the streets like sunset clouds;But we have woven and spunIn scarlet or in golden-greenThe gay coats of the sun.
You whom the usurers and the lordsWith insolent liveries trod,Deep in dark church behold, aboveTheir lance-lengths by a rod,Where we have blazed the tabardOf the trumpeter of God.
II. The Bridge-Builders
In the world's whitest morningAs hoary with hope,The Builder of BridgesWas priest and was pope:And the mitre of mysteryAnd the canopy his,Who darkened the chasmsAnd domed the abyss.
To eastward and westwardSpread wings at his wordThe arch with the key-stoneThat stoops like a bird;That rides the wild airAnd the daylight cast under;The highway of danger,The gateway of wonder.
Of his throne were the thundersThat rivet and fixWild weddings of strangersThat meet and not mix; The town and the cornland;The bride and the groom:In the breaking of bridgesIs treason and doom.
But he bade us, who fashionThe road that can fly,That we build not too heavyAnd build not too high:Seeing alway that underThe dark arch's bendShine death and white daylightUnchanged to the end.
Who walk on his mercyWalk light, as he saith,Seeing that our lifeIs a bridge above death;And the world and its gardensAnd hills, as ye heard,Are born above spaceOn the wings of a bird.
Not high and not heavyIs building of his: When ye seal up the floodAnd forget the abyss,When your towers are uplifted,Your banners unfurled,In the breaking of bridgesIs the end of the world.
III. The Stone-Masons
We have graven the mountain of God with hands,As our hands were graven of God, they say,Where the seraphs burn in the sun like brandsAnd the devils carry the rains away;Making a thrift of the throats of hell,Our gargoyles gather the roaring rain,Whose yawn is more than a frozen yellAnd their very vomiting not in vain.
Wilder than all that a tongue can utter,Wiser than all that is told in words,The wings of stone of the soaring gutterFly out and follow the flight of the birds;The rush and rout of the angel warsStand out above the astounded street,Where we flung our gutters against the starsFor a sign that the first and the last shall meet.
We have graven the forest of heaven with hands,Being great with a mirth too gross for pride, In the stone that battered him Stephen standsAnd Peter himself is petrified:Such hands as have grubbed in the glebe for breadHave bidden the blank rock blossom and thrive,Such hands as have stricken a live man deadHave struck, and stricken the dead alive.
Fold your hands before heaven in praying,Lift up your hands into heaven and cry;But look where our dizziest spires are sayingWhat the hands of a man did up in the sky:Drenched before you have heard the thunder,White before you have felt the snow;For the giants lift up their hands to wonderHow high the hands of a man could go.
IV. The Bell-Ringers
The angels are singing like birds in a treeIn the organ of good St. Cecily:And the parson reads with his hand uponThe graven eagle of great St. John:But never the fluted pipes shall goLike the fifes of an army all a-row,Merrily marching down the streetTo the marts where the busy and idle meet;And never the brazen bird shall flyOut of the window and into the sky,Till men in cities and shires and shipsLook up at the living Apocalypse.
But all can hark at the dark of evenThe bells that bay like the hounds of heaven,Tolling and telling that over and under,In the ways of the air like a wandering thunder,The hunt is up over hills untrod:For the wind is the way of the dogs of God:From the tyrant's tower to the outlaw's denHunting the souls of the sons of men.Ruler and robber and pedlar and peer, Who will not harken and yet will hear;Filling men's heads with the hurry and humMaking them welcome before they come.
And we poor men stand under the steepleDrawing the cords that can draw the people,And in our leash like the leaping dogsAre God's most deafening demagogues:And we are but little, like dwarfs underground,While hang up in heaven the houses of sound,Moving like mountains that faith sets free,Yawning like caverns that roar with the sea,As awfully loaded, as airily buoyed,Armoured archangels that trample the void:Wild as with dancing and weighty with dooms,Heavy as their panoply, light as their plumes.
Neither preacher nor priest are we:Each man mount to his own degree:Only remember that just such a cordTosses in heaven the trumpet and swordSouls on their terraces, saints on their towers,Rise up in arms at alarum like ours:Glow like great watchfires that redden the skiesTitans whose wings are a glory of eyes, Crowned constellations by twelves and by sevens,Domed dominations more old than the heavens,Virtues that thunder and thrones that endureSway like a bell to the prayers of the poor.