Sydney Thompson Dobell

Here you will find theLong PoemIn War-Time: A Prayer Of The Understandingof poet Sydney Thompson Dobell

In War-Time: A Prayer Of The Understanding

瞧,这是晚上。你,哦,太阳,拒绝你countenance, or is thy golden arm Shortened, or from thy shining place in heaven Art thou put down and lost? Neither hast thou Refused thy constant face, nor is thine arm Shortened, nor from thy principality Art thou deposed, oh sun. Ours, ours, the sin, The sorrow. From thy steadfast noon we turned Into the eastern shade-and this is night. Yet so revolves the axle of the world, And by that brief aversion wheels us round To morn, and rolls us on the larger paths Of annual duty. Thou observant moon, That dancest round the seasonable earth As David round the ark, but half thy ring In process, yet, complete, the circular whole Promotes thee, and expedes thy right advance, And all thy great desire of summer signs. And thou, oh sun, our centre, who thyself Art satellite, and, conscious of the far Archelion, in obedience of free will And native duty, as the good man walks Among the children's faces, with thine house About thee, least and greatest, first and last, Makest of the blue eternal holiday Thy glad perambulation; and thou, far Archelion, feudatory still, of one Not sovran nor in fee of paramount power; Moons round your worlds, worlds round your suns, suns round Such satraps as in orderly degree Confess a lordlier regent and pervade A vaster cycle-ye, so moved, commoved, Revolving and convolving, turn the heavens Upon the pivot of that summery star, Centre of all we know: and thou, oh star, Centre of all we know, chief crown of crowns, Who art the one in all, the all in one, And seest the ordered whole-nought uninvolved But all involved to one direct result Of multiform volution-in one pomp, One power, one tune, one time, upon one path Move with thee moving, Thou, amid thy host Marchest-ah whither? --Oh God, before Whom We marshal thus Thy legioned works to take The secret of Thy counsel, and array Congress and progress, and, with multitude As conquerors and to conquer, in consent Of universal law, approach Thy bound, Thine immemorial bound, and at Thy face Heaven and earth flee away; oh Thou Lord God, Whether oh absolute existence, Thou, The Maker, makest, and this fair we see Be but the mote and dust of that unseen Unsought unsearchable; or whether Thou Whose goings forth are from of old, around Thy going in mere effluence without care Breathest creation out into the cold Beyond Thee, and, within Thine ambient breath, So walkest everlasting as we walk The unportioned snows; or whether, meditating Eternity, self-centred, self-fulfilled, Self-continent, Thou thinkest and we live, A little while forgettest and we fade, Rememberest and we are, and this bright vision Wherein we move, nay all our total sum And story, be to Thee as to a man When in the drop and rising of a lid Lo the swift rack and fashion of a dream, No more; oh Thou inscrutable, whose ways Are not as ours, whose form we know not, voice Hear not, true work behold not, mystery Conceive not, who-as thunder shakes the world And rings a silver bell-hast sometime moved The tongue of man, but in Thy proper speech Wearest a human language on a word As limpets on a rock, who, as Eternal, Omnipotential, Infinite, Allwise, In measure of Thine operation hast No prime or term, in subject as in scheme No final end, in eidol as in act Nought but the perfect God; oh Thou Supreme, Inaudible, Invisible, Unknown, Thy will be done.