Preludes 1921-1922

Excerpt

Though black the night, I know upon the sky,A little paler now, if clouds were none,The stars would be. Husht now the thickets lie,And now the birds are moving one by one,—A note—and now from bush to bush it goes—A prelude—now victorious light alongThe west will come till every bramble glowsWith wash of sunlit dew shaken in song.Shaken in song; O heart, be ready now,Cold in your night, be ready now to sing.Dawn as it wakes the sleeping bird on boughShall summon you to instant reckoning,—She is your dawn, O heart,—sing, till the nightOf death shall come, the gospel of her light.

And Jonathan too had honour in his heart,Jonathan who with an armour-bearer wentAlone by Michmash to the Philistines,And met a spray of swords because of courageThat made him single greater than a host.Jonathan too had known his battles, daredAt any hour the coming of death, becauseIn twilight silence he had walked with God,Read Him in blossoms and the mountain brooks,And learnt that death, well known, can alter nothing.He was a brown man, burnt with love of summer,His young beard curled, and russet as the eyesThat looked on life, and feared it, yet were master,Because they knew the tyranny they feared,Measured it, learnt it, gazed it into nothing.

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And now he watched the boy, the son of Jesse,David with hair like maples in October,And skin that women loving coveted,David with eyes that often by the sheepfoldsHad looked through leaves up to the folds of heaven,And seeing them crammed with golden fleece of stars,Had known how the blood can run because of beauty.Jonathan watched him take the armour offGiven by Saul, and choose the bright smooth pebbles,And walk out from the Israelitish throngInto the field against the Philistine giant.Watching, he snatched his sword and cried to Saul,"Bid him come back. This murder must not be."And as he spoke, he knew the words were treason,His heart alone in all the world was sureThat David was the Lord's appointed arm,To meet this bulk of dirt, this giant fearBrandishing out of the loathly camps of evil.And before Saul could answer, he put downThe sword, and said, "I love him. Let him go."

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But the words, I love him, were not for his father Saul,Hardly Jonathan knowing he spake them out.But as he looked on David love was there,Waking from that in David that he himselfA little was, and always greatly shapingHimself towards, so that his name was spokenFamously in Saul's kingdom. It was courage,The clean heart, undivided in its doing,The purpose that, being bodied in the brain,Thenceforth knew every trickling argumentThat fell from tongues of persuading circumstance,As lures of evil ever threatening life,That Jonathan loved above all enterprise.He knew, or the rarer man within him knew,That once your yea in holy meditationHad shaped itself in the perfect syllable,Thenceforth no nay from any other tongueOr wise or passionate or masterful,Could be listened to without the shame of sinCorrupting all your constancy for ever....