O seeming powerless, omnipotent, O quiet bride of Winter, grown so great This hoary King is driven to resent The slow erosion of his crown and state Til, lashing out in hail and furious ice He makes his subjects of your reign despair. Then, mild still, soothing his bloody rage, You cut a lock from off his steel-white hair. He would not part with power at any price; Now he must bow, and yield the world’s vast stage. In truth, there waits for you no glorious reign, Marked by brash tempests that uproot the soul And teach it to know Heaven’s bone and vein By exodus from flesh. Nor shall you toll The silent bell struck by each flake of snow, The which, in smothering both wight and weed, Prepares us for the earth-shroud of the grave. No—yours is a gentler, less rigid creed. Less rigid, but no less your strength will show: Thus the bent stem his wind-tossed head doth save. Nor were you born in beauty, but from sleet And black thick silt was built your nursery cramped. All friendless your pale eye the world did meet, That was with hated Winter’s vision stamped. Where did you learn, thus shunned, your love of Man? For sure you love us—else, why so delight Our finest senses by your quiet grace? Summer’s profusion feeds thin shallow sight, But, as your showers sink where no spade can, So, through the eye, you soothe a deeper place. Goddess who draws from dust, root, sap and bark! You scatter from your hand a thousand tombs That seem impervious as death—yet mark— Where each mote falls, there is not one but blooms From such strait prison into singing blood. Thus Lazarus on Lazarus you raise, And give his hands the strength to rend apart The very walls that would his breath encase, And smite Death’s house to ashes where it stood. Nor is thanksgiving absent from the heart Of wood or flesh, that thus you taught to beat: The cardinal has changed his cold-snap dirge For a new ballad, strange and metered fleet. The wild lily stands upon the verge Of splitting night with her five-petalled sun. Long exiled by ice in sight of land, The waves unbound clamber each other o’er As, pulling each the other down to sand, Years-absent sailors now half-fall, now run In eagerness to kiss their native shore.