Chapter III

Oh Sun, that yet will my spring thoughts astound,
How often this lone mendicant you found
Stripped in your presence of all earthly things.
A happy dervish whirling round and round.

You were his tree of incense and his feast,
You were his wagon and his harnessed beast,
His singing brother, yet his tyrant hard,
With whip and spur and shout that never ceased.

He thought of Freedom that rides round with you
Healing the nations with a crystal dew,
The comrade of your car, with Science there,
Making the ways of men forever new.

Would we might lift a mighty battle-cry.
Nations and mendicants, and shake your sky:
Would that you caught us singing as one man
That song I sang when begging days began
Hearing it in every beam on high:
“Man’s spirit-darkness shall forever die.”

DANTE

Would we were lean and grim, and shaken with hate
Like Dante, fugitive, o’er-wrought with cares,
And climbing bitterly the stranger’s stairs,
Yet Love, Love, Love, divining: finding still
Beyond dark Hell the penitential hill,
And blessed Beatrice beyond the grave.
Jehovah lead us through the wilderness:
God make our wandering brave.

THE COMET OF PROPHECY

I had hold of the comet’s mane
A-clinging like grim death.
I passed the dearest star of all,
The one with violet breath:
The blue-gold-silver Venus star,
And almost lost my hold....
Again I ride the chaos-tide,
Again the winds are cold.

I look ahead, I look above,
I look on either hand.
I cannot sight the fields I seek,
The holy No-Man’s-Land.
And yet my heart is full of faith.
My comet splits the gloom,
His red mane slaps across my face,
His eyes like bonfires loom.

My comet smells the far off grass
Of valleys richly green.
My comet sights strange continents
My sad eyes have not seen,
We gallop through the whirling mist.
My good steed cannot fail.
And we shall reach that flowery shore,
And wisdom’s mountain scale.

And I shall find my wizard cloak
Beneath that alien sky
And touching black soil to my lips
Begin to prophesy.
While chaos sleet and chaos rain
Beat on an Indian Drum
There in tomorrow’s moon I stand
And speak the age to come.

“Confucius appeared, according to Mencius, one of his most distinguished followers, at a crisis in the nation’s history. ‘The world,’ he says, ‘had fallen into decay, and right principles had disappeared. Perverse discourses and oppressive deeds were waxen rife. Ministers murdered their rulers, and sons their fathers. Confucius was frightened by what he saw,--and he undertook the work of reformation.’

“He was a native of the state of Lu, a part of the modern Shantung.... Lu had a great name among the other states of Chow ... etc.” Rev. James Legge, Professor of Chinese, University of Oxford.

SHANTUNG, OR THE EMPIRE OF CHINA IS CRUMBLING DOWN

_Dedicated to William Rose Benét_