EPILOGUE

Into a land

Storm-wrought, a place of quakes, all thunder-scarred,

Helpless, degraded, desolate,

Peace, the White Angel, comes.

Her eyes are as a mother's. Her good hands

Are comforting, and helping; and her voice

Falls on the heart, as, after Winter, Spring

Falls on the World, and there is no more pain.

And, in her influence, hope returns, and life,

And the passion of endeavour: so that, soon,

The idle ports are insolent with keels;

The stithies roar, and the mills thrum

With energy and achievement; weald and wold

Exult; the cottage-garden teems

With innocent hues and odours; boy and girl

Mate prosperously; there are sweet women to kiss;

There are good women to breed. In a golden fog,

A large, full-stomached faith in kindliness

All over the world, the nation, in a dream

Of money and love and sport, hangs at the paps

Of well-being, and so

Goes fattening, mellowing, dozing, rotting down

Into a rich deliquium of decay.

Then, if the Gods be good,

Then, if the Gods be other than mischievous,

Down from their footstools, down

With a million-throated shouting, swoops and storms

War, the Red Angel, the Awakener,

The Shaker of Souls and Thrones; and at her heel

Trail grief, and ruin, and shame!

The woman weeps her man, the mother her son,

The tenderling its father. In wild hours,

A people, haggard with defeat,

Asks if there be a God; yet sets its teeth,

Faces calamity, and goes into the fire

Another than it was. And in wild hours

A people, roaring ripe

With victory, rises, menaces, stands renewed,

Sheds its old piddling aims,

Approves its virtue, puts behind itself

The comfortable dream, and goes,

Armoured and militant,

New-pithed, new-souled, new-visioned, up the steeps

To those great altitudes, whereat the weak

Live not. But only the strong

Have leave to strive, and suffer, and achieve.