PROLOGUE TO THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY

Fire, and behind the breathless flight of fire

Thunder that quickens fear and quells desire,

Make bright and loud the terror of the night

Wherein the soul sees only wrath for light.

Wrath winged by love and sheathed by grief in steel

Sets on the front of crime death's withering seal.

The heaving horror of the storms of sin

Brings forth in fear the lightning hid therein,

And flashes back to darkness: truth, found pure

And perfect, asks not heaven if shame endure.

What life and death were his whose raging song

Bore heaven such witness of the wild world's wrong,

What hand was this that grasped such thunder, none

Knows: night and storm seclude him from the sun.

By daytime none discerns the fire of Mars:

Deep darkness bares to sight the sterner stars,

The lights whose dawn seems doomsday. None may tell

Whence rose a world so lit from heaven and hell.

Life-wasting love, hate born of raging lust,

Fierce retribution, fed with death's own dust

And sorrow's pampering poison, cross and meet,

And wind the world in passion's winding-sheet.

So, when dark faith in faith's dark ages heard

Falsehood, and drank the poison of the Word,

Two shades misshapen came to monstrous birth,

A father fiend in heaven, a thrall on earth:

Man, meanest born of beasts that press the sod,

And die: the vilest of his creatures, God.

A judge unjust, a slave that praised his name,

Made life and death one fire of sin and shame.

And thence reverberate even on Shakespeare's age

A light like darkness crossed his sunbright stage.

Music, sublime as storm or sorrow, sang

Before it: tempest like a harpstring rang.

The fiery shadow of a name unknown

Rose, and in song's high heaven abides alone.