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A DAY AT CASTROGIOVANNI: 3. DEMETER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Here stood thy temple, on the mountain's horn
Last Line: Great mother, vanished from the mountain's horn.
Subject(s): Demeter; Goddesses & Gods; Mankind; Mythology; Religion; Ceres; Human Race; Theology


HERE stood thy temple, on the mountain's horn,
Lifted high over the subjected plain;
Here rose the sower's incense in the morn;
Here pealed his loud thanksgiving for the rain.
Demeter, goddess of the fruitful earth,
Our Mother of the Wheat, behold thy hearth!

Vacant the rock, of every herb swept clean,
Juts naked in the blue sky, -- all is gone:
Tall grow the crops beneath; the fields lie green;
The rain cloud has not failed; the sun has shone.
Were the hands crazed that reared thy altar-stone
And laid the first-fruits of the world thereon?

Long generations knelt in this hoar place
And filled thy marble hall with prayer and praise;
And sire and stripling of the mountain race
Paid here thy golden dues and went their ways, --
Thy children, -- vanished all in Time's advance, --
Vanished their temple! O dense ignorance!

Yet surely there are gods -- thou or another,
Some happier offspring of eternal mind;
Nor halts man's adoration, mighty Mother,
Nor all his yearning through the world to find;
All things have had his worship, -- earth, sea, air;
Oh, unto whom now shall he lift up prayer?

From old religion and that fair array
Of beauty and of love once eminent,
He turned unto the light, clearer than day,
Within his breast, and thought it heaven-sent;
He throned invisible a world ideal;
Again the thousand years their will reveal.

Crescent and Cross, with equal carnage wet,
Rode a long age the aye-revolving skies;
They are declining now; soon shall they set;
But over man shall other heavens arise,
And other thoughts and other rites appear,
And other forms shall the old faith endear.

Temple and shrine have fallen to the ground;
Minster and spire by truth deserted lie;
Minaret and mosque have heard a far roar sound,
And tremble in their little squares of sky;
All ancient superstition has been doomed --
Soon shall the stars see the old world entombed.

The sorceries of midnight and moonshine,
Brewers of witchcraft, dabbling in eclipse,
Went out long since on that dark border-line
Where the old world into the new world slips;
Now go the gods from every land away --
So great a dawn is broadening into day.

And gladly we behold the great event
That frees our cities from the hooded fear;
And joyfully we take the element
Of nature for our habitation here;
Ours, not another's: but old woes abide;
Not yet the soul is wholly purified.

We will not mourn, deserted by the gods
By us so much beloved, the gods divine,
Though on them also fall the solemn clods,
As on our earthen sleep where we recline;
Ill is he bred, and foolish draws his breath,
Who has not learned to live life-long with death.

Once, O Demeter, was thy woe as ours,
And, like our own, all mortal was thy mood;
Then, weeping, thou didst crave through orphaned hours
Holy responses to lorn motherhood;
And when thy wandering through the world was o'er,
Men found thee sitting by Eleusis' shore.

A light was in thy face; not of our sphere
Nor of the world Olympian that clear beam;
And from them passed the old religious fear
Who there beheld the Resurrection gleam;
And thou didst shrine in sacred rites that word
Which first by us was in thy temple heard.

Ah, desolate I found that pleasant shore
Where sat thy temple, once the awe of Greece;
From later gods we hold an ampler store,
And still the granaries of the world increase;
But that great word was moulded not in vain
Upon man's lips, the planter of the grain.

The spirit-thronged world has passed away,
And shorn of terror is the sun's eclipse;
Science has dulled our wonder day by day;
No awe, no silence, lingers on our lips;
For deity in things we do not look;
Now closed to all the gods is nature's book.

Yet, though man grows in truth from more to more,
Old forces through our mystic being sweep;
The soul remembereth its holy lore;
Some moods habitual to mankind we keep;
We believe; though time forever on the scroll
Buries the early writing of the soul.

Lo, I believed in all the gods in turn,
And know they have no being but in me;
All is the form of what doth inly burn,
Up from the fetich to eternity;
Wherever man doth pray, and finds faith there,
I kneel beside him and repeat his prayer.

O Thou of many names, whom I invoke,
Thought in our souls and breath within our lungs,
One is the burden of the human yoke,
Though many are the earth's confused tongues;
Christian and Moslem, Buddhist, Pagan, Greek,
A thousand dialects, the same prayer speak.

Illusion all; for only man is real,
Dreaming on truth through symbols known to sense;
Of his own heart is formed each new ideal
That fires the nations with its eloquence;
So spring-like through the centuries ever ran
The resurrection of the hope of man.

Thou wilt not answer, who in us art power;
Yet quicker is the beating of my heart,
Seeing from year to year, and hour to hour,
The joyful springtime in this old world start,
And in me feeling the fresh power of man
Unfold, and recreate what time began.

For now creation is, not long ago
In chaos; chaos reigned not on the deep;
Order is all of nature that we know.
Which, changing all, itself unchanged doth keep;
And true creation is the soul's alone --
A light that grows upon the vast unknown.

O foul and bloody strife, since time began,
Up from the beast to man's imperial mould!
O long his empire-toil, since he was man,
The soul's confederation to unfold!
And many heavens he scaled ere Bethlehem's star
Hymned human love above all gods that are!

He doth prevail, who masters, age by age,
The secret forces that through nature ply,
And with the changes of the mind grows sage, --
Whose faith burns brighter as the old truths die;
Truth is the cloud, moulded by every storm;
Faith, like the rainbow, changes not its form.

He hath transcended nature -- such a flame
Is nourished on his body; he shall rise,
Remembering the altars whence he came,
To be for all the nations sacrifice;
Nor only for far ages is the fruit --
Eternal beams did in his first loves shoot.

There is no truth save what to him is known;
There is no beauty save within his eye;
There is no love but what in him has grown,
And only in his mandate right doth lie;
Justice and mercy his, and good and ill,
And virtue throneless save within his will.

No longer outwardly shall godhood shine,
To tend the flock, the ripened field to thresh;
Nor only Christ shall harbor love divine
Within the tabernacle of our flesh;
But every soul shall be that form of grace,
And universal man love's dwelling-place.

This is the faith, the crown of many years,
That long has gathered prescience in his heart;
Now shall it run its course through blood and tears
Wherever from the world the gods depart;
Sealed by this intuition, over all,
That truth doth unto resurrection fall.

Oh, fain to love the gods, the gods divine,
He clasped unto his breast the phantom fair
That emanates from nature and doth shine
From isle and mount on visionary air;
And thee he deified, O Mother-Love,
And throned thee on the rock, his fields above.

Each race in turn a mighty harvest reaps,
And shares with gods the glory of its toil;
And old divinity forever keeps
Some portion in the consecrated soil;
And what was sacred once is sacred still --
Lo, great Demeter, I salute thy hill.

Though born too late to bring unto thy shrine
From scanty stores a poor man's offering,
The empire of another world is mine,
Whose only treasure is the lyre I bring;
I lay it down upon the naked rock,
And on thy gates invisible I knock.

O Giver of the Corn, thy child is dead,
And Greece lies buried by the sounding sea;
A greater sun uprears a mightier head
On a new land where many oceans be;
And where the bison and the reindeer ran
A world of wheat renews the hope of man.

I thank thee for our food through sun and rain,
The summer's wealth, the winter's garnered store;
I thank thee for the rising of the grain;
And ever thee I thank, and more and more,
For the hope hid in kernels of the corn,
Great Mother, vanished from the mountain's horn.





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