For the first time I behold you uprising,

Rumoured, remotest, incredible war-god.

For, blazing, the god

With one sweep of the scythe mows down

The crop of the nation's roots, and the harvest begins.

Godhead at last! And we who so often failed

To hold fast to the peaceful god, are suddenly seized by the war-god;

Hurled is his brand, while over the heart full of home

Blood-red the heaven screams where thundering he dwells.

Blessed am I, beholding the possessed. Long, long ere this

Our dramas seemed unreal,

Nor did the symbols used make a decisive appeal.

Beloved, now speaks like a seer old Time Blind,

from the spirit of yore. Hark.

You ne'er heard it before. But now you're the trees

Which the most mighty of winds louder and louder streams through.

For three days, is it true? Am I really hymning the horror,

Really that god whom as one of the olden times,

Distant and only remembering, I was wont to believe and admire?

Like a volcanic peak he lay to the westward. Sometimes

Flaming. Sometimes a-smoke. Sorrowing, godlike.

Only perhaps some district near to his borders

Would quake. But we raised aloft our undamaged lyres

To others: to which of the future gods?

And now up rose he. He stands. Higher

Than standing towers. Higher

Than the inbreathed air of the days just gone by,

He stands. He transcends. And we? We merge into one together,

Into a new kind of being, mortally animate through him.

So too am I no more. Out of the general heart

My heart is beating in tune; and the general mouth

Is forcing my lips apart.

And yet in the night there blares like sirens on shipboard

In me a questioning, blares for the way, the way.

Does the god see it above over his lofty shoulder?

Is he a light-house beam cast over future storms

Which have long sought us? Has he foreknowledge?

Can he foresee and know, this rending divinity,

He, the destroyer of everything known to us? Long known

And lovingly, all that we trustfully knew. And now sprawl

The houses round us like ruins of his temple. Uprising

He scornfully thrust them from him and rose up into the skies.

Even now they were summer skies. Skies of summer.