(Suggested by a line in the magnificent opening description of Miss A.
MARY F. ROBINSON’S “Janet Fisher.”)
God’s wrath is travelling overhead,
God’s wrath upon the wing,
Which makes man cower in his bed
If he has heaven’s strength to dread,
And hides some guilty thing.
The booming peals of thunder shake
These walls and the black night;
They make the mountains thrill and quake:
I listen as I lie awake,
While Earth and Heaven fight.
What seek’st thou with repeated stroke,
Wrath, as thou hurriest past?
Is it, through night’s scorched riven cloak,
Some huge old solitary oak
Or some doomed storm-bent mast?
The mountains court thy blow and each
Unfathomable abyss,
Where thy white blasting stroke may reach
Some Titan still unstruck whose speech
Is the wild torrent’s hiss.
There mayst thou, where presumptuous pines
To climb God’s sky aspire,
Do battle ’gainst their serried lines,
And ere the lurid storm-dawn shines,
Strike dead their kings with fire.
There may thy peal, enclosed by rock,
Long struggle and die slow;
And while it seeks some gorge’s lock,
Growl, laugh and roar, and fiercely mock
Each sound of human woe.
Along the backs of the mountain chain
Where thou awhile mayst cling,
O’er the boundless sea and the endless plain,
With driven hail and sheeted rain
Thick shaken from thy wing,
Thou hurriest on, black cloud of wrath,
Thou hater of human walls,
Shaking men’s souls upon thy path
As thou dost shake the beams, like lath,
In battlemented halls;
Or pausing, broodest o’er the night,
In silence gathering strength;
While, ever and anon, the light
Quivers from out thee, dazzling bright,
And shows earth’s breadth and length.
So have I seen thee, dreaded Power,
Show Venice in her sleep
More vivid than at noon’s fierce hour,
With every palace, dome, and tower
That rises from the deep;
Tinting the briny city pink,
In one long quivering flash;
Then snatching back, ere you could think,
All into darkness black as ink--
Dumb save the ceaseless plash.
Then on, and on, black cloud of fire,
Upon thy stormy ways,
To vault the shaken sky with ire,
To shatter the presumptuous spire,
To make the forest blaze.
To roll in folds of lurid steam
O’er ocean’s rolling waves,
With rolling peals of sound that seem
To ask account for the dead that teem
In all its oozy caves.
By sea or land, by night or day,
Thy savage booming voice
Makes, as thou hurriest on thy way,
And all earth’s shaken pillars sway,
My awe-struck soul rejoice.
Even as stormy passions here,
Battling with God above,
Revenge and wrath, despair and fear,
Make glorious music to my ear,
Beyond all songs of love.