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Greek wayfarers, and other poems

Chapter 9: THE GLORY

By Edwina Stanton Babcock

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Mythology, Legends & Folklore Poetry

About This Book

A lyrical collection evokes ancient and modern Greece through mythic retellings, ritual scenes, and landscape vignettes. Poems range from dramatic addresses to figures of legend to intimate portraits of contemporary Easter processions, seafaring rites, funerary stelæ, and rural labor, using vivid sensory detail of temples, hills, and the sea. Themes of memory, reverence, loss, and cultural continuity recur as the poet moves between narrative lyric, ekphrastic responses to antiquities, and pastoral sketches. The result is a varied formal palette that intertwines classical allusion with observations of everyday life and seasonal celebration.

THE GLORY

Good Friday Night, Athens, 1914.

Myriad candles windy flaring

Over faces stilled in prayer;

Silken banners, icon-bearing,

Jewelled vestments, laces rare—

All the people in a daze,

Walking in a candle-haze,

Of uplifted pure amaze.

All the people in a stream,

Crowding in an Easter dream;

While choragic song

Pours from out the throng—

“It is the Glory—holy holiday.”

So, smiling, good Athenians say.

Priests in choir, softly singing,

Carry the Pantokrator,

While the city-bells are ringing

In their wild two-toned uproar;

All the people, in a mass,

With the purple-robed Papas,

Bearing crosses made of brass,

Scarlet cap, and fustanelle,

Turkish fez, and bead, and bell,

While choragic song

Leads the trancèd throng.

“It is the Glory—holy holiday,”

So, smiling, good Athenians say.

Colored lights, and dripping torches,

Burn on Lykabettos crags;

In the narrow streets and porches

Whole-sheep roasting never flags.

Bonfires all the country light,

Up to dark Hymettus’ height,

Making all the hillsides bright.

Still the surging crowds advance,

Moving, moving in a trance;

While choragic song

Leads the trancèd throng.

“It is the Glory—holy holiday,”

So, smiling, good Athenians say.

In their wistful majesty,

See them waiting for a sign,

Of religious unity

From the human or divine;

Faithful, yearning, poor, uncouth,

Pagan-born, yet craving truth—

Old grey-heads and stripling youth.

All the people in a stream,

Holding candles in a dream,

While choragic song

Swells throughout the throng.

“It is the Glory—holy holiday,”

This, smiling, good Athenians say.