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The Martyrs' Idyl, and Shorter Poems

Chapter 15: SANCTUARY
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About This Book

The collection opens with a long dramatic idyl that stages the arrest, trial, and martyrdom of a young Christian woman and the spiritual awakening of a soldier, rendered in scene-like poetic dialogue and sacred allusion. The shorter poems that follow range from pastoral and elegiac lyrics to devotional and liturgical pieces, meditating on faith, loss, memory, nature, and ritual with formal diction, musical cadences, and classical and religious imagery.


SANCTUARY

HIGH above hate I dwell:
O storms! farewell.
Though at my sill your daggered thunders play,
Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,
To me they sound more small
Than a young fay’s footfall:
Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low
In Long Ago,
And winnowed into silence on that wind
Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.
Hither Felicity
Doth climb to me,
And bank me in with turf and marjoram
Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb;
With golden barberry-wreath,
And bluets thick beneath;
One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest
With bud-red breast,
Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage
Float less than April fog below our hermitage.