His path, doth he permit to force her chains
A soft Persuader coursing through his veins,

An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:
What one the flash disdains;

What one so gives it grace.
But is he rightly manful in her eyes,

A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,
A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,

Desireing and desireable he shines;
As peaches, that have caught the sun's uprise

And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.
Earth fills him with her juices, without fear

That she will cast him drunken down the steeps.
All woman is she to this man most dear;

He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:
She conscient, she sensitive, in him;

With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:
By him humaner made; by his keen spurs

Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb,
Her crazy adoration of big thews,

Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,
Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world

In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.
This man, this hero, works not to destroy;

This godlike - as the rock in ocean stands; -
He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands

Creative; in his edifice has joy.
How strength may serve for purity is shown

When he himself can scourge to make it clean.
Withal his pitch of pride would not disown

A sober world that walks the balanced mean
Between its tempters, rarelyoverthrown:

And such at times his army's march has been.
Near is he to great Nature in the thought

Each changing Season intimately saith,
That nought save apparition knows the death;

To the God-lighted mind of man 'tis nought.
She counts not loss a word of any weight;

It may befal his passions and his greeds
To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,

But life gone breathless will she reinstate.
Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,

When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,
Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,

Strike camp, and onward, like the wind's cloud-fleets.
Unresting she, unresting he, from change

To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;
She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,

Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.
No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,

She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;
But he, the flower at head and soil at root,

Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.
And that way seems he bound; that way the road,

With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,
Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,

He travels, urged by some internal goad.
Dares he behold the thing he is, what thing

He would become is in his mind its child;
Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;

For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled.
So moves he forth in faith, if he has made

His mind God's temple, dedicate to truth.
Earth's nourishing delights, no more gainsaid,

He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth.
Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls;

The star of sky upon his footway cast;
Then match in him who holds his tempters fast,

The body's love and mind's, whereof the soul's.
Then Earth her man for woman finds at last,

To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.
Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate?

Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood;
The sly Persuader snaky in his blood;

With her the barren Huntress alternate;
His rough refractory off on kicking heels

To rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed;
And as a torrentstream where cattle grazed,

His tumbled world. What, then, the faith she feels?
May not his aspect, like her own so fair

Reflexively, the central force belie,
And he, the once wild ocean storming sky,

Be rebel at the core? What hope is there?
'Tis that in each recovery he preserves,

Between his upper and his nether wit,
Sense of his march ahead, more brightly lit;

He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves;
With such a grasp upon his brute as tells

Of wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.
A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a Sun

Resplendent springs, to faith refreshed compels.
Poem: The Cageing Of Ares

[Iliad, v. V. 385 - Dedicated to the Council at The Hague.]
How big of breast our Mother Gaea laughed

At sight of her boy Giants on the leap
Each over other as they neighboured home,

Fronting the day's descent across green slopes,
And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced.

Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,
Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,

It signalled some adventurous master-trick
To set Olympians buzzing in debate,

Lest it might be their godhead undermined,
The Tyranny menaced. Ephialtes high

On shoulders of his brother Otos waved
For the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,

Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roar
While Otos aped the prisoner's wrists and knees,

With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;
Till Gaea's lap receiving them, they stretched,

And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,
Burst the hot story out of throats of both,

Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut
The hurried spout. And as when drifting storm

Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon
A peak, a forest mound, a valley's gleam

Of grass and the river's crooks and snaky coils,
Signification marvellous she caught,

Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,
Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at last

Subsided, and the serious naked deed,
With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,

Stood in her sight confirmed: she could believe
That these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,

These two made up of lion, bear and fox,
Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,

Still by the reckoning infants among men,
Had done the deed to strike the Titan host

In envy dumb, in envious heart elate: