Prologue to The Broken Heart

The mightiest choir of song that memory hears     Gave England voice for fifty lustrous years.     Sunrise and thunder fired and shook the skies     That saw the sun-god Marlowe's opening eyes.     The morn's own music, answered of the sea,     Spake, when his living lips bade Shakespeare be,     And England, made by Shakespeare's quickening breath     Divine and deathless even till life be death,     Brought forth to time such godlike sons of men     That shamefaced love grows pride, and now seems then.     Shame that their day so shone, so sang, so died,     Remembering, finds remembrance one with pride.     That day was clouding toward a stormlit close     When Ford's red sphere upon the twilight rose.     Sublime with stars and sunset fire, the sky     Glowed as though day, nigh dead, should never die.     Sorrow supreme and strange as chance or doom     Shone, spake, and shuddered through the lustrous gloom.     Tears lit with love made all the darkening air     Bright as though death's dim sunrise thrilled it there     And life re-risen took comfort. Stern and still     As hours and years that change and anguish fill,     The strong secluded spirit, ere it woke,     Dwelt dumb till power possessed it, and it spoke.     Strange, calm, and sure as sense of beast or bird,     Came forth from night the thought that breathed the word;     That chilled and thrilled with passion-stricken breath     Halls where Calantha trod the dance of death.     A strength of soul too passionately pure     To change for aught that horror bids endure,     To quail and wail and weep faint life away     Ere sovereign sorrow smite, relent, and slay,     Sustained her silent, till her bridal bloom     Changed, smiled, and waned in rapture toward the tomb.     Terror twin-born with pity kissed and thrilled     The lips that Shakespeare's word or Webster's filled:     Here both, cast out, fell silent: pity shrank,     Rebuked, and terror, spirit-stricken, sank:     The soul assailed arose afar above     All reach of all but only death and love.