Prologue to The Revenger's Tragedy

Fire, and behind the breathless flight of fire     Thunder that quickens fear and quells desire,     Make bright and loud the terror of the night     Wherein the soul sees only wrath for light.     Wrath winged by love and sheathed by grief in steel     Sets on the front of crime death's withering seal.     The heaving horror of the storms of sin     Brings forth in fear the lightning hid therein,     And flashes back to darkness: truth, found pure     And perfect, asks not heaven if shame endure.     What life and death were his whose raging song     Bore heaven such witness of the wild world's wrong,     What hand was this that grasped such thunder, none     Knows: night and storm seclude him from the sun.     By daytime none discerns the fire of Mars:     Deep darkness bares to sight the sterner stars,     The lights whose dawn seems doomsday. None may tell     Whence rose a world so lit from heaven and hell.     Life-wasting love, hate born of raging lust,     Fierce retribution, fed with death's own dust     And sorrow's pampering poison, cross and meet,     And wind the world in passion's winding-sheet.     So, when dark faith in faith's dark ages heard     Falsehood, and drank the poison of the Word,     Two shades misshapen came to monstrous birth,     A father fiend in heaven, a thrall on earth:     Man, meanest born of beasts that press the sod,     And die: the vilest of his creatures, God.     A judge unjust, a slave that praised his name,     Made life and death one fire of sin and shame.     And thence reverberate even on Shakespeare's age     A light like darkness crossed his sunbright stage.     Music, sublime as storm or sorrow, sang     Before it: tempest like a harpstring rang.     The fiery shadow of a name unknown     Rose, and in song's high heaven abides alone.