For Four Guilds: IV. The Bell-Ringers

The angels are singing like birds in a tree     In the organ of good St. Cecily:     And the parson reads with his hand upon     The graven eagle of great St. John:     But never the fluted pipes shall go     Like the fifes of an army all a-row,     Merrily marching down the street     To the marts where the busy and idle meet;     And never the brazen bird shall fly     Out of the window and into the sky,     Till men in cities and shires and ships     Look up at the living Apocalypse.     But all can hark at the dark of even     The bells that bay like the hounds of heaven,     Tolling and telling that over and under,     In the ways of the air like a wandering thunder,     The hunt is up over hills untrod:     For the wind is the way of the dogs of God:     From the tyrant's tower to the outlaw's den     Hunting the souls of the sons of men.     Ruler and robber and pedlar and peer,     Who will not harken and yet will hear;     Filling men's heads with the hurry and hum     Making them welcome before they come.     And we poor men stand under the steeple     Drawing the cords that can draw the people,     And in our leash like the leaping dogs     Are God's most deafening demagogues:     And we are but little, like dwarfs underground,     While hang up in heaven the houses of sound,     Moving like mountains that faith sets free,     Yawning like caverns that roar with the sea,     As awfully loaded, as airily buoyed,     Armoured archangels that trample the void:     Wild as with dancing and weighty with dooms,     Heavy as their panoply, light as their plumes.     Neither preacher nor priest are we:     Each man mount to his own degree:     Only remember that just such a cord     Tosses in heaven the trumpet and sword;     Souls on their terraces, saints on their towers,     Rise up in arms at alarum like ours:     Glow like great watchfires that redden the skies     Titans whose wings are a glory of eyes,     Crowned constellations by twelves and by sevens,     Domed dominations more old than the heavens,     Virtues that thunder and thrones that endure     Sway like a bell to the prayers of the poor.