Poem by Madison Julius Cawein

Deity

No personal; a God divinely crowned
With gold and raised upon a golden throne
Deep in a golden glory, whence he nods
Man this or that, and little more than man!

And shalt thou see Him individual?
Not till the freed intelligence hath sought
Ten hundred hundred years to rise and love,
Piercing the singing cycles under God,
Their iridescent evolutions orbed
In wild prismatic splendors, shall it see
Through God-propinquity become a god
See, lightening out of spheric harmonies,
Resplendencies of empyrean light,
Prisms and facets of ten million beams
Starring a crystal of berainbowed rays,
And in this - eyes of burning sapphire, eyes
Deep as the music of the beautiful;
And o'er the eyes, limpid hierarchal brows,
As they were lilies of seraphic fire;
Lips underneath, of trembling ruby lips
Whose tongue's a chord, and every sound a song:
Cherubic faces of intensity
In multiplying myriads to a word
Forming the unit, God; Supremity
Creative and ubiquitous.

            From this
Thy intellect, detached, expelled and breathed
Exaltant into flesh endowed with soul,
One sparkle of the Essence clothed with clay.
O high development! devolvings up
From matter to unmattered potencies,
Up to the source and fountain of all mind,
Beauty and truth, inviolable Love,
And so resumed and reabsorbed in God,
One more expression of eternity!

1. In the Mountains
2. The Iron Cross
3. Communicants
4. Gertrude
5. Riders in the Night

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