Poem by Charles Walter Stansby Williams

Vision

I saw the happy spirits all in bliss
beholding and beheld with heavenly sight,
contemplative of that now and of this,
and still rejoiced with subtle new delight;

feeling the universal lordship run,
illumining infinities of joy,
till contemplation, mounting in each one,
became infinity and had no cloy;

no cloy of all desire, now cloy of dread,
because desire and dread are but one name,
but studious evermore in lowlihead
to see the shape he wore, the road he came,

to each of all that multitude; in each
tender and terrible epiphany
beholding more than even himself could teach
and still expanding in felicity.

All ways they saw his motion and were seen,
and were adorable and were adored,
each by all those its peers; and still between
heir knowledge was his newer coming toward.

And all their past was with them, and they sang,
and therein only sweetly were disposed,
each to some other, and love's memories range
within the Eternal that about them closed.

And up at once a myriad ways he passed,
and out of all these myriad spirits shone,
and was made perfect in them all at last,
and did them wholly as himself put on;

and they were gathered and became the Child,
and he, more fast than any thought could know,
beyond all names wherewith he should be styled,
was with his own devised joy aglow;

Crimson and fiery-thunderous he stood;
in his one hand a bow, in one a shaft.
so young, and yet so apt in hardihood,
that out of very tenderness he laughed;

then, all delight, he, lifting up his bow,
aiming at my immortal heart, let fly
his arrow, and was gone, and all the glow
passed, and the moon rode in a sober sky.

1. Bethlehem
2. The Adventures of the Holy Week
3. Pentecost
4. Saint Matthias
5. Christmas

Joyce Kilmer Vision ("Homer, they tell us, was blind and could not see the beautiful faces")

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