Joseph Campbell. Whence Comes the Stranger. Harriet Monroe, ed. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912-22

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22.

Whence Comes the Stranger

By Joseph Campbell


WHENCE comes this stranger
That with hoarse, lifted throat
Threatens the fields?

Night’s darkness
And the darkness of mystery	5
Cover him as in a tent
Of two hides.

At twilight
I looked through the windows of my body,
And, lo!	10
The sheaves scattered.
And the rooted trees uptorn.

His feet are flails of iron:
What he has threshed
Only the birds of the air will gather.	15
Bedstraw and branch
Will lie, and rot,
And dig unseen graves.

The wind blows where it wills:
(The Gift of Heaven wrote it in Patmos).	20
I hear the sound thereof,
But cannot tell whence it comes,
Or whither it will go.

War rides, without thought,
On a pale horse	25
Through quiet places.
His banners are smoking torches;
His trumpets blow horribly.

He reaps a red harvest,
But not with the crooks of sickles.	30
The swaths fall slowly,
And the wings of vultures shadow them.

Love is a lamb, for weakness;
Kin a dove, for sorrow;
Peace the silence of a song.	35

He thunders,
And the suckling’s cry
Is not heard:
He casts his lightning,
And flame breaks from the roofbeam:	40
He shakes the earth,
And the stones of the altar
Are dust.

At dawn
I looked through the windows of my spirit,	45
And, lo!
A sower had passed,
Sowing.

For my thoughts
Are not your thoughts,	50
Neither are your ways
My ways,
Saith the Lord.