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| BEFORE the beginning of years | |
| There came to the making of man | |
| Time, with a gift of tears; | |
| Grief, with a glass that ran; | |
| Pleasure, with pain for leaven; | 5 |
| Summer, with flowers that fell; | |
| Remembrance fallen from heaven, | |
| And madness risen from hell; | |
| Strength without hands to smite; | |
| Love that endures for a breath; | 10 |
| Night, the shadow of light, | |
| And life, the shadow of death. | |
| |
| And the high gods took in hand | |
| Fire, and the falling of tears, | |
| And a measure of sliding sand | 15 |
| From under the feet of the years; | |
| And froth and drift of the sea; | |
| And dust of the labouring earth; | |
| And bodies of things to be | |
| In the houses of death and of birth; | 20 |
| And wrought with weeping and laughter, | |
| And fashion’d with loathing and love, | |
| With life before and after | |
| And death beneath and above, | |
| For a day and a night and a morrow, | 25 |
| That his strength might endure for a span | |
| With travail and heavy sorrow, | |
| The holy spirit of man. | |
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| From the winds of the north and the south | |
| They gather’d as unto strife; | 30 |
| They breathed upon his mouth, | |
| They fill’d his body with life; | |
| Eyesight and speech they wrought | |
| For the veils of the soul therein, | |
| A time for labour and thought, | 35 |
| A time to serve and to sin; | |
| They gave him light in his ways, | |
| And love, and a space for delight, | |
| And beauty and length of days, | |
| And night, and sleep in the night. | 40 |
| His speech is a burning fire; | |
| With his lips he travaileth; | |
| In his heart is a blind desire, | |
| In his eyes foreknowledge of death; | |
| He weaves, and is clothed with derision; | 45 |
| Sows, and he shall not reap; | |
| His life is a watch or a vision | |
| Between a sleep and a sleep. | |
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