Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CHRISTMAS, 1915, by PERCY MACKAYE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CHRISTMAS, 1915, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Now is the midnight of the nations: dark
Last Line: What new-wing'd world, or mangled god still-born?
Alternate Author Name(s): Mackaye, Percy Wallace
Subject(s): Christmas; World War I; Nativity, The; First World War


Now is the midnight of the nations: dark
Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas,
Earth, like a mother in birth-agonies,
Screams in her travail, and the planets hark
Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark,
Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees
Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades,
Wrenching the night's imponderable arc.

Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn
Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another
Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother
Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn
From her racked flesh?—What splendor from the smother?
What new-wing'd world, or mangled god still-born?





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