Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A RIME OF THE ROOD, by CHARLES LEO O'DONNELL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A RIME OF THE ROOD, by                    
First Line: A word of mystery is told / whose secret shall remain
Last Line: Ecce lignum crucis!
Subject(s): Jesus Christ


A Word of mystery is told
Whose secret shall remain,
That the heart of happiness should ache
With hungering for pain.

That God in those years of silent
And sole eternity
Should know Himself a homeless Man
Dead on a wayside tree.

For in the mirror of His mind
All things that come to pass
Are, from the mystery of man
To the miracle of grass.

Himself is the enigma
That from His triune tower
Moves barefoot down those timeless coasts
To make and meet His hour.

Before the fallen princes
Set the balefires of their doom,
God from His central stillness
Moves to a Maiden's womb.

He sees when we can not foresee,
He does what we shall do,
And Rome is there, and its iron rule
And the unborn race of the Jew.

All in His everlastingness,
Before His time began,
Something there was that shook His world
And made Him man.

Not yet had swung the planets
No one was yet to name,
There was not king or country,
Honor was not or shame.

Before a foot was on the earth
Or any earth to tread,
God chose Himself a deathbed
And God was dead.

Then worlds were turned where woods might grow
With sap tides running free,
Unnumbered cycles making
A tree for Him, a tree.

God, in His day that had no dawn,
Visioned a fallen sky
Against whose storm-stirred edges
Himself should hang and die.

And time came down to a little span
When men contrived these bars
Known as a cross, esteemed a curse,
An insult to the stars.

The Roman, when he broke the back
Of Jewry and its pride,
Came with his legioned banners
And this thing at his side.

Straight as a Roman spear and strong
As a pine in the Norse wood,
The Roman brought the cross from Rome
And its omen was not good.

High on a hill or by the road
Where all might see who pass,
'This is the way,' the Roman said,
'We deal with Barrabas.'

'And I, if I be lifted up,' --
What infinite jest is this
On lips that had eternally
A foretaste of that bliss?

Before the star of Lucifer
Fell, or Eden's loss,
God in those years of wonder
Was in love with the Cross.

They can be trusted, wood and iron,
To do their hapless part,
Under the brawn of the Roman arms
And the hate in the high priest's heart.

They fixed it firm in the blasted hill,
He looked and called it good,
As the hour that He had hurried to
Struck in His Blood.

A turn of pain and darkness,
A space of tortured breath,
And every fibre of the wood
Grows alive with His death.

An afternoon of April
Fulfils the eternal plan
That evermore His men might say,
'Behold the Man!'

That evermore while sight shall be,
Cross-bar and upright rod
Shall bear to the eyes of all the world
The broken body of God.

This is that terrible garment
He could alone conceive --
A stiff red cloak of wood and iron
His hand nailed to His sleeve.

Who walked His worlds of wonder,
God of very God, --
He will not move in the shoes of iron
Wherewith He now is shod.

Men shall not say a hidden Heart
Is His and doubt thereat --
A Roman spear and a Roman arm
Have seen to that.

Fixed in an iron certainty
No power shall undo
God hangs, His own love story,
And this tale is true.

There He shall be till the worlds are gone,
In Manhood and Godhead,
He who so loved one little world,
Love's and life's Giver, dead.

For Him men plough the desert,
Furrow the foam for Him,
Because for them He trained His eyes
Beyond the Seraphim.

Because before there was any thing
Or any one but He,
God for His own Name's glory
Put His Name on the tree.

And when the trump of doom shall blow
To strike the living dumb,
The King in His beauty shall appear
And His Kingdom come.

Then shall the top of heaven
And the last deep be spanned
By the bridge the Roman soldiers built
With its sign in Pilate's hand.

A bridge, a throne, a doorway,
A banner, a reward,
Adorable as no other thing:
The Cross of the Lord.

Ecce nunc in tenebris,
Crux est lumen lucis,
Semper in coelestibus,
Ecce lignum crucis!





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