How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers, And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers! But fiends and dragons from the gargoyled eaves Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves, And underneath the traitor Judas lowers! Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain, What exultations trampling on despair, What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, Uprose this poem of the earth and air, This medieval miracle of song! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...POETRY by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON THE HEART OF THE TREE by HENRY CUYLER BUNNER LIMERICK by OLIVER BROOK HERFORD TO FINE LADY WOULD-BE by BEN JONSON BLIGHTERS by SIEGFRIED SASSOON THE OLD BUFFALO TRAIL by ISABEL ANDERSON |