Read "The Gospel Women" by George MacDonald online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The Mother Mary / I
Mary, to thee the heart was given / For infant hand to hold, / And clasp thus, an eternal heaven, / The great earth in its fold.
He seized the world with tender might / By making thee his own; / Thee, lowly queen, whose heavenly height / Was to thyself unknown.
He came, all helpless, to thy power, / For warmth, and love, and birth; / In thy embraces, every hour, / He grew into the earth.
Thine was the grief, O mother high, / Which all thy sisters share / Who keep the gate betwixt the sky / And this our lower air; / But unshared sorrows, gathering slow, / Will rise within thy heart, / Strange thoughts which like a sword will go / Thorough thy inward part.
For, if a woman bore a son / That was of angel brood, / Who lifted wings ere day was done, / And soared from where she stood, / Wild grief would rave on love's high throne; / She, sitting in the door, / All day would cry: "He was my own, / And now is mine no more!"
So thou, O Mary, years on years, / From child-birth to the cross, / Wast filled with yearnings, filled with fears, / Keen sense of love and loss.
His childish thoughts outsoared thy reach; / His godlike tenderness / Would sometimes seem, in human speech, / To thee than human less.
Strange pangs await thee, mother mild, / A sorer travail-pain; / Then will the spirit of thy child / Be born in thee again.
Till then thou wilt forebode and dread; / Loss will be still thy fear --
Till he be gone, and, in his stead, / His very self appear.
For, when thy son hath reached his goal, / And vanished from the earth, / Soon wilt thou find him in thy soul, / A second, holier birth.
II
Ah, there he stands! With wondering face / Old men surround the boy; / The solemn looks, the awful place / Bestill the mother's joy.
In sweet reproach her gladness hid, / Her trembling voice says -- low, / Less like the chiding than the chid --
"How couldst thou leave us so?"
But will her dear heart understand / The answer that he gives --
Childlike, eternal, simple, grand, / The law by which he lives?
"Why sought ye me? " Ah, mother dear, / The gulf already opes / That will in thee keep live the fear, / And part thee from thy hopes!
"My father's business -- that ye know / I cannot choose but do."