Explore "The Two Ages" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On a great cathedral window I have seen / A Summer sunset swoon and sink away, / Lost in the splendours of immortal art. / Angels and saints and all the heavenly hosts, / With smiles undimmed by half a thousand years, / From wall and niche have met my lifted gale. / Sculpture and carving and illumined page, / And the fair, lofty dreams of architects, / That speak of beauty to the centuries- / All these have fed me with divine repasts. / Yet in my mouth is left a bitter taste, / The taste of blood that stained that age of art.
Those glorious windows shine upon the black / And hideous structure of the guillotine; / Beside the haloed countenance of saints / There hangs the multiple and knotted lash. / The Christ of love, benign and beautiful, / Looks at the torture-rack, by hate conceived / And bigotry sustained. The prison cell, / With blood-stained walls, where starving men went mad, / Lies under turrets matchless in their grace.