Explore "The Virgin Mother" by George William Russell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Who is that goddess to whom men should pray / But her from whom their hearts have turned away, / Out of whose virgin being they were born, / Whose mother nature they have named in scorn / Calling its holy substance common clay.
Yet from this so despised earth was made / The milky whiteness of those queens who swayed / Their generations with a light caress, / And from some image of whose loveliness / The heart built up high heaven when it prayed.
Lover, your heart, the heart on which it lies, / Your eyes that gaze, and those alluring eyes, / Your lips, the lips they kiss, alike had birth / Within this dark divinity of earth, / Within this mother being you despise.
Ah, when I think this earth on which we tread / Hath borne these blossoms of the lovely dead, / And made the living heart I love to beat, / I look with sudden awe beneath my feet / As you with erring reverence overhead.