The Sword of Song

THE SWORD OF SONG II I suppose!” continued the Knight, in a superior, but rather offended voice. “If you would, please, sir!” “Well, that,” pronounced the Knight, with the air of having thoroughly studied the question and reached a conclusion absolutely final and irreversible, “ that, Goodness only knows. But I will sing it to you.” PRELIMINARY INVOCATION NOTHUNG.* THE crowns of Gods and mortals wither ; Moons fade where constellations shone ; Numberless aeons brought us hither ; Numberless aeons beckon us on. The world is old, and I am strong— Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! Here, in the Dusk of Gods, I linger ; The world awaits a Word of Truth. Kindle, O lyre, beneath my finger ! Evoke the age’s awful youth ! To arms against the inveterate wrong ! Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! Sand-founded reels the House of Faith ; Up screams the howl of runing sect ; Out from the shrine flits the lost Wraith ; “God hath forsaken His elect !” Confusion sweeps upon the throng— Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! Awake to wound, awake to heal By wounding, thou resistless sword ! Raise the prone priestcrafts that appeal In agony to their prostrate Lord! Raise the duped herd—they have suffered long Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! My strength this agony of the age Win through; my music charm the old Sorrow of years: my warfare wage By iron to an age of gold :— The world is old, and I am strong— Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! * The name of Siegfried’s sword. INTRODUCTION TO “ASCENSION DAY AND PENTECOST” NOT a word to introduce my introduction! Let me instantly launch the Boat of Dis- course on the Sea of Religious Speculation, in danger of the Rocks of Authority and the Quicksands of Private Interpretation, Scy lla and Charybdis. Here is the strait; what God shall save us from shipwreck? If we choose to understand the Christian (or any other) religion literally, we are at once over- whelmed by its inherent im possibility. Our credulity is outraged, our m oral sense shocked, the holiest foundations of our in- most selves assailed by no ardent warrior in triple steel, but by a loathy and disgusting worm. That this is so, the apologists for the religion in question, whichever it m ay be, sufficiently indicate (as a rule) by the very method of their apology . The alter- native is to take the religion symbolically, esoterically; but to m ove one step in this direction is to start on a journey whose end cannot be determined. The religion, ceasing to be a tangible thing, an object uniform for all sane eyes, becom es rather that m ist whereon the sun of the soul casts up, like Brocken spectres, certain vast and vague images of the beholder himself, with or without a glory en-compassing them. The function of the facts is then quite passive: it matters little or nothing whether the cloud be the red m ist of Christianity , or the glim - mering silver-white of Celtic Paganism ; the hard grey dim-gilded of Buddhism, the fleecy opacity of Islam, or the my sterious medium of those ancient faiths which com e up in as many colours as their investigator has moods.* * “ In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naïve naturalism of many parts of those Scr iptures, in the divine autho- rity of which he fir mly believed, Philo bor rowed from the Stoics ( who had been in like straits in respect of Greek m ythology) that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill—the m ethod of allegorical in- terpretation. T his m ighty ‘ two handed engine at the door’ of the theol ogian is war ranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically, or, as it is otherwise said “ poeti- cally’ or ‘in a spiritual sense,’ the plainest words mean whatever a pious inter preter de sires they should m ean.” ( Huxley, “E volution of Theology”).—A.C.