The Black Virgin

One in thy thousand statues we salute thee

On all thy thousand thrones acclaim and claim

Who walk in forest of thy forms and faces

Walk in a forest calling on one name

And, most of all, how this thing may be so

Who know thee not are mystified to know -

That one cries "Here she stands" and one cries "Yonder"
And thou wert home in heaven long ago.

Burn deep in Bethlehem in the golden shadows,

Ride above Rome upon the horns of stone,

From low Lancastrian or South Saxon shelters

Watch through dark years the dower that was thine own:
Ghost of our land, White Lady of Walsinghame,

Shall they not live that call upon thy name

If an old song on a wild wind be blowing

Crying of the holy country whence they came?

Root deep in Chartres the roses blown of glass
Burning above thee in the high vitrailles,

On Cornish crags take for salute of swords

O'er peacock seas the far salute of sails,
Glooming in bronze or gay in painted wood,

A great doll given when the child is good,

Save that She gave the Child who gave the doll,
In whom all dolls are dreams of motherhood.

I have found thee like a little shepherdess

Gay with green ribbons; and passed on to find
Michael called Angel hew the Mother of God

Like one that fills a mountain with a mind:

Molten in silver or gold or garbed in blue,

Or garbed in red where the inner robe burns through,

Of the King's daughter glorious within:
Change thine unchanging light with every hue

Clothed with the sun or standing on the moon
Crowned with the stars or single, a morning star,
Sunlight and moonlight are thy luminous shadows,
Starlight and twilight thy refractions are,

Lights and half-lights and all lights turn about thee.
But though we dazed can neither see nor doubt thee,
Something remains. Nor can man live without it

Nor can man find it bearable without thee

There runs a dark thread through the tapestries
That time has woven with all the tints of time
Something not evil but grotesque and groping,
Something not clear; not final; not sublime;
Quaint as dim pattern of primal plant or tree

Or fish, the legless elfins of the sea,

Yet rare as this thine image in ebony

Being most strange in its simplicity

Rare as the rushing of the wild black swans

The Romans saw; or rocks remote and grim

Where through black clouds the black sheep runs accursed
And through black clouds the Shepherd follows him.

By the black oak of the aeon-buried grove

By the black gems of the miner's treasure-trove

Monsters and freaks and fallen stars and sunken -

Most holy dark, cover our uncouth love

From thine high rock look down on Africa

The living darkness of devouring green

The loathsome smell of life unquenchable,

Look on low brows and blinking eyes between
On the dark heart where white folk find no place,
On the dark bodies of an antic race,

On all that fear thy light and love thy shadow,
Turn thou the mercy of thy midnight face.

This also is in thy spectrum; this dark ray;
Beyond the deepening purples of thy Lent
Darker than violet vestment; dark and secret
Clot of old night yet cloud of heaven sent:

As the black moon of some divine eclipse,

As the black sun of the Apocalypse,

As the black flower that blessed Odysseus back
From witchcraft; and he saw again the ships.

In all thy thousand images we salute thee,
Claim and acclaim on all thy thousand thrones
Hewn out of multi-coloured rocks and risen
Stained with the stored-up sunsets in all tones -
If in all tones and shades this shade I feel,
Come from the black cathedrals of Castille
Climbing these flat black stones of Catalonia,
To thy most merciful face of night I kneel.