Return [Poem]Author(s): Howard CarrollSource: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Winter, 1944), p. 80Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27537483 .

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Ill

CATHEDRAL

Cathedral, treasureless and stricken vault,

behold a congregation, gathered in

beneath these arching centuries, assault

your God and history, as under sin

and treason flesh lies broken. Now the veins

confess through wounds to bandages and hands

of nurses to their gross and sanguine pains while eyes turn up to where an altar stands.

Let nowT your centuries have meaning for

the mind entrapped in days; renew the warm

and tender movements of the heart. And more:

sustain the trust of one before the swarm.

For life?the prostrate in the straw?time kneels

in you, itself at Mass, and breaks its seals.

IV

RETURN

Returned from agony of shrilling steel

and robber flame, his figure falls upon

the land that bore and sold him with the feel

of righteous trade. And, hired to frenzy, sun

and stars alone can state his vacant creed

of lovelessness. So beaten by the hate

of wills upon the anvil-earth, the deed

of thought now loses shape and falls to fate.

In shattered mind the wind replaces tears

with leaves and blowing smoke of brush afire.

This is our lover in the after-years? with sanity in season, not clear fire.

Now what of time and dear, complacent art

to set a trust in mind, sharp love in heart?

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