Mary’s Birthday
Francis Ridley
Havergal
Havergal, Francis Ridley
H.
Metadata research and editing
DVPP Project Team
Fukushima
Kailey
University of Victoria Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project
Victoria, BC, Canada
In the public domain
Poet attribution: The Poetical Works of Francis Ridley Havergal, E. P. Dutton and Co., 1888, p. 51. (AC)
Good Words
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She is at rest,
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Mary’s Birthday
.
She is at rest,
In God’s own presence blest,
Whom, while with us, we loved to greet this day ;
Her birthdays o’er,
She counts the years no more ;
On her hath beam’d the light of heaven’s one nightless
day.
When we would raise
A hymn of birthday praise,
The music of our hearts is faint and low ;
Fear, doubt, and sin,
Make dissonance within ;
And pure soul-melody no child of earth may know.
That strange “ new song,”
Amid a white-robed throng,
Is gushing from her harp in living tone ;
Her seraph voice,
Tuned only to rejoice,
Floats upward to the emerald-arched throne.*
No passing cloud
Her loveliness may shroud,
The beauty of her youth may never fail ;
No line of care
Her healed brow may wear,
The joy-gleam of her eye no dimness e’er may veil.
* Rev. iv. 3.
No stain is there
Upon the robes they wear,
Within the gates of pearl which she hath pass’d ;
Like woven light,
All beautiful and bright,
Eternity no shade upon those robes may cast.
No sin-born thought
May in that home be wrought,
To trouble the clear fountain of her heart ;
No tear, no sigh,
No pain, no death be nigh
Where she hath enter’d in, no more to “ know in part.”
Her faith is sight,
Her hope is full delight,
The shadowy veil of time is rent in twain :
Her untold bliss—
What thought can follow this !
To her to live was Christ, to die indeed is gain.
Her eyes have seen
The bruisèd Nazarene,
In blood-dipp’d vesture gloriously array’d :
No earth-breathed haze
May e’er becloud her gaze—
She sees Him face to face on whom her guilt was laid.
A little while,
And they whose loving smile
Had melted ’neath the touch of lonely woe,
Shall reach her home,
Beyond the star-built dome :
Her anthem they shall swell, her joy they too shall know.
H.