Editor’s note: This poem has been republished as part of America’s special 110th anniversary issue. It was originally published April 26, 1952.
Come is the love song of our race and Come
Our basic word of individual wooing.
It lifts audacious arms of lowliness
To majesty’s most amiable undoing,
To Godhead fleshed and cradled and made least.
It whispers through closed doors a hurry, hurry
To Tierce and fiery feast.
The liturgy of Advent plucks its buds
From the green shrub of love’s compendium:
O Wisdom, Adonai, Root of Jesse
And Sign by which the mouths of kings are dumb,
O Key, O Orient, King and Cornerstone,
O our Emmanuel, come.
And Paschaltide prepares an upper room
Where burns the fuller bloom.
Come is the small sweet-smelling crib we carve
From fir, and bear across December frost.
It is the shaft of the flame-wishing Church
In public spring, or the thin javelin tossed
Privately at a cloud that splits in fire
And drowns us in the flood of some amazing
Personal Pentecost.
