The Great and Little Weavers

The great and the little weavers,
   They neither rest nor sleep.
   They work in the height and the glory,
   They toil in the dark and the deep.
   The rainbow melts with the shower,
   The white-thorn falls in the gust,
   The cloud-rose dies into shadow,
   The earth-rose dies into dust.
   But they have not faded forever,
  They have not flowered in vain,
  For the great and the little weavers
  Are weaving under the rain.

  Recede the drums of the thunder
  When the Titan chorus tires,
  And the bird-song piercing the sunset
  Faints with the sunset fires,

  But the trump of the storm shall fail not,
  Nor the flute-cry fail of the thrush,
  For the great and the little weavers
  Are weaving under the hush.

  The comet flares into darkness,
  The flame dissolves into death,
  The power of the star and the dew
  They glow and are gone like a breath,

  But ere the old wonder is done
  Is the new-old wonder begun,
  For the great and the little weavers
  Are weaving under the sun.

  The domes of an empire crumble,
  A child's hope dies in tears;
  Time rolls them away forgotten
  In the silt of the flooding years;

  The creed for which men died smiling
  Decays to a beldame's curse;
  The love that made lips immortal
  Drags by in a tattered hearse.

  But not till the search of the moon
  Sees the last white face uplift,
  And over the bones of the kindreds
  The bare sands dredge and drift,

  Shall Love forget to return
  And lift the unused latch,
  (In his eyes the look of the traveller,
  On his lips the foreign catch),

  Nor the mad song leave men cold,
  Nor the high dream summon in vain, --
  For the great and the little weavers
  Are weaving in heart and brain.