Christmas: 1915

Now is the midnight of the nations: dark Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas, Earth, like a mother in birth agonies, Screams in her travail, and the planets hark Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark, Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades, Wrenching the night's imponderable arc. Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn From her racked flesh?--What splendour from the smother? What new-wing'd world, or mangled god still-born?