ambitious effort, which, lacking a better title, I have ventured to call "Our Lady of the Air." It is built round a unique and apt metaphor:
Wild air, world-mothering Air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-fixed
Snowflake; that's fairly mixed
With riddles, and is rife
In every least thing's life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This Air which, by life's law,
My lung must draw and draw,
Now but to breathe its praise—
Minds me in many ways
Of her, who not only
Gave God's Infinity
Dwindled to Infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk and all the rest,
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a Woman, yet
Whose presence power is
Great as no goddess's
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God's glory through,
God's glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.
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If I have understood
