'These things are real,' said one, and bade me gaze <br />On black and mighty shapes of iron and stone, <br />On murder, on madness, on lust, on towns ablaze, <br />And on a thing made all of rattling bone: <br />'What,' said he, 'will you bring to match with these?' <br />'Yea! War is real,' I said, 'and real is Death, <br />A little while--mortal realities; <br />But Love and Hope draw an immortal breath.' <br /> <br />Think you the storm that wrecks a summer day, <br />With funeral blackness and with leaping fire <br />And boiling roar of rain, more real than they <br />That, when the warring heavens begin to tire, <br />With tender fingers on the tumult paint; <br />Spanning the huddled wrack from base to cope <br />With soft effulgence, like some haloed saint,-- <br />The rainbow bridge eternal that is Hope. <br /> <br />Deem her no phantom born of desperate dreams: <br />Ere man yet was, 'twas hope that wrought him man; <br />The blind earth, climbing skyward by her gleams, <br />Hoped--and the beauty of the world began. <br />Prophetic of all loveliness to be, <br />Though God Himself seem from His station hurled, <br />Still shall the blackest hell look up and see <br />Hope's rainbow on the summits of the world.<br /><br />Richard Le Gallienne<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-rainbow-23/
