Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Walter Murdoch (1874–1970). The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse. 1918.

28. The Virgin Mother

WHO is that goddess to whom men should pray,

But her from whom their hearts have turned away,

Out of whose virgin being they were born,

Whose mother nature they have named with scorn

Calling its holy substance common clay.

Yet from this so despised earth was made

The milky whiteness of those queens who swayed

Their generations with a light caress,

And from some image of whose loveliness

The heart built up high heaven when it prayed.

Lover, your heart, the heart on which it lies,

Your eyes that gaze and those alluring eyes,

Your lips, the lips they kiss, alike had birth

Within that dark divinity of earth,

Within that mother being you despise.

Ah, when I think this earth on which I tread

Hath borne these blossoms of the lovely dead,

And makes the living heart I love to beat,

I look with sudden awe beneath my feet

As you with erring reverence overhead.