THE SWORD OF SONG 
II
I suppose!” continued the Knight, 
in a 
superior, but rather offended voice. 
“If you would, please, sir!” 
“Well, that,” pronounced the Knight, with 
the air of having thoroughly
 studied the 
question and reached a conclusion absolutely 
final and irreversible, “ that, Goodness only  
knows.  But I will sing it to you.” 
PRELIMINARY INVOCATION 
NOTHUNG.* 
 
THE crowns of Gods and mortals wither ; 
Moons fade where constellations shone ; 
Numberless aeons brought us hither ; 
Numberless aeons beckon us on. 
The world is old, and I am strong— 
Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! 
 
Here, in the Dusk of Gods, I linger ; 
The world awaits a Word of Truth. 
Kindle, O lyre, beneath my finger ! 
Evoke the age’s awful youth ! 
To arms against the inveterate wrong ! 
Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! 
 
Sand-founded reels the House of Faith ; 
Up screams the howl of runing sect ; 
Out from the shrine flits the lost Wraith ; 
“God hath forsaken His elect !” 
Confusion sweeps upon the throng— 
Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! 
 
Awake to wound, awake to heal 
By wounding, thou resistless sword ! 
Raise the prone priestcrafts that appeal 
In agony to their prostrate Lord! 
Raise the duped herd—they  have suffered 
long 
Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! 
 
My strength this agony of the age 
Win through; my music charm the old 
Sorrow of years: my warfare wage 
By iron to an age of gold :— 
The world is old, and I am strong— 
Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! 
 
* The name of Siegfried’s sword. 
INTRODUCTION TO “ASCENSION 
DAY AND PENTECOST” 
NOT a word to 
introduce my introduction!   
Let me instantly launch the Boat of Dis- 
course on the Sea of Religious Speculation,  
in danger of the Rocks of Authority and the 
Quicksands of Private Interpretation, Scy lla 
and Charybdis.  Here is the strait; what 
 
God shall save us from 
shipwreck?  If we 
choose to understand the Christian (or any
 
other) religion literally, we are at once over-
whelmed by its inherent im possibility.  Our 
credulity is outraged, our m
oral sense  
shocked, the holiest foundations of our in- 
most selves assailed by  no ardent warrior in 
triple steel, but by  a loathy  and disgusting 
worm.  That this is so, the apologists 
for  
the religion in question, whichever it m
ay  
be, sufficiently indicate (as  a rule) by  the  
very method of their apology
.  The alter- 
native is to take the 
religion symbolically, 
esoterically; but to m
ove one step in 
this 
direction is to start on a journey whose end 
cannot be determined.  The religion, ceasing  
to be a tangible thing, an object uniform 
 
for all sane eyes, becom es rather that m ist 
whereon the sun of the soul casts up, like 
Brocken spectres, certain vast and 
vague 
images of the beholder himself, with or 
without a glory  en-compassing them.  The 
function of the facts is 
then quite passive:  
it matters little or nothing whether the cloud  
be the red m ist of Christianity , or the glim -
mering silver-white of Celtic Paganism ; the 
hard grey dim-gilded of Buddhism, the fleecy 
opacity of Islam, or the my sterious medium 
of those ancient faiths  which com e up in as 
many colours as their investigator has moods.* 
* “ In order to get over the 
ethical difficulties 
presented by  the naïve 
naturalism of many  
parts of those Scr
iptures, in the divine autho- 
rity of which he fir mly believed,  Philo bor rowed 
from the Stoics (
who had been in like 
straits  
in respect of  Greek m
ythology) that great 
Excalibur which they  had forged with infinite 
pains and skill—the m
ethod of allegorical 
in-
terpretation.  T his m ighty ‘ two handed engine  
at the door’ of
 the theol ogian is war ranted to  
make a speedy end of
 any and every moral or 
intellectual difficulty, by
 showing that,  taken 
allegorically, or, as it is otherwise said “
poeti-
cally’ or ‘in a spiritual sense,’ the plainest 
 
words mean whatever a 
pious inter preter de 
sires they  should m ean.” ( Huxley, “E volution of 
Theology”).—A.C.