The Blog from the Core - Condé B. Pallen: "Christus Triumphans"

Condé B. Pallen: "Christus Triumphans"

Easter Sunday 2006

Christus Triumphans

i

Mors Victor

Before thy grisly front no man may stand;
   No heart but quakes at sounding of thy feet;
   Thy coming none may flee, though ne'er so fleet,
And trembling earth confesses thy command.
From kings their crowns thou pluck'st and from the hand
   Of Power its scepter; thou mock'st the vacant seat
   Of Pride or Love; or high nor low degree may cheat
Thee of thy tribute, Lord of sea and land.

Dreadful thou art, and terrible thy power
   Against our piteous frailty doomed to die!
   Weakly we lift our fending hands in vain,
And crouching wait the inexorable hour,
The thunderbolt of thy dark sovereignty
   To smite and blast us with its mighty pain!

ii

Mors Victa

Babes now may smile into thy sunless eye
   And fear thee not, prone in thy kindred dust;
   No longer reck we thine insatiate lust
Of this our crumbling brief mortality.
Time is our bound no more; this narrow sky
   Metes not our vision; vaster is our trust
   Than all the regions of thy moth and rust,
Since passing now we know we do not die.

For risen is our Christ, and with Him we;
   And prostrate thou beside His open grave,
   O Ancient Victor, in thy first defeat
And everlasting! Smiling now we see
Thou art but shadow with a broken glaive,
   Within thy futile hands His winding-sheet.

Condé B. Pallen (1858-1929)

The Catholic Anthology: The World's Great Catholic Poetry (revised edition, 1940), ed. Thomas Walsh and George N. Shuster, pp. 325f.