Schoolgirls Hastening by John Shaw Neilson

Fear it has faded and the night:
  The bells all peal the hour of nine:
The schoolgirls hastening through the light
  Touch the unknowable Divine.

What leavening in my heart would bide!
   Full dreams a thousand deep are there:
All luminants succumb beside
   The unbound melody of hair.

Joy the long timorous takes the flute:
   Valiant with colour songs are born:
Love the impatient absolute
   Lives as a Saviour in the mom.

Get thou behind me Shadow-Death!
   Oh ye Eternities delay!
Morning is with me and the breath
   Of schoolgirls hastening down the way.

First published in The Bookfellow, 30 April 1922;
and then later in
Collected Poems of John Shaw Neilson edited by R. H. Croll, 1934;
A Book of Australian Verse edited by Judith Wright, 1956;
Poems by John Shaw Neilson, 1964;
Australian Letters, 4 September 1964;
Australian Kaleidoscope edited by Barbara Ker Wilson, 1968;
The Vital Decade: Ten Years of Australian Art and Letters edited by Geoffrey Dutton, 1968;
My Country: Australian Poetry and Short Stories, Two Hundred Years edited by Leonie Kramer, 1985;
The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse edited by Les Murray, 1986;
Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry edited by Les Murray, 1986;
Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century edited by Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann, 1991;
John Shaw Neilson: Poetry, Autobiography and Correspondence edited by Cliff Hanna, 1991;
Selected Poems edited by Robert Gray, 1993;
Australian Verse: An Oxford Anthology edited by John Leonard, 1998;
Hell and After: Four Early English-Language Poets of Australia edited by Les Murray, 2005; and
The Puncher & Wattman Anthology of Australian Poetry edited by John Leonard, 2009.

Author reference sites: Austlit, Australian Dictionary of Biography

See also.