Chartres Windows

by Rudyard Kipling

    Colour fulfils where Music has no power:
    By each man’s light the unjudging glass betrays
    All men’s surrender, each man’s holiest hour
    And all the lit confusion of our days 
    Purfled with iron, traced in dusk and fire,
    Challenging ordered Time who, at the last,
    Shall bring it, grozed and leaded and wedged fast,
    To the cold stone that curbs or crowns desire.
    Yet on the pavement that all feet have trod 
    Even as the Spirit, in her deeps and heights,
    Turns only, and that voiceless, to her God 
    There falls no tincture from those anguished lights.
    And Heaven’s one light, behind them, striking through
    Blazons what each man dreamed no other knew.