Poem on Christ (complete)

True offspring of God, older than all the years, now born, you who always were, and discoverer of light, parent of your own mother before her, whom the coeternal Father sent from the stars, poured into the seeds of the Word, to dwell in a virgin's womb, and bade you enter the ways of a body's limbs and stay in a small dwelling: you whom no dwelling contains, who in the first light saw whatever you would create as the world was born, yourself the maker, yourself the work, deigned to feel the harsh changes of age, and to endure the unlike ways of this body, and to take on manhood, that you might show God, lest slippery error and the long-deceived cleverness of the varied world should leave mortal hearts astray for so many ages. Your mother, aware of the birth, knew you as God the Author, and the astonished fears of the cattle sensed you; scanning new stars with anxious gaze, the Magi first saw you in heaven and, following the light, found you. You set free guilty hearts, and lead back souls that had slipped away into dead bodies; you pierce the world and reach the shades, and the hiding places of death you, the immortal, enter: to you alone dying was neither beginning nor end, but when the night had been driven back you climb into heaven to the Father, and again in an everlasting order you take away the defilement from the cleansed lands. You alone are both the Father's companion, you the innocent Spirit, and so many times one, simple in a threefold light. Who, unless it were for all, who could believe that you could die, you who could give back life?