The Wild Knight and Other Poems

FEMINA CONTRA MUNDUM

The sun was black with judgment, and the moon
Blood: but between
I saw a man stand, saying, 'To me at least
The grass is green.

'There was no star that I forgot to fear
With love and wonder.
The birds have loved me'; but no answer came —
Only the thunder.

Once more the man stood, saying, 'A cottage door,
Wherethrough I gazed
That instant as I turned – yea, I am vile;
Yet my eyes blazed.

'For I had weighed the mountains in a balance,
And the skies in a scale,
I come to sell the stars – old lamps for new —
Old stars for sale.'

Then a calm voice fell all the thunder through,
A tone less rough:
'Thou hast begun to love one of my works
Almost enough.'

TO A CERTAIN NATION

We will not let thee be, for thou art ours.
We thank thee still, though thou forget these things,
For that hour's sake when thou didst wake all powers
With a great cry that God was sick of kings.

Leave thee there grovelling at their rusted greaves,
These hulking cowards on a painted stage,
Who, with imperial pomp and laurel leaves,
Show their Marengo – one man in a cage.

These, for whom stands no type or title given
In all the squalid tales of gore and pelf;
Though cowed by crashing thunders from all heaven.
Cain never said, 'My brother slew himself.'

Tear you the truth out of your drivelling spy,
The maniac whom you set to swing death's scythe.
Nay; torture not the torturer – let him lie:
What need of racks to teach a worm to writhe?

Bear with us, O our sister, not in pride,
Nor any scorn we see thee spoiled of knaves,
But only shame to hear, where Danton died,
Thy foul dead kings all laughing in their graves.

Thou hast a right to rule thyself; to be
The thing thou wilt; to grin, to fawn, to creep:
To crown these clumsy liars; ay, and we
Who knew thee once, we have a right to weep.

THE PRAISE OF DUST

'What of vile dust?' the preacher said.
Methought the whole world woke,
The dead stone lived beneath my foot,
And my whole body spoke.

'You, that play tyrant to the dust,
And stamp its wrinkled face,
This patient star that flings you not
Far into homeless space.

'Come down out of your dusty shrine
The living dust to see,
The flowers that at your sermon's end
Stand blazing silently.

'Rich white and blood-red blossom; stones,
Lichens like fire encrust;
A gleam of blue, a glare of gold,
The vision of the dust.

'Pass them all by: till, as you come
Where, at a city's edge,
Under a tree – I know it well —
Under a lattice ledge,

'The sunshine falls on one brown head.
You, too, O cold of clay,
Eater of stones, may haply hear
The trumpets of that day

'When God to all his paladins
By his own splendour swore
To make a fairer face than heaven,
Of dust and nothing more.'

THE BALLAD OF THE BATTLE OF GIBEON

Five kings rule o'er the Amorite,
Mighty as fear and old as night;