For you came out on the dome of the earth

  Like a vision of victory,

  Out on the great green dome of the earth

  As the great blue dome of the sky for girth,

  And under your feet the shires could meet

  And your eyes went out to sea.

  Under your feet the towns were seven,

  Alive and alone on high,

  Your back to the broad white wall of heaven;

  You were one and the towns were seven,

  Single and one as the soaring sun

  And your head upheld the sky.

  And I thought of a thundering flag unfurled

  And the roar of the burghers’ bell:

  Beacons crackled and bolts were hurled

  As you came over the top of the world;

  And under your feet were chance and cheat

  And the slime of the slopes of hell.

  It has not been as the great wind spoke

  On the great green down that day:

  We have seen, wherever the wide wind spoke,

  Slavery slaying the English folk:

  The robbers of land we have seen command

  The rulers of land obey.

  We have seen the gigantic golden worms

  In the garden of paradise:

  We have seen the great and the wise make terms

  With the peace of snakes and the pride of worms,

  and them that plant make covenant

  With the locust and the lice.

  And the wind blows and the world goes on

  And the world can say that we,

  Who stood on the cliffs where the quarries shone,

  Stood upon clouds that the sun shone on:

  And the clouds dissunder and drown in thunder

  The news that will never be.

  Lady of all that have loved the people,

  Light over roads astray,

  Maze of steading and street and steeple,

  Great as a heart that has loved the people:

  Stand on the crown of the soaring down,

  Lift up your arms and pray.

  Only you I have not forgotten

  For wreck of the world’s renown,

  Rending and ending of things gone rotten,

  Only the face of you unforgotten:

  And your head upthrown in the skies alone

  As you came over the down.

  THE RED SEA

  Our souls shall be Leviathans

  In purple seas of wine

  When drunkenness is dead with death,

  And drink is all divine;

  Learning in those immortal vats

  What mortal vineyards mean;

  For only in heaven we shall know

  How happy we have been.

  Like clouds that wallow in the wind

  Be free to drift and drink;

  Tower without insolence when we rise,

  Without surrender sink:

  Dreams dizzy and crazy we shall know

  And have no need to write

  Our blameless blasphemies of praise,

  Our nightmares of delight.

  For so in such misshapen shape

  The vision came to me,

  Where such titanian dolphins dark

  Roll in a sunset sea:

  Dark with dense colours, strange and strong

  As terrible true love,

  Haloed like fish in phospher light

  The holy monsters move.

  Measure is here and law, to learn,

  When honour rules it so,

  To lift the glass and lay it down

  Or break the glass and go.

  But when the world’s New Deluge boils

  From the New Noah’s vine,

  Our souls shall be Leviathans

  In sanguine seas of wine.

  FOR A WAR MEMORIAL

  (Suggested Inscription probably not selected by the

  Committee.)

  The hucksters haggle in the mart

  The cars and carts go by;

  Senates and schools go droning on;

  For dead things cannot die.

  A storm stooped on the place of tombs

  With bolts to blast and rive;

  But these be names of many men

  The lightning found alive.

  If usurers rule and rights decay

  And visions view once more

  Great Carthage like a golden shell

  Gape hollow on the shore,

  Still to the last of crumbling time

  Upon this stone be read

  How many men of England died

  To prove they were not dead.

  MEMORY

  If I ever go back to Baltimore,

  The city of Maryland,

  I shall miss again as I missed before

  A thousand things of the world in store,

  The story standing in every door

  That beckons with every hand.

  I shall not know where the bonds were riven

  And a hundred faiths set free,

  Where a wandering cavalier had given

  Her hundredth name to the Queen of Heaven,

  And made oblation of feuds forgiven

  To Our Lady of Liberty.

  I shall not travel the tracks of fame

  Where the war was not to the strong;

  When Lee the last of the heroes came

  With the Men of the South and a flag like flame,

  And called the land by its lovely name

  In the unforgotten song.

  If ever I cross the sea and stray

  To the city of Maryland,

  I will sit on a stone and watch or pray

  For a stranger’s child that was there one day:

  And the child will never come back to play,

  And no-one will understand.

  THE ENGLISH GRAVES

  Were I that wandering citizen whose city is the world,

  I would not weep for all that fell before the flags were furled;

  I would not let one murmur mar the trumpets volleying forth

  How God grew weary of the kings, and the cold hell in the north.

  But we whose hearts are homing birds have heavier thoughts of home,

  Though the great eagles burn with gold on Paris or on Rome,

  Who stand beside our dead and stare, like seers at an eclipse,

  At the riddle of the island tale and the twilight of the ships.

  For these were simple men that loved with hands and feet and eyes,

  Whose souls were humbled to the hills and narrowed to the skies,

  The hundred little lands within one little land that lie,

  Where Severn seeks the sunset isles or Sussex scales the sky.

  And what is theirs, though banners blow on Warsaw risen again,

  Or ancient laughter walks in gold through the vineyards of Lorraine,

  Their dead are marked on English stones, their loves on English trees,

  How little is the prize they win, how mean a coin for these —

  How small a shrivelled laurel-leaf lies crumpled here and curled:

  They died to save their country and they only saved the world.

  NIGHTMARE

  The silver and violet leopard of the night

  Spotted with stars and smooth with silence sprang;

  And though three doors stood open, the end of light

  Closed like a trap; and stillness was a clang.

  Under the leopard sky of lurid stars

  I strove with evil sleep the hot night long,

  Dreams dumb and swollen of triumphs without wars,

  Of tongueless trumpet and unanswering gong.

  I saw a pale imperial pomp go by,

  Helmet and hornèd mitre and heavy wreath;

  Their high strange ensigns hung upon the sky

  And their great shields were like the doors of death.

  Their mitres were as moving pyramids

  And all their crowns as marching towers were tall;

  Their eyes were cold under their carven lids

  And the same carven smile was on them all.

  Over a paven plain that seemed unending

  They passed unfaltering till it found an end

  In one long shallow step; and these descending

  Fared forth anew as long away to wend.

  I thought they travelled for a thousand years;

  And at the end was nothing for them all,

  For all that splendour of sceptres and of spears,

  But a new step, another easy fall.

  The smile of stone seemed but a little less,

  The load of silver but a little more:

  And ever was that terraced wilderness

  And falling plain paved like a palace floor.

  Rust red as gore crawled on their arms of might

  And on their faces wrinkles and not scars:

  Till the dream suddenly ended; noise and light

  Loosened the tyranny of the tropic stars.

  But over them like a subterranean sun

  I saw the sign of all the fiends that fell;

  And a wild voice cried “Hasten and be done,

  Is there no steepness in the stairs of hell?”

  He that returns, He that remains the same,

  Turned the round real world, His iron vice;

  Down the grey garden paths a bird called twice,

  And through three doors mysterious daylight came.

  A SECOND CHILDHOOD

  When all my days are ending

  And I have no song to sing,

  I think I shall not be too old

  To stare at everything;

  As I stared once at a nursery door

  Or a tall tree and a swing.

  Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs

  On all my sins and me,

  Because He does not take away

  The terror from the tree

  And stones still shine along the road

  That are and cannot be.

  Men grow too old for love, my love,

  Men grow too old for wine,

  But I shall not grow too old to see

  Unearthly daylight shine,

  Changing my chamber’s dust to snow

  Till I doubt if it be mine.

  Behold, the crowning mercies melt,

  The first surprises stay;

  And in my dross is dropped a gift

  For which I dare not pray:

  That a man grow used to grief and joy

  But not to night and day.

  Men grow too old for love, my love,

  Men grow too old for lies;

  But I shall not grow too old to see

  Enormous night arise,

  A cloud that is larger than the world

  And a monster made of eyes.

  Nor am I worthy to unloose

  The latchet of my shoe;

  Or shake the dust from off my feet

  Or the staff that bears me through

  On ground that is too good to last,

  Too solid to be true.

  Men grow too old to woo, my love,

  Men grow too old to wed:

  But I shall not grow too old to see

  Hung crazily overhead

  Incredible rafters when I wake

  And find I am not dead.

  A thrill of thunder in my hair:

  Though blackening clouds be plain,

  Still I am stung and startled

  By the first drop of the rain:

  Romance and pride and passion pass

  And these are what remain.

  Strange crawling carpets of the grass,

  Wide windows of the sky:

  So in this perilous grace of God

  With all my sins go I:

  And things grow new though I grow old,

  Though I grow old and die.

  MEDIÆVALISM

  If men should rise and return to the noise and time of the tourney,

  The name and fame of the tabard, the tangle of gules and gold,

  Would these things stand and suffice for the bourne of a backward

  journey,

  A light on our days returning, as it was in the days of old?

  Nay, there is none rides back to pick up a glove or a feather,

  Though the gauntlet rang with honour or the plume was more than a crown:

  And hushed is the holy trumpet that called the nations together

  And under the Horns of Hattin the hope of the world went down.

  Ah, not in remembrance stored, but out of oblivion starting,

  Because you have sought new homes and all that you sought is so,

  Because you had trodden the fire and barred the door in departing,

  Returns in your chosen exile the glory of long ago.

  Not then when you barred the door, not then when you trod the embers,

  But now, at your new road’s end, you have seen the face of a fate,

  That not as a child looks back, and not as a fool remembers,

  All that men took too lightly and all that they love too late.

  It is you that have made no rubric for saints, no raiment for lovers,

  Your caps that cry for a feather, your roofs that sigh for a spire:

  Is it a dream from the dead if your own decay discovers

  Alive in your rotting graveyard the worm of the world’s desire?

  Therefore the old trees tower, that the green trees grow and are stunted:

  Therefore these dead men mock you, that you the living are dead:

  Since ever you battered the saints and the tools of your crafts were

  blunted,

  Or shattered the glass in its glory and loaded yourselves with the

  lead.

  When the usurer hunts the squire as the squire has hunted the peasant,

  As sheep that are eaten of worms where men were eaten of sheep:

  Now is the judgment of earth, and the weighing of past and present,

  Who scorn to weep over ruins, behold your ruin and weep.

  Have ye not known, ye fools, that have made the present a prison,

  That thirst can remember water and hunger remember bread?

  We went not gathering ghosts; but the shriek of your shame is arisen

  Out of your own black Babel too loud; and it woke the dead.

  POLAND

  Augurs that watched archaic birds

  Such plumèd prodigies might read,

  The eagles that were double-faced,

  The eagle that was black indeed;

  And when the battle-birds went down

  And in their track the vultures come,

  We know what pardon and what peace

  Will keep our little masters dumb.

  The men that sell what others make,

  As vultures eat what others slay,

  Will prove in matching plume with plume

  That naught is black and all is grey;

  Grey as those dingy doves that once,

  By money-changers palmed and priced,

  Amid the crash of tables flapped

  And huddled from the wrath of Christ.

  But raised for ever for a sign

  Since God made anger glorious,

  Where eagles black and vultures grey

  Flocked back about the heroic house,

  Where war is holier than peace,

  Where hate is holier than love,

  Shone terrible as the Holy Ghost

  An eagle whiter than a dove.

  THE HUNTING OF THE DRAGON

  When we went hunting the Dragon

  In the days when we were young,

  We tossed the bright world over our shoulder

  As bugle and baldrick slung;

  Never was world so wild and fair

  As what went by on the wind,

  Never such fields of paradise

  As the fields we left behind:

  For this is the best of a rest for men

  That men should rise and ride

  Making a flying fairyland

  Of market and country-side,

  Wings on the cottage, wings on the wood,

  Wings upon pot and pan,

  For the hunting of the Dragon

  That is the life of a man.

  For men grow weary of fairyland

  When the Dragon is a dream,

  And tire of the talking bird in the tree,

  The singing fish in the stream;

  And the wandering stars grow stale, grow stale,

  And the wonder is stiff with scorn;

  For this is the honour of fairyland

  And the following of the horn;

  Beauty on beauty called us back

  When we could rise and ride,

  And a woman looked out of every window

  As wonderful as a bride:

  And the tavern-sign as a tabard blazed,

  And the children cheered and ran,

  For the love of the hate of the Dragon

  That is the pride of a man.

  The sages called him a shadow

  And the light went out of the sun:

  And the wise men told us that all was well

  And all was weary and one:

  And then, and then, in the quiet garden,

  With never a weed to kill,

  We knew that his shining tail had shone

  In the white road over the hill:

  We knew that the clouds were flakes of flame,

  We knew that the sunset fire

  Was red with the blood of the Dragon

  Whose death is the world’s desire.

  For the horn was blown in the heart of the night

  That men should rise and ride,

  Keeping the tryst of a terrible jest

  Never for long untried;

  Drinking a dreadful blood for wine,

  Never in cup or can,

  The death of a deathless Dragon,

  That is the life of a man.

  SONNET

  High on the wall that holds Jerusalem

  I saw one stand under the stars like stone.

  And when I perish it shall not be known

  Whether he lived, some strolling son of Shem,

  Or was some great ghost wearing the diadem

  Of Solomon or Saladin on a throne:

  I only know, the features being unshown,

  I did not dare draw near and look on them.

  Did ye not guess ... the diadem might be

  Plaited in stranger style by hands of hate ...

  But when I looked, the wall was desolate

  And the grey starlight powdered tower and tree:

  And vast and vague beyond the Golden Gate