High witness borne of knights high-souled and hoary
  Before death’s face and empire’s rings and glows
Even from the dust their life poured forth left gory,
  As the eagle’s cry rings after from the snows
Supreme rebuke of shame clothed round with glory
  And hosts whose track the false crowned eagle shows;
More loud than sounds through stormiest song and story
  The laugh of slayers whose names the sea-wind knows;
      More loud than peals on land
      In many a red wet hand
  The clash of gold and cymbals as they close;
      Loud as the blast that meets
      The might of marshalled fleets
  And sheds it into shipwreck, like a rose
    Blown from a child’s light grasp in sign
That earth’s high lords are lords not over breeze and brine.

XIII.

Above the dust and mire of man’s dejection
  The wide-winged spirit of song resurgent sees
His wingless and long-labouring resurrection
  Up the arduous heaven, by sore and strange degrees
Mount, and with splendour of the soul’s reflection
  Strike heaven’s dark sovereign down upon his knees,
Pale in the light of orient insurrection,
  And dumb before the almightier lord’s decrees
      Who bade him be of yore,
      Who bids him be no more: 
  And all earth’s heart is quickened as the sea’s,
      Even as when sunrise burns
      The very sea’s heart yearns
  That heard not on the midnight-walking breeze
    The wail that woke with evensong
From hearts of poor folk watching all the darkness long.

XIV.

Dawn and the beams of sunbright song illume
  Love, with strange children at her piteous breast,
By grace of weakness from the grave-mouthed gloom
  Plucked, and by mercy lulled to living rest,
Soft as the nursling’s nigh the grandsire’s tomb
  That fell on sleep, a bird of rifled nest;
Soft as the lips whose smile unsaid the doom
  That gave their sire to violent death’s arrest. 
      Even for such love’s sake strong,
      Wrath fires the inveterate song
  That bids hell gape for one whose bland mouth blest
      All slayers and liars that sighed
      Prayer as they slew and lied
  Till blood had clothed his priesthood as a vest,
    And hears, though darkness yet be dumb,
The silence of the trumpet of the wrath to come.

XV.

Nor lacked these lights of constellated age
  A star among them fed with life more dire,
Lit with his bloodied fame, whose withering rage
  Made earth for heaven’s sake one funereal pyre
And life in faith’s name one appointed stage
  For death to purge the souls of men with fire. 
Heaven, earth, and hell on one thrice tragic page
  Mixed all their light and darkness: