Appeared to skirt the horizon, yet they stood
Within a bowshot. Where the Cæsars dwelt,
And dwell the tuneless birds of night, amidst
A grove which springs through levelled battlements,
And twines its roots with the imperial hearths,
Ivy usurps the laurel's place of growth;

But the gladiators' bloody Circus stands,
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!

While Cæsar's chambers, and the Augustan halls,
Grovel on earth in indistinct decay.

And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which softened down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and filled up,
As 't were anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old,

The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns. —

'T was such a night!

'T is strange that I recall it at this time;

But I have found our thoughts take wildest flight
Even at the moment when they should array

Themselves in pensive order.

George Gordon Byron

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A CONSECRATION

Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years, Rather the scorned the rejected the men hemmed in with the spears;

The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries, The men with the broken heads and the blood running into their eyes.

Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne, Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known.

Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road, The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,

The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.

The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout,

The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired lookout.

Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the
earth!

THEIRS be the music, the color, the glory, the gold;
Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.

Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold

Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told.

AMEN.

- John Masefield

THE ROAD TO DIEPPE

Before I knew, the Dawn was on the road,
Close at my side, so silently he came

Nor gave a sign of salutation, save

To touch with light my sleeve and make the way
Appear as if a shining countenance

Had looked on it. Strange was this radiant Youth,
As I, to these fair, fertile parts of France,
Where Cæsar with his legions once had passed,
And where the Kaiser's Uhlans yet would pass
Or e'er another moon should cope with clouds
For mastery of these same fields. -To-night
(And but a month has gone since I walked there)

Well might the Kaiser write, as Cæsar wrote,
In his new Commentaries on a Gallic war,
"Fortissimi Belgae." - A moon ago!

Who would have then divined that dead would lie
Like swaths of grain beneath the harvest moon
Upon these lands the ancient Belgae held,
From Normandy beyond renowned Liège! —

But it was out of that dread August night
From which all Europe woke to war, that we,
This beautiful Dawn-Youth, and I, had come,
He from afar. Beyond grim Petrograd
He'd waked the moujik from his peaceful dreams,
Bid the muezzin call to morning prayer
Where minarets rise o'er the Golden Horn,
And driven shadows from the Prussian march
To lie beneath the lindens of the stadt.

Softly he'd stirred the bells to ring at Rheims,
He'd knocked at high Montmartre, hardly asleep,
Heard the sweet carillon of doomed Louvain,
Boylike, had tarried for a moment's play
Amid the traceries of Amiens,

And then was hast'ning on the road to Dieppe,
When he o'ertook me, drowsy from the hours
Through which I'd walked, with no companions else
Than ghostly kilometer posts that stood

As sentinels of space along the way. —
Often, in doubt, I'd pause to question one,

With nervous hands, as they who read Moon-type;
And more than once I'd caught a moment's sleep
Beside the highway, in the dripping grass,

While one of these white sentinels stood guard,

Knowing me for a friend, who loves the road,
And best of all by night, when wheels do sleep
And stars alone do walk abroad. But once

Three watchful shadows, deeper than the dark, Laid hands on me and searched me for the marks Of traitor or of spy, only to find

Over my heart the badge of loyalty.
With wish for bon voyage they gave me o'er
To the white guards who led me on again.

Thus Dawn o'ertook me and with magic speech
Made me forget the night as we strode on.
Where'er he looked a miracle was wrought:
A tree grew from the darkness at a glance;
A hut was thatched; a new château was reared
Of stone, as weathered as the church at Cæn;
Gray blooms were colored suddenly in red;
A flag was flung across the eastern sky.
Nearer at hand, he made me then aware
Of peasant women bending in the fields,
Cradling and gleaning by the first scant light,
Their sons and husbands somewhere o'er the edge
Of these green-golden fields which they had sowed
But will not reap,
out somewhere on the march,
God but knows where and if they come again.
One fallow field he pointed out to me

Where but the day before a peasant ploughed,
Dreaming of next year's fruit, and there his plough
Stood now mid-field, his horses commandeered,
A monstrous sable crow perched on the beam.

Before I knew, the Dawn was on the road,
Far from my side, so silently he went,