The women have wept away their tears, with red eyes turned on death, and loss of friends and kindred, have left the biers flowerless, and bound their heads in their blank veils, and climbed the steep slope of Golgotha; fails at last the wail of their bereavement, and all the jagged world of rocks and desert places stands before their racked sightless faces, as any ice-sea silent. This is the feast of conquering death. The beaten flesh worships the swishing rod. The lacerated body bows to its God, adores the last agonies of breath. And one more has joined the unnumbered deathstruck multitudes who with the loved of old have slumbered ages long, where broods Earth the beneficent goddess, the ultimate queen of quietness, taker of all worn souls and bodies back into the womb of her first nothingness. But ours, who in the iron night remain, ours the need, the pain of his departing. He had lived on out of a happier age into our strident torture-cage. He still could sing of quiet gardens under rain and clouds and the huge sky and pale deliciousness that is nearly pain. His was a new minstrelsy: strange plaints brought home out of the rich east, twanging songs from Tartar caravans, hints of the sounds that ceased with the stilling dawn, wailings of the night, echoes of the web of mystery that spans the world between the failing and the rising of the wan daylight of the sea, and of a woman's hair hanging gorgeous down a dungeon wall, evening falling on Tintagel, love lost in the mist of old despair. Against the bars of our torture-cage we beat out our poor lives in vain. We live on cramped in an iron age like prisoners of old high on the world's battlements exposed until we die to the chilling rain crouched and chattering from cold for all scorn to stare at. And we watch one by one the great stroll leisurely out of the western gate and without a backward look at the strident city drink down the stirrup-cup of fate embrace the last obscurity. We worship the nails and the rod and pain's last choking breath. We make of our pain God. This is the feast of death. VIII PALINODE OF VICTORY Beer is free to soldiers In every bar and tavern As the regiments victorious March under garlands to the city square. Beer is free to soldiers And lips are free, and women, Breathless, stand on tiptoe To see the flushed young thousands in advance.