Roses and Rue 239 Désespoir 242 Pan: Double Villanelle 243 THE SPHINX (1894) 245 THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL (1898) 269 RAVENNA (1878) 305 POEMS HÉLAS! TO _drift with every passion till my soul_ _Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play_, _Is it for this that I have given away_ _Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control_? _Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll_ _Scrawled over on some boyish holiday_ _With idle songs for pipe and virelay_, _Which do but mar the secret of the whole_. _Surely there was a time I might have trod_ _The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance_ _Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God_: _Is that time dead_? _lo_! _with a little rod_ _I did but touch the honey of romance_— _And must I lose a soul’s inheritance_? ELEUTHERIA SONNET TO LIBERTY NOT that I love thy children, whose dull eyes See nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,— But that the roar of thy Democracies, Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies, Mirror my wildest passions like the sea And give my rage a brother—! Liberty! For this sake only do thy dissonant cries Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades Rob nations of their rights inviolate And I remain unmoved—and yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some things. AVE IMPERATRIX SET in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! what shall men say of thee, Before whose feet the worlds divide? The earth, a brittle globe of glass, Lies in the hollow of thy hand, And through its heart of crystal pass, Like shadows through a twilight land, The spears of crimson-suited war, The long white-crested waves of fight, And all the deadly fires which are The torches of the lords of Night. The yellow leopards, strained and lean, The treacherous Russian knows so well, With gaping blackened jaws are seen Leap through the hail of screaming shell. The strong sea-lion of England’s wars Hath left his sapphire cave of sea, To battle with the storm that mars The stars of England’s chivalry. The brazen-throated clarion blows Across the Pathan’s reedy fen, And the high steeps of Indian snows Shake to the tread of armèd men. And many an Afghan chief, who lies Beneath his cool pomegranate-trees, Clutches his sword in fierce surmise When on the mountain-side he sees