Classic Poem

A RMS

I

ARROWS

When heavy woods, hung on the beetling steep
Of mountains rising sheer against the sky,
Echoed the savage and sonorous cry
Of some huge brute, roused from his gluttonous sleep,
Then did your feathery swiftness, whirring, leap
From strong bows answering to the watchful eye
And through the palpitant shadows you would fly,
Your sharp point searching when the heart lay deep.
The Parthian plains, the red Arabian sands,
The oak-clad English glades, and islands set
Like sombre stars in sweeps of argent sea,
The Amazonian pampas, and the lands
With Arctic glaciers for a coronet,
Are rich with graves, whose dead were given to thee.

II

SWORDS

Who fashioned first the keenness of your blade?
Was it swart Nomads by the upper Nile?
Or men who dwelt, where, rising pile on pile,
The palaces of Babylon stood arrayed?
Whose hate for you the earliest harvest made?
Rude Northmen rushing through some dark defile?
Or southern armies, marking every mile
With sanguine ruin and death's fearful shade?
The giants of the world, whose tombs were lost,
Before the seething waters of the flood
Rushed down the wide and waste Assyrian plains,
High up the sunlight your pure brightness tost,
Then quenched your glory in the rust of blood,
And all the years are lurid with your stains.

III

BATTLE-AXES

Cumbrous and hard, among the ancient trees,
That tossed where foaming rivers swept along,
Flung swift and sure, one sung a deathful song,
And brought the Indian warrior to his knees.
Where bluff Norse prows, above the stormy seas
Met in rude shock, a fierce and mail-clad throng
With cold, hard hearts, and sinews firm and strong,
Made their bright keenness whistle down the breeze.
Now dull and rusted on the castle wall,
One hangs where droop the banners rent and old,
The relics of dead years and kingly sport;
But smooth it shone when answering to the call
Of valiant Harry, it crushed through the gold
That crowned a ducal head at Agincourt.

IV

A SPEAR-HEAD

Once in the bowels of the earth I lay,
Circled with fire, that fused my different parts
With all the subtlety of mighty arts,
Till the pure metal shone amid the clay:
Then throes gigantic swept the dross away,
And like the beating of a myriad hearts
Busy amid the rush of teeming marts,
A continent rose pulsing through the spray.
Years passed, and man came, claiming for his own
The world, and all that lay within its hold,
And I was wrought to serve his strength and skill;
Shining a spear-head where fierce cries, wind-blown,
Compassed a brow, whose gleaming crown of gold
Was the dread sign of Rome's Imperial will.