Classic Poem

I saw him,
Standing in red armour before an altar
Under the fish-scale roof of a church
In a river valley in mid-France.
The organ was crying an anthem along the great nave
And the eddy of it tickled the noses of the impish stone manikins with foxes' tails curled beneath the architraves.
When the organ ceased crying, he lifted his head
And gazed through the clear-story windows at the white-blue of an after-rain sky.
Suddenly a thin scatter of sunlight smote upon his armour
And it flamed like a bonfire, and he in the midst, unnoticing.

White wood of poplar beneath green bark,
A man, the height and spread of a tall man,
Beneath a burning armour.
I would have flung my kerchief to him to bind upon his helmet,
But kerchiefs fall obliquely through backward centuries,
And already the light was growing too dim to see a silken nothing upon a shadowed floor.
Steel footsteps on stone make a strange sound;
I never heard the like before, and I think
—I never shall again.
For which unreasonable reason
I am determined to remain a virgin.