To blossom that sweetened the sweet spring wind,
I saw her only—a girl reclined
In her girlhood’s indolent trances.
The realism of the picture is carried no further. With fine artistic sensibility Gordon recognises that he has said enough. The woman has entered; the man has grown blind to the blossom and deaf to the song-bird; the eternal tragedy, which is not altogether a tragedy, has begun.
For the rest, the poem plays upon two strings. Alternately there are echoes from the fields of undying renown, and again voices of sad and hopeless and unending regret. The well-known lines beginning:—
Then a steel-shod rush, and a glittering ring,
And a crash of the spear staves splintering
are a memorable piece of versification. They arrest and perpetuate the fighting Arthurian spirit, they convey in words the actual clash of arms, and they bring back the forgotten mood of the man of personal valour as possibly no other verses have yet done. Such a word picture might be expected to leave weak and tame anything that followed; but with equal conviction, and with equal command of tone and touch, Gordon strikes again the chord of intense spiritual shame and sorrow, gradually merging it into one of religious appeal and exhortation. On this latter note the poem closes.
The man who had done this great thing surely deserved something in this existence, or in some other existence, in return for what he had given to the people among whom he lived. Surely, one likes to think, there must be, somewhere, at some time or another, a compensation, a recompense, for the tragedy of a life that merited so much success and vanished, or seemed to vanish, in such utter dark.