I
To-night o'er Bagshot heath the purple heather
Rolls like dumb thunder to the splendid West;
And mighty ragged clouds are massed together
Above the scarred old common's broken breast; And there are hints of blood between the boulders,
Red glints of fiercer blossom, bright and bold;
And round the shaggy mounds and sullen shoulders
The gorse repays the sun with savage gold.
And now, as in the West the light grows holy,
And all the hollows of the heath grow dim,
Far off, a sulky rumble rolls up slowly
Where guns at practice growl their evening hymn.
And here and there in bare clean yellow spaces
The print of horse-hoofs like an answering cry
Strikes strangely on the sense from lonely places
Where there is nought but empty heath and sky.
The print of warlike hoofs, where now no figure
Of horse or man along the sky's red rim
Breaks on the low horizon's rough black rigour
To make the gorgeous waste less wild and grim;
Strangely the hoof-prints strike, a Crusoe's wonder,
Framed with sharp furze amongst the footless fells,
A menace and a mystery, rapt asunder,
As if the whole wide world contained nought else,—
Nought but the grand despair of desolation
Between us and that wild, how far, how near,
Where, clothed with thunder, nation grapples nation,
And Slaughter grips the clay-cold hand of Fear.
II
And far above the purple heath the sunset stars awaken,
And ghostly hosts of cloud across the West begin to stream,
And all the low soft winds with muffled cannonades are shaken,
And all the blood-red blossom draws aloof into a dream; A dream—no more—and round the dream the clouds are curled together;
A dream of two great stormy hosts embattled in the sky;
For there against the low red heavens each sombre ridge of heather
Up-heaves a hedge of bayonets around a battle-cry;
Melts in the distant battle-field or brings the dream so near it
That, almost, as the rifted clouds around them swim and reel,
A thousand grey-lipped faces flash—ah, hark, the heart can hear it—
The sharp command that lifts as one the levelled lines of steel.