Around the couch, a silent solemn ring,48
They whom the Teuton call the Valkyrs sate.
Shot through pale webs their spindles glistening;
Dread tissues woven out of human hate
For heavenly ends!—for there is spun the woe
Of every war that ever earth shall know.
Below their feet a bottomless pit of gore49
Yawn'd, where each web, when once the woof was done,
Was scornful cast. Yet rising evermore
Out of the surface, wander'd airy on
(Till lost in upper space), pale wingèd seeds,
The future heaven-fruit of the hell-born deeds;
For out of every evil born of time,50
God shapes a good for his eternity.
Lo where the spindles, weaving crime on crime,
Form the world-work of Charlemains to be;—
How in that hall of iron lengthen forth
The fates that ruin, to rebuild, the North!
Here, one stern Sister smiling on the King,51
Hurries the thread that twines his Nation's doom;
And, farther down, the whirring spindles sing
Around the woof which from his Baltic home
Shall charm the avenging Norman, to control
The shatter'd races into one calm whole.
Already here, the hueless lines along,52
Grows the red creed of the Arabian horde;
Already here, the arm'd Chivalric Wrong
Which made the cross the symbol of the sword,
Which thy worst idol, Rome, to Judah gave,
And worshipp'd Mars upon the Saviour's grave!
Already the wild Tartar in his tents,53
Dreamless of thrones—and the fierce Visigoth[6]
Who on Colombia's golden armaments
Shall loose the hell-hounds,—nurse the age-long growth
Of Desolation—as the noiseless skein
Clasps in its web, thy far descendants, Cain!
Already, in the hearts of sires remote54
In their rude Isle, the spell ordains the germ
Of what shall be a Name of wonder, wrought
From that fell feast which Glory gives the worm,
When Rome's dark bird shall shade with thunder wings
Calm brows that brood the doom of breathless kings![7]
Already, though the sad unheeded eyes55
Of Bards alone foresee, and none believe,
The lightning boarded from the farthest skies
Into the mesh the race-destroyers weave,
When o'er our marts shall graze a stranger's fold,
And the new Tarshish rot, as rots the old.
Yea, ever there, each spectre hand the birth56
Weaves of a war—until the angel-blast
(Peal'd from the tromp that knells the doom of earth)
Shall start the livid legions from their last;
And man, with arm uplifted still to slay,
Reel on some Alp that rolls in smoke away!
Fierce glared the dwarf upon the silent King,57
"There is the prize thy visions would achieve!
There, where the hush'd inexorable ring
Murder the myriads in the webs they weave,
Behind the curtains of Incarnate War,
Whose lightest tremour topples thrones afar,—