The tides of restless passion ages old.

I know thy humours and their contradiction,

I know thy fevers and hallucinations,

I see beneath the painted mask of fiction

Thy face of fierce and weary exaltations.

And art thou come to gaze with wakened eyes

Into the sick world's travail and her grief,

Dost thou from thy long battling surmise

The end of battle and the world's relief?

While we are creeping in our crooked ways