[The Colour-Bearer]
Thy charge was: "Hold My banner
Against our hidden foe;
To war where sounds no manner
Of glorious music, go!"
And like Thy word my answer all joyless: "Be it so."
Ah, not to brave Thy censure
But win Thy smile of light,
My heart of misadventure
Will end in the losing fight,
And lie out yonder, wattled with wounds from left to right.
The day will pass of torment,
The evenfall be sweet
When I shall wear for garment
The nakedness of defeat.
But when afield Thou comest, and look'st in vain to meet
That eagle of the wartime,
That oriflamme, outrolled
With strength of staff aforetime,
With cleanly and costly fold,—
Ride on, ride on! and seek me with lanthorns through the cold,
And take from me (turned donor
That night on blood-soaked sand),
The stick and rag of Honour
There safe in a stiffened hand,
Not left, not lost, nor ever a spoil in the victor's land.
[Sanctuary]
High above hate I dwell:
O storms! farewell.
Though at my sill your daggered thunders play
Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,
To me they sound more small
Than a young fay's footfall:
Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low
In Long Ago,
And winnowed into silence on that wind
Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.
Hither Felicity
Doth climb to me,
And bank me in with turf and marjoram
Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb;
With golden barberry-wreath,
And bluets thick beneath;
One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest
With bud-red breast,
Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage
Float less than April fog below our hermitage.
[Emily Brontë]
What sacramental hurt that brings
The terror of the truth of things
Had changed thee? Secret be it yet.
'Twas thine, upon a headland set,
To view no isles of man's delight,
With lyric foam in rainbow flight,
But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar,
Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.