Classic Poem

See where the jets of music break and fly
Like dizzy swallows in an amber sky;
And the devout dusk flooding aisle and aisle
Labours gigantic mysteries the while.
Grave women level-coifed, whose eyeballs gaze
Into the void from long-forgotten days,
Relax; crowned faces mild of bearded kings;
And piteous, nameless, misbegotten things
(Jests of the chisel, made to flout mankind)
Under the corbel of the arch consigned,
Lean to the recreative airs that make
The semblance live and frozen stones awake.
The gray dust stirr'd in yon Crusader's tomb
Recalls a soul to haunt her ruined room;
The mailed feet propped against the marble hound
Tingle with penetrating spells of sound,
And in the stony palms and ears of stone
He feels again the holy madness blown —
Challenge of dazzling cities mountain-walled,
Leaguer and march and melley and stratagem,
And hears the European trump that called
The knights to escalade Jerusalem.