Holy of England! since my light is short And faint, O rather by the sun anew Of timeless passion set my dial true, That with thy saints and thee I may consort; And wafted in the cool enshadowed port Of poets, seem a little sail long due, And be as one the call of memory drew Unto the saddle void since Agincourt! Not now for secular love’s unquiet lease, Receive my soul, who, rapt in thee erewhile, Hath broken tryst with transitory things; But seal with her a marriage and a peace Eternal, on thine Edward’s altar-isle, Above the stormless sea of ended kings.

II.

FOG.

Like bodiless water passing in a sigh, Through palsied streets the fatal shadows flow, And in their sharp disastrous undertow Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky. The towery vista sinks upon the eye, As if it heard the horns of Jericho, Black and dissolved; nor could the founders know How what was built so bright should daily die. Thy mood with man’s is broken and blent in, City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown The generous light in which thy life began. Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin, Greater and elder yet the love of man Full in thy look, though the dark visor’s down.

III.

S. PETER-AD-VINCULA.

Too well I know, pacing the place of awe, Three queens, young save in trouble, moulder by; More in his halo, Monmouth’s mocking eye, The eagle Essex in a harpy’s claw; Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw Sundown of Scotland: how with treasons lie White martyrdoms; rank in a company Breaker and builder of the eternal law. Oft as I come, the bitter garden-row Of ruined roses hanging from the stem, Where winds of old defeat yet batter them, Infects me: suddenly must I depart, Ere thought of men’s injustice then, and now, Add to these aisles one other broken heart.