The lanes, you know, were white with May,

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I knew you could not look but well; And dews, that would have fall'n in tears, I kiss'd away before they fell.

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Ah, well — but sing the foolish song
I gave you, Alice, on the day
When, arm in arm, we went along,

A pensive pair, and you were gay
With bridal flowers that I may seem,
As in the nights of old, to lie
Beside the mill-wheel in the stream,
While those full chestnuts whisper by.

It is the miller's daughter,

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I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields,
But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would,
Till the High God behold it from beyond,
And enter it, and make it beautiful?

Or else as if the world were wholly fair,

But that these eyes of men are dense and dim,
And have not power to see it as it is;
Perchance, because we see not to the close;
For I, being simple, thought to work His will,
And have but stricken with the sword in vain;
And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend
Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm
Reels back into the beast, and is no more.
My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death:
Nay God my Christ I pass but shall not die.'

Then, ere that last weird battle in the west
There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain kill'd
In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown
Along a wandering wind, and past his ear
Went shrilling Hollow, hollow all delight!
Hail, king! to-morrow thou shalt pass away.
Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee.
And I am blown along a wandering wind,
And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.'

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And fainter onward, like wild birds that change

Their season in the night and wail their way

From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream
Shrill'd; but in going mingled with dim cries

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Far in the moonlit haze among the hills,

As of some lonely city sack'd by night,

When all is lost, and wife and child with wail

Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and call'd,

Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind.

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Thine, Gawain, was the voice are these dim cries
Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild
Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?'

This heard the bold Sir Bedivere and spake :
'O me, my king, let pass whatever will,
Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field;
But in their stead thy name and glory cling
To all high places like a golden cloud
For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass.
Light was Gawain in life, and light in death

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Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man;

And care not thou for dreams from him, but rise

I hear the steps of Modred in the west,

And with him many of thy people and knights

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Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown
Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee.
Right well in heart they know thee for the king.
Arise, go forth and conquer as of old.'

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Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:
Far other is this battle in the west

Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth,
And brake the petty Kings and fought with Rome
And thrust the heathen from the Roman wall,
And shook him thro' the north. Ill doom is mine

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To war against my people and my knights.
The king who fights his people fights himself.

And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke
That strikes them dead is as my death to me.

Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way

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Thro' this blind haze, which ever since I saw

One lying in the dust at Almesbury,

Hath folded in the passes of the world.'

Then rose the king and moved his host by night,

And ever push'd Sir Modred, league by league,

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By fire, to sink into the abyss again;
Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,
And the long mountains ended in a coast
Of ever-shifting sand, and far away
The phantom circle of a moaning sea.
There the pursuer could pursue no more,
And he that fled no further fly the king;

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And there, that day when the great light of heaven
Burn'd at his lowest in the rolling year,

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On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed.

Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight

Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west.
A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea:
Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew
Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold
With formless fear and ev'n on Arthur fell
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought,
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
And some had visions out of golden youth,
And some beheld the faces of old ghosts

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Look in upon the battle; and in the mist
Was many a noble deed, many a base,
And chance and craft and strength in single fights,
And ever and anon with host to host

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Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn
Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash
Of battle-axes on shatter'd helms, and shrieks
After the Christ, of those who falling down
Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist;
And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,
Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, laboring of the lungs
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.

Last, as by some one deathbed after wail Of suffering, silence follows, or thro' death Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,

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