The Queen of Seven Swords

It will be obvious that the Seven Champions of Christendom
who are here used as types of the different nations are only
the imaginary paladins of the old boyish romance; and have
no connection with the historical saints who bore their
names.

I had dreamed of a desolate land, deformed to its crooked
Skyline,

As if the round earth itself could be bent out of shape in its
shame,

Its plants stamped flat like a pattern, by marching of more
than mammoths,

Huge things, more naked and nameless; too old or new for a
name.

And I knew what Spirit had passed, who is vast beyond
meaning or measure,

The blank in the brain of the whirlwind, the hollow, the
hungry thing,

The Nothing that swells and desires, the void that devours
and dismembers,

In the heart of barbarian armies or the idle hours of a king.

Low light on the flat-topped hills, like headless creatures of
chaos,

Long shadows Striping the slime, like ghosts laid flat in the
grave,

Low clouds lying flattened and spread, as if heaven itself lay
prostrate;

And I looked on the world-wide waste; and I said, "There is
none to save"

I knew not if time out of mind, last night or now or to-
morrow,

Had broken that obscene dawn; on the strange, scarred hills
I trod,

I saw on their breaking terraces, cracking and sinking for
ever,

One shrine rise blackened and broken; like a last cry to God.

Old gold on the roof hung ragged as scales of a dragon
dropping,

The gross green weeds of the desert had spawned on the
painted wood:

But erect in the earth's despair and arisen against heaven
interceding,

Whose name is Cause of Our Joy, in the doorway of death,
she stood.

The Seven Swords of her Sorrow held out their hilts like a
challenge,

The blast of that stunning silence as a sevenfold trumpet
blew

Majestic in more than gold, girt round with a glory of iron,
The hub of her wheel of weapons; with a truth beyond
torture, true.

And it seemed as I gazed, from afar, from the cracks of the
withering mountains,

That seven sad knights came riding from seven points of the
Sky,

Yet I knew their crests from of old, who had ridden in the
faerie tourney,

When all the days were daydreams, in the truant days gone

by.

The green rust and the red had rotted their bronze and iron,
The green slime and the grey had stained them with many

lands.

The sheath of the sword hung hollow; but before the shrine
in the twilight

They ranked their empty scabbards; they raised their empty
hands.

And each man spoke, but in each was more than of one man
speaking;

A sound as of many waters, a tumult of many men.

And I heard through my heaving dream the noise of the
breaking of nations,

And tribes that the terror scatters and the trumpet gathers
again.