Vi

LOCUSTA.

COME close and see her and hearken.

This is she.
Stop the ways fast against the stench that nips
Your nostril as it nears her. Lo, the lips
That between prayer and prayer find time to be
Poisonous, the hands holding a cup and key,

Key of deep hell, cup whence blood reeks and drips;

The loose lewd limbs, the reeling hingeless hips, The scurf that is not skin but leprosy.

This haggard harlot grey of face and green

With the old hand's cunning mixes her new priest The cup she mixed her Nero, stirred and spiced. She lisps of Mary and Jesus Nazarene

With a tongue tuned, and head that bends to the east,

Praying. There are who say she is bride of

Christ.

VII.

CELÆNO.

THE blind king hides his weeping eyeless head,

Sick with the helpless hate and shame and awe, Till food have choked the glutted hell-bird's craw And the foul cropful creature lie as dead And soil itself with sleep and too much bread:

So the man's life serves under the beast's law, And things whose spirit lives in mouth and maw Share shrieking the soul's board and soil her bed, Till man's blind spirit, their sick slave, resign Its kingdom to the priests whose souls are swine, And the scourged serf lie reddening from their rod, Discrowned, disrobed, dismantled, with lost eyes Seeking where lurks in what conjectural skies That triple-headed hound of hell their God.

VIII.

A CHOICE.

FAITH is the spirit that makes man's body and blood
Sacred, to crown when life and death have ceased
His heavenward head for high fame's holy feast;
But as one swordstroke swift as wizard's rod
Made Cæsar carrion and made Brutus God,

Faith false or true, born patriot or born priest,
Smites into semblance or of man or beast

The soul that feeds on clean or unclean food.
Lo here the faith that lives on its own light,

Visible music; and lo there, the foul

Shape without shape, the harpy throat and howl.

Sword of the spirit of man! arise and smite,

And sheer through throat and claw and maw and

tongue

Kill the beast faith that lives on its own dung.

IX.

THE AUGURS.

LAY the corpse out on the altar; bid the elect
Slaves clear the ways of service spiritual,

Sweep clean the stalled soul's serviceable stall, Ere the chief priest's dismantling hands detect The ulcerous flesh of faith all scaled and specked Beneath the bandages that hid it all,

And with sharp edgetools œcumenical
The leprous carcases of creeds dissect.
As on the night ere Brutus grew divine
The sick-souled augurs found their ox or swine
Heartless; so now too by their after art

In the same Rome, at an uncleaner shrine,

Limb from rank limb, and putrid part from part, They carve the corpse-a beast without a heart.

X.

A COUNSEL.

O STRONG Republic of the nobler years

Whose white feet shine beside time's fairer flood

That shall flow on the clearer for our blood Now shed, and the less brackish for our tears; When time and truth have put out hopes and fears With certitude, and love has burst the bud,

If these whose powers then down the wind shall scud

Still live to feel thee smite their eyes and ears,

When thy foot's tread hath crushed their crowns and

creeds,

Care thou not then to crush the beast that bleeds,

The snake whose belly cleaveth to the sod, Nor set thine heel on men as on their deeds; But let the worm Napoleon crawl untrod, Nor grant Mastai the gallows of his God.

1869.