The Wild Knight and Other Poems

The dark abortive blunder that is you.
And you would change, forgiven, into flowers.

LORD ORM

And yet – and yet you do not strike me dead.
I do not draw: the sword is in your hand —
Drive the blade through me where I stand.

REDFEATHER

Lord Orm,
You asked the Lady Olive (I can speak
As to a toad to you, my lord) – you asked
Olive to be your paramour: and she —

LORD ORM

Refused.

REDFEATHER

And yet her father was at stake,
And she is soft and kind. Now look at me,
Ragged and ruined, soaked in bestial sins:
My lord, I too have my virginity —
Turn the thing round, my lord, and topside down,
You cannot spell it. Be the fact enough,
I use no sword upon a swordless man.

LORD ORM

For her?

REDFEATHER

I too have my virginity.

LORD ORM

Now look on me: I am the lord of earth,
For I have broken the last bond of man.
I stand erect, crowned with the stars – and why?
Because I stand a coward – because you
Have mercy – on a coward. Do I win?

REDFEATHER

Though there you stand with moving mouth and eyes,
I think, my lord, you are not possible —
God keep you from my dreams.

[Goes out.]

LORD ORM

Alone and free.
Since first in flowery meads a child I ran,
My one long thirst – to be alone and free.
Free of all laws, creeds, codes, and common tests,
Shameless, anarchic, infinite.
Why, then,
I might have done in that dark liberty —
If I should say 'a good deed,' men would laugh,
But here are none to laugh.
The godless world
Be thanked there is no God to spy on me,
Catch me and crown me with a vulgar crown
For what I do: if I should once believe
The horror of that ancient Eavesdropper
Behind the starry arras of the skies,
I should – well, well, enough of menaces —
should not do the thing I come to do.
What do I come to do? Let me but try
To spell it to my soul.
Suppose a man
Perfectly free and utterly alone,
Free of all love of law, equally free
Of all the love of mutiny it breeds,
Free of the love of heaven, and also free
Of all the love of hell it drives us to;
Not merely void of rules, unconscious of them;
So strong that naught alive could do him hurt,
So wise that he knew all things, and so great
That none knew what he was or what he did —
A lawless giant.

[A pause: then in a low voice.]

Would he not be good?
Hate is the weakness of a thwarted thing,
Pride is the weakness of a thing unpraised.
But he, this man…
He would be like a child
Girt with the tomes of some vast library,
Who reads romance after romance, and smiles
When every tale ends well: impersonal
As God he grows – melted in suns and stars;
So would this boundless man, whom none could spy,
Taunt him with virtue, censure him with vice,