Then and now

Then and Now
When battles were fought
With a chivalrous sense of should and ought,
In spirit men said,
"End we quick or dead,
Honour is some reward!
Let us fight fair -- for our own best or worst;
So, Gentlemen of the Guard,Fire first!
"In the open they stood,
Man to man in his knightlihood:
They would not deign
To profit by a stain
On the honourable rules,
Knowing that practise perfidy no man durst
Who in the heroic schools
Was nurst.
But now, behold, what
Is war with those where honour is not!
Rama laments
Its dead innocents;
Herod howls: "Sly slaughterRules now!
Let us, by modes once called accurst,
Overhead, under water,Stab first."
To A Lady
NOW that my page upcloses,
doomed, maybe,
Never to press thy cosy cushions more,
Or wake thy ready Yeas as heretofore,
Or stir thy gentle vows of faith in me:
Knowing thy natural receptivity,
I figure that, as flambeaux banish eve,
My sombre image,
warped by insidious heave
Of those less forthright,
must lose place in thee.
So be it. I have borne such.
Let thy dreams
Of me and mine diminish day by day,
And yield their space to shine of smugger things;
Till I shape to thee but in fitful gleams,
And then in far and feeble visitings,
And then surcease.
Truth will be truth alway.
To Flowers from Italy Sunned in the South,
and here to-day;
--If all organic thingsBe sentient,
Flowers, as some men say,
What are your ponderings?
How can you stay,
nor vanish quite
From this bleak spot of thorn,
And birch, and fir, and frozen white
Expanse of the forlorn?
Frail luckless exiles hither brought!
Your dust will not regain
Old sunny haunts of Classic thought
When you shall waste and wane;
But mix with alien earth,
be litWith frigid Boreal flame,
And not a sign remain in it
To tell men whence you came.
Zermatt Thirty-two years since,
up against the sun,
Seven shapes,
thin atomies to lower sight,
Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height,
And four lives paid for what the seven had won.
They were the first by whom the deed was done,
And when I look at thee,
my mind takes flight
To that day's tragic feat of manly might,
As though, till then, of history thou hadst none.
Yet ages ere men topped thee,
late and soon
Thou watch'dst each night the planets lift and lower;
Thou gleam'dst to Joshua's pausing sun and moon,
And brav'dst the tokening sky when Caesar's power
Approached its bloody end:
yea, saw'st that Noon
When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour.