Two Nations | Page 3

things, the seed of birth, The mystical warm earth. O thou her flower of flowers, with treble braid Be thy sweet head arrayed, In witness of her mighty motherhood Who bore thee and found thee good, Her fairest-born of children, on whose head Her green and white and red Are hope and light and life, inviolate Of any latter fate. Fly, O our flag, through deep Italian air, Above the flags that were, The dusty shreds of shameful battle-flags Trampled and rent in rags, As withering woods in autumn's bitterest breath Yellow, and black as death; Black as crushed worms that sicken in the sense, And yellow as pestilence. Fly, green as summer and red as dawn and white As the live heart of light, The blind bright womb of colour unborn, that brings Forth all fair forms of things, As freedom all fair forms of nations dyed In divers-coloured pride. Fly fleet as wind on every wind that blows Between her seas and snows, From Alpine white, from Tuscan green, and where Vesuvius reddens air. Fly! and let all men see it, and all kings wail, And priests wax faint and pale, And the cold hordes that moan in misty places And the funereal races And the sick serfs of lands that wait and wane See thee and hate thee in vain. In the clear laughter of all winds and waves, In the blown grass of graves, In the long sound of fluctuant boughs of trees, In the broad breath of seas, Bid the sound of thy flying folds be heard; And as a spoken word Full of that fair god and that merciless Who rends the Pythoness, So be the sound and so the fire that saith She feels her ancient breath And the old blood move in her immortal veins.
§ Strange travail and strong pains, Our mother, hast thou borne these many years While thy pure blood and tears Mixed with the Tyrrhene and the Adrian sea; Light things were said of thee, As of one buried deep among the dead; Yea, she hath been, they said, She was when time was younger, and is not; The very cerecloths rot That flutter in the dusty wind of death, Not moving with her breath; Far seasons and forgotten years enfold Her dead corpse old and cold With many windy winters and pale springs: She is none of this world's things. Though her dead head like a live garland wear The golden-growing hair That flows over her breast down to her feet, Dead queens, whose life was sweet In sight of all men living, have been found So cold, so clad, so crowned, With all things faded and with one thing fair, Their old immortal hair, When flesh and bone turned dust at touch of day: And she is dead as they. So men said sadly, mocking; so the slave, Whose life was his soul's grave; So, pale or red with change of fast and feast, The sanguine-sandalled priest; So the Austrian, when his fortune came to flood, And the warm wave was blood; With wings that widened and with beak that smote, So shrieked through either throat From the hot horror of its northern nest That double-headed pest; So, triple-crowned with fear and fraud and shame, He of whom treason came, The herdsman of the Gadarean swine; So all his ravening kine, Made fat with poisonous pasture; so not we, Mother, beholding thee. Make answer, O the crown of all our slain, Ye that were one, being twain, Twain brethren, twin-born to the second birth, Chosen out of all our earth To be the prophesying stars that say How hard is night on day, Stars in serene and sudden heaven rerisen Before the sun break prison And ere the moon be wasted; fair first flowers In that red wreath of ours Woven with the lives of all whose lives were shed To crown their mother's head With leaves of civic cypress and thick yew, Till the olive bind it too, Olive and laurel and all loftier leaves That victory wears or weaves At her fair feet for her beloved brow; Hear, for she too hears now, O Pisacane, from Calabrian sands; O all heroic hands Close on the sword-hilt, hands of all her dead; O many a holy head, Bowed for her sake even to her reddening dust; O chosen, O pure and just, Who counted for a small thing life's estate, And died, and made it great; Ye whose names mix with all her memories; ye Who rather chose to see Death, than our more intolerable things; Thou whose name withers kings, Agesilao; thou too, O chiefliest thou, The slayer of splendid brow, Laid where the lying lips of fear deride The foiled tyrannicide, Foiled, fallen, slain,