The Sword

Singing

The voice of the Sword from the heart

of the Sword Clanging majestical,

As from the starry-staired
Courts of the primal Supremacy,
His high, irresistible song.

ARABIAN NIGHTS'

ENTERTAINMENTS

(To Elizabeth Robins Pennell)

'O mes chères Mille et Une Nuits!'-Fantasio.

ONCE on a time

There was a little boy: a master-mage

By virtue of a Book

Of magic-O, so magical it filled

His life with visionary pomps

Processional! And Powers

Passed with him where he passed. And Thrones And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed, Thronged in the criss-cross streets,

The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields,

Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades, Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul

Pavilioned jealously, and hid

As in the dusk, profound,

Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.

I shut mine eyes. . . . And lo!

A flickering snatch of memory that floats

A

Upon the face of a pool of darkness five
And thirty dead years deep,

Antic in girlish broideries

And skirts and silly shoes with straps

And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks
Plain in the shadow of a church

(St. Michael's in whose brazen call

To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed),

Sedate for all his haste

To be at home; and, nestled in his arm,

Inciting still to quiet and solitude,

Boarded in sober drab,

With small, square, agitating cuts

Let in a-top of the double-columned, close,

Quakerlike print, a Book! . . .

What but that blessed brief

Of what is gallantest and best

In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance?

The Book of rocs,

Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris,

Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars,
And ghouls, and genies-O, so huge

They might have overed the tall Minster Tower
Hands down, as schoolboys take a post!

In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman,