I

Dead!
And the Muses cried with a stormy cry
" Send them no more, for evermore.
Let the people die."

II

Dead!
" Is it he then brought so low?"
And a careless people flocked from the fields
With a purse to pay for the show.

III

Dead, who had served his time,
Was one of the people's kings,
Had laboured in lifting them out of slime,
And showing them, souls have wings!

IV

Dumb on the winter heath he lay.
His friends had stript him bare,
And rolled his nakedness everyway
That all the crowd might stare.

V

A storm-worn signpost not to be read,
And a tree with a mouldered nest
On its barkless bones, stood stark by the dead;
And behind him, low in the West,

VI

With shifting ladders of shadow and light,
And blurred in colour and form,
The sun hung over the gates of Night,
And glared at a coming storm.

VII

Then glided a vulturous Beldam forth,
That on dumb death had thriven;
They called her " Reverence" here upon earth,
And " The Curse of the Prophet" in Heaven.

VIII

She knelt — " We worship him" — all but wept —
" So great so noble was he!"
She cleared her sight, she arose, she swept
The dust of earth from her knee.

IX

" Great! for he spoke and the people heard,
And his eloquence caught like a flame
From zone to zone of the world, till his Word
Had won him a noble name.

X

Noble! he sung, and the sweet sound ran
Through palace and cottage door,
For he touched on the whole sad planet of man,
The kings and the rich and the poor;

XI

And he sung not alone of an old sun set,
But a sun coming up in his youth!
Great and noble — O yes — but yet —
For man is a lover of Truth,

XII

And bound to follow, wherever she go
Stark-naked, and up or down,
Through her high hill-passes of stainless snow,
Or the foulest sewer of the town —

XIII

Noble and great — O ay — but then,
Though a prophet should have his due,
Was he noblier-fashioned than other men?
Shall we see to it, I and you?
XIV

For since he would sit on a Prophet's seat,
As a lord of the Human soul,
We needs must scan him from head to feet
Were it but for a wart or a mole?"

XV

His wife and his child stood by him in tears,
But she — she pushed them aside.
" Though a name may last for a thousand years,
Yet a truth is a truth," she cried.
XVI

And she that had haunted his pathway still,
Had often truckled and cowered
When he rose in his wrath, and had yielded her will
To the master, as overpowered,

XVII

She tumbled his helpless corpse about.
" Small blemish upon the skin!
But I think we know what is fair without
Is often as foul within."

XVIII

She crouched, she tore him part from part,
And out of his body she drew
The red " Blood-eagle" of liver and heart;
She held them up to the view;

XIX

She gabbled, as she groped in the dead,
And all the people were pleased;
" See, what a little heart," she said,
" And the liver is half-diseased!"

XX

She tore the Prophet after death,
And the people paid her well.
Lightnings flickered along the heath;
One shrieked " The fires of Hell!"