Classic Poem

Perched on its yellow peak beneath a sky
Inclement as of Africa, there lifts
Toledo, with its brows of wrinkled rifts
Crowned with the belfries of the long gone-by.
The sacred city shuts its midday eye
To take siesta 'mid the Orient wifts;
Only from out the forge the rumor drifts
Where on the sword-blade still the armorers ply.

Deep in the choir's ancient glooms, behind
The Gothic lattices, there bends in prayer
A pallid monk upon his ritual.
And on the balcony outside there wind
The garlanded carnations burning there
Fresh as the lips love's earliest sighs enthrall.