| And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in. | 95 |
| He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon, | |
| He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon, | |
| And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey | |
| Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day, | |
| And death is in the phial and the end of noble work, | 100 |
| But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk. | |
| Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed— | |
| Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid. | |
| Gun upon gun, ha! ha! | |
| Gun upon gun, hurrah! | 105 |
| Don John of Austria | |
| Has loosed the cannonade. | |
| The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke, | |
| (Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.) | |
| The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year, | 110 |
| The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear. | |
| He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea | |
| The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery; | |
| They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark, | |
| They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark; | 115 |
| And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs, | |
| And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs, | |
| Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines | |
| Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines. | |
| They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung | 120 |
| The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young. | |
| They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on | |
| Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon. | |
| And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell | |
| Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell, | 125 |
| And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign— | |
| (But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!) | |
| Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop, | |
| Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop, | |
| Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, | 130 |
| Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds, | |
| Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea | |
| White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty. | |
| Vivat Hispania! | |
| Domino Gloria! | 135 |
| Don John of Austria | |
| Has set his people free! | |
| Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath | |
| (Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.) | |
| And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain, | 140 |
| Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain, | |
| And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade.... | |
| (But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.) |