Written for the Queen's Golden Jubilee Day, 1897

LO, in this day we keep the yesterdays,

And those great dead of the Victorian line.*

They passed, they passed, but cannot pass away,

For England feels them in her blood like wine.

She was their mother, and she is their daughter,

This lady of the water,

And from their loins she draws the greatness which

they were.

And still their wisdom sways,

Their power lives in her.

Their thews it is, England, that lift thy sword,

They are the splendour, England, in thy song,

They sit unbidden at thy council-board,

Their fame doth compass all thy coasts from wrong,

And in thy sinews they are strong.

Their absence is a presence and a guest

In this day's feast;

This living feast is also of the dead,

And this, O England, is thine All Souls' Day.

And when thy cities flake the night with flames,

Thy proudest torches yet shall be their names.

* Whom the poet passed before him in ghostly procession the "holy poets," soldiers, sailors, and men of science.

Come hither, proud and ancient East,

Gather ye to this Lady of the North,

And sit down with her at her solemn feast,

Upon this culminant day of all her days;

For ye have heard the thunder of her goings-forth,

And wonder of her large imperial ways.

Let India send her turbans, and Japan

Her pictured vests from that remotest isle

Seated in the antechambers of the Sun :

And let her Western sisters for a while

Remit long envy and disunion,

And take in peace

Her hand behind the buckler of her seas,

'Gainst which their wrath has splintered; come, for

she

Her hand ungauntlets in mild amity.

Viftoria! Queen, whose name is victory,

Whose woman's nature sorteth best with peace,

Bid thou the cloud of war to cease

Which ever round thy wide-girt empery

Fumes, like to smoke about a burning brand,

Telling the énergies which keep within

The light unquenched, as England's light shall be;

And let this day hear only peaceful din.

For queenly woman, thou art more than woman;

Thy name the often-struck barbarian shuns:

Thou art the fear of England to her foemen,

The love of England to her sons.

And this thy glorious day is England's; who

Can separate the two?

Now unto thee

The plenitude of the glories thou didst sow

Is garnered up in prosperous memory;

And, for the perfect evening of thy day,

An untumultuous bliss, serenely gay,

Sweetened with silence of the after-glow.

Nor does the joyous shout

Which all our lips give out

Jar on that quietude; more than may do

A radiant childish crew,

With well-accordant discord fretting the soft hour,

Whose hair is yellowed by the sinking blaze

Over a low-mouthed sea. Exult, yet be not twirled,

England, by gusts of mere

Blind and insensate lightness; neither fear

The vastness of thy shadow on the world.

If in the East

Still strains against its leash the unglutted beast

Of war; if yet the canon's lip be warm;

Thou, whom these portents warn but not alarm,

Feastest, but with thine hand upon the sword,

As fits a warrior race.

Not like the Saxon fools of olden days,

With the mead dripping from the hairy mouth,

While all the South

Filled with the shaven faces of the Norman horde.