The Knight of St. John
Ere down yon blue Carpathian hills
The sun shall sink again,
Farewell to life and all its ills,
Farewell to cell and chain!
These prison shades are dark and cold,
But, darker far than they,
The shadow of a sorrow old
Is on my heart alway.
For since the day when Warkworth wood
Closed o'er my steed, and I,
An alien from my name and blood,
A weed cast out to die,-
When, looking back in sunset light,
I saw her turret gleam,
And from its casement, far and white,
Her sign of farewell stream,
Like one who, from some desert shore,
Doth home's green isles descry,
And, vainly longing, gazes o'er
The waste of wave and sky;
So from the desert of my fate
I gaze across the past;
Forever on life's dial-plate
The shade is backward cast!
I've wandered wide from shore to shore,
I've knelt at many a shrine;
And bowed me to the rocky floor
Where Bethlehem's tapers shine;
And by the Holy Sepulchre
I've pledged my knightly sword
To Christ, His blessed Church, and her,
The Mother of our Lord.
Oh, vain the vow, and vain the strife!
How vain do all things seem!
My soul is in the past, and life
To-day is but a dream.
In vain the penance strange and long,
And hard for flesh to bear;
The prayer, the fasting, and the thong,
And sackcloth shirt of hair.
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poem by John Greenleaf Whittier
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