Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Shrieks out of smoke, a flame of dung-straw fire         That is not quenched but hath for only fruit         What writhes and dies not in its rotten root:      Two things made flesh, the visible desire      To match in filth the skunk, the ape in ire, {87a}         Mouthing before the mirrors with wild foot         Beyond all feebler footprint of pursuit,      The perfect twanger of the Chinese lyre!      A heart with generous virtues run to seed      In vices making all a jumbled creed:         A soul that knows not love nor trust nor shame,      But cuts itself with knives to bawl and bleed -         If thou we've known of late, art still the same,         What need, O soul, to sign thee with thy name?      Once on thy lips the golden-honeyed bees         Settling made sweet the heart that was not strong,         And sky and earth and sea burst into song: {87b}      Once on thine eyes the light of agonies      Flashed through the soul and robbed the days of ease. {87c}         But tunes turn stale when love turns babe, and long         The exiled gentlemen grow fat with wrong.      And peasants, workmen, beggars, what are these? {87d}      O you who sang the Italian smoke above, -         Mud-lark of Freedom, pipe of that vile band      Whose envy slays the tyrant, not the love      Of these poor souls none have the keeping of -         It is your hand - it is your pandar hand         Smites the bruised mouth of pilloried Ireland!