Don Quixote On Market Street

Riding on Rosinante where the cars With dismal unremitting clangors pass, And people move like curbless energumens Rowelled by fiends of fury back and forth, Behold! Quixote comes, in battered mail, Armgaunt, with eyes of some keen haggard hawk Far from his eyrie. Gazing right and left, Over his face a lightning of disdain Flushes, and limns the hollowness of cheeks Bronzed by the suns of battle; and his hand Tightens beneath its gauntlet on the lance As if some foe had challenged him, or sight Of unredressed wrong provoked his ire..... Brave spectre, what chimera shares thy saddle, Pointing thee to this place? Thy tale is told, The high, proud legend of all causes lost— A quenchless torch emblazoning black ages. Go hence, deluded paladin: there is No honor here, nor glory, to be won. Knight of La Mancha, turn thee to the past, Amid its purple marches ride for aye, Nor tilt with thunder-driven iron mills That shall grind on to silence. Chivalry Has flown to stars unsooted by the fumes That have befouled these heavens, and romance Departing, will unfurl her oriflammes On towers unbuilded in an age to be. Waste not thy knightliness in wars unworthy, For time and his alastors shall destroy Full soon, and bring to stuffless, cloudy ruin All things that fret thy spirit, riding down This pass with pandemonian walls, this Hinnom Where Moloch and where Mammon herd the doomed.