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Shrill'd; but in going mingled with dim
cries

Far in the moonlit haze among the hills,
As of some lonely city sack'd by night,
When all is lost, and wife and child with
wail

Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and
call'd:

'Who spake? A dream. O, light upon the wind,

Thine, Gawain, was the voice

dim cries

are these

Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste

and wild

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Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way
Thro' this blind haze which, ever since I

saw

One lying in the dust at Almesbury,
Hath folded in the passes of the world.'

Then rose the King and moved his host by night,

And ever push'd Sir Modred, league by league,

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse A land of old upheaven from the abyss Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?' By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

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Where fragments of forgotten peoples

dwelt,

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After the Christ, of those who falling down Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist;

And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,

Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,

Sweat, writhings, anguish, laboring of the lungs

In that close mist, and cryings for the light,

Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.

Last, as by some one death-bed after wail Of suffering, silence follows, or thro' death Or death-like swoon, thus over all that shore,

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Brake in among dead faces, to and fro 130 Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down

Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen, And shiver'd brands that once had fought with Rome,

And rolling far along the gloomy shores
The voice of days of old and days to be.

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere, And whiter than the mist that all day long Had held the field of battle was the King:

'Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world,

And wastes the narrow realm whereon we move,

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And beats upon the faces of the dead,
My dead, as tho' they had not died for
me? -

O Bedivere, for on my heart hath fallen
Confusion, till I know not what I am,
Nor whence I am, nor whether I be king;
Behold, I seem but king among the dead.'

Then spake the bold Sir Bedivere: 'My

King!

King everywhere! and so the dead have kings,

There also will I worship thee as king.
Yet still thy life is whole, and still I live
Who love thee; but who hates thee, he that
brought

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The heathen back among us, yonder stands, Modred, unharm'd, the traitor of thine house.'

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My house are rather they who sware my

VOWS,

Yea, even while they brake them, own'd me king.

And well for thee, saying in my dark hour, When all the purport of my throne hath

fail'd,

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That quick or dead thou holdest me for king.

King am I, whatsoever be their cry;
And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see
Yet, ere I pass.' And uttering this the

King

Made at the man. Then Modred smote his liege

Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword

Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow, Striking the last stroke with Excalibur, Slew him, and, all but slain himself, he fell. 169

So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea, Until King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their lord, King Arthur; then, because his wound was deep,

The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

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