Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/266

 My father, who killed his. King Arthur's house Has more divisions in it than I like In houses; and if Modred's aim be good For backs like mine, I'm not long for the scene." KING ARTHUR, as he paced a lonely floor That rolled a muffled echo, as he fancied, All through the palace and out through the world, Might now have wondered hard, could he have heard Sir Lamorak's apathetic disregard Of what Fate's knocking made so manifest And ominous to others near the King If any, indeed, were near him at this hour Save Merlin, once the wisest of all men, And weary Dagonet, whom he had made A knight for love of him and his abused Integrity. He might have wondered hard And wondered much; and after wondering, He might have summoned, with as little heart As he had now for crowns, the fond, lost Merlin, Whose Nemesis had made of him a slave, A man of dalliance, and a sybarite. "Men change in Brittany, Merlin," said the King; And even his grief had strife to freeze again A dreary smile for the transmuted seer Now robed in heavy wealth of purple silk, With frogs and foreign tassels. On his face, Too smooth now for a wizard or a sage, Lay written, for the King's remembering eyes, A pathos of a lost authority Long faded, and unconscionably gone; And on the King's heart lay a sudden cold: