So through the desert, in the silent hills,
I’ the current of the battle’s storm and stress,
One thought has driven me,—­that though men may call
Me stainless Paladin, Knight leal and true
To Christ and Our Lady, still I know myself
A knight not after God’s own heart, a soul
Recreant, and whelmed in the forbidden sin. 
For dearer to my sad heart than the cross
I give my heart’s best blood for are the eyes
That long ago, when youth and hope were mine,
I loved in thy still valleys, far Provence! 
And sweeter to my spirit than the bells
Of rescued Salem are the loving tones
Of her dear voice, soft echoing o’er the years. 
They haunt me in the stillness and the glare
Of desert noontide when the horizon’s line
Swims faintly throbbing, and my shadow hides
Skulking beneath me from the brassy sky. 
And when night comes to soothe with breath of balm
And pomp of stars the worn and weary world,
Her eyes rise in my soul and make its day. 
And even into the battle comes my love,
Snatching the duty that I offer Heaven.

At closing of El-Majed’s awful day,
When the last quivering sunbeams, choked with dust
And fume of blood, failed on the level plain,
In the last charge, when gathered all our knights
The precious handful who from morn had stemmed
The fury of the multitudinous hosts
Of Islam, where in youth’s hot fire and pride
Ramped the young lion-whelp, Ben-Saladin;
As down the slope we rode at eventide,
The dying sunlight faintly smiled to greet
Our tattered guidons and our dinted helms
And lance-heads blooming with the battle’s rose. 
Into the vale, dusk with the shadow of death,
With silent lips and ringing mail we rode. 
And something in the spirit of the hour,
Or fate, or memory, or sorrow, or sin,
Or love, which unto me is all of these,
Possessed and bound me; for when dashed our troop
In stormy clangor on the Paynim lines
The soul of my dead youth came into me;
Faded away my oath; the woes of Zion,
God was forgot; blazed in my leaping heart,
With instant flash, life’s inextinguished fires;
Plunging along each tense limb poured the blood
Hot with its years of sleeping-smothered flame. 
And in a dream I charged, and in a dream
I smote resistless; foemen in my path
Fell unregarded, like the wayside flowers
Clipped by the truant’s staff in daisied lanes. 
For over me burned lustrous the dear eyes
Of my beloved; I strove as at a joust
To gain at end the guerdon of her smile. 
And ever, as in the dense melee I dashed,
Her name burst from my lips, as lightning breaks
Out of the plunging wrack of summer storms.