Where the sound of sin and riot
Broke upon the night’s dim quiet,
And the solemn bells hung nigh it
  Echoed from their looming towers;
Where the mourners wept alway,
Watching for the morning grey;
Where the weary toiler lay,
  Husbanding the niggard hours;

By the gates where all night long
Guests in many a joyous throng,
With the sound of dance and song,
  Dreamed in golden palaces;
Still he passed, and door by door
Opened with a pale outpour,
And the revel rose no more
  Hushed in deeper phantasies.

As we passed, the talk and stir
Of the quiet wayfarer
And the noisy banqueter
  Died upon the midnight dim. 
They that reeled in drunken glee
Shrank upon the trembling knee,
And their jests died pallidly,
  As they rose and followed him.

From the street and from the hall,
From the flare of festival
None that saw him stayed, but all
  Followed where his wonder would: 
And our feet at first so few
Gathered as those white feet drew
  To a pallid multitude;

And the hushed and awful beat
Of our pale unnumbered feet
Made a murmur strange and sweet,
  As we followed evermore. 
Now the night was almost passed,
And the dawn was overcast,
When the stranger stayed at last
  At a great cathedral door.

Never word the stranger said,
But he slowly raised his head,
And the vast door opened
  By an unseen hand withdrawn;
And in silence wave on wave,
Like an army from the grave,
Up the aisles and up the nave,
  All that spectral crowd rolled on.

As I followed close behind,
Knowledge like an awful wind
Seemed to blow my naked mind
  Into darkness black and bare;
Yet with longing wild and dim,
And a terror vast and grim,
Nearer still I pressed to him,
  Till I almost touched his hair.

From the gloom so strange and eery,
From the organ low and dreary,
Rose the wailing miserere,
  By mysterious voices sung;
And a dim light shone, none knew,
How it came, or whence it grew,
From the dusky roof and through
  All the solemn spaces flung.

But the stranger still passed on,
Till he reached the alter stone,
And with body white and prone
  Sunk his forehead to the floor;
And I saw in my despair,
Standing like a spirit there,
How his head was bruised and bare,
  And his hand were clenched before,

How his hair was fouled and knit
With the blood that clotted it,
Where the prickled thorns had bit
  In his crowned agony;
In his hands so wan and blue,
Leaning out, I saw the two
Marks of where the nails pierced through,
  Once on gloomy Calvary.

Then with trembling throat I owned
All my dark sin unatoned,
Telling it with lips that moaned,
  And methought an echo came
From the bended crowd below,
Each one breathing faint and low,
Sins that none but he might know: 
  “Master I did curse thy name.”