O lady of my heart, have
O'er all my thought their golden glamour cast;
As amber torch-flames, where strange men-at-arms
Tread softly 'neath the damask shield of night,
Rise from the flowing steel in part reflected,
So on my mailed thought that with thee goeth,
Though dark the way, a golden glamour falleth.

Within the iambic limits, there are no two lines in the whole
poem that have an identical rhythm.

We turn from this to a poem in "Exultations," the "Night
Litany":

O God, what great kindness
have we done in times past
and forgotten it,
That thou givest this wonder unto us,
O God of waters?

O God of the night
What great sorrow
Cometh unto us,
That thou thus repayest us
Before the time of its coming?

There is evident, and more strongly in certain later poems, a
tendency toward quantitative measure. Such a "freedom" as this
lays so heavy a burden upon every word in a line that it becomes
impossible to write like Shelley, leaving blanks for the