sense, And yellow as pestilence. Fly, green as summer and red as dawn and white As the live heart of light, The blind bright womb of colour unborn, that brings Forth all fair forms of things, As freedom all fair forms of nations dyed In divers-coloured pride. Fly fleet as wind on every wind that blows Between her seas and snows, From Alpine white, from Tuscan green, and where Vesuvius reddens air. Fly! and let all men see it, and all kings wail, And priests wax faint and pale, And the cold hordes that moan in misty places And the funereal races And the sick serfs of lands that wait and wane        See thee and hate thee in vain. In the clear laughter of all winds and waves, In the blown grass of graves, In the long sound of fluctuant boughs of trees, In the broad breath of seas, Bid the sound of thy flying folds be heard; And as a spoken word Full of that fair god and that merciless Who rends the Pythoness, So be the sound and so the fire that saith She feels her ancient breath And the old blood move in her immortal veins.       §        Strange travail and strong pains, Our mother, hast thou borne these many years While thy pure blood and tears Mixed with the Tyrrhene and the Adrian sea; Light things were said of thee, As of one buried deep among the dead; Yea, she hath been, they said, She was when time was younger, and is not; The very cerecloths rot That flutter in the dusty wind of death, Not moving with her breath; Far seasons and forgotten years enfold Her dead corpse old and cold With many windy winters and pale springs:        She is none of this world's things. Though her dead head like a live garland wear The golden-growing hair That flows over her breast down to her feet, Dead queens, whose life was sweet In sight of all men living, have been found So cold, so clad, so crowned,      With all things faded and with one thing fair, Their old immortal hair, When flesh and bone turned dust at touch of day:        And she is dead as they. So men said sadly, mocking; so the slave, Whose life was his soul's grave; So, pale or red with change of fast and feast, The sanguine-sandalled priest; So the Austrian, when his fortune came to flood, And the warm wave was blood; With wings that widened and with beak that smote, So shrieked through either throat From the hot horror of its northern nest That double-headed pest; So, triple-crowned with fear and fraud and shame, He of whom treason came, The 

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