Anonymous Plays: XVIII

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MORE yet and more, and yet we mark not all:
  The Warning fain to bid fair women heed
  Its hard brief note of deadly doom and deed;
The verse that strewed too thick with flowers the hall
Whence Nero watched his fiery festival;
  That iron page wherein men’s eyes who read
  See, bruised and marred between two babes that bleed,
A mad red-handed husband’s martyr fall;
The scene which crossed and streaked with mirth the strife
Of Henry with his sons and witchlike wife;
And that sweet pageant of the kindly fiend,
  Who, seeing three friends in spirit and heart made one,
Crowned with good hap the true-love wiles he screened
  In the pleached lanes of pleasant Edmonton.

© Algernon Charles Swinburne