Don Quixote on Market Street

by Clark Ashton Smith


	Riding on Rosinante where the cars
	With dismal unremitting clangors pass,
	And people move like curbless energumens
	Rowelled by fiends of fury back and forth,
	Behold! Quixote comes, in battered mail,
	Armgaunt, with eyes of some keen haggard hawk
	Far from his eyrie. Gazing right and left,
	Over his face a lightning of disdain
	Flushes, and limns the hollowness of cheeks
	Bronzed by the suns of battle; and his hand
	Tightens beneath its gauntlet on the lance
	As if some foe had challenged him, or sight
	Of unredressed wrong provoked his ire.....

	Brave spectre, what chimera shares thy saddle,
	Pointing thee to this place? Thy tale is told,
	The high. proud legend of all causes lost-
	A quenchless torch emblazoning black ages.
	Go hence, deluded paladin: there is
	No honor here, nor glory, to be won.
	Knight of La Mancha, turn thee to the past,
	Amid it's purple marches ride for aye,
	Nor tilt with thunder-driven iron mills
	That shall grind on to silence. Chivalry
	Has flown to stars unsooted by the fumes
	That have befouled these heavens, and romance
	Departing, will unfurl her oriflammes
	On towers unbuilded in an age to be.
	Waste not thy knightliness in wars unworthy,
	For time and his alastors shall destroy
	Full soon, and bring to stuffless, cloudy ruin
	All things that fret thy spirit, riding down
	This pass with pandemonian walls, this Hinnom
	Where Moloch and where Mammon herd the doomed.