breath
                 Had entered in to kill.

               He did not pass in purple pomp,
                 Nor ride a moon-white steed.
               Three yards of cord and a sliding board
                 Are all the gallows' need:
               So with rope of shame the Herald came
                 To do the secret deed.

               We were as men who through a fen
                 Of filthy darkness grope:
               We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
                 Or give our anguish scope:
               Something was dead in each of us,
                 And what was dead was Hope.

               For Man's grim Justice goes its way,
                 And will not swerve aside:
               It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
                 It has a deadly stride:
               With iron heel it slays the strong,
                 The monstrous parricide!

               We waited for the stroke of eight:
                 Each tongue was thick with thirst:
               For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate
                 That makes a man accursed,
               And Fate will use a running noose
                 For the best man and the worst.

               We had no other thing to do,
                 Save to wait for the sign to come:
               So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
                 Quiet we sat and dumb:
               But each man's heart beat thick and quick
                 Like a madman on a drum!

               With sudden shock the prison-clock
                 Smote on the shivering air,
               And from all the gaol rose up a wail
                 Of impotent despair,
               Like the sound that frightened marshes hear
                 From a leper in his lair.

               And as one sees most fearful things
                 In the crystal of a dream,
               We saw the greasy hempen rope
                 Hooked to the blackened beam,
               And heard the prayer the hangman's snare
                 Strangled into a scream.

               And all the woe that moved him so
                 That he gave that bitter cry,
               And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
                 None knew so well as I:
               For he who live more lives than one
                 More deaths than one must die.