\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Domino gloria! <\/i><\/div>\n <\/i><\/p>\nDon John of Austria<\/div>\n
Is shouting to the ships.<\/div>\n
King Philip\u2019s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck<\/div>\n
(
Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.<\/i>)<\/div>\nThe walls are hung with velvet that, is black and soft as sin,<\/div>\n
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.<\/div>\n
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,<\/div>\n
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,<\/div>\n
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey<\/div>\n
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,<\/div>\n
And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,<\/div>\n
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.<\/div>\n
Don John\u2019s hunting, and his hounds have bayed\u2014<\/div>\n
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid<\/div>\n
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!<\/div>\n
Gun upon gun, hurrah!<\/div>\n
Don John of Austria<\/div>\n
Has loosed the cannonade.<\/div>\n
The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,<\/div>\n
(
Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.<\/i>)<\/div>\nThe hidden room in man\u2019s house where God sits all the year,<\/div>\n
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.<\/div>\n
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea<\/div>\n
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;<\/div>\n
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,<\/div>\n
They veil the plum\u00e8d lions on the galleys of St. Mark;<\/div>\n
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,<\/div>\n
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,<\/div>\n
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines<\/div>\n
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.<\/div>\n
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung<\/div>\n
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.<\/div>\n
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on<\/div>\n
Before the high Kings\u2019 horses in the granite of Babylon.<\/div>\n
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell<\/div>\n
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,<\/div>\n
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign\u2014<\/div>\n
(
But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!<\/i>)<\/div>\nDon John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,<\/div>\n
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate\u2019s sloop,<\/div>\n
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,<\/div>\n
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,<\/div>\n
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea<\/div>\n
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.<\/div>\n
Vivat Hispania! <\/i><\/div>\nDomino Gloria!<\/div>\n
Don John of Austria<\/div>\n
Has set his people free!<\/div>\n
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath<\/div>\n
(
Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.<\/i>)<\/div>\nAnd he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,<\/div>\n
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,<\/div>\n
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….<\/div>\n
(
But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.<\/i>)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
Source: The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton<\/em> (1927)<\/p>\n\n
[hr color=”dark-gray” width=”100%” border_width=”2px” ]<\/p>\n
Some of the artistic renderings of that battle:<\/h5>\n
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