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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 its 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.