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THE  ISLAND

 

 

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD

MELBOURNE  ::  LONDON  ::  TORONTO

“I have been asked,” said Professor Humphrey Humphreys, “to pay a tribute to Francis Brett Young on this occasion as one of his oldest friends. Although we were both Worcestershire born and bred, we first met as medical students fifty years ago and were drawn together by our common tastes and our passion for this pastoral heart of England, whose pulse we had both felt beating so strongly in our formative years. This is not the place to recall those far-away student days though naturally many of their incidents crowd my memory—rural rides and walks, widely ranging talks such as young men love, and—perhaps most vividly remembered of all—musical evenings. For though Francis had a strong urge to artistic creation of several kinds, music was his first medium—composing accompaniments to songs. It was a Worcestershire poet, A. E. Housman, who first attracted him in this way, and his settings of verses from ‘The Shropshire Lad’ still seem to me most happily married to the words. Others that he wrote for some poetry of Robert Bridges later found a publisher: but he had had no real musical training, and without training success in any art is difficult to achieve. His passion for music was lifelong, and he had a special fondness for Elgar, another Worcestershire artist, whose ‘Nimrod’ we have just heard: he would recall hearing the first performance of the ‘Dream of Gerontius’ in this cathedral.

“Those student days provided material for one of his earliest novels The Young Physician, and brief experience as a locum tenens in the Black Country coupled with memories of the parental practice—his father was a doctor in this county—later flowered in My Brother Jonathan and Dr. Bradley Remembers. As soon as possible after qualifying he married and lived happily ever after. For the first chapter in the new story he acquired a not too busy practice at Brixham in South Devon with the deliberate intention of devoting as much time as possible to writing. Now success in any art requires first original talent, next its improvement by training and practice, finally, of course, something which the artist wishes to express in the particular medium of his choice. Francis was richly gifted with the first but a number of years passed before his professional duties gave him enough leisure to improve it to a standard that satisfied a publisher. In poetry, where inspiration counts for more and practice for less, success came earlier and his verses appeared regularly in the later volumes of ‘Georgian Poetry’ that were published during, and just after the 1914-18 war. Indeed it was this war that really launched him on his new career. Joining the R.A.M.C. he was posted to East Africa and served as medical officer to a Rhodesian regiment under General Smuts. This experience produced Marching on Tanga, generally acclaimed by the critics as a war narrative of the highest class; a novel with a local setting; a book of verse; Five Degrees South; and friendships in Rhodesia and South Africa which resulted in visits there during the post-war years; also a number of novels with a South African background. By the end of the war he felt confident he could earn a modest living as a writer, and with the encouragement of his wife, to whose self-sacrifice, devotion and care he owed much of his success, he decided to migrate to Italy and took a villa on the island of Capri. He was attracted by the climate, since his health, never robust, had suffered from his campaign in the tropics and he no longer felt equal to the physical strain of medical practice. He felt drawn too by the prospective company of brother artists, Compton Mackenzie, D. H. Lawrence, Axel Munthe and others. In this stimulating atmosphere he produced a regular series of novels so successful that by 1930 he was prosperous enough to acquire a pied-à-terre in England, first by Esthwaite Water in Westmorland and later at Craycombe House in his native Worcestershire. There followed some of the happiest years of an extremely happy life. He wrote regularly and diligently, took an interest in county cricket, attended the musical festivals in this cathedral and generally played a part in the life of the county. Then came the Second World War. Too old for service he devoted himself to writing his epic of English History published under the tide of The Island. It was dedicated to his wife in words which all his friends recognised as profoundly true:

The effort of writing this long sequence of poems, together with six war years in England, produced a serious deterioration in his health, and as soon as the war was over he migrated permanently to South Africa, though he paid occasional brief visits to this country. On one of these he received the Honorary Degree of D.Litt. from his old University. His health slowly failed but he bore this with courage and cheerfulness sustained by his characteristic joie de vivre, and by the tributes he constantly received expressing the pleasure his writings gave to unnumbered fellow countrymen and to a large reading public in America.

“Every artist, whatever his medium, expresses primarily his own experiences, personal or imaginary, and Francis Brett Young’s picture of life was coloured from first to last by his native county, which he loved so well. We started this Service singing some verses by Milton. I will conclude by quoting Milton again:”

To you, dear brethren of the Seven Seas

And the Five Continents, strong progeny

Of one earth-girdling brood—to you, whose Hopes,

Wills, Visions, Aspirations, are moved as ours

By living memory or the more profound

Surge of the unremembered; you, in whose ears

Words of a common stem and heritage

Waken the self-same echoes; you, from whose lips

High-syllabled names of legendary scenes

Fall neither more beloved nor less familiar

Than those of shires, cities or villages,

That gave your forbears birth and burial—

To you, from her wave-battered, war-swept shore

The Muse of Britain calls.

                           First unto you,

Wielders of axe and plough, who in midmost West

Patiently watch your wheat-sown prairie quicken

With fledgeling green, warm to red wealth of harvest

(Before your phœnix maple flames in death),

Then whiten with the powdery incandescence

Of Arctic snowlights, till, at a milder waft,

Their frozen sap shatters the living trees

In loud reverberation, and ice-locked lumber,

Loosened from glassy fetters, yields to the undertow

Of snow-fed cataracts falling

To lakes that swim like seas, and torrents lashed

By shoals of spring-run salmon—till, once again,

The axe rings in the sodden woods, the mould

Turns from your cleaving share in corduroy

Of tawny velvet, and Autumn’s ivory grain

Once more is drilled or scattered on the fallows.

Next you, whom that old sorceress Africa

Bewitched with her hot potions of welling light

And airs pellucid: you, twixt veld and sky,

Long-stirruped, falcon-eyed, riding for ever Northward

From pinnacled dolomite of stark Drakensberg

Trembling against the inviolable blue

To where Zambesi’s smoke

Rolls from his thunderous chasm: you, that in galleries

Torrid with neighbourhood of Earth’s radiant core

Blast grains of gold from niggard quartz to slake

The greed of cities; you that, saddle-propped

Beneath your trinket cross and old Magellan’s

Star-cloudy galaxies, hear in the breathless night

The whine of fever’s wings; the leafy rustle

Of stealthy-treading paws, or grosser wallowings

Of monsters that once ruled the wild, but now

Quail at the scent of man . . .

Then you, my brothers,

Who, ceiled by selfsame stars, but in a clime

Less terrible for aught beside its silence,

Deep in smooth-pillared eucalyptus, hear

The brittle chatter of bark, like cobra-casts

Sloughed from the living tree;

Or startled scream of halcyon parakeets

Splashing the blue-green twilight—you who, poised

Between parched earth and salamander sky,

Range the dun Austral sheepwalks, choked with dust

Of myriad-pattering flocks and the hot reek

Of burdened fleeces; you who, more venturous

Through thickset tropical tangles penetrate

The trackless Never-Never Land, or Northward

By Carpentaria and the Coral Sea,

Through hyaline glooms

Watch the sleek Philipino grope for pearls:

You, harlequin crowds,

Who, on loud ocean-beaches, lazily

View the Pacific gather in indigo deeps

His cumulative surges, where, rank on rank,

His shuddering rollers break, plunge, pound, and seethe

Over the hissing sands to kiss your feet

With warm, sun-dazzled fringes of faint foam . . .

You, Eastward of the stormy Tasman housed,

Youngest in heart and blood,

Most distant yet most near;

Islanders, like ourselves, braced by the breath

Blown from another Pole—who hear, as we,

Dawn-song of lark and ousel and homely rooks;

Who, from your ferny mountain corries, see

The red stag toss his antlers, and far beneath,

Sheep-dappled downs and comfortable farms

Where, when the South whitens your hills with snow,

And timber-fires burn bright,

The old songs are sung, the old tales re-told . . .

To you, more lonely,

Who, on blanched coral beaches, where man’s blood

Grows thin with tropic languors, from Antilles

To hot Malacca, see the identical fringe

Of leaning palm-fronds seaward, landward, sway

On tides of tepid air diurnally

Ebbing and flowing; you, who by steamy estuaries

Of mud and mangrove gloomed with melancholy

Thickets that neither Spring nor Autumn know,

Swelter and languish; you who in jungle-clearings

Watch viscous rubber from the wounded bark

Drip and congeal;

You, who on orient uplands, holly-green

With kempt plantation, raise flinching lids to meet

The dazzle of heaped Himalaya’s glaciers

Taunting dry lips; you, who in shuttered chambers

Above the babel of murmurous bazaars,

Lulled by the lazy punkah and the shuffle

Of bare or sandalled feet, must chain your wits

To tallies, files and ledgers, checking bales

Of musky merchandise—yet often pause,

Pen in mid-air, closing your eyes to see

The king-cup watermeadows and dewy lawns

Hushed in bird-haunted twilight . . .

You, no less,

Whom a crazed king and his crass minister

With feeble mercenary arms provoked

Affronted and estranged (but in a struggle

Less bitter than the later feud that reft

Your brotherhood) and thereby sealed those freedoms

Of thought and speech ungrudged and unafraid

Which are our common pride in kinship deeper

Than that of blood or tongue—whose eager brains

And tireless thews have wrested from the soil

Of an unpeopled continent such wealth

And power as never Empire yet on earth

Has known, casting the mantle of your might

In three short centuries from the frozen shores

Of Massachusets and the pinnacles

Of many-towered Manhattan to far sands

Where the Pacific thunders—and from the ice

Of our unguarded frontiers to the warm seas

Where New Orleans swelters and the silt

Of Mississippi clouds the steamy gulf

Of Mexico—you, whose most noble spirit,

Re-minting the rough ore of Runnymede

At bloody Gettysburg, stamped on it the shape

Of a new currency that rings as bright

In our ears as in yours, for ever honoured

By them that stand for liberty and prize

The rights of the defenceless . . .

Unto you all,

Now, in this awful hour, when earth’s foundations

Quaver as when, long since, her cooling crust

Wrinkled in slow convulsions, overwhelming

Oceans and lands—now, when the patient flesh

Of frail, brief-sojourning man sustains anew

Fate’s most barbaric insults, let us remember

How that our heritage was ever rooted

In stress and turmoil—nay, how the very soil

We cherish, our sovereign isle, was born of tumult:

Vexed by titanic forces, blasted, riven,

Torn from her mother-continent, then moulded

By mortal drift of long-forgotten seas;

Her basalt core by frost and torrent fretted,

Her mountains etched with ice.

                        Let us remember

What fierce and gentle strains war in our blood,

Colour our eyes and hair; the innumerable richness

Of entropy that gives our chequered race

Its greatness. For Britain is not one, but many:

She is Brython and Saxon and Norse; she is Brennus, twin son

Of the Gaul Dunwallon, who cast

His Celtic sword in the ransom-balance of Rome:

She is Shakespeare and Burns, Jane Austen and Jonathan Swift;

John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, Pitt and Washington;

Gloriana, and Florence Nightingale—and Nell Gwynn.

She is rude Stonehenge and ageless Avebury no less

Than Hadrian’s rampart and Durham’s Norman Keep;

Paul’s guardian dome and Lincoln’s aery Gothic.

Hers are the Pennine scarps; the stormy summits

Of Grampian and Cader Idris and helmed Blencathra;

Smooth Sussex downs, dappled with shine and cloud;

The patient central ploughlands; the cherry-blossom

Of Teme and Medway. Hers are the silent rivers

And singing streams we love: strong-flowing Severn,

Spey’s snow-fed torrent; Test’s pellucid slides

And emerald-weeded stickles; those dimpling rivulets

That, born of Cotswold, feed the lordly flood

Of many-masted Thames. All these are hers;

Yet the core of her coasts is granite; the salt in her blood

Is drawn from no mediterranean puddle, foul

With the ordure and deliquescence of dead dynasties,

But from ocean’s running surges, the fury that beats

On iron-bound cliffs from Cornwall to Cape Wrath,

Rimed with Atlantic spray: the seas that sever:

The seas that make us one! Come then, my brothers,

Hear, and behold!

From an exalted station upon the confines of stellar space, the terrestrial globe is seen. The view-point is sufficiently low for certain general features of the planet’s surface to be vaguely discernible; yet so high that the curved outline of the Northern Hemisphere, immediately beneath our eyes, can be marked as it rolls over, within its enveloping atmosphere, against the background of space, through which it is travelling, and in which it revolves. The turning of the globe becomes appreciable not so much through any details in the variation of its surface (which indeed are but dimly seen) as through the manner in which it appears to heave its bulk out of darkness, and, as day succeeds night, into sunlight which suddenly quenches those volcanic coruscations that, like the glow from the flank of a smouldering pit-mound, or sparkles of ignited carbon amid the soot of a fire-back, break out in a series of quick pin-points and serpentine lines of flame. From this contemplation the voice of the First Age summons us.

Come then, and from this breathless height,

Where, through the silent stratosphere

Dead planets blaze with borrowed light

And live suns sparkle doubly clear;

Where the cold moon, but lately torn

From her parent’s riven sides,

Circling, captive and forlorn,

Drags at the lava-tides;

Where, in an incandescent dust,

Meteorites, like Lucifer

Falling, burst their iron hearts,

Sputter, and disappear:

See the lumbering Earth upthrust

Out of darkness into day

One segment of her cooling crust,

Gleam for a while, then roll away

From out the creeping sickle of light,

To sink beneath night’s blinding veils,

Flecked with spurts of flame and bright

With red serpiginous trails;

Where, piercing Earth’s integuments,

The flux of molten magma spills

Through fissures and red-throated vents

Of domed volcanic hills:

Till seas go up in plumes of steam,

Threshed by the fiery flail

Of spent lapilli, and ocean-beds

Lie choked in pumice hail;

Till new-formed plains are rent again

By fiercer shocks and quakes,

And sands are strewed with lava spewed

From out the heaving lakes;

Till the last cooling crater spends

Its last Titanic ire,

And a cold quietude descends

On the First Age of Fire!

As the tempestuous chant of the Archæan Age dies away, the Earth is seen to be wrapped in vapours condensed from her seas during these phlegræan convulsions: a shroud of dangling whiteness defines and magnifies the invisible sphere. By degrees, the mist thins and dissipates, and through its vestiges, faintly at first, the calmer chant of the Second Age is heard.

No more, no more, tormented planet

Suffer birth-pangs such as these!

Earth’s cold heart shrinks; her limbs of granite

Sprawl to embrace the Cambrian Seas.

Bemused she sleeps; if she be shaken

’Tis by the swell of earth-storms spent

That heave her bulk but cannot waken

The new Atlantic continent.

No sound her slumber breaks; naught changes

Her form but fretting of the tides,

Or polar winds that scour the ranges

With grits from their dead crater-sides.

Lifeless the lands, and deathlike-seeming

The mask of ocean; yet beneath

That crushing weight of water teeming,

A myriad lives grapple with death:

Dreamy Medusa trails her springes

For floating prey, and Trilobite

Gropes eyeless through the coral fringes

Blanched by the deep sea’s timeless night;

And carrion of that carnage, drifting

With land-born debris swept from shore,

Death’s silt, perpetually sifting,

Settles in slime on the sea-floor,

A new, dim continent devising—

Till, a chained monster, ill at ease,

Earth burst her granite bonds uprising,

And shook the oceans from her knees;

Till, mountain-high, the waters, helmed

With emerald spindrift, surged and tossed;

And, in white fury overwhelmed,

Atlantis foundered and was lost . . .

Was lost, for ever lost . . . And yet,

See, where the patient corals built

Their galleries, a domed island set

On slimes of powdered shell and silt.

That dome (whose brittle matrix shrank

To bone of Malvern, yet to be,)

Loomed for an age; then slowly sank

In a tumultuous sea

That seethed and simmered as when schools

Of whales in polar waters sport,

Or grey amphibians, in the pools

Of green Limpopo wallowing, snort—

Heaving their leaden sides to shake

The river from their streaming flanks,

And, sounding, spread a wave to wake

The saurians basking on her banks.

So, from that sea, emergent shapes

Of mountain sent a great wave forth

That lashed the Hebridean capes

And woke the craters of the North

To frenzies of a second birth

In sheeted flame amid the roar

Of waters. And bewildered Earth

Is lost to sight once more.

Birth and Destruction . . . So they run;

Yet each is granted little room:

The new theme, tenderly begun,

Fades, silenced by the drums of doom;

Buds, cheated of their blossoming,

Fall to feed the common mould;

And ever new creations spring

From the dust of the old.

So, recking neither toil nor waste,

Creative Earth’s indifferent eye

Sees each new chronicle erased

Before the ink is dry—

As when some eager poet, swayed

By exaltations of fierce thought,

Pores on the music he has made

And knows it for a thing of nought,

Then, challenged by that mocking gage,

Crumples the paper, lifts his pen,

And pondering on the vacant page

Fashions his faulty dream again.

In this cataclysmic scene we have witnessed nothing less than the birth-pangs of Europe. Again and again the amphibian ranges lift their whale-backs and subside; until, at last, land and sea appear to have reached a state of equilibrium, and the monsters emerge as a series of mountain chains of an Alpine magnificence—resembling the fingers of a prone hand, in the intervals between which lie a number of diagonal firths and elongated lakes of fresh or brackish water: the obverse, as it were, of the Caledonian orograph. But though the ranges gather clouds from the sea, and torrents, born of these, eat into their flanks with deep erosions, draining into the Devonian lakes and friths, at their feet lie thirsty steppes swept by pillars of dust and veiled in sandstorms—the earth caked and cracked with heat, or pitted with infrequent rain; and though the bases on which this continent rests may seem to be built for eternity, the forces of subsidence and destruction are already at work; and lo, before the volcanic fires have flickered out, this new continent collapses—volcanoes and peaks, firths, lakes and inland seas commingled in what is neither wholly sea nor land: a vast swamp of black pools and crevasses, and one immense delta, where conterminous rivers, wider than Mississippi or Amazon, discharge the silt and debris of that destruction. Through warm, moisture-laden air, the chant of the Third Age is heard.

Yet mark how from this waste of fire and mud

Steaming and seething with mephitic gases

That break in bubbles from its black morasses,

Wells, with incontinent haste, the living flood

Of high, impetuous growth: how root with root,

In subterranean struggle for survival,

Wrestles to overwhelm its bitterest rival;

How leaves with predatory leaves dispute

The ambience of moist air, that, like a lens

Gathers and concentrates upon the fens

Rays fiercer than our planet’s denizens

Have ever known. See, in this carnival

Of lush proliferation, how the tall

Lycopod drinks the light and steals the breath

Of humbler creatures stifling underneath

Her dome of shade; and how the gorgon hair

Of Sigillaria with aerial tresses

Sucks moisture from the sodden swamp’s recesses,

Then droops to earth to find new foothold, where

Fanwise the fern-frond sways, and epiphyte

In crevice of bark or mossy fork entreed

Drains the sap blindly creeping toward the light;

How, in this world that knows nor flower nor seed,

The sexless spores shed from green leaves and breed,

Unravished by wantoning of breeze or beel

Yet wingéd life there is: from tree to tree

Bright Archeoptilus, like a dragon-fly

Rustling his gauzy pinions, quivers and flits,

And clouds of locusts darken pools of sky

Reflected in the coal-swamp’s inky pits;

While spider, roach and cricket grave their trails

On the smooth mud-bank’s palimpsest, and scales

Of armoured ganoids gleam as each pursues

His prey of shrinking molluscs in the ooze.

So, on that dreamlike world, deep silence broods

For all its restless vehemence—save when floods

Of swollen sea, bursting its bars of sand,

Surge through the estuaries and drown the land,

Through creek and channel curiously creeping,

Brimming the lone lagoons with brine, and seeping

To rot each rootlet with a salty kiss,

Till the whole forest wilts and perishes!

And see how, revelling on that poisonous tide,

The plunging shapes of sea-born creatures ride;

Shoals of lean sharks, with crushing pavement-teeth

Explore their new-found pastures, and beneath

Ridges of shell-bank delve with routing heads

To crunch the blind crustaceans on their beds!

Time and again, the inflowing salty tide

Sickened those forests, and the green trees died

And fell and rotted; in the age between,

Time and again, they quicken with new green,

And coldly by their chlorophyll, encage

The sunlight that shall warm a distant age.

And now (it is almost as if the Earth herself grew intolerant of these endless alternations of growth and decay that seem to lead nowhere) a new cataclysm shakes those regions of drowned Atlantis from which the bastions of Armorica still tower unsubmerged. From their bases an earth-wave spreads Northward, rippling the ocean-floor, and breaking, at last, on the rudimentary ridge of the Malverns, which it overrides with so great a pressure that their basalt is buckled and curled over to enfold the verges of the coal-swamp. And now that this barrier has been lowered, torrential floods, charged with alluvium from the flanks of the quiescent Western volcanoes, pour into the swamp and seal it; and later, amid these flats of solidifying sand, which resemble those that surround the Dead Sea and the Caspian, there is born a pellucid lake; and the water sucked up from that lake in innumerable summers descends as rain, so that the basin, extending its margins by constant erosion, at length breaks its banks and lets in the Sea of the Oolite, warm from the tropics and rich with new forms of life. From the borders of that sea the Chant of the Fourth Age is heard.

Beneath my corals, locked in death

Of ebony, the coal-swamps lie;

And, for an age, no living breath

Ruffles my tepid air or wakes

The slumber of my silken sea—

Till, sudden from the silence, breaks

The Scherzo of Time’s Symphony!

Now behold the labouring Earth

Delivered of a monstrous birth,

As from creative fancy swarms

A welter of fantastic forms:

See, where the fruitful sea impinges

Upon my sands, the palmy fringes

Of cycads thrust their clustered spears,

And forests of flowered conifers

In myrtle and magnolia mingle

Honey and resin. On slopes of shingle

The crocodile with languid eye

Stares into a steamy sky,

And wandering through cypress-groves

Nightmare creatures of this age

Make their gigantic pasturage

Or celebrate their monstrous loves:

Here, with deliberation, moves

Bird-footed Iguanodon

To curve his slender neck and slake

His thirst within the Wealden Lake

Or pools where Ichthyosaurs and lithe

Water-serpents swarm and writhe,

And through the blue-green opal gleams

The moon-pale radiance of the chalk;

Or sprawls where Pterodactyls stalk

And, lighting, furl their bat-like wings

To stamp upon the forming cliff

Their footprints’ feeble hieroglyph.

Inland, ravening forest plains,

Hear the more formidable brood

Of Dinosaurs crash through the wood,

Rending their unsuspicious prey

With sabred fangs and vulture claws,

Or, if a rival bars their way,

Engrappled with ferocious jaws;

While, at the first loud challenge flung,

Fleet marsupials pouch their young

And scatter, like the animate spray

Of flying-fish when dolphins play;

And every beast that feels the ground

Shudder with clash of armoured sides,

And heaven shaken by the sound

Of those tremendous battle-cries,

Cowers in the trampled fern and hides

Until the deadly work is done,

As the vanquished roars and dies

And the dazed victor stumbles on.

So, in those resinous woods, and glades

Of honey-sweet magnolia, fades

This pageant of fantastic Time:

The mailed reptiles sink to slime:

Dinosaur, Iguanodon

And Pterodactyl, all are gone,

And o’er their unrecorded grave

Shimmers again the lustral wave.

This is indeed the greatest deluge of all. Unceasingly the chalky seas pour out of the Asian tropics through the gulf of Greenland, until all that remains of the British lands, over which the great reptiles roamed, is an archipelago of islands—the greater of which are based on the Grampians, the Snowdon massif, the Brecon Beacons and the Carmarthen Vans. In the strait between these and the perdurable Armorican granite, the white dome of the Weald uprises, then sinks, and then reappears as part of a promontory jutting Northward from what is now the European mainland, presenting the profile of a human head in a peaked hood, and vaguely foreshadowing the shape of the British Isles.

But this promise, too, fails of fulfilment. Fire’s last and most violent protest, launched from the volcanic chain that bounds the North from Antrim to Hecla, overwhelms this rudimentary Britain in a flow of lava—and all that can be seen is an inferno of fire and water fiercely contending. When the lava-flow cools and sets, rains furrow its slaggy surface, and, streaming Southward, carve out of the silt left by the last sea, the courses of two great rivers. One, impeded by Pennine, sweeps over the bed of the Irish Sea and flows into the Atlantic; the second shies from what remains of the Malvern ridge to break through the Southern Cotswold and join the Channel. Though it is still part of Europe, the shape of Britain begins to define itself and the Chant of the Fifth Age is heard.

From Ushant unto Orkney spread

Green lies my land, new-forested

With oak and ilex, birch and ash,

Made musical by streams that splash

To silence in their river-bed.

Green lies my land: a temperate air

Wavers and wanders everywhere

Through wood and marsh and water-meadow.

To dapple with a moving shadow

Of cloud the downland bare.

Green lies my land: from dusk to dawn

Peace broods upon the forest lawn,

And ever mistier starlight spills

Its silver on sleep-folded hills,

Till darkness be withdrawn,

And my bird-nestling woodland wakes

In tender tremolos and shakes

And muted whimperings that fill

Its leafy clerestories, until

Morning’s full music breaks.

Hear my woodlarks, tossed in bright

Fountain-jets of sheer delight,

From their palpitating throats

Let fall a shower of limpid notes

Like raindrops sprayed with light,

And sinking on extended wings

Bestir the thrush to murmurings

Of sweet, reiterated phrases,

While the bolder blackbird raises

His orange bill, and flings

Reveille through the echoing wood

Waking the drowsy multitude

That through the tapestry of leaves

A web of tenderer music weaves

Till noonday silence brood

Unruffled on that leafy sea

Save for the drone of honey-bee,

Or doves that croon, or whispering

Of branches where the squirrels spring

Nimbly from tree to tree.

Yet ever, from the whirling snows

Of deserts where the ice-wind blows

Cutting the tundras like a knife,

A slow tide of warm-blooded life

Into my pleasance flows:

See the light-stepping reindeer nip

Young lichens with a velvet lip,

While herds of roes and dappled fallows

Pause to drink from minnowed shallows,

Where hare and marmot sip

Dew from blades of springing grass,

And in the bittern’s moist morass,

Knee-deep, with antlers tossing high,

The red stag roars his rutting-cry,

And droves of lemmings pass:

Like calm thoughts in a dream they roam,

Seeking an unimagined home;

And the brown bear’s inquiring snout

Snuffles and sucks the sweetness out

From the wild-bee’s honeycomb,

Where, deep in sunless forests, grey

Rhinoceros and mammoth stray,

Brushing bent saplings from their knees,

And through the wrack of shattered trees

Forging their ruthless way.

And when the pride of day is done,

Creatures that in the friendly sun

Browsed without terror, rise and slink

To reedy waterpools and drink

Timidly, one by one.

Beneath the dark’s protective shield,

In thicket, bush and brake concealed,

They sink and cower out of sight,

When the fierce hunters of the night

Breathe fear upon the field;

When, from her caverned resting-place,

The tigress, with deliberate grace

Steals, and the lion licks his jaw

And yawns, or with a curving paw

Washes his golden face,

When startled on the darkening plain

The wary aurochs shakes his mane,

And stamps and snorts and sniffs the airs

That eddy from the charnel lairs

Wherein their cubs have lain.

Through wood and weald and waving grass

The hunters and the hunted pass;

And mingling in this carnival,

A shape more terrible than all,

Deadliest that ever was,

Man, with soft skin and brittle bone

And puny sinew, hunts alone,

In his brain’s many-shuttled looms

Weaving more complicated dooms

Than life had ever known;

In his dim armoury of wit,

By fear’s imaginations lit,

Fashioning pikes of wood and bone,

Flint-headed lance and throwing-stone,

And thongs for axe-heads split:

Man, who in loops of springe and snare

Trammels the heron and the hare,

And with stone axe or bludgeon clubs

The litters of blind tiger-cubs

Mewling within their lair:

Whose mind, more swift, can overtake

The fleetfoot reindeer herds, and break

In sunken pits the mammoth’s pride,

Laughing to see that shaggy hide

Pierced by the pitfall stake.

Man, whose inventive fingers crave

Perpetual artifice, and grave

The imaged victims of his sleight

On ivory, or the stalagmite

That glazes his dark cave;

Ever, with cumulative skill

Sharpening his wits and flints, until

Hunters and hunted wince to hear

His voice, and sniff his scent with fear,

And perish at his will,

Or, like the wild dog, cringe and cower

To serve. Yet, even in this hour

Of man’s first mastery, he and they

Together quailed beneath the sway

Of a more pitiless power,

When flying flakes of owl-soft snow

Whirled from the fields of Arctic floe

Weighed on the forest’s sagging crown

And sent the green vault crashing down

On the warm life below;

And, winging these, an icier breath,

Foretaste of a crystal death,

Sealed the lakes in sheeted glass

And froze the lemmings to the grass

They nibbled underneath;

And crept into foul caverns where

Man, with the tiger and the bear

And cowed hyæna, huddles near

Fires whose very flames appear

To freeze upon the air,

Till, mustering his numb wits, he sees

How blue-green glaciers lap the knees

Of mountains, and the glacial wave

Sets on the threshold of his cave,

And, cold with terror, flees.

Southward, to where the blood-red sun

Sickens at noon in vapours dun,

He stumbles with the fear-tamed herds

Of savage beasts, while homeless birds

Waft over, one by one.

So, in dumb fellowship of pain,

Man, with his victims, limps the plain;

And he that lags or falters feels

Ice-cold fingers clip his heels,

And staggers on again,

Or falling, crushed beneath the tread

Of starved hordes trampling overhead,

Stiffens, and still for ever lies

Under the glassy shroud of ice

That ceres those frozen dead.

Thrice the grey glaciers melted—thrice

They clamped the mammoth in a vice,

Moulded the fell and scoured the plain

With boulder-drift and sharp moraine,

While, lost beneath the ice,

Their voiceless waters patiently

Furrowed new river-bed and sea,

And chiselled under moving floe

The lineaments of the land we know,

Peerless epitome

Of all sweet shapes and tender hues;

Land that the girdling sea imbues

With misty radiance, clothing green

Mountain and meadow with the sheen

Of its pellucid dews.

Yet, year on year, the greedy tide

Swelled from the West, unsatisfied,

And ever, with impatient fret,

Gnawed at the bridge of land that yet

Bound her to Europe’s side;

And currents of the hungry Rhine

Rifted that bridge with creek and chine,

Crept to the base of every baulk

That propped the flint ribs of the chalk

And rotted it with brine;

And undermined the chalky lea

Till, in a foaming ecstasy

The twin tides kiss—and, like a ship

That shudders from the launching-slip,

An Island takes the sea!

Through years unnumbered now the Western tide

Boring and fretting has poured into the breach

And scoured the crumbling funnel of the chalk.

And now, behold, the Kentish cliffs, clear-cut

Above their hissing beaches of chesil, frown

Upon a sea that knows its continents.

Mark, on the Gallic shore,

Two bony promontories, Blancnez and Grisnez,

Resistant remnants of that broken causeway,

Gape to engulf a shallow crescent of sand

And one precarious roadstead: Portus Itius,

Where, rocking at their anchors, or careened

Above the driftwood tidemark, see assembled

Cæsar’s diverse armada: high-pooped carracks

With leather lugsails and thonged rigging, reft

From the vanquished Veneti; Gaulish coracles

Of hide and wattle, that like water-spiders

Skim between shore and ship; lean Roman galleys,

Iron-rammed and beaked, fitter for tideless waters

Than these capricious surges: an ominous throng

Of eighty ships and more.

                     Here, on the crown

Of Grisnez’s thrifty turf, it is so calm,

So still, this breathless evening, you can hear

Voices of seamen in the anchored fleet

Crying from ship to ship—and from inland dunes,

Where the two legions lie, an undertone

Like noise of babbling water or starling-flocks

Roosted in reed-beds; see, from their bivouac-fires,

A dove-grey smoke-film dim the harbour’s glass

Like a breath-misted mirror; smell the pungency

Of woodsmoke wavering where the breath of thyme

Mingles with salt marsh savours . . . It is so clear

That the silken channel, shot with the iridescence

Of a pigeon’s throat or milky mother-of-pearl,

Swims like a tide-brimmed estuary, and the downs

Beyond the cliffs of Kent float unsubstantial

As layered cloudbanks.

                Here, set upon the summit,

A group of reed-thatched hutments, ragged by the wind,

Shelter headquarters; and here, that evening,

Three men bareheaded walk: First, Titus Labienus,

Stocky and shaggy as a moor-fed colt,

Gruff-voiced, short-spoken, with decisive gesture,

And a skin tanned as leathery as his tunic

By three years hard campaigning in the hungry

Winters of Gaul. Next, Quintus Cicero,

Thin-lipped, dark eyed, and elegantly-fashioned

With more Greek subtlety than Roman iron,

Mocks, with the indolent flicker of a smile,

The old campaigner’s earnestness, interjecting

The lancet of a finely-pointed phrase

That makes the elder pause suspiciously,

Knitting his brows in doubt whether the word

Be bitter jest or earnest,—then laugh to hide

His solemn mind’s perplexities. Last, Julius Cæsar,

Triumvir and Proconsul of Transalpine Gaul,

A spare man, taller than either of these, whose mien

Combines both qualities—the literal pragmatism

Of Labienus, and Quintus’ Attic subtlety:

Master of word and deed, and yet the slave

Of single-minded purpose; soldier and orator,

Schemer and dreamer. His furrowed face betrays

Anxieties unshared; the firm mouth, faintly drooping,

Ruthless self-confidence; that width of brow

From which fair curls retreat untimely, carries

The vision of a widening world unguessed

By lesser minds; and, though he seems to heed

The chaffering of his legates, and sometimes smiles

When Cicero’s lazy wit pricks at his humour,

His eyes, chained to the master brain behind,

Brood on the silken straits, and probe incessantly

The darkening shores of Cantion. He speaks:

“It seems so near,” he says . . .

                        Labienus stiffens:

“So near? The width of water has been computed

At thirty thousand paces—or, by the reckoning

Of the barbarians, eleven leagues.”

Cicero laughs: “Too wide, too far, for me!

If Balbus and his engineers could bridge it

As once they bridged the Rhine, I’d like it better.

Give me firm land! There’s width enough in Gaul

To keep my legion tramping, and enough

Booty to gild the spectacle of a triumph

Would make Rome yell with rapture. Why go to Britain

With Gaul but half subdued? This gentle sea

Fawns like a leopardess, whose very velvet

Sheathes iron talons. Listen how she purrs,

And licks the shingles with a rasping tongue;

But when she rises, your flat-bottomed craft

May feel her teeth. Why, even her monstrous tides . . .”

“The tides, too, have been measured,” snaps Labienus.

“At Springs, with the full moon as now, they rise

To twenty Roman feet, two palms, one digit,

Varying, of course, with the wind’s strength and quarter;

And now there is none.” Cicero spreads his hands

In a gesture that is all Greek. “No wind to-night:

But what of winds to-morrow? I’m neither augur

Nor seaman, and Poseidon never smiled

Upon my stomach. He may have dark designs

In store for us, and, speaking with respect,

Cæsar, your obstinate phantasy . . .”

                         The black eyes burn.

Then smile on him. “Phantasy, Quintus, phantasy?

That word is Greek. Imagination

Is better Latin; and, if Imagination

Set my feet on a path, nothing but reason

Will ever keep them there. It’s an old tale

(Your brother knows it well)—how this one image, Britain,

Has lured me like a marsh-fire, ever since,

Flying from Sulla’s tyrannies, I sailed

For Rhodes; how, leeward of Pharmacuse, the wind

Failed us, and as we rocked with flapping canvas

Becalmed, a pirate galley of Cilicia

Swooped, like a famished falcon on a quail,

And held our souls to ransom. In that hulk,

Stinking with bitumen and sun-dried fish,

There was one man (or monster) whom our captors

Favoured as their familiar laughing-stock:

A wizened bow-legged antic, that swarmed the mast

With half-articulate cries and fierce grimaces.

Naked he swung, but for a leather loin-cloth

And torque of iron forged about his neck;

And from that torque there hung an amulet,

A disk of graven metal. A hundred times

With scraps and blandishments I tempted him

To let me touch his trinket; and, when at last

I tamed him—lo, a coin of gold, resembling

A stater of Philip of Macedon as rudely

As he resembled Man. Oft and again

(For the time hung heavy on my hands) I pressed him

To tell me whence that relic came, until

One day, unasked, he blurted out my answer

In bastard Greek: “From the Pretanic Isles . . .”

“The Pretanic Isles,” he said, “the Pretanic Isles . . .”

A name and nothing more . . .

Now mark the sequel: when, our ransom paid,

I landed at Piræus and made my way

To the house of your wife’s brother, Atticus,

There, in his library, I found an inky slave

Squatting among his parchments. The work he copied

Was the geography of Posidonius:

And, once again, the name of Britain flashed

Into my mind and stirred it. Greedily

I snatched the rolls, and read them to the end:

They told of a great island, forested

With green woods, under skies for ever veiled

In ocean mists, whose ultimate cliffs divided

The Frozen Sea; of painted men who wrought

Weapons of curious bronze, and threshed their grain

In barns, and brewed of it a honey-wine;

Of a cragged promontory, Belerium,

Where troglodytes on breathing embers smelted

The tin they dredged from rivulets or delved

With uncouth hands from crannies of the rocks;

And there were grains of gold, and pearls . . .”

                              Cicero started:

“A pearl, a pearl,” he thought. “There is the simile

For which I laboured. There it lies, an island

Luminous as a pearl born from the nacre

Of the sea’s iris. I must remember this.”

Once more Cæsar’s eyes held him: “Gold and pearls . .

When one is young, my friend, intangible treasure

Dazzles our sight, our fingers itch to clutch it;

Yet ageing eyes see not the thing itself

But what it buys—the wills of other men,

With power to bend or use them; and, in the play

Of restless wits that, like corpse-candles, flickered

Over dead Athens, that island-image faded—

While Rome, the richer treasure, dazzled me,

And might have led me, blinded, to calamity

Had I not found that neither birth nor eloquence

Nor wealth (as witness Crassus!) can tip the beam

Against the naked sword. And I had none.

Therefore I left the wine of young ambition

To season; sailed for Spain, and nursed my legions,

And learnt the weightier art of War. Yet even in Spain

Reminders of that lost image came to me,

In ships that nosed the wharves of Gabes, captained

By slim Phœnicians (friends of our good Balbus)

Men who had seen Belerium, and trafficked

Made wares for British ingots. So the vision

Grew nearer and more real. And when I marched

My legions into Gaul and broke the Veneti,

I found their fleets were fed and manned from Britain,

And that their chiefs sought sanctuary in Britain

To brew rebellion. I am no mystic, Quintus,

Nor Platonist; Aristotle is my master:

Yet I believe my destiny is linked

With Britain’s; and, to purge my mind of Britain,

I must subdue it—not pursuing any phantasy,

Nor slaves nor gold nor commerce, but compelled

By the cold logic of necessity.

Listen: To-night I hold Gaul in my hands,

But as a fluttering eaglet; if I unclasp

My fingers she escapes me. Beyond the Rhine

Enemies far more formidable and fiercer,

The bloody German horde, shadow my flank,

And know (for they are cunning) I cannot venture

Beyond their marches and crush them in their forests

With Gaul, unfettered, rising in the rear;

And Gaul I cannot wholly break while Britain

Remains her arsenal: my Gallic enemies

Gather the threads and weave their plots unseen

In that veiled island. Gaul can never know

Peace, with those German savages untamed;

Yet, if I turn to tame them, I must risk

War on a double front . . .

                  This is the strategy

Of all Transalpine Europe, as I read it,

Now and for ever: No power that hath not gained

Mastery of Britain and her seas can hold

Gaul and the frontier of the Rhine. No other power,

Lacking the mastery of those narrow seas,

Can long hold Gaul or Britain in subjection.”

He smiled. “I think you have your answer, Quintus.

The sea is calm; the land-breeze stirs. At midnight

We sail for Britain. The Gallic cavalry,

Embarking at the nether port, will join us

Tomorrow. You, Cicero, will go with me;

You, Labienus, stay.”

And now, before late moonrise, see the dunes

Flicker with marsh-fire lanterns. On the shore

Two legions stand to arms, the Seventh and Tenth,

With complement of swart Numidian bowmen

And Balearic slingers. Hear, as they muster,

The trumpet-calls and sharp words of command,

And, as each cohort forms its ranks and marches,

Methodical plod of hobnails pounding shingle

Or shuffling through soft sands to plunge knee-deep

And launch the galleys. Hear the metallic clink

Of javelin and sword on iron-banded corselets;

The creaking of taut halyards in the tackle;

The shudder of rowlocks and the measured plash

Of sweeps that dip as one. Now, as the full moon rises,

See the whole fleet afloat, and all the roadstead

Rippled with broken moon-flakes: galley and carrack

Burnished alike with clustered helms and eagles.

Then, as the land-breeze freshens, watch them steal

Seaward, between the headlands—till the chuckling

Waters are silent, and the moony wakes

Lost in the outer channel.

                     Labienus,

Lonely on Grisnez, saw them out of sight;

Then wrapped his cloak around him, and turned, and slept.

And, as he slept, the foremost galleys, clearing

The windward headland, led the fleet of sail

West of the Lodestar’s bearing, like pilot-fish

Guiding a shoal of sharks; but with the dawn

(Dawn ominous for Britain) the land-breeze freshened,

Veering into the sun, and held the transports

Floundering a league astern. On the larboard bow

Unscalable scarps of chalk loomed through the mist

And drove the galleys northward to a breach

Where the cliffs fell away, and running surges

Crashed on a shore of shingle. It was a landfall

To quell the most adventurous. But time pressed:

Already watchful eyes, piercing the mist,

Had spied the straggling flecks of sail. Already

The brazen wail of war-horns drifted inland

To wake the hornets’ nests; already the beaches

Swarmed with blue-painted warriors and rang

With battle-cries.

             Two galleys of the Tenth,

Urged by swift strokes, shot forward, and shuddering

Grounded in shelving sand. Swept by a hail

Of slingstones and a whirling sleet of spears

They stopped. A hoarse cry broke: “All overboard!

Charge for the shore!” But not a soldier stirred.

“What, would you shame your leader and your eagles,

Men of the Tenth?” The legion’s signifer

Clambered the bows and plunged in, shoulder-deep,

His eagle held on high. Another followed

And soon the shallows frothed with half a cohort

Floundering and staggering shoreward up the shelf,

Tripped as the undertow dragged back the shingles,

Yet ever stumbling on, until firm foothold

Gives purchase for the javelin-fling. And soon,

Before that inexorable wave of iron

Creeping from out the wave of sea, the British

Quaver and break, leaving their dead awash

In blood-stained foam—yet never lessening

Their hail of taunts and missiles.

                     See that drenched cohort

Straggle ashore and stamp and shake themselves

Like water-spaniels, laughing as they press

Salt from their smarting lids and curse the plague

Of gadfly missiles—yet each no sooner set

Foot on firm sand than the iron habit of discipline

Led him, unthinking, to his appointed place

In the fixed battle-order. Now, with locked shields,

The armoured tortoise crawled, when, suddenly

Launched from the woods, a formidable host

Fell on their flank: a charge of chariots,

Fierce as a breaking coamer helmed with fury,

Smote on them and surged over. Dazed and deafened

By wild cries, thunderous hoofs, and the shrill whinnying

Of horses maddened by lash and spearprick; blinded

With clouds of javelins and spatters of sand

And rattling chesil thrown from rapid wheels;

Shorn from their severed feet by blades that flashed

From every spinning felloe, the dwindled cohort

Still held its ground—but, from the foremost rank,

The maimed and dead lay strewn like corn in swathes

Shed from the mowers’ scythes. And, even before

The rearward files sprang forward, sword in hand,

To mend the ranks and close the riven carapace

Of shields, the charioteers had whirled away

And wheeled behind them—and the bloody scythes

Swung through the second cohort, straggling forward

Knee-deep to aid its fellow!

                  Thrice the wheeled fury swept

On the linked lines of shields, and thrice it shore

Through them and shredded them to particles

Of stubborn valour, fighting back to back,

Broken, but still unvanquished: till the British,

Drunken with pride and blood, and over-eager

To clinch their triumph, leapt from their running chariots

And rushed, incontinent, to make an end

Of the shorn fragments, battling, hand to hand,

In single combat. Then the iron of Rome,

Forged in the furnace of wild Gaul and tempered

On battle’s anvils, proved its mastery

O’er mere impetuous courage, stroke by stroke

Hacking a pathway through the light-armed rabble

Of Britain—till their Celtic fury spent

Its vehemence, and the painted warriors

Confused, ran for the chariots and scattered

To shelter of their woods . . .

                    It was a moment

When, in the tilting balance, victory

Lay for the taking, could but the fingers grasp it.

“Pursue, pursue!” men cried: but what pursuit

Of plodding foot could hope to overtake

Wheeled chariots? “Where are our cursed cavalry?”

The old centurions swore, straining their eyes

For sight of nearing sails, but seeing only

Blank waters lashed by ever-rising wind

And not a sail in sight.

                That night, the legions

Dug fosse and vallum, and entrenched a camp

Foursquare above the beach, hauling their galleys

High on the shingle, while the transports rode

At anchor, where they had grounded.

                           On the morrow

There came an embassy from the chiefs of Kent

Entreating Cæsar’s pardon for the hot-headedness

Of their impetuous youth; offering hostages

With full submission; humbly beseeching

The grace of an alliance and protection

Against more savage neighbours. Cæsar listened

Gravely, and granted all. It was the story

Of Gaul again: for every word betokened

That malady of which the Celtic spirit

Sickened—those jealousies of tribes and feuds

Of princes which had lately rotted Gaul

And, shrewdly fostered, might soon deliver Britain

Into his hands with even scantier shedding

Of Roman blood. Therefore he frowned, and bade them

Bring in their hostages, fencing, with words, for time

And kindlier winds, knowing (as they knew not)

That, without cavalry, he could neither master

Their chariots nor keep what land he held.

But, on the third day, when the tardy convoy

Dipped like a flock of kittiwakes in the troughs

Of off-shore waves, he saw the reefed sails suddenly

Gybe, put about, and scatter, till all were hidden

In white spume shredded from the outer sea;

And, that same night, the risen North Easter, stiffening

To a full gale, drove the full moon’s spring-tide

Over the roaring chesil, to brim the fosse,

And breach the parapets, till the camp was drenched

Knee-deep in icy brine—while wind and tide,

Rioting together, snatched at the grounded galleys

With fierce teeth, tossing them like windlestraws

To crash on grinding shingle; and half the carracks

Carried away their anchors and were spewed

Out of the channel’s throat or, caught abeam,

Flung through mid-air and cast above the tidemark.

So, through the dusk

Of stormy dawn and moonset, Cæsar saw

Only grey desolation: half the fleet

Vanished or stove or floundered, and, of the rest,

Not a third seaworthy. Shivering in their camp,

Amid salt-sodden victuals and quenched embers,

The legions murmured: “Better we had stayed in Gaul

Where, at the worst, an army can draw back

Upon its bases, than have hazarded

Starvation on this barren shelf of sand,

The impassable sea behind us, and before

The bloody chariot-scythes!” And others cried:

“We are lost: the unpropitiated gods

Of these barbarians scourge us. How should we

Who are mortal match our valour against mysteries

Of air and water? Ay, and where is the plunder

With which we were lured: the vaunted gold and pearls

Of Britain; the rich pastures, the sleek herds,

The white-armed captives? There is more tangible loot

In one square league of Gaul than in all Britain!

Say what you will, our leader’s wits have erred,

Tricked by the malice of some jealous god

Who grudged his easy triumphs—and we, chained

To the falling star, fall with it.”

                            So the camp

Seethed like an ant-nest, till the centurions

Brought word to Cæsar’s tent: and he, straightway,

Summoned the mutinous troops with trumpet-call

To stand to arms, and held the murmurers clamped

In rigid ranks of discipline. Some of the Tenth

He set to salvage of the wrack, and gathering

Of broken flotsam; shattered spars and timbers

Tumbled in the waves’ wash, and floating sweeps

And nests of tangled tackle. Others, more skilled

In the shipwright’s craft, caulked bulging seams and botched

The riven hulls with bolts of copper hammered

Out of the driftwood—till the beaches rang

With busy adze and matchet and the blithe voices

Of men heartened by toil. The Seventh Legion,

Screened by a single maniple, marched inland,

Scouring the woods for fuel and seeking grain

To eke their ruined rations; and now the sun,

Which had withheld his blessing from that scene

Of comfortless frustration, broke through and flooded

The mournful land with light, and every heart

Quickened to feel his warmth and see the fleets

Of dazzling cumulus scud through a lightened sky

And a sea no longer sullen-faced, but dancing

With gay sapphire and crisped by wavelets capped

With joyous foam. Even those sombre woodlands

Of oak no longer boded ill, but showed

Through sunlit glades the green of pastures, misted

With ivory of meadowsweet, traversed by streams

Winding through minty marsh-land, and the gleam

Of cornfields ripe for harvest but unreaped

That rippled like the sea. Then, as a flock

Of noisy daws swoops on a stubble, the Seventh

Broke ranks and scattered, and fell upon the corn

With swords for sickles, boisterously calling

And laughing as they reaped. Some, faint with hunger

And lack of sleep, sprawled on the headlands, lazily

Watching their comrades toil; others, who reaped,

Stripped to their woollen tunics, shed their armour

And piled their shields and javelins in the shade,

Unwary, not unseen . . .

                   For this fair day

Had brought new hope to Britain. From the downs

Above the ravaged cornfields, and from the cliffs

That frowned upon the beaches, watchful eyes

Marked the wrecked fleet of Rome, and saw their enemies,

Disarmed and unsuspicious, pillage their harvest.

And, swarming to their camps, the headier youth

Called on their faint-heart elders to send no more

Hostages, but rather, summoning strength and courage,

Fall on the crippled foe and hurl him, broken,

Into the sea. So, in the heat of noon,

When broom-pods crackled and the slumbrous crooning

Of stock-doves in the drowsy woodlands lulled

The harvesters to stretch their limbs and sleep—

Deep in those silent woods, their footfalls muted

By felting of soft leaf-mould, horse and chariots

And spearmen mustered; all the armed might of Kent

Waiting upon a word; and, that word spoken,

Whirled through the hapless reapers like the wind

That wakes a thunderstorm. But that storm broke

Before they knew it near . . .

                   A mile and more away

On the busy beaches, deafened by the sullen

Pounding of the spent sea and the perpetual

Brisk clatter of adze and hammer, Cæsar heard

Naught of this sudden onslaught—yet, forearmed

By that taut wariness which is the instinct

Of the tried soldier, and ever glancing inland,

Suddenly saw the dark woods topped with clouds

Of turbulent dust churned from the chariot-wheels

Of the invisible battle, and instantly

Called out the guard, two cohorts of the Tenth,

And bade the rest equip themselves and follow

As swiftly as they could. Another moment,

And he had been too late! Even as he reached

The trampled corn, reft fragments of the Seventh,

Like empty husks whirled from a threshing-floor,

Streamed back to meet him—nor could he hope to stay

The rout, but opened ranks to let them pass

Through his advancing cohorts—then closed the ring

Of iron shields behind them, and stubbornly

Fighting a rearguard action, foot by foot,

Withdrew within the camp.

                  That night, two ships,

The remnant of the storm-tossed fleet of transports,

Made land, and disembarked a single squadron

Of sick, bedraggled cavalry, but not a bale

Of stores, and only scanty, salt-spoilt forage.

And now, the long storm spent, motionless clouds

Drank up the moonlight and, in darkness, drenched

The huddled legions: two days, unceasingly,

A pitiless rain came down, and fouled the camp

With trampled quagmire—and still the tattered sky

Hung black with unshed water . . .

                         “Autumn has come,”

The old men murmured. “Ay, and if this be Autumn,

What danker misery faces us? What of Winter,

When, as they tell, the sun is hardly seen

And the rain never ceases, and the waves

Are never still? If we must die,” they cried,

“Then let us perish in Gaul among our comrades;

Or, at the worst, go forth and fall like men,

Fighting, rather than perish like clemmed rats

Drowned in their holes!”

                Hearing these murmurs, Cæsar

Held conference with his legates—more to test

The legions’ dubious temper than to take

Counsel—and, in cold judgement, struck a balance

Of loss and profit: First, twelve ships destroyed

Or wrecked beyond repair; of men,—two cohorts

Lost or put out of action, and the rest

Weakened by want of food; of booty—nothing;

Of captives—but a handful of ragged hostages

Unfit for sale or triumph. Against these

Debts of misfortune, he set some solid gains:

Much bitter knowledge of the island’s crags

And hazardous landings; more of its evil tides

And freakish climate; most, of its natives’ mettle,

That breathless valour which gave the British chariot

(A weapon old as Troy!) the mastery

Of men who fought on foot; something, again,

Of Britain’s weaknesses—her lack of leadership,

Divided will, and dim-witted neglect

To man her invulnerable moat and stem

Invasion on her seas; enough, in all,

To make the prospect of a second landing,

With stronger force of cavalry and more propitious

Season, secure of victory. This year

He could not conquer Britain; but, lest his men

Should carry back to Gaul the bitter aftertaste

Of failure, and the enemy reap unmixed

Glory from their retirement, he determined

To offer battle.

            No bloodier day than this

Had ever dawned on Britain. Hour after hour,

Gigantic in white sea-mist, wave on wave

Of British chivalry, their horses spattered

With flakes of blood and foam and terrified

By fierce cries, cast themselves on the locked shields

Of Rome—to be tossed forth like broken water

Spewed from a basalt cliff, and then sucked seaward

To gather from the deep new spite and strength

To charge and charge again. But still, at sunset,

The iron wall held firm—and at its feet,

Like a fringe of driftwood lodged upon a tidemark,

Lay wrack of horse and horseman, broken chariots,

Cleft helms and twisted weapons—all the bronze panoply

Of Britain dashed to pieces! And in the night,

While the bruised Britons licked their wounds and wrangled

Over new means to breach the wall of shields

Or sap its stubborn bases, the worn legions

Hoisted full sail and manned the galley-sweeps;

So, in the darkness fading like a ghost,

The fleet set course for Gaul, leaving their fires

To burn out, and their very dead unburied

In the deserted camp. And when the sun

Rose on the reddened beaches, all were gone.

On Bredon Cloud the starveling grass

No echoes made

To hooves in loose-reined canter threading

The firwood’s needly shade

To where an earthen rampart, ledged

Like a peregrine’s nest

High on the badger-scrabbled scarp,

Brooded on the West.

Statue-still at the falling brink

My horse and I

Paused, in an element that seemed

Neither of Earth nor Sky;

While downward-plunging sight, through glaze

Of denser airs,

Marked tower and steeple blossom-misted

In Avon’s steely snares:

All that dry firth where salty tides

Once inward swirled,

Breaking on basalt barrier-cliffs

Of an old western world.

So still that air, so mute that hour

Rapt and sublime,

The solitary mind must turn

To thoughts of Life and Time;

Yet, meditating, never guessed

How near beneath

The rabbit-nibbled sward lay strewn

A hecatomb of Death;

Herdsmen, who on that airy dome

(Alas, in vain!)

Sought refuge from the treacherous woods

Of Severn’s firth and plain,

Pastured their lank-ribbed beasts and wrought

With pick and spade

Rampart and fosse and guarded gate,

And dwelt there, unafraid;

Yet woke, one startled midnight, blinded

By fire and blood;

Swarmed to their broken gates in panic,

And perished where they stood.

Axe-cloven skull and splintered thigh,

Those dead lay prone

Till kites had pecked the marrow out

And wolves gnawed flesh from bone;

Till greedy beak and claw had stripped

Their carrion prize,

And wood-wolves sniffed in vain to sate

The hunger in their eyes;

Till blistering sun and icy wind

Bleached the bones dry,

And only brittle fragments crumbled

Beneath the empty sky;

Till wind-blown dust and sailing seed

Silted between,

And wove about the mortal wrack

A soft shroud of green;

Till, a palm’s depth new sward beneath,

Those dead men lay

Flattened, like shapes of Pleistosaurs

Locked in the Lias Clay . . .

Two thousand years the missel-thrush

His challenge loud

Flung in the teeth of Winter riding

On banks of snow-black cloud;

Two thousand Springs the risen lark

In twittering flight

Rained there on hand-clasped lovers’ ears

His ripples of delight.

Lirra, lirra, trills the lark,

While lovers list,

Finger to lip, that silvery shower

Filtering through the mist . . .

That day I rode on Bredon Cloud

Loud sang the lark;

Yet a shadow of undiscovered dooms

Made my mind dark;

My horse, too, trembled and snatched the rein,

Restless to depart,

And the shiver that spread from his body to mine

Troubled my heart.

So I turned his head from the hidden death

And rode like the wind,

Galloping back through the firwood shade,

But dared not look behind.

What was it plucked at my heart that day

With fingers cold?

I cannot tell . . . I only know

That Man’s mind is old,

And the memory of Man a mystery:

That in my veins

There may run, (who knows?) the blood of one

Who fled that night to the plains;

That, in my brain, some timeless cell

May still be endowed

With a dim dream of the massacre

That reddened Bredon Cloud.

Middle England, A.D. 78. The Scene is on the Southern boundary of the country of the Cornavii, fifteen miles North of the settlement of Glevum (Gloucester). To modern eyes the landscape would be almost unrecognisable; for the shrinking Severn Sea still retains its estuarine character, and the Hams of Severn are huge mud-flats, submerged, at Spring-tides, by the Bore, and scattered at low water (as now) with flocks of waders and other water-fowl.

On the left bank of the river, a dense bush of dwarf oak and ash and holly covers the triangle between Severn and Avon; but West of the greater river the woodland lies more open, with grassy slades, in which herds of roedeer are grazing, interspersed with vivid green patches of swamp. The only familiar features in this countryside are the summits of the hills that bound the plain: the wide dome of Bredon, with the ramparts of a deserted camp crowning its escarpment, and the serrated outline of the Malverns rising stark from a sea of forest which overflows their Northern prolongations, the Ankerdine and Abberley Hills.

On the Southern slope of Bredon, in the midst of a considerable clearing, stands a solitary white habitation: a small, half-timbered villa, consisting of a long, low range of rooms facing South, with a covered terrace in front of it, an entrance in the middle of the façade, and two wings protruding at right-angles to enclose a courtyard (or farmyard), in the midst of which stands an ornamental well-head, with a wrought-iron pulley and tackle for hoisting water.

On this terrace, enjoying the air of the early autumn evening, walks the owner: a small, spare, rustic figure, with a round head still covered by a close crop of white hair—a time-expired centurion, named Caius Petronius. He is shod with laced sandals of ox-hide, home-made, with the hairy side outward; and wears strips of wool wound round his legs like puttees, and, above these, a short-sleeved coarse woollen tunic, open at the neck and loosely girt about the waist by a belt of leather. As he walks to and fro, like a ship-master pacing his quarterdeck, his eyes rest idly on the moss of rank forest that clothes the plain at his feet; but, at the end of one turn, he stops and shades his eyes to focus a trail of dust which he has seen slowly rising and creeping forward above the treetops. After a moment he hurries to the door of the villa and shouts instructions in Latin to the slaves at the back of the building. Then he tucks up his tunic, tightens his belt, and sets off, with an agility remarkable in a man of his age, down a steep path which, judging from the direction of the dust-trail, seems likely to intercept its course at the foot of the hill. And indeed, as he reaches the level, well in front of the advancing dust, he steps out on to a rudimentary road, which has once been metalled but is now overgrown with grass. Here he stands waiting, slightly out of breath from his rapid descent, until he hears the sound he has been expecting, the rhythmical plodding of hobnails, and sees, in front of the dust, the head of a column of soldiers slowly advancing and led by a tall young man, more lightly and elegantly clothed: a subaltern commanding a vexillation of the Twentieth Legion. The young officer wears a plumed helmet of bronze and carries no shield; and his sword, longer than those of his detachment, is slung from his girdle. As he approaches, the old centurion hails him cheerily, and holds up his hand; and the optio, returning his salute, calls his men to a halt. Caius Petronius speaks.

Hail, comrade! Welcome, and welcome again! Do you know,

When I saw your dust topping the woods by Severnside

I said to myself: “By Hercules, there’s a draft

Coming up from Glevum!” And that’s a rare thing nowadays—

Though thirty years ago, when we made this road

In the time of Caratacus, it wore out some shoe-leather

And no grass ever grew on it! Why, not a day passed

Without troops on the march; while now . . . But bless my soul,

You don’t know who I am! My name’s Caius Petronius,

Centurion of the Third Cohort of the Second Augusta,

Time-expired these many years. And yours? Claudius Terentius?

Terentius . . . Yes, I remember a man named Terentius;

But he was a Thracian horseman, while you are Italian:

That’s easily known from your speech, and damned good to hear

In these days, when the legions are stiff with barbarians

Who can’t speak articulate Latin. So you’re in the Twentieth,

Valeria Victrix? Oh yes, I know the Twentieth:

They’re old comrades of ours: came over from Gaul with us

And the Fourteenth Gemina in the year of the big invasion

Under Aulus Plautius—but the Fourteenth Gemina,

Or all that was left of them, were transferred to Armenia

Soon after the trouble with Boudicca. That’s a long time ago,

And you’ve probably never heard of it. Still, ours and the Twentieth

And the poor old Ninth are regular British legions:

And I always say, no man who hasn’t done service

In Britain has any right to call himself soldier.

Well now . . . We’d better step to it. The sun’s nearly down.

The best thing you can do is tell your lads to fall out

And bivouac here. They’ll find plenty of dry wood about

For a fire to keep off the wolves, and excellent water.

You, of course, will come up to my farm and drink something better.

Vile potabis modicis Sabinum cantharis. What?

Do young soldiers ever read Horace nowadays?

I don’t suppose so. I’m not much of a reader myself;

But it happens that I was born in the Sabine Hills,

And the poet’s farm—the one Mæcenas gave him,

To keep him out of the way as I always think,—

Was near my grandad’s; and he used to drop in of an evening

And spout verse by the hour, for lack of a better audience,

Though the old man was deaf as a post. Flaccus must have been

An odd fellow by all accounts; yet his verse has a way

Of sticking in one’s head—not the odes in which he buttered

Mæcenas and Augustus, but those that remind me

Of the country I knew as a lad and haven’t set eyes on

Since long before you were born. Eheu fugaces . . .

Yes, they shoved me into the army when I was eighteen,

Being a younger son with a taste for women and gladiators,

And because a neighbour of ours, Vespasian,

Commanded the Second in those days, and promised my dad

He’ld keep an eye on me.

                  I can’t say I’ve ever regretted it,

Nor yet that Fate took me to Britain. Let me tell you something

For the good of your soul: When first I came here, I felt

I’d slipped over the edge of the world. It was the light, or the lack of it,

And the endless rain that made my heart sink to my boots;

But after a while, when my eyes grew used to the change,

I found this light kinder to them than the glare that beats back

From Apennine rocks or the black dust of Campania;

And the older I grow, the better I like it. You know,

Many’s the time, when I was a lad, I used to think

Summer was the only season worth living in: how good it was

To wake in the cool of the morning and pick black mulberries

Or figs when the dew was on them, and lie all day

Under a pinetree, watching the lizards, and snaring them

With a noose of grass—ay, and listening to the crickets

Trilling in the ilex-woods or the wind-blanched olives

Till the very sky seemed to simmer—and sometimes a serpent

Swarmed over your legs and blinked with little flat eyes

Before he dared put out his nickering tongue to sip

At our fountain . . . Yes, yes, but when you are middle-aged

And glad to loosen your belt, you begin to feel

The sun a torment and Summer too long—while here

It’s never too hot nor too cold. Of course there are things

One can’t help missing at first. It’s no use pretending

This clammy soil’s as fertile as the red Tuscan earth;

And you haven’t the sense of space you feel when you see

The foothills falling away from the knees of Soracte

To the Tyrrhenian shore. And yet there are compensations

And even likenesses . . . Do you mind if I halt a moment?

Of late years I have found it wiser to take things easily

Up a stiff pitch like this: the old bellows aren’t what they were.

That’s better . . . What was I saying? Ah, yes, likenesses . .

Observe how the land slopes downward from here to the ford

By the fifteenth milestone from Glevum—in your itinerary

They call it Ad Antonam. Now half-close your eyelids.

Remark that undulant mountain-line in the West,

And tell me, candidly, if it doesn’t resemble

The Alban Hills where they bar the Appian Way?

Now look half-left, where you see my vineyard reddened

With Autumn (the vines change colour earlier here)

And imagine those thorn-trees olives, which isn’t difficult

In the fading light. Now doesn’t that remind you

Of Latium as it did me when first I saw it?

No? Well, you’re honest enough. Perhaps I’ve forgotten

What Latium looks like—and I shan’t ever see it again;

But that’s how it struck me, all those years ago,

When my gang was at work on the road, and I built a hut

Just where we’re standing now. I remember, that evening,

I said to myself: “Why keep on hankering after Rome

When you know very well, by the time your service is over

There won’t be a living soul left there to remember you,

And everything will have changed?” And not only that.

During all those years of soldiering with the Second

I’d seen a good bit of Britain, from Vectis, the island

That guards the Great Port, to the moors of Belerium

And then north again to Isca, where the legion was stationed

To keep the Silures quiet; and during that time—

Though it may seem odd to you—I’d taken a fancy to Britain.

Why? That’s not so easy to answer; but I think the first thing

That attracted me was its quietness. Of course we had fighting

Now and again; but war is a soldier’s duty,

And fighting’s what he’s paid for. Yet, here in Britain,

Our life was secure and placid beyond measure

Compared with life in Rome or even in Gaul.

Consider a moment; during my forty years’ service

There have been four Cæsars—and every jack man of them

Has died by violence! Claudius, Caligula, Nero,

And Galba. And every time an emperor’s died

He’s dragged his friends to the grave with him, and left

Our poor distracted Italy to be vexed

By plots and jealousies, persecutions, portents

And judgements of the gods: Rome burnt to ashes,

Pompeii buried in pumice—while here—in Britain,

Year stole on year unvexed by any violence

But of our changing seasons, and not a ripple

Of the storms that lashed the empire ever reached us

Across the blessed sea. And, since man lives but once

I think he may as well live peaceably,

And no land is more peaceful than Britain to-day.

Now here’s another thing that may surprise you:

I like the Britons as much as I like their island.

Of course you are bound to have heard a lot of nonsense

About them at home, where nobody sees any farther

Than Mons Albanus or Tibur; but when you’ve travelled

As I have, you’ll find that (but for the Germans and Scythians,

Who are utter barbarians) men are much of a muchness,

And one people as good as the next. These Gauls and Britons

Have ancient virtues that have grown old-fashioned in Rome,

More’s the pity. As slaves they may not be so intelligent

As the Greeks—but who wants to be a slave or a Greek?

While as for calling them ‘bloody savages’

‘Brutal barbarians’ and all the rest of it—

That’s just the flattering writers’ way of saying

What fine fellows we were for licking them—just as if

We’d fought them on equal terms and with equal weapons;

While, in fact, they faced us without any body-armour

And with swords of untempered iron, ay, and gave us a run

For our money too! If you could only have seen—

As, thanks be, you probably never will now—a British host

With their waving plumes and blue-painted chariots;

Their rainbow-coloured kilts of saffron and emerald,

Azure and Tyrian, and their helms of bronze,

You’ld think you were back in the age of Troy, and wonder

How anything so brilliant could have happened

Under these Boreal skies. The shield of Achilles

Was not more finely wrought than those which Caradoc

And the Silurian chieftains bore in battle.

They died like heroes too . . . No, Britons, take my word for it,

Are neither better nor worse than you or me.

They have their own way of life; their own dignities;

Their own strait standards of honour; their own religion—

Which is much like ours, by the way, though the names of their gods

May be different. And when it comes to the arts of peace,

Their craftsmen can teach us a lot. When we reach the farm,

The wine you drink may be tart, but the cups you’ll drink from

Are choicer in shape than Samian. Our greatest mistake

Is our arrogance in forcing these Britons into the mould

Of Rome, and sneering at all they do or make,

Not because it’s worse than ours, but simply because

It’s British and different . . .

                  Suppose we quicken

Our pace a little? I should like you to see

The view from my terrace before we lose the sun

And recline for supper. I’ve told you what I think

Of the British men. But what of the British women?

You’ve been warned against them, no doubt; but take no heed

Of that, my boy. Should you go ramping round

Like a randy young bull, it’s possible you will get

More than you bargained for. If your hand is heavy

You may find you are fondling a tigress. Boudicca was one;

And Cartimandua, the Brigantine witch

Who betrayed Caradoc another: and both were queens!

But tell me: were there never such queens in Rome?

Even we, in dim, benighted Britain, have heard

Of Messalina’s poisons, and how she played

With her poor cuckold Claudius—while Agrippina

Was handy with the same medicine—as Claudius

Found to his cost, and Nero might have found

To his, had not another queen (and poisoner),

His sweet Poppæa, taught him matricide!

Yet I will tell you of one British woman

Who was no queen, yet queenly in all graces

And dignities. Her name was Placida,

And placid was her spirit. We lived together

For more than thirty years, and she is dead;

(Gods of the Shades, be gracious!) but no woman

Of any race could have been wiser, stronger,

Or tenderer than she—ay, or more beautiful

In her clean, swift youth—though beauty is a thing

The memory cannot hold for long. My wife

Bore me three sons. I wish they were here this evening.

One is a signifier of the Fourteenth,

Now on the Danube; the second a centurion

In my sister legion, Adjutrix, stationed at Deva;

The third, alas, had little taste for soldiering,

But may go farther than either of his brothers

In this long peace: he’s a decurion

Of Verulamium—a coming man

By all accounts, although I never see him,

Being a rough old farmer. But all three

Have half of Britain in their blood, and that

Seems good to me. You think I’m talking treason?

But then, an old man as lonely as myself,

Browsing on memories, has much time for thought;

And I have often wondered why this empire

Of ours should have more permanence than those

Which rose and fell before us: Athens, Macedon,

Carthage and Egypt . . . Rome will not last for ever;

And if she withers like a stricken oak,

Maybe—who knows?—that which was best in her

May live in lands where the acorns were scattered

In her green prime—perhaps even in this Britain

Which she despised. Sometimes I think I see

This Island as the ultimate sanctuary

Of ordered life—in which a new Deucalion

Shall ground his Ark upon a new Parnassus

To populate a world that has been drowned

Beneath barbaric floods with the old stock

Of homely, civil virtues. A new Parnassus . . .

Why not? Who knows but that the Muses may find

Foothold in Britain?

              Enough . . . This is sober talk

For a lusty lad like you. Old minds are prone

To meditate upon the past and probe

A future they will never know—while Youth

Has far too much to think of in its present,

Too much to grasp, to worry about either.

And here’s my villa! Note how I have placed it

To catch the light from dawn to dusk. You may think

The scale ambitious for a humble veteran;

But old bones covet comfort. Let me tell you

What fortune made me master of it. We will sit here

A moment while we talk; this tawny stone

Drinks in the sunlight and dispels its warmth

Slowly . . .

     I left the legion, time-expired,

Ten years ago. The Second had gone West

To permanent quarters in Isca of the Silures;

And we, its veterans, had been granted holdings

In our old station, the new city of Glevum,

To drag out our declining years—and many

Were grateful. But not I. I’m a born countryman

And hate the smell of towns: the city life

Irked me unbearably. It was about the time

Of Nero’s murder, when the Spanish legions

Had lifted Galba on their shields. No sooner

Had he assumed his honours than we, in Britain,

To whom his name meant next to nothing, heard

That he, too, had fallen: Otho and Vitellius

Were scrabbling for the purple like a couple

Of curs worrying a bone. We only shrugged

Our shoulders—for it mattered little to us

Who ruled in Rome so long as we enjoyed

The peace of Rome in Britain. Then, of a sudden,

Great news for me! My old friend and commander

Vespasian had left Judæa to his son Titus,

And marched on Rome. It seemed the time had come

When quarrelsome rogues were silenced, and honest men

Might get their dues. Next year he came to Britain,

And halted at Glevum on his way to inspect

His old command at Isca. That was a day

Worth waiting for! Ha . . . I can see it now:

The great brand-new forum densely lined

With files of cheering veterans; the Prætorium

Thick-set with spears and trumpeters—and, in the midst,

That spare old figure in the faded purple

Limping along the lines, his wrinkled eyes

Bright as a bird’s, searching the ranks to find

The face of an old comrade. When he came

Abreast of me, he halted; and the old smile

Lightened his leathery face: “What, you, Petronius,

Old friend? I hardly knew you; for your head’s

White as Soracte in Winter! Many snows

Have fallen and melted there since last we met.

So come this evening: we will sup together

To talk of Tibur and the Sabine Hills,

And make the lost years live again.”

                         That night

We talked and laughed till daybreak, happily

Recalling the small things old men remember,

And joking in the rough mountain dialect

We spoke when we were boys—a saltier tongue

Than your smooth Latin, which was the mean language

Of plebs and plain-dwellers! And, in the end,

He tempted me: “Petronius,” he said,

“Why not come back with me to Rome? I shall have need

Of men whom I can trust—and they are rare.”

And when I shook my head, and told him frankly

My roots were deep in Britain, he only laughed

And wrinkled his bright eyes: “Perhaps you are right.

My friendship may prove dangerous. But tell me,

Before we part, if you are so determined

To die in Britain, what can I do for you

In token of our comradeship?”

                    I had no shame

In taking what he offered: I think I had earned it

By solid years of service, better than many

Who fawned on him like dogs begging for scraps.

So, with the gold he gave me, I built this house

And cleared the forest, and broke up the fields

With a wheeled Gallic caruca whose iron coulter

Bites deeper than the share of the aratrum

With which we plough in Italy; and here

I set my vineyard with soaked vine-shoots packed

In moss that Cæsar sent me by his couriers

From our old Sabine Hills, and trained and pruned them

With my Calenian knife: no Britain knows

The vine, or ever will. And here I have lived

Eight lonely years since my wife Placida

Left me. You see her tablet: DIIS MANIBUS

PLACIDA ANNORUM QUINQUAGINTA

CURAM AGENTE CONJUGE ANNORUM

TRIGINTA. Yes, thirty years . . . The lettering

Was chiselled by my foreman. So were these altars

To our Lares and Penates and Mars, my patron.

Nodens—that puzzles you?—is a British deity

Of my wife’s country, the March of the Silures:

She had great faith in Nodens . . .

                       But sit you down.

Let the dogs sniff your knees: you need have no fear of them

For all their snarling looks—they know the difference

Between master and slave without my telling them,

And keep their fangs for wolves. These British hunting-dogs

Are famous the world over. Ay, sit you down,

While the girls light the lamps and cool your wine,

The vile Sabinum of which I spoke to you.

It’s no choice vintage, but you’ll find it wholesomer

And far less heady than the honey-wine

The Britons brew, or even the barley-beer

Which they call Courmi—not a headache in it!

And now let your mouth water: we will dine

On a fish more tasty than any bearded mullet

That ever floundered in the porphyry fishponds

Of the new-rich at Baiae: a noble monster,

With succulent flakes as pink as rosebuds, netted

By coracle-fishers in the foamy stickles

Of clear Sabrina this very day. The salmon

We call it. Salmo—the fish that leaps. You’ld know

The reason for the name if once you’d seen them

Hurling themselves in the air, again and again,

With the curve of a Parthian bow. And after that

You shall eat well-spiced venison, which that fine fellow

Who licks your hand bowled over in the woods

A week ago—and then a roasted pheasant

Fattened in my pens. We do not fare so badly

In our outlandish back-of-beyond. In Rome

Such living as ours would cost a poor pensioner

A mint of money; nor is my house so comfortless

As the farm in which I was born. This pavement, bright

With tesseræ of marble, is cool to the feet

In Summer; but later in the year, when Boreas

Howls in the thatch and snatches at the shutters,

The hypocaust, fed with logs of seasoned oak

And crackling brushwood, warms it so thoroughly

That a man may walk bare-footed. I love our Winters

As well as any season, though now, alas,

My nights are long and lonely, and the days

Seem shorter than they used to be. That is why

I welcome visitors, and probably,

Being old and prosy, bore them with a spate

Of inconsequent garrulousness. I ask your pardon,

Claudius Terentius, and will talk no more.

I lift my cup to you! Dinner is served!

Arthur is gone . . . Tristram in Careol

Sleeps, with a broken sword—and Yseult sleeps

Beside him, where the westering waters roll

Over drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps.

Lancelot is fallen . . . The ardent helms that shone

So knightly and the splintered lances rust

In the anonymous mould of Avalon:

Gawain and Gareth and Galahad—all are dust!

Where do the vanes and towers of Camelot

And tall Tintagil crumble? where do those tragic

Lovers and all their bright-eyed ladies rot?

We cannot tell—for lost is Merlin’s magic.

And Guinevere—call her not back again

Lest she betray the loveliness Time lent

A name that blends the rapture and the pain

Linked in the lonely nightingale’s lament,

Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discover

The bower of Astolat a smoky hut

Of mud and wattle—find the knightliest lover

A braggart, and his Lily Maid a slut;

And all that coloured tale a tapestry

Woven by poets. As the spider’s skeins

Are spun of its own substance, so have they

Embroidered empty legend. What remains?

This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak

That age had sapped and cankered at the root,

Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke

The miracle of one unwithering shoot

Which was the spirit of Britain—that certain men,

Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood

Loved freedom better than their lives; and when

The tempest crashed about them, rose and stood

And charged into the storm’s black heart, with sword

Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed

With a strange majesty that the heathen horde

Remembered after all were overwhelmed;

And made of them a legend, to their chief,

Arthur, Ambrosius—no man knows his name—

Granting a gallantry beyond belief,

And to his knights imperishable fame.

They were so few . . . We know not in what manner

Or where or when they fell—whether they went

Riding into the dark under Christ’s banner

Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent;

But this we know: That, when the Saxon rout

Swept over them, the sun no longer shone

On Britain, and the last lights flickered out;

And men in darkness murmured: Arthur is gone . . .

Wessex, A.D. 878. The Scene is the western edge of the limestone escarpment of Mendip. It is a frosty winter evening, and the air is so dry that from this point of vantage the greater part of the swamp of Somerset can be seen outstretched from the foot of these hills to the muddy waters of the Severn Firth. At this season, indeed, the colour of the land is hardly distinguishable from that of the tidal flats; and the seaward prolongations of the Mendip range—Wavering Down, Brean and Bleadon, together with its detached outliers—Brent, Glastonbury Tor, the knoll of Athelny and the little hill of Nyland, appear as insular in character as the two veritable islands—the Steep Holme and the Flat Holme—whose dim shapes are seen in the distance of mid-channel. Apart from these elevations, the whole of the Somerset plain, from Mendip to Quantock, is an undrained morass—a vast sponge of land, over which the tributaries of Axe and Brue and Parret spread a network of stagnant water, made brackish at spring tides by the invasion of the Atlantic.

For melancholy, this landscape would be hard to match in any part of Britain save the East Anglian fens or the mosses of Solway; and this sense of desolation is increased by the presence, in the middle distance, of the ruins of what must once have been a human habitation, now fallen to waste, which would have been covered long since by brushwood and weed had the site been less exposed to the violence of the South Wester, and, near this, a reed-thatched hovel shaped like a bee-skip, from the apex of which a thin spiral of pale blue smoke now rises into the still air filling it with the reek of smouldering turves. Outside this hovel there burns another fire of sticks, and two shaggy men are sitting by it, with thick woollen cloaks wrapped over their byrnies of chain-mail. They are, in fact, two of the King’s Thegns, or bodyguard, of Ælfred of Wessex. The elder is Ælfric, an atheling of the royal house and of the blood of Cerdic. The younger is Edred, son of the Ældorman of Wilsætan. Both are weary with their long flight from the defeat of the fyrd of Wessex at Chippenham at the hands of the Danes under Halfdene; but Edred, who sits huddled close to the fire; appears to feel the cold more keenly than his grizzled companion.

How far are we from Athelny?

                      Another night

Of stiff plodding over the hills, and then

We drop to Glastonbury. Look . . . there it lies.

The high tor marks it. If we took to the fen

In these dank winter days we might well flounder

Knee-deep another week before we reached

Our bourne.

            Yet how I hate these hills: They smell

Of death. See how those barrows on the down

Brood over us! I have seen the like before

Where I was bred, and heard the old men tell

How, at midnight, dry bones that moulder in them

Take flesh, and withered fingers clutch their weapons,

And ghosts of dead men gibber at the doors

Or sit in awful dumbness. And these stark walls

That crumble behind us . . . Who knows what witchery

Clings to their stones? There is a haunted chester

Hard by my home at Wilton that has lain waste

Years beyond reckoning—a wilderness

Of dust and nettles. None of our churls dare dwell

Beside it or draw near it, even in daylight;

But when night falls in winter, and the wind

Howls through its empty streets, the stones awaken

To shrieks of woe and the loud clashing of shields,

And panic clatter of hurrying feet that run

This way and that in shiftless dread. . . .

                                    They hear

The rattle of driven leaves, or pads of wolves

Hunting for conies, and shrieks of night-owls harrying

Their small game. Stones are speechless; and the dead

That walk the night, sad souls, grow dim and falter

If but you sign yourself.

            Yet these hills fright me.

I think we must have come to the world’s end,

And this bank be the brink of it. Have you ever seen

A waste more threatening than this soaked marshland

That lies beneath us—its net of waterways

Brimmed by the red of sunset—as though they ran

With the blood of an old slaughter, or foretold

Slaughters to be? Why need our lord have chosen

A halt unhallowed as this?

                            The king was sick,

And held till his strength dwindled. This is the ill

That smote him first upon his wedding’s morrow

And lies in wait—so that he never knows

What time the blow may fall. You have seen the swiftness

With which it sets on him. First his eyes dazzle;

Then his head swims, and he must stagger, blind

As Paul upon the road to Philippi;

And eft an arrowy ache bores through his skull

And splits it like an axe, and numbness wilts

His thews to watery weakness, so that he halts

Like a foot-rotted wether. It is a mischief

That neither prayers nor leeches can allay;

So lie he must until the evil lifteth,

And we must tarry with him. It ill becomes

A king’s thegn and thegn’s son to show such scant

Forbearance. Asser, the Welch priest, will warn us

When the pain’s fetters slacken. Better snatch

What sleep you can, as I do; for when he rises

We must plod on to Athelny.

                            Forgive me,

But I am overdone. This homeless faring

Through the mired ways of Winter quenches all hope

That ever was in me. It would not irk me, Ælfric,

If we could see an end to it.

                              It is not for us

To plot the end or seek it. That is work

For wits more cunning than yours or mine. Enough

For us that Ælfred leads, and that we follow

Our king.

          A landless king of waste and water!

There are no kingdoms left in England now.

See how the wave of heathenesse overflows

And whelms them one by one! Bernicia,

Northumbria, Mercia . . .

                    Mercia has always played

Loose with her neighbours. Mercia is English—

Which is to say half-Dane, more than half-heathen.

There’s not a Mercian but would gloat to see

The doom of Wessex, and the Danish ravens

Fattened on her torn flesh!

                        There your teeth grit

Upon the gall of truth. Our house is cleft

Within itself; and how shall we of Wessex

Tauten the sagging timbers—our king in flight,

His fyrd dwindled and scattered? I may seem to you

Redeless and callow; yet I see the years

That stretch before us yawn as emptily

As those drear marshlands. I think we have been born

Beneath a creeping shadow, ruthless as that

Which erstwhile swallowed up the morning sun

And made noon midnight. We are the ill-begotten

Brood of a thriftless fatherhead who, while we lay

Like a litter of blind whelps, besotted with milk

And sleep, gave up our birthright and let us wake

To meet their reckoning. If they had stopped

The first cracks in the dyke—if they had shown

Their spunk and driven the first Danes from Sheppey,

Or drowned them on the seas before they fastened

Deep roots in Kentish earth, we might have hoped

To stem the seepage. First they were only flighted

Like woodcock on the North wind driven: now

There is no tide nor airt that does not bring

The winged helms and the red sails bearing on us

From East or South or West: white Danes of Norway,

Black Danes of Ireland—we are meat for all.

And now it is too late . . . They have horsed themselves

On the wild hengests of the Anglian woods,

And sweep the land, swift as a swaling fire

In a high wind. There is no inch of England

From Lindisfarne to Exeter unreddened

By fire and blood; there is no hidden creek

But the oared dragons have thrust their greedy snouts

Within it, snuffling for flesh and plunder.

And God is blind or deaf . . . Minster and chantry

Topple their spires together; the holy images

Are hacked and hewn; Christ’s very roods now feed

The fires that roast His ministers! How could this be

If He had not forsaken and foredoomed us

To utter loss? Why, there is nothing fair

Or seemly but these heathen run to wreck it;

No learning that they loathe not, and no law

But they must trample on. Within their pack

No man has any rights but what he can wrest

Wolflike from weaker wolves than he. What boots it

That our king, or another, and his wise men

Have set down dooms to bind us, if the writ runs

Unheeded? There is neither law nor learning

Alive in England now—nor ever will be,

From what I see of it. This is the end

Of all our civility: Egyptian night

Smothers the land; no spark will wink in it

But one thin taper flickering like a marsh-light

In Athelny so long as Ælfred lives,

And, after that, the darkness . . .

                              I am neither learned

Nor over godly—but if my eyes were as yours

I would liever have left them on the field at Chippenham

In the last folk-fight to be pecked from their sockets

By Thor’s ravens! This is a nithing’s talk.

I’ll hear no more of it. If we must die,

What then? Do we not know that God still whets

The keen sword of vengeance on the behalf

Of those who bleed for Christendom, and for a king

Whom Christ’s own vicar has aneled? Our meed

Is bliss in heaven or freedom on British earth.

I ask none other. Whist . . . I hear footsteps.

Hand to your hilt!

From the ruins of the waste villa a gnomish figure emerges furtively. It is that of a small, dark man, with a bristling grey beard. He is clothed in a leather smock, and his bow-legs are clumsily strapped with bands of the same material. Over his shoulder he carries a bundle of nets. At the sight of the two Saxons he hesitates and halts, looking around him nervously for a way of escape. The loud laugh with which Ælfric greets his appearance seems to reassure him. He changes his mind and comes nearer. There is a look of shy curiosity in the black, humorous eyes that shine through his unkempt thickets of hair. Edred, too, laughs uneasily, and releases the sword-hilt he has grasped.

                  Who are you, churl? What do you here?

What do I here? So said the cuckoo’s brat

To the wagtail that hatched him! This is my own toft—

Or so I thought it. I am a groovier,

And delve for lead in Mendip; and now I go

To snare my morrow’s meat.

                            Who is your lord?

The first that feeds me. We have no lords in Mendip

But cold and toil and hunger. We fend for ourselves,

And ask no leave of any man for the right

To bide where we were born.

            Tell me your name, then.

My name is Maccus, son of Rum of the Holloway.

That is no Christian name! You are a Welchman,

Or kin of Welch.

              I am a man of Mendip:

We have no kinship with any other folk,

And need none. Have you done with me?

                                Wait a while!

Tell me: have any Danes been seen of late

About your hills?

                  Danes? Danes? You mean Redshanks?

Ay, there was a deal of that fair-headed devilry

Came to the marshes back of Parret-mouth

Last harvest, filching corn. You could see their fires

Specking all Somerset to the fords of Severn;

But none set foot on Mendip, and we took

No heed of them.

                You would heed them sore enough

If once you met with them!

                      What should we fear?

There is naught for them to take and naught for us

To lose but our lank bones—and them they would never

Set teeth on, for the hills are riddled with dens

And grooves and swallet-holes where we could lurk

As our fathers hid before us till they were gone.

No outland folk ever abode in Mendip

Longer than snow on Mayday—though, in old time,

Many have come and gone again. Once, they say,

Came web-foot men who propped their nests like dabchicks

On eyots in the meres, and lived like herns

On fish they jagged—but these were over-nesh

For Mendip winters, and soon trickled back

Starved to their fens. They were a sorry folk,

And baneless. Next, out of the sunrise, came

An angrier breed, red-maned and horsed in war-wains,

Who bore the grinning heads of boars and wolves

And dyed their bodies with woad. These men were tall

As gods that ride on clouds above a field

Of slaughter; but when our fathers hid, they fell

To fighting with one another, and so dwindled

Till the Romans drove them westward. These same Romans

Were a cunning folk, of our own hue and kidney,

Who knew the groovier’s craft, and cast the ore

Our fathers found in shapes of sand and stamped it

With their king’s runes. They brought their gods with them

And built stone housen, and a shallow pit

Where cocks and men were set to fight. Long ages

They dwelt with us; then, like the swallows, packed

And flew from Mendip, leaving their gods to crumble

In the waste Chester; and a guileless brood,

Skirted like women, with close-shaven heads,

Sailed over Severn from Gwent and broke their altars,

Bidding us worship a man the Romans slew,

Yet found us and our hills too cold, and took

Their god to Glastonbury. Next came King Ceawlin,

With a wild host flaxen-haired, who swung the axe

And guzzled ale like swine . . .

                        Now heed your words!

This Ceawlin was a Saxon, and those stout drinkers

Were our forefathers!

                  Time has ripened their sons

And made them milder. It has been so with all

Who ever dwelt in Mendip but us, whose roots

Are tough as those of hews bird-sown in clefts

And cracks of thirsty stone, and have no pride

Of branch but the brine burns and the wind lops it,

Keeping us hard and lowly. Your folk will last

No longer than the Roman. Now come these Redshanks.

They, too, will bide their while and go their ways

As Merlin’s rede foretold.

                      Who was this Merlin?

What? Know you not Merlin? He was the wisest druid

That ever wont in Britain, and this his weird:

“Woe to the Red Dragon,” he said—and that was Rome—

“The White Dragon shall seize his lurking holes”—

That was the Saxon—“and Britain shall lie wet

With night tears. Then shall the Danish wood be stirred.

And cry, on a man’s speech: ‘Come, Cambria!

Bind Cornwall to thy side; tell Winchester

The earth shall swallow her!’ Usk shall burn seven months

And Badon’s baths grow cold. The bones of Kings

Shall bleach upon the waste. The floors of harvest

Shall turn again to forest, and evil weeds

Riot within the City of the Legions

And all men starve—till, out of Winchester,

Three streams shall break, and these three sunder Britain

Into three shares, and the twelfth Bretwalda

Shall build a fleet of ships . . .”

                                  Enough, enough

Of this rambling. I see no wisdom in it.

It has this wisdom: that, when you are gone

And those that follow you, Britain will still be Britain

And Mendip ours . . . till the King come again.

Your king is come.

                    What? Arthur?

                                  He is named Alfred

Of the West Saxons.

                    I never heard that name.

Nor yet I Arthur’s. Who is this king of yours?

Arthur is gone . . . But he will come again

Riding to Camelot on a May morning

When hawthorn-buds are swollen, and the dykes

Golden with water-blobs and fringed with spears

Of yellow marsh-flags; and a glittering host

Will ride behind him—Tristram and Lancelot

And Gawain—to give back freedom to the earth

And Britain to her own . . .

                        Quick! On your knees!

Here comes the King!

I have kept you a long while; but now it is over

And I am myself again. Who is this knave?

A man of the hills. He has whiled away our waiting

With his silly talk.

                        Better let him be gone.

I have much to tell you of what ran through my mind

While I lay gripped with anguish: At such times,

Though outwardly I be blinded, the inward eye

Sees sharper in grief’s night, than in health’s noon;

And, when pain dims the sight, that which was clouded

Takes hopeful shape. And even as the burdock

That soothes the nettle’s sting grows next the nettle,

So, next the mischief of to-day, I have seen

The healing of tomorrow. Britain is broken

Beyond mending—there’s not one kingdom can boast

Strength greater than another’s: therefore should those

Who grudged their neighbours’ might take heart from it,

Old wrongs forgotten, and clasp hands to stay

The ill that threatens all. This is the time

When one strong will may weld all broken folk

Who share our blood in Britain—from Hadrian’s dyke—

Ay, and beyond it—to the Exe, to stand

By their lost brotherhood. One land, one folk

Forged in war’s smithy . . .

                      None will ever bring

Mercia to stand by Wessex, or Northumbria

To stand by either—and the East English love us

As little as the West Welch.

                      Your eyes are bleared

By an old, backward-looking bitterness.

What say you, Edred?

                Mayhap mine are too young

To see beyond to-morrow. I can say nothing

But that the King’s sight flies too far for me

To follow.

                Yet you may be young enough

To see the end I have dreamed of. Here’s a vision

For shorter-sighted eyes. Your fathers and mine

Were erst sea-faring folk who sailed to Britain

Over salt water, but found so fat a living

That they forgot their seacraft. Now we are tied

To the plough’s tail, and dread to dab our feet

In the brine that we were born to; while these Danes

Fare where they will and flick at us like gadflies

From every wind. Therefore, if we would thwart them,

We must turn seamen. Our flat-bottomed hoys

Of Frisian build can never match their longships

In speed or handling—but there’s no lack of oak

Nor yet of shipwright’s cunning in the coves

And creeks of Britain. Our first need is ships

More speedy and more heavily-oared than theirs

And loftier in the bulwark, so that they loom

Above their benches and they cannot board us.

Such is the work that I have set myself

While we lie lost in Athelny, gathering

Our dwindled strength. I will build such a fleet

Of ships . . .

            Hearken, Edred! This is the weird

Of Merlin. Do you mind it? The twelfth Bretwalda

Shall build a fleet of ships . . .

                      Who is this Merlin?

That I can tell you. He was a devilish wizard

Of Gwent, who cast so many haphazard prophecies

Into the winnowing wind that some few grains

Of sooth still settle from his clouds of chaff

And make the credulous gape. I would have burned him

And all his prophecies!

                      Yet he spoke truth:

For I am Bretwalda—and, by the Grace of God,

I will build my fleet. So, on to Athelny!

In our sweet shires of Mercia

Five blessed Saints we had;

Four were proud Princes of the Church,

And one was a little lad.

Wistan, Wulstan, Oswald, Chad:

Each hallowed Mercia’s realm;

But the saint we love all others above

Is little Saint Kenelm.

Kenelm was but a child of seven

And his father seven weeks dead,

When in Lichfield town they set the crown

Of kingship on his head,

And hailed him as their anointed king,

While all the Mercian lords

Took oath to stand at Kenelm’s hand

On the cross-hilts of their swords;

And the bronze bells of Lichfield clanged

And rocked their towers of stone,

That God had sent an innocent

To sit on Offa’s throne;

While folk that laboured in the fields

Heard the bells clang with joy,

And thronged the ways to cheer and gaze

On the beauty of the boy.

But his sister Quendryth in her bower

Brooding stayed apart;

Alone she sate, with naught but hate

And black gall in her heart,

And a sour face thrawn with bitterness

That this weak child should own

The shining prize for which her eyes

Most lusted: Mercia’s crown.

So sent she for her paramour—

Lord Escebert was his name—

And whispered near his willing ear

These words of dark shame:

“We twain are one in will and flesh,

And but for one small thing

I should have been thy crowned queen

And thou my wedded king;

“And that small thing is but the breath

Of my father’s brat, Kenelm.

Give me his life, and wed me wife,

And we will share this realm!”

Then Escebert, her paramour,

Pondered Quendrytha’s rede,

And searched his mind some way to find

To compass that dark deed.

And as it chanced, that very month,

The Lords of Mercia went

To hunt the wolf in Offa’s Wood

That shags the hills of Clent:

A deep wood and a dark wood,

For black deeds meet, where grew

A brambled brash of oak and ash,

Hazel and holly and yew.

And when into the wood’s green heart

He saw the hunters ride,

Then Escebert slipped behind, and clipped

Himself to Kenelm’s side.

“Good Escebert, they ride too fast:

Forsake me not, I pray,

When through the thorns the wail of horns

Shivers and dies away!”

“Let them ride on, my little king:

No matter how far they go,

You need have no fear of wolf or bear

With me at your saddle-bow.”

“Good Escebert, a thorn has hurt

My pony’s hoof, I fear:

The dusk now broods on these wild woods

And the black of night draws near.”

“Content thyself, my little king,

Nor dread the fading light:

Full well I wot of a woodward’s cot

Where we may bide this night.”

“Good Escebert, I am athirst,

And my tongue cleaves to my mouth.”

“I know of a spring, my little king,

To slake and quench thy drouth.”

But when they came to a woodland brook,

And the child, unaware,

Knelt by the brink and bent to drink,

A sword flashed in the air;

And the shorn head of little Kenelm

Reddened the brook with blood,

While Escebert leapt to his saddle and crept

Like a wolf from Offa’s Wood.

Loose-reined he rode through the dark night

Till he came to the hall of a thane

Where the huntsmen rolled with ale and told

Of the fierce wolves they had slain.

“Ho, Escebert, good lord,” they cried,

“Come join our wassailing!

For you have missed our drinking-tryst

To ride with the little king.”

Then Escebert’s false cheek grew wan:

“God witness what I say!

I have not seen Kenelm, I ween,

Since noon of yesterday,

“Nor can I guess what ways he strayed:

So quit your wassail-board,

That all may search oak ash and birch

To find our little lord!”

A weary week those woods they searched

By holt and holm and glade;

But neither eye nor foot drew nigh

The place where he was laid;

And never a single whisper woke

Those brambly solitudes

But the rustle that spreads from the wind-stirred heads

Of wild trees in the woods.

(Hazel, hazel, bend your boughs

Over the streamlet’s bed,

And with your primrose pollen gild

A halo for his head!

Holly, holly, shake your branch

Till the brittle leaves rain down,

And weave about the dead child’s brow

A martyr’s thorny crown!

Cherry, cherry, shed your snow

Of petals in a cloud,

And on the little limbs below

Spread a soft shroud!

Yew tree, yew tree, over him

Your funeral pennons wave;

But let not your bright berries drip

Their blood upon his grave,

To fleck the whiteness of the shroud

That the wild cherry strewed

On the gentlest fawn that ever was torn

By wolf in Offa’s Wood!)

So home the hunt to Lichfield rode

And the bronze bells clanged again

A muffled toll for the innocent soul

Of the child that had been slain;

And folk who heard the tolling wept,

For they knew what it must mean;

And the Mercian Lords swore on their swords

To hold Quendrytha queen.

Now far away in Italy,

Under Peter’s dome,

Frail and old on his throne of gold

Slept Paschal, Pope of Rome.

A weary man, an aged man

Of four score years and seven;

And in his listless hands he held

The Crossed Keys of Heaven.

Holy, Holy, Holy!

The children’s voices swell,

While sweet and loud, through the incense-cloud

Shivers the Sanctus Bell;

And as they heard the silvery chime,

From the clouded vault above

Like a falling flake of cherry-bloom

Fluttered a milk-white dove

That held a quill in his golden bill

And laid it on the Host,

And all the people rose and cried:

“See, see: the Holy Ghost!”

“A miracle . . . A miracle!”

So loud a cry there broke

That the old Pope rubbed his rheumy eyes

And dropt his keys, and woke!

And he called three scarlet cardinals

To read out what was writ

On the parchment folded within the quill,

But they could not fathom it.

“These words are writ in rhyme,” they said,

“And the tongue of a far land

That none in Rome or Christendom

Is like to understand.

“Yet all strange peoples come to Rome,

So let the rhyme be heard;

Some ear may catch the sound and match

The sense to fit the word”:

In Clent coubethe Kenelm Kynebear lith

Under thorne hævedes bereaft.

Then up spoke an old Saxon clerk:

“Sirs, you have given news

Of the bloodiest deed that ever was done

Since Christ was slain by the Jews:

“That in Cowbeath, which is by Clent,

Midmost in Mercia’s realm,

Beneath a thorn, his head off-shorn,

Lieth our king, Kenelm.”

So the Pope blessed that screed, and with

The ring of Peter sealed,

And bade that Saxon carry it

To his Bishop, in Lichfield.

Then, once again, from Lichfield towers,

The bells boomed overhead;

And the Mercian thanes rode out again

To search for Kenelm’s head;

And when they came to the woods of Clent

And rode into the shade,

Behold—a shaft of blinding light

Fell where the child was laid!

So, tenderly, they lifted him

And bore him to his tomb

In Winchcombe, where our Mercian kings

Lie till the Day of Doom;

But as through Winchcombe’s mourning street

They passed by slow degrees,

Quendrytha at her window sate

With the Bible on her knees.

She read of false Queen Jezebel,

And when they spied the hearse

That carried Kenelm, her wicked eyes

Spat blood upon the verse.

And the common folk, who saw this thing,

Knew what it meant full well,

And flung her down into the street

To lie like Jezebel;

And Escebert, her foul paramour,

They slew him where he stood;

And those twain lay for a week and a day,

And the dogs lapped their blood.

But the king’s lords buried little Kenelm

With pomp in Winchcombe’s fane,

And built a chantry for pilgrim-folk

By the brook where he was slain;

And the waters that well from where he fell

All mortal ills assuage—

Not even Saint Thomas of Canterbury

Hath greater pilgrimage

Than the innocent king of Mercia

That his sister’s leman slew

And hid in the brash of oak and ash,

Hazel and holly and yew!

Wistan, Wulstan, Oswald, Chad:

All pray for Mercia’s realm;

But our loveliest saint was a little lad;

King Kynewulf’s son, Kenelm.

It was the black year when King Edward died,

And the Octave of Easter in April, that Wulfgeat, my father,

Dragged me forth from deep sleep and flung wide the window-shutters

Bidding me gaze at the heavens, and, therein hanging

Bright over Bredon, the star men called the Comet

Trailing its horrid tresses with such fierceness

That lesser lights grew wan, as when the moon

Quenches their shine. And my father said to me:

“Son, this is no mean portent, but one that foreshadoweth

Dooms that we dream not. No living eye hath seen

The like of it since the time when Swegen and Olaf

Reddened the reign of Ethelred the Redeless;

And let none doubt but that God’s sword is unsheathed

To flash and fall on England. Wherefore, at daybreak,

We will ride to Evesham and make our peace with heaven

Ere worse befall. Our kinsman, Ælfwine the Abbot,

Shall shrive our souls; and I will give his Abbey

The lands by the Whitsun brook and the watermill

Which was your brother’s portion before he turned monk

And left us.”

        So I, Ædwulf, arose, sore in heart,

And rode with him sullenly—for, being the eldest,

I grudged to see those fair fields and the watermill

By the pools where I had fished for perch as a lad

Go to feed the fat Abbey of Evesham. Yet was I dutiful

As became my father’s son—and in aftertime

Have had cause to bless the cold hand that robbed me then

Of my rights; since now I would rather see them sealed

In the Abbey’s honour than wrung from me like the rest

By the Norman Urse and his bear-cubs!

                             A full week

The comet shone in the sky; and many were driven

By dread to shiftless penitence; yet the doom

Betokened fell not on them—though many rumours

Ran through the shires: how that Duke William, the Bastard,

False kinsman of our new King, Harold Godwineson,

Denied his right, boasting he had sworn away

That heritage in his favour; how William stayed

Gathering sails in Normandy to swoop

On England unawares, and had suborned

Pope Alexander to hallow his enterprise;

How that King Harold, stedfast in the certainty

Of his chrismed kingship and the inheritance

King Edward, dying, gave him, now swept the channel

With such a well-found fleet as had not furrowed

The waves since Alfred died, and his weak heirs

Left half his ships to lie with rotting ribs

In the Cornish creeks. Neither did these tales fright us

(Mayhap King Edward’s peace had sapped our wits)

Nor had we dread of foreigners: many such

Had dwelt long time among us: some thanes of Denmark,

Old servants of King Cnut, and some few Normans—

Earl Ralph of Hereford, Richard son of Scrob,

Who, riding from their towers on Offa’s Dyke

(That now sprang up like mushrooms in an orchard

Grazed by a stallion,) and keeping the March of Powys,

Clipped the Welsh dragon’s claws and stayed his ravaging

Of Severnside. Nor had we any fear

Of William and his barons; since we knew

Harold a proven warrior, and his housecarls

Unmatched in battle. So, shriven, we slept sound

While the doom-star flared beneath a waxing moon

And waned to a snuffed candle-wick, and went out,

And the mild, familiar stars stole over Bredon

Once more from dusk to dawn.

                  That was a season

Of kindliest showers and warm sun, promising

A plenteous harvest; but, when the bearded grain

Bent its ripe ears for reaping, there came word

That Harold Hardrada had broken forth from Norway

And fallen on Northumbria, while Harold of England

Now rode loose-reined to meet him. And my father,

Being a king’s thane, and bounden by that honour,

Took down his rusty mail and whetted the bite

Of his double-handed battle-axe. Hotly I pleaded

To ride with him; but he denied me, saying:

“This is no stripling’s play. You are over-young

For such stern service. See, I have but two sons,

And one vowed to the cloister. Should you fare with me

And we two fall together, who would fend

For your mother and sisters? Nay, if I take the sword,

Take you the sickle and tend the fields and see

Our harvest reaped and garnered. If I should die

In the King’s battle, then will he care for you

As the son of one who served him. But if fortune

Turn against Harold, remember: you are his man,

And owe him a thane’s fealty till your death.”

Then he spoke darkly: “These are but the first-fruits

Of the dooms that star foretold. Let no man doubt

That our fyrd can crack the Northmen; for we are swift

In movement, and our Saxon battle-axes

Bite deeper than theirs, I reckon. But if news travel

By any traitorous tongue to Normandy

Whispering Duke William that the English fleet

Keeps not the southern sea, and that our King

Speeds to the North to grapple with Hardrada

A hundred leagues away, then may he catch

His moment, and hurl his host on the naked shores

Of Kent and Sussex—and, if that befall,

Then God help England!—for no lesser hand

Can save our necks from the dominion

Of a foreign yoke. Such ills could never have been

Were we but one in spirit; but the King’s realm

Is riven by bitter jealousies and sapped

By treasons that have burrowed underground

Like oonts since Edward’s faltering hand forsook

The sceptre for the breviary, and, fumbling

For a heavenly diadem, left the crown of England

Fallen in the dust while subtle foreign priests

Battened on English bishoprics: Robert of Jumièges

Sat throned in Canterbury, and William, the king’s chaplain,

Still holds the see of London; and other strangers

Have Wells and Hereford. Nor can the sons

Of Godwine, the King’s blood-brothers, be fully trusted

To take his part: Tostig has ranged himself

With Harold Hardrada; and the Northern Earls,

Edwin and Morcar, sit lightly in their saddles,

Unstirrupped, to leap which side they list should Harold

Falter or fall. Now all our loyalties

Lie in God’s hand; and you, lad, should be grateful—

Though you looked crabbed about it!—that I gave

The Whitsun lands to Evesham.”

                    So he blessed me,

And spake no more, but smiled, and bade me follow him

To the Manor, where my sisters Eadhild and Eadgyth

Scrubbed his chain-shirt and burnished it with sand

From the Whitsun brook’s bright shallows, laughing, child-like,

And vying with one another for the prize

Of polishing his head-piece. And my mother

Laughed with her lips to see them; but her eyes

Though tearless had no brightness, and I guessed

Her heart was emptier than mine. And once

I saw my father look at her, and her lips

Trembled, yet smiled again; and she turned away

Hurriedly, calling on the maids to bring

Meats from her store to stuff his saddlebags

With provender for the journey. Then little Eadhild

Chirped like a wren: “Father! Come, father! See

How silver-bright your helm is burnished. Look!

You must put it on and see yourself in the mirror!”

But Eadgyth sulked: “It is no better burnished

Than the ugly shirt I scrubbed. See how the rust

Reddens my finger-nails!” And he, to please them,

With a grave mien armed himself, cap-à-pie,

As the Normans say, turning this way and that

To show his glory—while our great hound Bran

Gazed at him with anxious eyes and thrashed his tail,

Not knowing what mood could have moved so grave a man

As his master to play; and the two children danced

About him, boasting of their handiwork,

Crying: “Rode there ever a king’s thane out of Mercia

More knightly than our father? When the King sees him

His eyes will dazzle! Ay, and father will tell

How two small maidens in Worcestershire, Eadgyth and Eadhild,

Thus preened him for the fight. But now,” they said,

“We must burnish sword and axe.” And when she heard them

My mother’s brows were knitted, as though her eyes

Were hurt by the fancy that such gentle fingers

Should handle such grim tools. So she forbade them.

And now came Cerdic—he who first taught me to ride,

And was our staller, a halting, bright-eyed old man

With a slant mouth and a shrewd face as warty

As a notched crook cut from a blackthorn thicket, leading

Two saddled horses: one was my father’s grey,

A Picard stallion with hot blood of Aragon

Lightening his bone to fleetness, and the other

Our plodding thill-horse, Grim, that was twelve year old,

Slow-paced and patient-natured, having been wont

To plough in the yoke with oxen—yet wise enow

To guide the furrow straight if the ploughman nodded;

And Cerdic held both of them dearer than his wife

(Who was a shrewish body) and they, in return,

Loved him as rarely, though when the grey was younger

And mettlesome in mating, it had cracked a leg for him

And made him limp for life!

                    I reckon my father

Was loth to tarry longer; for he kissed the two maids

And swung himself to the saddle nimbly, for all

The weight of his harness. But when my mother drew near

He stooped, and took her face in his hands, and kissed her,

But spoke no word; and she kissed him again, with closed eyes.

Now I knew naught of love, being but a boy

And simple in all such ways; yet I think no kiss

Spoke ever deeper of love than theirs, being given

Not in the heat of desire but in pure tenderness

To a woman whose beauty had waned long since in the bearing

Of children and homely labours. And she laid her fingers,

That were roughened by toil, on his hand that held the rein,

Till the tall grey tossed his head and moved on,

And her hand fell limp to her side, and she turned and went

With downbent eyes to her bower . . .

                    But the great hound, Bran, who had stood

With head on one side, in doubt of what was afoot,

When he saw the two riders move to the verge of the woods

Threw back his jowl and bayed for joy, for he thought

They were going a-hunting wolves, and leapt after them eagerly

With his long loping stride, till my father swerved in his saddle

Halloaing ‘Home, Bran! Home!’; and the hound, for a moment,

Stood still with one paw uplifted, gazing after them,

Then trotted back, cowed and puzzled; nor would he heed me

Howsoever I petted and called him. . . So they rode Northward;

And I, with a dreary heart, betook myself

To the fields of harvest and toiled there, thinking thereby

To lighten my load of gloom—but all in vain.

Now this was the twentieth day of September, the feast

Of Saint Matthew Evangelist, and a week and a day to go

To Michaelmas. Never in all my life have I seen

An Autumn more richly dight; for early frost

Had touched the elms, and the corn-lands of Avon

Lay floored with golden stubbles. The apple-orchards

Drooped with their bounteous burdens, and the wild pears

Robed with vermilion flared in pyramids

Of flame against the darkening woods. By night

The brown owls swooped across the stars and filled

The sky with whinnyings and hag-like scratches,

Hunting for shrews and flittermice, so that none

Could sleep for their shrill carnival. One such night

When Bran was couched beside me—for since the hour

That my father went he had moped all day in the hall

Miserable of mute bereavement, more like a Christian

Than a dumb brute, for ever cherishing

A cast clout of his master’s that still kept

The smell of him—on one such night, I say,

In the dark of the moon, Bran started to his feet

And opened his fanged throat in such a bellow

As made the rafters shake; nor could I calm him,

For the dog was distraught, and panted and paced the hall

Like a sad soul in purgatory, dismally howling

As one that bays the moon. But there was no moon . . .

So at dawn my mother stole to my side and said:

“What was amiss with Bran?” And I lied to her,

Saying he was angered by the pattering feet

Of rats in the thatch, and that bats had flown into the hall,

Chased by the owls, and fluttering in aimless circles

Had maddened him. Whereat the maidens, hearing

My tongue stammer of bats, screamed out in fear

Of the foul mice tangling their unbraided tresses;

But my mother sighed and gazed and shook her head;

And I ran afield rather than face her, knowing, as she did

That my father had fallen . . .

                There were partridges in the stubble

Pecking for ungleaned grain; but I never thought

To set a springe for them; and the grey fisherman

That pored on the minnowed shallow flapped his wings

And flew unscathed to his heronry—for I had no heart

To fly my falcons, though the young peregrine

Was a fierce hearner. And a week passed.

                            It was Michaelmas

When the ill word came by old Cerdic, limping home

With the lamed thiller, and, slung from his saddle-bow,

My father’s sword and helm and the shirt of mail

They had stripped, at my father’s behest, from his warm body

Before they buried him. “Take these,” he had said,

“To my son Ædwulf. Tell him that Harold Godwinson

Hath utterly broken the host of Harold Hardrada

At Stamfordbridge on Derwent, and his king

Now hastens southward to uphold his rights

Against his cousin of Normandy, disembarked

At Pevensey. And tell Ædwulf that his hand

Must grasp this sword that has dropped from mine, and wield it

In Harold’s service and in the honour of England

Unto his death. And so God help him!” Then I

Took the sword from him, kissing the hilt, and swore

To serve as my father had bidden me, and put on

My father’s helm and byrnie, and strode to the bower

To tell my mother; and she, first seeing me

Loom in the doorway with the light behind,

Thought it had been my father, and stretched out her hands

To clasp me, crying: “Dear love, art thou come indeed?

I had thought thee lost for ever and my heart was broken.”

Then little Ædhild laughed: “This is not my father,

But brother Ædwulf. I know him by the brown mole

At the side of his nosepiece.” And I cried: “Mother,

It is I . . .” But she thrust me from her in anger. I think

She never forgave me the trick I played that day,

Though indeed it was no trick, but the thoughtless vanity

Of a youngster pranked in armour.

                         She was a strange woman,

Kin to that lady Godiva, wife of Earl Leofric,

Who rode stark-stripped through Coventry; and I never knew her

As a son should know his mother; for all her love

Had been given to my father, and none left for her sons,

And I never saw tears in her eyes but on that one day.

Thus, on the morrow, I went from my home, ill-mounted

For a thane and a thane’s son, on the halting thill-horse,

And Cerdic behind me, riding on a shaggy pony

That was half-Welchman and barely broke. Old Bran

Watched me go listless; for his spirit was gone, and the ribs

Stared through his brindled hide. One look he gave me

Of neither joy nor pain; then dropped his head

On his paws and blinked his eyes. Four days we rode

Clean over Cotswold to the cold clay stubbles

Of Essex, where Harold lay gathering his powers

At Waltham Holy Cross. And though doom still darkened

My mind, yet must I grant that this sudden journey,

With the glory of battle before it, quickened the blood

Of a youth who had never ranged farther than Worcester, and now

Beheld the world opened wide, and had come to manhood

And the pride of arms in a single hour, and for copper

Bore gold in his purse. So, when I rode through the city

Of Oxford, it seemed to me gowned merchants gaped

To see so gallant a warrior, and maidens stared

At my tall helm, smiling kindly—though, like as not,

They were wondering in what outlandish wood or waste

Of uttermost Mercia this uncouth stripling-in-arms

Had gotten his horse from the tail of the plough and dragged

His shaggy hind to follow him!

                      On the fifth day we came

To the new Abbey of Waltham, where I did homage

To Harold of England; and the King, in requital

For my father’s blood, gave me, by writ and seal,

Seizin of all his lands, free of redemption;

Yet he hardly looked at me—and I who had yearned

To see him royally robed in ermine with a gold crown

On a high throne, saw a plain man, no taller than myself,

Wan-featured, haggard-eyed, and garbed not in gold

But in a woollen shirt, such as my mother wove,

Bearing no token of kingship: and I felt I was cheated,

Like a child, when minstrel and mummer come not at Christmas,

Being mired in mud or snowdrift.

                        But two things I saw there

Bide with me yet: how, first, in the hush of evening

I saw the King walk with a woman in the closed garth

Of the Abbey cloisters. Never had I dreamt such rareness

In shape or hue as hers—for her hair, unbraided

Shone like wind-rippled barley, and her throat

Showed moonpale in the dusk as doth the wild cherry

Or March windflower in Werewood; and when she bent

Her lissom body toward him she swayed like a birch-tree

Or aspen puffed by a gust of April, that curtseys

But to recover; and when they walked more swiftly

She seemed to feather the earth rather than tread it,

As doth the lightfoot plover that skims to her landing

And runs before she lights. So, when I stood ravished

By her beauty, and asked her name of a man-at-arms

Who stared beside me, he laughed: “What? Have you not heard

Of Eadgyth Swan-neck, the King’s paramour? It is she—

And a tastier morsel, I reckon, than the Welch King’s widow,

Who is his lawful wife! See what it is

To be a king, and gobble the first dainty

That whets your fancy!” And I, having been nursed

In the rustic modesty of my mother’s ways,

Felt shamed by the King’s lightness, yet, no less, stirred

By the warmth of his dalliance.

                       Next, I remember

How, on the morrow, Harold, with kingly pomp

And lordly company, paid his last penance,

Laying upon the high altar a rich oblation

Of treasure, and holy relics reft from the shrine

Of King Edward in Westminster. Humbly he prayed

For the grace of victory, vowing, if that were granted,

To be God’s ransomed servant all his days.

Then turned he to depart; and the black-robed canons

Slow-footed followed him under the new-cut ashlar

Of their pillared nave. But when he came to the galilee

Where the Holy Rood of Montacute fronts the West,

He flung himself down in the dust, and lay abased,

Flat on his face; and the thorn-crowned head of Christ

Bowed sorrowfully above him and bent downward,

As though the carved lips murmured: “It is finished . . .”

But this omen the King saw not, though Thurkill, the Sacrist,

Marked and remembered it; and Harold, for sure,

Thought that his prayer had been granted; for now his face shone

Like that of a saint in glory, and the splendour

Of its majesty overbore me through all that day

While we rode to the city of London, and crossed the bridge

Where grim heads of traitors grinned from the parapet

Of the gatehouse, and a gay throng babbled about us,

Noisy as crows at Craycombe in their nesting

When the twigged trivets are tossed, and the March wind

Roars through the naked wood.

                     Six days we tarried

In London, undetermined; for Gyrth, the King’s brother,

Earl of East Anglia, withstood his purpose

To fall on William with that dwindled host,

Hard-ridden and battle-weary. “Rather,” he said,

“Let me ride forth short-handed, and call the Norman

To single combat, seeing I am not bounden

By any oath of homage, however given,

So risk no charge of perjury; and if he disdain

To lift my gage, then let me harry the shires

From London to the sea, and burn the harvest

So that he starve in the waste!”

                          And the court cried

This was good counsel; but Harold would have none of it.

“Never,” he swore, “will I burn an English village

Or an English house! Never will I hurt the lands

Or goods of any Englishman! How should I plunder

The folk who ate put under me to govern

As their just King?”

              Thus, on the seventh day,

He led us forth from London over the marshes

To the white-scarred Kentish downland, pied with cloud

And crisped with crinkling hoar-frost—a rare field

For falconry; but by sunset we were swallowed

By the forest of the Weald, where the shy roebuck

Scattered like ghosts (and I wished old Bran were with me!)

Till night fell, and the charcoal-burner’s fires

And gleed of smelting-hearths winked through dim glades

Wreathed in sweet-smelling woodsmoke. Darkling we rode

Till we came at dawn to the Andrædasweald,

Where a waste Chester crumbles, that was once

A city of the Romans, and from the verge

Of smooth downs stared upon the glassy sea

Where the fleet of Normandy bobbed like a flight of mallard

Floating upon a mere, and their sprinkled sails

Scudded this way and that as when the breast-feathers

Are plucked from a goose at Michaelmas.

                                It was the Eve

Of Saint Calixtus (though who Calixtus was

Or why Rome hallowed him I know not) when,

On the long ridge called Senlac we pitched our camp

By the hoar apple-tree. Many have asked me

What force we had at Hastings; and the Normans,

To gild their own glory, have magnified our number

Beyond belief or measure. Yet this I know:

There were nigh three thousand housecarls, sorely-tried

In the battle with Harold Hardrada, and besides

Eight or nine thousand more, free men, such as I,

Who had ridden from far shires alone, and many

Who brought their followers: Breme of East Anglia;

Esegar the Staller, Sheriff of Middlesex,

Who led the fyrd of London; Ælfric of Huntingdon;

Godric of Fifhide; Thurkill, the Dane, a Lord

Of Berkshire; two mitred Abbots—Ælfwig of Winchester,

Who was the King’s own uncle, Earl Godwine’s brother,

With twelve monks from his Abbey, and Leofric

Abbot of Peterborough, with his own chaplain

Easric the Deacon—ay, and a dozen more

Whose names I disremember. But there was none

Rode from Northumbria, where the earls Edwin and Morcar

Still waited on the issue. It was the East

And the South that fed us with a multitude

Of homespun folk who had dropped their sickles and flocked

From Wessex and East Anglia, armed with few weapons

But the tools of their husbandry—pikels and flails,

Hayforks and blackthorn staves hacked from the hedge—

And had no body-armour and no buckler

But their lust for freedom and their fixed intent

To rid their land of strangers.

                       On that night

Few slept, for all their weariness. I have been told

The Normans kept vigil on their knees and were shriven

By the fierce Bishop of Bayeux—who had better

Repented his own deeds of blood than pardoned

The sins of others—but we were a merry folk

By nature—and the merrier that our consciences

Were lighter than theirs; so, while the watchfires flared

And the harps twanged, we gathered round them, roaring

The battle-song of Brunanburh, and sang

Of the three who kept the bridge against the Dane

When Byrhtnoth fell at Maldon; and every heart

Waxed great with courage of our right. So dawned

The day of Saint Calixtus . . .

                     Harold had set

Our line of battle cunningly. Behind us

Lay the woods of Anderida; on our right

We were girdled by a sluggard stream that wound

Through a sogged marsh, while on the other flank

And the full front, the slope fell to the plain

So steep, no charge of cavalry could breast it

With wind unspent. On our right, where the brook guarded them,

He had ranged his right-armed levies; in the centre

Set the main battle—the iron of his housecarls

Locked in three ranks of shields so densely knit

There was bare room to sweep and swing the axe

That had cracked Hardrada’s pride; and at their feet

We had dug a fosse to cast the floundering cavalry

Into confusion. Behind this triple barrier

Of iron, where the thrawn crabtree stood, he raised

His banners: first, the ancient Dragon of Wessex

That Ælfred bore to victory at Ethandun

And Æthelstan at Brunanburh, and beside it

Flaunted the standard of the Fighting Man,

A gonfanon of gold, broidered with gems,

That drooped of its own richness. There, between them,

With axe slung from the shoulder and spear in hand,

Stood Harold the King, and his own kinsmen: Hakon,

Son of his brother Swegen, Gyrth and Leofwine,

And his uncle Æthelwig, Abbot of Winchester,

The monk’s cowl tucked within his helm—the pride

Of the great house of Godwine.

                       This was the charge

The King laid on us: that all should hold their ground

And let the horsed Norman fury spend itself

On spear and shield, until the terrible axe

Had tamed it; and that none, however tempted

By triumph or wrath of battle, should break his ranks,

Or we were lost; for, if the shield-wall held,

He knew there was no earthly power could break us,

And Heaven fought on our side.

                        It was the hour

Of Prime, three before noonday, when the battle

First broke. Well I remember how we had waited

Gazing across the valley to Telham Hill

Where they had trenched their camp, with a tower of wood

In the midst; how, in the steely light of morn,

Their lifted lances glinted like icicles

Dripped from a thatch; how the sea-breeze, arising

Wafted the smoke of camp-fires and the hoarse challenge

Of their battle-cry ‘Dex aie!’, and we roared back

Our own cries: ‘Holy Rood!’ and ‘God Almighty!’;

How next the glinting lance-icicles melted

Into an iron-grey wave that slowly crept

Across the sere grass of Autumn; and how there passed

Suddenly a sleet of arrows, whispering

Like the wing-beats of packed starlings when they wheel

Over a reed-bed—but these wings whispered Death,

And one glanced from my father’s byrnie, splintering

The shaft to fragments; yet I felt the blow

As though a mailed fist had smitten me: an inch higher,

And I had not lived to tell this tale! But now

My heart, that had been drunk with the fumy wine

Of war’s adventure, halted, and grew cold

As that of a partridge flattened in the stubble

When my falcon stooped; and I knew I was afraid

Of a sport in which I was quarry; the next I knew

That the grey wave I had watched was made of men

Ready to slay me, who had done them no wrong,

And there was kindled in me a hot anger

Against these men I knew not; and its flame, rising,

Consumed both fear and anger in one desire—

To have at him who would hurt me; and this, I reckon

Was what most men call Courage, though I was a boy

And did not stop to question, only knowing

I would liever slay than be slain. So I grit my teeth,

That were chattering of themselves like knuckle-bones,

And laughed at the splintered arrow-shaft—though verily

My laugh had no mirth in it, and my lips bivered

Like a child’s when the trumpet blared, and under the sleet

Of bolts and arrows the Norman foot rolled forward

To fall on us.

           Now a strange thing befell:

For, through their opened ranks full-tilt, there rode

An antic horseman, who threw his sword in the air

And caught it like a juggler when it flashed

Before him. This was the minstrel Taillefer;

And, as he charged, he stood in the stirrups, singing

The high song of Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver

And the vassals that died at Roncesvalles. When we saw him

Hurl himself single-handed on all our host,

We laughed—but the fool was bolder than we reckoned,

For ere the axes felled him in the fosse

He had spitted one housecarl on his lance, and cleft

A second with his sword. And the heavy footmen,

Spurred by this crazy valour, cast themselves

Reckless upon the shield-wall. Then I saw

A sight of terror: the line of great axes rising,

Flashing, and falling as one, and the mortal wrack

Mown down before them till the fosse was cluttered

With maimed and dead—and I heard the housecarls roaring

“Out! Out!!” with every stroke; and the axe-heads clanged

On cloven helms like hammers in a smithy

Smiting on anvils; but the shield-wall, unbreached,

Still fronted the broken remnant, and they fled.

Then were we itching to pursue, but minded

The King’s strict counsel that we should not swerve

But hold our ground: and it was well we heeded him;

For now, through the rout of flying foot, Duke William

Launched the full pride of Normandy, lance in rest,

To crash through the iron barrier by sheer weight

Of metal and maddened horseflesh. Four thousand knights,

Choicest of Europe’s chivalry, hurled themselves

Upon us like a thunder-wind; and the dust

Was churned from their thudding hooves, so that they rode

Wrapped in the heart of a storm-cloud. And before them

Came William and his brother, the black-hearted

Prelate of Satan, bloodier than he,

Odo of Bayeux, armed not with sword or lance

But with maces of iron, heavier than the battle-axes

The housecarls swung two-handed, yet these men whirled them

With one. And round his bull-neck William wore

The relics on which King Harold had sworn away

(As he said) the crown of England; and behind them

Billowed the banner of the Apostle, blessed

By their pander, the Pope of Rome. Now in the clash

Of the main battle I could see naught but a mellay

Of helms that rose and fell and arms that flashed

Through the dust the wind blew over them. Yet I saw

That the Dragon of Wessex still flew, and the Fighting Man,

Which had drooped of its weight of gems and gold, now streamed

On the wind; and though there were times when the wall of shields

Seemed bent or buckled, it straightened itself, and the knights

Of Normandy were rolled backward down the long slope

To form and charge again till their spent steeds panted

For lack of breath. And once I heard a great cry

Rising above the tumult, that William was down,

And the shaken cavalry snatched at their reins to turn

Their horses and flee; but out of the fosse’s carnage

I saw a tall man arise and tear the helm

From his fiery face. “Madmen,” he cried, “Why flee ye?

There is death behind you, and victory before.

I am living—and by the grace of God I will conquer!”

So he snatched a spear from a fallen hand to rally

The fugitives, and they turned; and once again

His tall bare head and flushed face were lost in the dust

Of battle. No doubt but the Bastard bore himself well;

For, now the black destrier that the Spanish King

Had sent him was fallen, he called on a knight of Maine

To give him his horse, and when this knight refused it

He felled him with one fierce blow of the mace and leapt

To the empty saddle; and when this horse, too, fell pierced

By the thrust of an English spear, he called on Eustace,

Count of Boulogne, for his. Three times in all

Was William unhorsed, and twice mounted; and with his own hand

He slew Gyrth, the King’s brother; and Odo the Bishop slew Leofwine:

So that now, of the sons of Godwine, was only one left,

And that Harold of England; but him the Duke could not reach,

For the King was hedged by the shield-wall of his housecarls

And the swinging axes that none could pass; and the flag

Of the Fighting Man still flew. So, at last, the Normans,

Having had more than a bellyful, thundered back to their camp

And gave us breathing-space.

                   God knows we needed it:

For the fight had been joined at the hour of Prime, and now

The hour of Vespers drew nigh, and the sun that had crept

Westward over the sea, now slowly sank,

Staining the bloody field with a baleful light.

Six hours had we fought, and the battle hung still in the balance

Though the beam seemed to tilt in our favour. Sol drew breath

And gulped a mouthful of muddy water old Cerdic

Had cupped from the brook in the helm of some dead Breton;

And as I moistened my throat, I became aware

That blood dripped in the cup from my brow where a bolt had grazed it,

And my tunic-skirt was stiff with caked blood that had run

From a wound that ripped my flank, but I had not heeded it

In the heat of battle. And I thought how strange it was

That I, Ædwulf, a country lad with no care

For aught but my hawks and hounds and the simple ways

Of husbandry, should be sitting there on the brow

Of Senlac, weary and bleeding, with the wide sea

Before me, and the dark woods behind, and never a soul

I knew, save Cerdic, near me. Yet before I had wiped

The blood from my cheek, I heard men crying: “Ware. Ware!

They are on us again!” So I dragged myself to my feet

And gripped my father’s sword, though its weight seemed the double

Of what it had been when the fight began, and my fingers

Felt numb and nerveless.

                Now this, though I knew it not,

Was the turning-point of the fray; for when William saw

That no spite could breach the shield-wall, he contrived

A subtler stratagem, and sent forth the levies

Of Maine and Poitou, with the Welch of Brittany

Led by Count Alan, and flung them on that flank

Where the low sun beat in the eyes of the light-armed fyrd

Of Wessex—but bade them let their onslaught seem

Half-hearted. And when these simple country-folk

Saw the French falter, they straight forgot the charge

Harold had laid on them, and broke their ranks

To rush upon them with their pikes, pursuing

The feigned flight in a rabble. And now the Bastard,

Having gotten his end and cracked the line that held

The hilltop, launched his lances in a wedge

That split the scattered fyrd of Wessex, and gained

The vantage of ground to smite us on the side

Their reckless zeal had breached.

                         Then, then indeed

Were we hard beset: for though the shield-wall swung

Westward to meet them, now we faced two fronts;

And the horse that swerved between us and the woods,

Drove in upon our rear—so that the housecarls,

Girdling the standard of the Fighting Man

With steel, rose like a spray-stripped island crag

Or an eyot in a mill-race; and though they wielded

Their axes in the same awful unison,

The shield-wall shrank and the narrowing ranks were pressed

Inward upon the standards, where Harold towered

Above his two slain brethren. One desperate knight,

Robert Fitz-Erneis, kin to Ralph of Tesson,

Shore through three ranks of housecarls, only to fall

As his hand clutched the standard, and the wave

Of the heaving mellay broke on him and covered him

With swathes of newly-slain, and the breach he had made

Was healed anew with flesh and steel, and rivetted

By the valour of Harold’s housecarls, and held fast

By the grace of a miracle. So we fought on; but ever,

Above that changing battle, I saw two faces:

The Bastard’s fiery jowl, grown black with rage,

And the fair head of Harold, streaked with blood

And sweat, yet ever kingly. And once again,

Foiled of their purpose, the Norman horse fell back,

While a crimson sunset, barred with black cloud, dyed

That dreadful hill with the hue of blood and dazzled

Our blinking eyes—and I prayed it would set soon

And twilight bring us respite.

                       William no less

Saw how the dark might save us, and summoning

His knights to a last onslaught, bade the archers

Shoot to the sky, so that their arrowy sleet

Beat on us from above, unseen, and centre

This falling terror on that one small space

Where Harold and the remnant of the housecarls

Ringed the two standards. Thus, when the trumpets wailed

And his knights charged on us, the air was threshed

By a winged storm that smote us unawares,

Soundless and shadowless, falling ere we knew

That death was on us. Many a helm was pierced

By shafts that dropped as plumb as a falcon stooping

To kill his quarry. Many lifted their shields

For shelter, and so laid their bodies bare

To thrust of lance or sword-stroke. Some, dismayed,

Threw back their heads to see whence the winged fury

Fell, and were smitten as they stared. Three times

I plucked away three glancing arrows caught

In the chain-links on my shoulder; and as I turned

To pluck the last I saw King Harold topple

Like a tree struck by lightning, and he fell

At the standard’s foot with an arrow in his eye,

Pierced to the brain. And a cry came to my lips,

But I could not utter it; for, as I gazed at him

With eyes distraught, a lance-point ripped my ribs

And flung me flat and senseless, where I lay

Sprawling amid the dead. . . .

                      Full night had fallen,

When a whisper woke me, and the hoarse voice of Cerdic

Bade me lie still and stir not, but feign death

For fear of it; telling me the fight was over

And lost, and that my life hung upon silence.

At first I knew not what he said, or where

I was lying—though it seemed to me for a while

I was stretched in the hall at home, and that old Bran

Tugged at a jingling chain, and I was racked

By a fierce pain in my side. But soon my senses

Fought back to clearness, and I knew that sound

Was the clink of mailed men, walking in their armour,

Who laughed, and swore in French. And when I winced

To blink my narrowed eyelids, I saw the light

Of lurid torches flaring, and lit by these

A great man with a fiery face, who sat

Unhelmed upon a mound of dead, and hungrily

Munched bread, sliced with his bloody dagger, and swilled

From a flagon of dark wine. Beneath his spurs

They had spread the proud Dragon of Wessex, daggled

With dirt and blood; and when he had filled his belly

He clapped his brother Odo on the shoulder

And the twain rolled off together . . .

                            Then I slept

For a while; and when next I woke it was daylight,

And the wives of the dead came to bear their bodies away,

Though the King’s wife came not. Yet two good canons of Waltham,

Old Osgod and Æthelric the Childmaster,

Who had followed the host, but fought not, being better Christians

Than the Bishop of Bayeux, sought for the King’s body

Amid the mounds of slain—yet found it not

Till the lady Eadgyth Swansneck, who searched with them,

Marked on his mangled groin a mole that none

But she had known; and they covered his mauled limbs

And the marred kingly head, with a purple cloak,

And bore him to the shore and buried him

Beneath a cairn of stones. Thus ended Harold

Of England—and England with him. . . .

And what more can I tell—but that I lay

Athirst, and still as Christ upon his cross,

In feigned death all that day, and how, at eve,

When the field was emptied, leaning on old Cerdic,

I limped into the Weald; how, for a month,

We lurked in the woods of Wessex and woodwards’ huts,

And crossed Cotswold by Fairford, and came at last

To Evesham, plodding through snow, and I was healed

Of my jagged lance-wound? But these were but the start

Of the woes that fell upon me; for my mother,

Who might have loved me better, feared to house me

By my own hearth; and my kinsman, Abbot Ælfwine,

Disowned me for a traitor—though he and Wulstan

Bishop of Worcester had treacherously ridden

On the morrow of Hastings fight to Berkhampstead

And truckled to the Norman, and for this

I scorned them ever after, though some have called

Wulstan a saint. Therefore (though none but he

Knew I had fought at Hastings) I hid myself

For prudence in Cerdic’s hovel, ever hopeful

That the storm would blow over. But soon the Normans,

That smooth-faced seed of Sodom, with their greedy

Womanish cruelties, lapped up all the shires;

And soon the Bishop and Abbots were contending

With the king’s sheriff, Urse d’Abitot, who should snatch

The choicest lands our Saxon thanes had held

Since Alfred ruled—and mine were reft, with the rest,

To swell the roll of Urse, save only my house

And a few lean fields beside it, that were left,

As the King’s alms, to my mother, who had claimed them

As her morning-gift with which she was endowed

On the morrow of her marriage.

                       So I went landless

And dispossessed, being neither churl nor thane,

But a wanderer in the waste—and the very woods

Where I had hawked and hunted for meat were closed

By Urse’s foresters, so that we should have starven

But that my monkish brother, who had become

Prior of the Abbey of Evesham, in grudging charity

Granted me lease of the lands my father had given

His Abbey on the morn the Comet shone,

To hold them at his pleasure and for the payment

Of some three pound a year—which are hard to come by

In these bare days! Here, since my mother died,

And the old hall fell to ruin for lack of money

To mend it, and my two sisters married, I have dwelt

In bitter idleness at the little watermill

(That is no longer mine) by the Whitsun Brook

And the pools where I fished for perch when I was a lad;

Though I have no heart to angle now, but live

Listless, and ever dreaming of that sweet time

That wilted when the Comet came, and was lost

For ever when King Harold fell at Hastings.

          Cold heart and bloody hand

          Now rule fair England.

In the mid-watches of night Ruthe spake to me

Reproachfully: “See, you have smudged another page

Of your island-annals red; and I foresee

No respite from this cruel heritage

Of bloody deeds that tragic Man calls Glory,

Quaffing the dreadful cup to quell his fears

Or lull his conscience. Yet must all your story

Be written in the ink of blood and tears?”

Then said I: “Mistress, though your plaint be guided

By Reason, you reck not how Man’s nature is riven

Twixt that same Reason and Instinct, thus divided

Between the opposing sways of hell and heaven;

How, in his blood, cell with invasive cell

Struggles to keep its territory whole,

And guard within that fleshly citadel

The seed of Self that flowers in Man’s soul;

How, thus, each nascent brood, by instinct tied

To hold Self’s heritage holy, must maintain

The pattern breed has given, and the pride

Of its discrete integrity—nay, is fain

To court destruction rather than forsake

Its tribal virtues, fearing neither strife

Nor peril should another dare to shake

The freedom it loves dearer than its life;

How tribes that saw this nearing doom and feared

To lose their oneness, wan for lack of strength,

Clung to their kindlier neighbours and cohered

Like globules of bright quicksilver—and at length

Out of such fusion rose new nations, bound

By blood and tongue and custom to defend

All that they held in common and the ground

Their common forbears tilled. So, in the end,

An ampler Self was born; and in the roll

Of heroes those are held in honour most

Who gave their lives to save their nation’s soul

And, losing all else, counted nothing lost.

Nor is such faith the special heritage

Of Man, but grounded in the marrow and pith

Of humbler creatures that know not the gage

Of glory, yet will die to fend their kith

Against aggression. See with what valiant might

The nesting stickleback defies the rival

That fans his favoured waters, and will fight

Till one be vanquished, reckless of survival!

See how the fiery robin-redbreast stakes

His chosen territories, and sounds the clarion

Of shrill defiance to challenge him who breaks

His marches or disputes his gauzy carrion!

See how the sexless droves of emmets band

Themselves in black-mailed legions; and honey-bees

Cluster them round their queenship to withstand

The death-moth’s fingers on the sill; yet these

Feeble and small-brained folk will yield their stings,

And with their stings their lives, that they may see

Their threshold undefiled by alien wings!

There is no Ruthe in Nature, nor will be.

And Man, imperfect Man, as her prime heir,

Bears that red birthmark yet—nor had he risen

So high, nor fallen so low, did he not wear

Stamped on his brow the brand of Nature’s prison;

Yet, since its hue affrights you, I will set

A song of rivers—Severn, with her mild daughters

Avon and Teme—and you shall thus forget

The noise of War in the running of sweet waters.”

(1)

Severn is born of the sodden mosses

Where smooth Plynlimmon’s dome is bowed

Under the rain the West Wind tosses

From tattered fleeces of sea-born cloud;

Where the sour-grass moors lie wet and wan,

And the mawn-pool’s mirror is misted glass,

And the skirts of the sky’s pavilion

Daggle the lint-white cotton-grass;

Where wild the curlew whinnies and cries

And whimbrels wheel in windy weather

And buzzards peck at the glazing eyes

Of sick lambs lost in the rain-lodged heather.

Only the carrion wings rejoice

Screaming above the smell of slaughter;

For the mountain’s voice is but the voice

Of wind-stripped grasses and welling water:

Of water that whispers as it seeps

And water that tinkles as it drips

In a cup of stone before it creeps

To the moss where the meadow-pipit sips;

Of water that gurgles underground

To gush anew in the bubbling spring

Of brooks that run with the ripply sound

Of dimpling pebbles—and streams that sing

Such innocent strains as have their birth

In the joy of morning and maidenhood

And ambience of the April earth,

When the primrose blooms are pale, and the bud

Of the blackthorn breaketh snowy-cool.

Such songs they sing, so laughs their light

From glancing stickle to amber pool;

And their bubbled foam, it danceth white

From the waterfall as lambs that leap

In meadows on April evenings

When the fledgeling woods are stirred from sleep

And first the willow-warbler sings;

Till the wet wild moorlands fall behind

And the murmur of brooks and streams is blent

In the roar of a river that hath no mind

Of its mountain birth, but turbulent

As an untamed colt with foam-flecked shoulders

And fiery eyes and streaming mane,

Thunders over its bed of boulders

And falls in tumult to the plain.

So swollen Severn rolleth proud

Under the domed green hills of Wales

Dappled with flocks like shadows of cloud

In Summer; and all the Powys vales

Grow loud where the tumultuous floods

Of Vyrnwy, brimmed with Berwyn’s snows,

Pour from their craggy solitudes

To stain her torrent. But Severn flows

With the graveness of a deepening stream,

Till her waters part—and high in air

The steeple vanes of Shrewsbury dream

Caught within her silver snare,

And her voice is stilled; for now she hath

Forgotten the madrigals that she sung

In the dalliance of her downward path

And the lilt of the valleys where she was young,

But hath put away such childish things

With the merriment of light-heart youth;

And the memory of her mountain springs

Is all forgotten—for now in sooth

She floweth mantled in sober state,

Laced with the fire of the rising sun,

And the turbid sully of Vyrnwy’s spate—

Where the silver-sided salmon run

To their gravelly redds—doth not abate

The majesty of her tawny tide

Solemnly flowing towards the gate

Where the dark woods of Wenlock hide

Their brambled scarp, and Wrekin’s dome

Shaggy with forest broodeth on

That crumbled city of Old Rome

Which dead men once called Uricon—

That white-walled City of the Woods

Whose stark, fire-blackened ruin guards

The mortal ashes of multitudes

Scattered amid their broken shards.

Yet the river recks not of the doom

Of the hapless folk who throve and died

And saw the white wild cherry-bloom

Lighten and rust on Severnside,

Who lived and loved and fell to dust

As the cherry-blow that whitens and wanes;

For her waters are timeless, and the lust

Of the salt stirs ever in her veins—

So the broom and the cherries of Wenlock Edge

Spend gold and snow for her in vain

As she roars through the cleft of Ironbridge

And veereth Southward to the plain

Where the blood-red rock of Bridgenorth frowns

On shoals of sand where the ravening Danes

Beached their dragons and burnt the towns

And lashed the land like Lammas rains

And spread afield like a Lammas flood,

Stripping the ripened cornlands bare.

Yet Severn recks not of fire or blood,

For she is timeless—nor tarryeth there,

But rolleth past on her seaward road

By villages that know not Time:

Alveley and Arley and Hampton Loade,

Whose gentle names together chime

Sweet as their Sunday church-bells ringing

For evensong in the month of June

When the lazy throstle mutes his singing

And the cuckoo flattens his April tune,

When the clang of their bells is wafted over

The moving water, to mingle and meet

In dim airs drenched with the honey of clover

And drowsy scents of meadowsweet . . .

But see! The river livens her pace

As she tugs at the ties of Arley ferry

And plunges headlong into the race

Of the Folly Rapids, and maketh merry,

And racing under the woods of Wyre

Like a two-year filly-foal recaptures

In one brief revel her youthful fire

And the ardour of youth and youth’s fierce raptures;

Where Werewood broods on the water’s brink

And leaf-shades dapple the delicate fallow

That steals from the shadow at eve to drink

From foam-fringed eddy and wave-lapped shallow.

But this fleeting zest is the last she will know

Of her morning joy—for the burden of years

And the load of care weigh heavily now

On the sobered water that laps the piers

Of Bewdley bridge, and the solemn stream

That ebbeth sullenly mile on mile

Without a voice, without a smile.

Yet rare and fugitive, hour by hour,

Fade on the moving mirror’s face

The imaged beauty of Worcester tower

And Tewkesbury tower, and the stony lace

Of Gloucester’s fretted parapet;

And the mournful stone of Berkeley’s keep

Saddens her surface—but not yet

Shall dreaming Severn awake from sleep,

Not till the green vale opens wide

And the wrath of the bore rolls in from sea

And the stinging salt of the sudden tide

Mindeth her of her destiny.

Till, moving with more majestic gait,

She taketh seizin of the skies,

And robed in ever queenlier state

Spreadeth the firth in which she lies

With azure of the imaged vault

And clouds dove-grey and blinding white

And steely gleams of cool cobalt;

And the galaxies of indigo night

Spangle her raiment with cold fire

And burn within her broadened breast,

Till the hungry sea hath his desire

And she sinketh in his arms to rest.

Water to water . . . Her life is o’er,

And the sea-born mists that fell to earth

On the mountain-tops are merged once more

In the bitter waves that gave them birth.

Yet, Mistress Ruthe, do not forget

How the seal of Liberty was set

On our rights when free men fought and died

For God’s Crowning Mercy on Severnside.

(2)

Teme is Severn’s wild, sweet daughter,

A wayward child; and her limpid water

Gushes and wells from the gentler rills

That trickle from the Kerry hills,

Where pale, cloud-tented sheepwalks lie

Meek beneath a rain-washed sky

In airs that are thin and crystal-clear

As spring-water, where the idle ear

Listening heareth little else

Than the rustle of harebells and heather-bells,

Or the boom of blundering bumble-bees

Drunken with honey culled from these,

Or the whisper of grasses, that is almost

Silence, or bleating of weak lambs, lost

In bracken too tall for them to spy

Their anxious dams—and so they cry

Desolately, but dare not move

For the hungry wings that hover above . . .

But virgin Teme knows naught of these

As she lapseth under her alder-trees

From pool to stickle and stickle to slide

Threading the thin-strung woods that hide

Her hesitant meanderings,

Where the pied water-ouzel sings,

Bobbing his breast on an island stone—

(Stir but a finger, and he is flown,

Whirring upstream from the shadow of harm

With a startled stutter of alarm

That is like two pebbles clashed together!)

Where, in the drowsier Summer weather,

Gleams for a moment and is gone

The burning blue of Halcyon;

And the redstart flits from a crannied wall,

Flashing above the waterfall

The rufous glow of a feebler fire;

And the light-hearted pipits spire

Tossing their bodies high in air

And twittering as they hover there.

So, with alternate gloom and shine,

Teme falls by Llanfairwaterdine

To Knucklas village and Knighton Vale,

Where the felled woods lie silver-pale

With floss of silken willow-weed;

And on her face the windblown seed

Lighteth softer than thistledown

To drift and skim, like mayflies blown

To their death in June—till a tiny waft

Of light air lifteth it aloft,

And the seed goes sailing on its way,

While sweet Teme floweth without stay

Between the wild flags’ clustered swords,

Where gentle, wide-horned Herefords

Bend their white-muzzled heads to drink

From muddy pools on the trampled brink;

Or stand knee-deep in the cool stream

In an unimaginable dream

And slowly swing their tails, while flies

Settle on their uncurious eyes;

Till the roofs of a rising village strown

On a steep hillside, and a tower of stone,

Stand in her path and halt her flow,

And clear Teme feels the undertow

Of denser waters that have run

From the marly dales of Corve and Clun,

And the streams of the confluent rivers mingle

In a deep pool that laps the shingle

Where the twin sisters meet and twine

Under the bridge at Leintwardine

And the two waters flow as one . . .

So swollen Teme goes tumbling down

Over the rapids to Trippleton,

Then falls to peace in a shadowy slide

Where tall trees lean on either side,

And their drooping boughs are arched above

Water that hardly seems to move

Save for the drift of scum that floats

Dappled by foam and dense with motes

Of silt suspended in mid-stream.

Here, by the banks, the great trout dream

Daylong in sunless sanctuaries

Of root and snag—but when the skies

Grow cool, and the last loaded wain

Creaks home to Trippleton again,

Forth from their haunts they steal and lie

Heading upstream, with greedy eye

Waiting, a bare palm’s depth beneath

The surface, for the drift of death

Or winged life that the current then

Washes within their hungry ken,

And, lifted on a quivering fin,

Suck the delicious morsel in

So gently that the water’s skin

Is barely dimpled; but if their prey

Flutters or dips to flit away,

Then will they leap to snatch it, heaving

Their black backs arched in air, and leaving

On the broken water a ring that spreads

To rock the dabchicks in the reeds,

Or, borne in widening circles, fades

In the shallow tail of the pool, where shades

Of silvery umbers, ghostly-grey,

Sway on the gravelly ledge; for they

Hover not under the water’s face,

But spring upright from their resting-place

To gulp their prey in the toothless gape

Of small, smooth lips—yet the grayling’s shape

Outshines the stippled trout’s in its mail

Of imbricate silver, for his broad tail

And fins are dipped in crimson dyes,

And when, forspent, on the bank he lies

He smelleth sweetly of mountain-thyme

Or cool cucumber. And in the prime

Of the mayfly-hatch, when Teme grows warm

And the limp-winged drakes are whirled like a storm

Of flurried snowflakes to spin and dip

In the brief, hapless fellowship

Of their nuptial flight, and, spent, go sailing

With draggled vanes—then trout and grayling

Forget their wariness and fall

With one accord to the carnival

Of June’s fierce gluttony in the slaughter

Of gauzy myriads, and the water

Boils with the rises of great fish springing

Into the air, and swirling and flinging

Their silver bodies this way and that

In wanton greed—and the tiniest sprat

Of a fingerling may take his fill,

Till the mayfly-storm drifts by, and the still

Surface is turned again to glass,

Unflawed and lifeless as it was—

Mere mirror of the dusk that hears

Naught but the wimpling of the weirs

And murmur of the pebbled shallows.

Then zig-zag bats that swoop like swallows

Dart and flitter on web-winged fingers

Hawking the last mayfly that lingers

Unharmed in that fierce hecatomb

Of watery death. And when night’s gloom

Falls deeper on the starlit dubs,

The otter whistles her frolicsome cubs

To cease their gambolling and tear

The eels she has dragged to the dripping weir

In her pointed teeth. But when day breaks,

A wild, aerial music wakes

The valley, in the curlew’s calling

And cat-like cries of lapwings falling

Like tumbler-pigeons from the sky,

And the clear trilling of the shy

Hovering sandpipers that trip

With delicate feet on an island strip

Of sand, or the dipper’s wren-like notes.

Sometimes through morning mist there floats

The shrilling of vigilant greenshanks,

Where, beneath grass-tussocked banks,

Grey wagtails, with their yellow breast

And gorget of black velvet, nest

In a cleft of clay, and flutter near

With a soft brilliance that hath no peer

In the English air . . . So Teme runs on

From Leintwardine to Burrington,

Stealing with a soberer pace

Past Downton Rocks to Bringewood Chase:

And here she floweth without sound;

For Bringewood Chase is holy ground,

Where Comus and his sisterhood

Of laughing dryads ruled the wood,

And wove about the enchanted vale

Their silvan magic—that was frail

As morning gossamer, yet fraught

With such strange potency, it caught

The mind of Milton in its net;

And leafy Bringewood liveth yet

With Vallombrosa’s leaves, for ever

Sacred in song . . .

              So the hushed river

Hurrieth, as her waters sweep

Under Ludlow’s storied keep,

Where the castle’s crumbling walls look down

Upon the many-chimneyed town,

And the sweet-tempered Ludlow chimes

Waver through wreathing smoke that climbs

From the draughty vale—and still they seem

Rapt in the other-worldly dream

That thralled them in the haunted wood

Of Comus—and this raptured mood

Dwells with those waters as they glide

Through tranquil meadowlands and wide

Stubbles, where seagulls, fluttering low,

Whiten the furrow behind the plough

And hover above the ploughman’s head,

Watching the burnished mould-board spread

Its furrow-slice, and lighting there

To raven their choice inland fare

Of wireworms in the cloven turf

As greedily as they comb the surf

Of their native surge . . . So Abdon Burf

Falleth behind, and Titterstone Glee

Looms on the left—and Teme runs free

Through the spreading vale to Saltmoor Well

And the elms of Ashford Carbonell,

To drown the last of her panic fear

In the deep green of Worcestershire;

Where her marl-reddened currents fret

Cliffs of red sand, and hopyards set

With intricate trellises of twine

In quaint cat’s-cradles, and the bine,

With eager tendrils spiring, weaves

Its clerestory of translucent leaves

Vaulting the alleys with their slight

Radiance of cool green light.

Here the gnarled cider-orchard breaks

Its shell-pink buds; here Autumn shakes

The ripe wind-fallen fruit to lie

Hid in lush grass—and when men pry,

Raking the windfalls into heaps,

A drowsy smell of pomace steeps

The valley. Yet Teme’s chiefest pride

Is her miracle of Eastertide

When the white cherry-blow is whirled

In drifts upon a dazzled world,

And billowy blossom, tossed on high,

Beggars the brightness of the sky

With an innocence beyond belief

On this aged earth—yet fugitive

As the radiance of April’s moon

Whitening the ghostly boughs—and soon

The mirror of Teme hath naught to show

But the lesser light of hawthorn-blow;

And ivory-plumed elder throws

Its image on a stream that flows

Deep-sunken through the tawny clay

Of the cold plain, and ebbs away

Sullenly, with the sluggard pace

Of age—till Severn’s arms embrace

Her tired daughter, and tenderly

Carry her, sleeping, to the sea.

Yet, Sister Ruthe, remember well

How the first blow for freedom fell

Upon the powers of privilege

Where Teme joins Severn at Powick Bridge!

(3)

Avon springs from the mints and cresses

Of a gentle pastureland that lies

Midmost in Mercia’s green recesses

Beneath mild-tempered midland sides;

Little she knows of the fierce birth

Of Severn her mother or sister Teme,

For her waters well from a kindlier earth,

And her youth is quiet as a dream

Unbroken by any stormy splendour

Of moor or mountain, or the loud

Tumult of torrents. Gay and tender,

She moveth idly as a cloud

In Summer, or a careless child

On a spring morning gathering posies

Of wet marsh-marigolds, and wild

Forgetmenots, and faint primroses,

And yellow-varnished celandine,

And rushes pithed as white as milk,

And sallies flossed with smoky silk,

And lilac ladies-smocks, and all

The moisture-loving flowers that twine

In April’s dewy coronal;

For innocent are Avon’s ways,

And meditative is her mien

As through the minty marsh she strays

In a shallow vale that runs between

Low hills of rolling grassland, pied

With gorse and spinneys of oak and ash

Where the horsemen halt at the covert-side

Till twenty dappled couples crash

In a burst of music, and the wail

Of the hunting-horn’s sweet quavers

Wakens the leafless woods, and wavers

Over her water to the pale

Chequer of forty-acre fields

That the quick-set bullfinch shields

With triple thorn . . . So, like a skein

Of scarlet threading the green weft,

The bright hunt straggles over plain

And hillock, and Avon’s vale is left

Empty—as when, on this same field

Of Naseby, Cromwell’s Roundheads broke

Rash Rupert’s cavalry—and they reeled

And scattered on the wold like smoke

And vanished . . .

        But Avon floweth still,

Gathering to her nascent stream

Clear tributary waters: Leam

And Swift; and many a nameless rill

Steals through the rushy watermeads

To filter through her fringing reeds

Unseen. And many a water-mill,

Fed by the borrowed race, returns

The flow the slatted mill-wheel churns

In a bright cataract that re-fills

Her dwindled trickle. And lifted high

On the smooth skyline of the hills,

Sails of gaunt windmills sweep the sky

With cumbrous lattice, languidly

Turning the low-geared pinion wheel

That rolls the gritstone, till the meal

Dusts the miller’s shoulders white

As a mealy cockchafer or bee

That in high summer you may see

With pallid clover-pollen dight . . .

So Avon girdles in her sleep

The gabled roofs of Warwick town

Where the King-maker’s castle-keep

Shadows her face, and floweth down

Into the unmysterious glades

Of Arden’s oaks, no longer haunted

By dappled fallow—yet the shades

Of the sweet meinie that enchanted

This leafy wildwood, in the Spring

Of Shakespeare’s youthful fancy, still

Brood on the twilight lanes and bring

Their magic with them, when the trill

Of May’s last nightingale awakes

Infinite yearnings, and the fall

Of his dwindling cadenza shakes

The heart with hushed delight—and all

Arden lies breathless, listening

For the light step of Rosalind

And Amiens’ song . . . Yet still the spring

Of a nimble squirrel that in the thinned

Woodland leaps from tree to tree

Trailing his feathery brush, is free

To traverse all the ancient girth

Of Arden without touching earth;

Still the glade’s bracken-fronds unfold

Their croziers of mealy gold;

Still Arden’s bluebells fan the verges

With silvan fragrance, and wood-spurges

With triple cups of golden green

Betray the woodland’s old demesne—

And the lost forest lives in these

Its lowlier denizens, that held

Their stations when the mightier trees

Sheltering their humble growth were felled

To keel the fleets that kept the seas

In the days of great Elizabeth,

And carried to Virginian leas

Those words that are the very breath

Of England . . . But Avon knoweth naught

Of any music but her own,

And nothing of the magic wrought

By him who sleeps beneath the stone

Of Stratford’s airy spire, and yet

Makes our imaginations seem

As thoughts that flower in a dream

And wilt on waking, or are flown.

Yet, swan-sweet Avon, can you forget

How one whose meanest word was lit

By passionate perfection, stood

Mirrored in your translucent flood,

Or idly on your banks would sit

Trailing his fingers in the water?

O swan-sweet Avon, Severn’s daughter,

Do you remember how he moved

Through the pied meadows that he loved,

And how he smiled to catch those sweet

Elusive images, as fleet

And fiery as the kingfisher’s

Arrowy azure, in his verse?

And did you hear his rustic tongue

Savour each salty syllable

Shaped on his lips when he was young?

Saw you him ever when he leant,

Undazzled by the glancing looks

That flickered from your stream, intent

Upon the many-storied books

Of Plutarch, or the turgid flow

Of Holinshed’s grim chronicle?

And did you see his dark eyes glow

When fierce imagination fell

To burn upon the prosy page,

Till the wide skies became a stage

And, in the light of that rich birth,

Heroes walked again on earth?

But Avon answers naught, for she

Was passing-old when he was young,

And still may flow when all he sung

Shall live but in man’s memory

As a crabbed text in a dead tongue.

So Arden’s wasted woodlands sink

Behind; and white on Avon’s brink

The widening Vale of Evesham throws

Its benison of blossomed boughs.

So dazzling-bright the orchards lie,

It seems as though the April sky

Had fallen upon earth and strewn

Its cloudy billows there—and when

Night falls on Bredon, and the moon

Silvers the prodigal blossom, then

The orchards of the vale seem lost

In a soundless sea of mist that laps

The bases of the hills and wraps

Their sleeping knees—where like a ghost

The dome of Bredon glimmers pale,

Islanded in the misty Vale . . .

But when lascivious winds of May

Have ravished the light petal-cloud

And fruit swells on the leafy spray,

Then are the plum-trees’ branches bowed

With tasselled clusters of cool green

That August’s bounty, warms to gold

Or deepening orange—and some are seen

Drooping with purple and tawny-red,

So closely set no branch can hold

Its juicy burden, but will shed

Ripe fruit at the first finger-touch;

And the bruised flesh, fallen, spills

Its heavy-sugared juice and fills

The Vale with vinous fragrance. Such

Are the Summer languors Avon loves:

For when the weedy lock-gates close,

Her listless current barely moves

Under the drooping willow-boughs

Where the deep-bellied, sullen chub,

Gaping through the scum and froth

That eddies in a sunless dub,

Sucks in the velvet of a moth

Faint-fluttering with sodden wings

In hapless circles—or hungrily

Heaving his slimy body, springs

To gulp it in mid-air, and sends

A ripple to the beds of reed

Where pike with olive-mottled flanks

Bask on the mud of shelving banks,

So drowsily, they will not heed

The shadowy roach that swim in shoals,

Or spectral perch with tiger-stripes

Lurking in their deep water-holes;

But when October’s rigour tips

The elms with pallid leprosy,

And the first gales of Autumn shiver

The rustling reedbeds, then the river

Wakes from her lethargy: and you see

Slow Avon crisped with waves and rippled

With wind—and clouds of babbling stares

Wheel from their granaries in the stippled

Stubbles to roost in reedy cover.

And now the dome of Bredon wears

Its richest liveries—for over

Her falling flanks the tall elms stand

Robed in bright gold; and over all

The orchards spreads the yellow pall

Of Autumn; and the meadowland

Of Avon seems to hold its breath

In the mute majesty of death:

Till ice, with brittle crystal, edges

The shallows, and the frozen sedges

Grow stiff with rime. So Avon sweeps

Unsmiling through more sullen deeps

In a null nescience flowing down

By Nafford Mill and Eckington

To the wide, flood-whitened fields that lie

Beneath the tower of Tewkesbury:

A weary river that hath run

Her course—sunk in oblivion

So death-like that she hardly hears

The hollow thunder of the weirs

That draw her listless to her rest

In mother Severn’s ancient breast.

Yet, Sister Ruthe, remember too

That day when freedom flamed anew

To perish in the darkened hour

When Montfort fell by Evesham Tower.

The Scene is the Infirmary in the Monastery of Our Lady of Worcester, a capacious chamber, with a high-roof of rough-hewn timber, dimly lit by slender lancets. In its darkest corner, on a narrow pallet-bed, lies the mummy-like form of Brother John de Mathon, an old man clothed in the habit of a Benedictine monk. He is so ancient, indeed, as to seem hardly human. The wrinkled scalp that defines the shape of his skull is the colour of dirty leather; his orbits are so cavernous that the blind eyes are invisible, lost in their depths; and the only parts of his anatomy that betray any sign of life are his hands, disproportionately large compared with the stick-like wrists, whose taloned fingers pluck with a restless automatism at the grimy coverlet which has been thrown over him. By his side, on the stone-flagged floor, a florid young man, robed in a similar habit, sits cross-legged, with a parchment on his knees, a pen in his hand, and an ink-horn within easy reach. He looks alternately bored and faintly amused as he bends over the malodorous pallet to catch the words that issue from Brother John’s toothless mouth. Occasionally he scratches a perfunctory note on the parchment; but for the most part he is content (or constrained) to listen to a rambling tale that has little of interest for him, as the old man speaks in a thin, toneless voice:

Art thou still there, my son, and canst thou hear me?

It were well to press my hand lightly now and again,

For thus I may know that my scanty breath is not wasted,

And, should I fall asleep, thy touch will awaken me

And pluck my mind from dreaming. What did I say?

The days of our years are three score years and ten:

And if, by reason of strength, they be fourscore years,

Then is their strength but sorrow.

                               I was born

In the first year of Richard Lion-Heart,

When the Welsh kings rode to Worcester to make peace

With John Sansterre his brother; and of my boyhood

I have naught to tell—albeit therein my memory

Burns with the brightness of a lamp new-lit,

Discovering trivial things as doth the shaft

Of a mote-laden sunbeam. Little I recked

Of the realm’s turmoil, or the march and counter-march

Of turbulent barons; for mine own earth was bounded

By the enfolding hills, and was no larger

Than the sweet-smelling cowslip-balls we made

In the meadows of Malvern Chase.

                      I was but eighteen

When I trudged my way to Worcester, and first donned

The habit of our order, that I have worn

For well-nigh seventy years; and Prior Simon,

Marking my true, sweet voice, gave me more favour

Than a raw lad merited; and when I had learnt

My notes and conned the canticles, chose me to lead

The singing on high festivals. Many came

To hear me sing, and I, being callow, was puffed

With the glory I owed to God, who had endowed me

With this pretty talent. Ay, and I well remember

(But for Christ’s sake set not this down!) how one bold wench,

Who was wife to a brewer in Silver Street, by the Shambles,

Heard Mass whensoever I sang; and as the procession

Trailed by where she knelt on the stones, and I passed so near

(For so had she placed herself) that I all but brushed

Her hair, which was mouselike in hue and sweetly-scented

As musk or clover in Summer—then did she peek at me

Through her crossed fingers, smiling, and blinked one eye!

At which I—as any might guess—blushed red to the crown

Of my tonsure, but, none the less, when those high notes came

In which I excelled, and I saw she still gazed my way,

Her face calm and pale in the distance, then did I carol

(God pardon me!) like any cock-chaffinch, perched

On an apple-tree’s topmost bough, that fluffs his breast

To bursting with the might of his brazen challenge!

Yet, albeit I was a young fellow then and well-favoured,

I think there was more lust of pride than of concupiscence

In my error; and though, indeed, I made no confession

Till fifty years later, one day when I thought I was dying,

Yet doth the memory of her glance and the musky spice

Of her hair abide—though she, fond soul, is dust,

And I am a man no longer. Beyond doubt,

There is little true sanctity untried by temptation,

As Augustine knew to his cost. My sin was Pride;

And Time hath humbled me—as thou shouldst perceive,

Hearing the thin, cracked pipe of one who has ravished

The ears of kings . . .

                  Kings, do I say? There were two

For whom I sang. The first was John the Landless;

And never, some say, was king more unkingly than he

In his treacheries; though I, being cloister-reared

And unworldly, saw not this blackness of heart, but was dazzled

By the mere shine of kingship, glorying in the flattery

Of a prince who favoured our house, and often abode here

With his lackey, Walter the Bishop (the same who stood

By his side at Runnymede) for the high festivals

Of our church, and ever delighted in the sweet music

We made—but even more in our Severn salmon

And lamperns and royal sturgeon washed down with the wines

Of Gascony and Touraine, when he made of Lent

A season of prodigal banquets. John was a man

Of ruddy and open countenance, well-fattened, and easy

Of laughter for them that pleased him; yet, were he crossed

In the meanest trifle, then would his Angevin blood

Blacken his face with wrath till the veins in his temples

Were swollen to bursting, and his small body was shaken

With such a tempest that he would writhe on the ground,

Rolling his eyes, and catch up sticks and straws

To chew them like a madman. Such, I have heard,

Were his ravings at Runnymede, when the magnates bound him

By dooms he had no intent to suffer; though we, being swayed

By his kingly graces and the words of our Bishop,

Walter de Gray, held this poor king ill-used,

And deemed the Barons’ charter less an instrument

Of liberty for the common folk than a change

From the rule of one man, who had loved us well, to the power

Of a many who loved but themselves. For, mark you, my son,

There was naught in their vaunted charter that had not been granted

Long since by King Henry the First, and more concern

For their own rights than for those of Holy Church,

As Pope Innocent surely knew when he laid his ban

On those barons and their shrewd counsellor, Stephen Langton,

Making the king’s cause ours. So we of Worcester

Stood by our lawful liege, and reckoned his enemies

Accursed—the more so when Geoffrey de Mandeville

Called on King Philip of France to send his Dauphin

To conquer England and filch John’s kingship from him:

For, know you this: when I was a lad we still called

One man a Norman and another English;

But now those Normans who had dispossessed

Our Saxon forbears boasted their Englishness,

And hated the foreigner fiercely as they themselves

Had once been hated; and when the Frenchman set foot

On the shore of Essex and marched his knights toward London,

Then was all England one, save for those few

Who, by duress, had bound the king at Runnymede

And sworn to oust him . . .

                 It was then that the cruelty

Of the king’s heart first showed itself, as he fell

On the rebels of the North. Never have I known

Such a passionate fury as burned in his body and drove him

This way and that through the length of England, snapping

Like a mad cur at all that crossed his path,

Whether they were friend or foe, and never sleeping

Two nights in the same bed. Yet those who condemn him

Remember not that the king was hard beset

As a hunted wolf; and if his fangs were reddened

With innocent blood, his hunters’ hands were no cleaner;

Nor that the Holy Father himself had frowned

On their lawlessness. It was intemperate haste

That drove him to his doom; for, as he strained

Northward to harry Lincoln, with less wisdom

Than King Canute tempting the mighty malice

Of the untameable tides, his baggage-train

Sank in the quicksands of the Wash, and was lost;

And the king himself, struggling so far as Swineshead

To dry the draggled remnant, there fell sick

Of a mortal flux. There is a story told

How that he died of a surfeit of peaches swilled

With fresh-made cider—and I, of my own eyes,

Know him a glutton, having seen him bloated

With meat at the Bishop’s board; yet that which slew him

Was but the flame of hatred, that burnt out

Like a fierce bonfire, consuming his tortured body

As they bore him to Lincoln, ever panting and groaning,

On a litter of horsecloth stiffened with woven withies

From the fen; and there, on the third day after, he died,

Duly shriven (as should be told) by the Abbot of Croxton,

And when they asked him where he would lie, he bethought him

Of our church of St. Mary at Worcester, saying: “I commend

My body and soul to God, and to Saint Wulstan.”

So here we buried him, even as Merlin foretold,

With the bones of Wulstan on one hand, and on the other

The relics of Oswald; that, when the trumpet sounds

And the graves give up their dead, he might take his place

In the bright company of Heaven—though some

Still call him Nature’s enemy, and maintain

That not even their saintly sponsorship shall save

His perjured soul. Yet never will I believe

That any burn in hell who have died in grace

As he did. And, whatsoever havoc he wrought

In his evil life, his death brought England peace,

As is graven on his tomb: Hoc in sarcophago

Sepelitur regis imago, qui moriens multum

Sedavit in orbe tumultum—which is lame Latin

And middling rhyme, but, in the essence, true.

So may God rest his spirit, I say, who gave

His realm rest by his dying . . .

                The second king

Before whom I sang (and never sang I more sweetly

Than on that day) was Henry, his son; a child

But nine years old, whom a splendid company

Of barons, earls, bishops and mitred abbots

Carried to Worcester for the dedication

Of the new cathedral church. And of this I will tell thee

A tale—though whether or no thou shouldst set it down

I am doubtful, seeing that it brings little credit

To our new bishop Silvester, once our prior.

Yet the story hath this moral: that impatience

May sink to sacrilege . . .

            Know you, then, we had fashioned

A new shrine for Saint Wulstan, since the old

Had been stripped of all its richness to provide

The fine we were mulcted for our forced submission

To the French Dauphin. Never was a saint’s shrine

More gloriously wrought. But when we came

To set Saint Wulstan’s body therein, we found

The mason had mismeasured, the saint’s stature

Being greater than ordinary. Then Bishop Silvester,

Vexed by our hesitations, and determined

To have done with the business, stripped off his robes

And with his own ringed fingers hacked and hauled

Saint Wulstan’s body asunder, cramming his bones

Into the coffin, ay, and even boasted

Of his own ruthlessness, calling the sacred relics

Naught but dry bones. That was the sixth of June,

As I remember well, and six weeks later

All but two days, he died; and afterward,

On the festival of Saint Andrew, a whirling wind

Cast down two towers on either side the apse

Of the minster. From which signs let no man doubt

But that saints in deathless glory still are swayed

By mortal spites and passions . . .

                  Once again

My ill-shepherded thoughts have erred; it would be pleasant

To let them stray thus browsing on the sweeter

Pastures of memory; and much could I tell

Of Silvester’s successor, William de Blois,

Whom Gualo, the Pope’s legate, thrust upon us;

For this man was a rare builder, and up-raised

The soaring arches of a new sanctuary

Above Our Lady’s altar; and, being warned

Doubtless by poor Silvester’s doom, disposed

The buried bones his masons marred in a pit

Beneath the new-built charnery, where mine

Shall rest when God so wills it. But of him

I will speak no more; for now my chronicle

Takes sterner shape, being shadowed by the presences

Of three huge men, who rise above the press

Of pettier persons as the craggy peaks

Of Ararat towered over the drowned wastes

Of Noah’s deluge: first, Walter de Cantelupe,

My lord of Worcester; next Robert Grosseteste,

Bishop of Lincoln; last, and greater than either,

Earl Simon, called de Montfort, the noblest man

England has ever known—which is the stranger

In that this knightly paragon was born

In Normandy, and lived the greater part

Of his stormy days in Gascony. See, already

I have overshot my mark! Hear then, my son,

How that fair child whose kingly presence honoured

Our dedication, grew to belie the promise

Of innocent boyhood. Hapless is the realm,

Men say, in which a child is king: and never

Was saying more grimly proved than in the fruit

Of this enhavocked reign; for, from the day

When he was chrismed, his sapling strength was twisted

By the ambitions of ruthless men who schemed

But for themselves; and by their flatteries

Nourished a weak-willed tyrant, as unstable

As a wind-tossed aspen flurried this way and that

By every changeful gust—whereby our country

Became once more the prey of foreigners

Who battened on her bones. It was an evil day—

Though little we guessed—when John, his father, drowning

In surges of rebellion, clutched at the rock

Of Rome, and made the honour of England part

Of Peter’s patrimony. For now the claws

Of the Roman dragon gripped our Church’s throat,

And, throttling, squeezed forth the last gouts of blood

From her blanched carcase—not only in exactions

Of treasure to feed sinews of temporal might

In lands we knew not (first a tenth part of all

We had, then, appetite growing with gluttony,

One fifth) but also in the greedy gullocking

Of vacant benefices, from bishoprics

To simple chaplaincies that we had reckoned

Our natural right, till every cure was filled

With predatory aliens and pluralists

Who never set foot on English earth and spoke not

One word of English. And King Henry’s court

Was little better, being crammed with sycophants

Of Anjou and Poitiers—the hungry crew

That, in the time of the Confessor, tempted

The Conqueror to Hastings. And when the King

Wedded the Princess Eleanor, to these

Was added a locust-swarm of Provençals

Who stripped all that was left, and soon, inflaming

The king’s mind with vain schemes of foreign conquest

That fell to nothing, pitted his light wits

Against more practised players, till his crown

Seemed but a pawn upon the chequer-board

Of shrewd dynastic gamesters, and Church and Laity,

Being thrust at length into each other’s arms,

Were joined as never before. Then was a murmur

Of protest, loud though late, wrung from the lips

Of England. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln,

Was our first champion, an old man steeped

In ancient wisdoms; and our own Bishop, Walter,

His friend and my loved master, stood beside him

With Simon, Earl of Leicester, when they brought

The King to Oxford—even as his father before him

Was haled to Runnymede. I, as Walter’s chaplain,

Rode with him over Cotswold. There was the weakness

Of the King made plain; for when he saw the powers

Of Church and Baronage in arms, he cried:

“Am I your prisoner?” Whereon Roger Bigod

(For so I heard him) answered: “Nay, my Lord King;

For all we ask is that your Poitevins

And the alien placemen who have dispossessed

Both folk and faith of freedom, shall be banished

For the realm’s honour and welfare. And we demand

That you and your son the Prince shall solemnly swear

To lay no burdens on us but with the leave

Of counsellors we shall choose.” Then did King Henry,

Powerless to do aught else, submit himself,

Swearing as he was bidden; and by that Parliament

Of Oxford, clerk and layman, rich and poor,

Obtained protection, under the firm hand

Of Simon and his fellows. It was as if

We had waked from nightmare dreams into the peace

Of a clear dawn—though they that watched more shrewdly

Saw the sky streaked with presage of the tempest

That followed after . . .

             I have little to tell

Of the wars that wracked us then; for my own knowledge

Is naught but hearsay, save that the King forswore

That oath, in his father’s fashion, soaking the land

With innocent blood, and that the jealous Pope

Released him of his promise to maintain

The charter sealed at Oxford. It is a tale

Of manifold treacheries. But the last page

Of this chronicle was writ beneath my own eyes

Downcast with shame and dim with tears. For, know you,

After the battle at Lewes, when Earl Simon

Had caged the elder hawk and thrid his leash

Through the young falcon’s jesses, then that envy

Which has been freedom’s bane in all her story

Gnawed at Earl Simon’s powers. There is enchantment

In the very air kings breathe, as if the height

Of their station turned men dizzy, and the smiles

Of captive royalty were more dazzling

Than the light of reason—so that those who fret

At their peers’ dominion are fain to grovel

Before a faithless throne. Thus, one by one,

Earl Simon’s friends forsook him: Gloucester and Norfolk

And Bohun and Mortimer and Roger Bigod

Who had been freedom’s spokesman—all forsook him;

And though Earl Simon held the King, Prince Edward,

Laughing at his fond leniency, slipped

His leash and fled to Wigmore, gathering

The Mortimers to his side. So, when Earl Simon

Turned toward faithful London, then he found

All Severn held from Shrewsbury to the sea,

With every bridge down-broken, and every boat

Scuttled or beached on the far bank, and half

The force he counted on, under young Simon,

Divided from him. Thus was he caged no less

Than his kingly captive; and in the extremity

Of need, called on Llewelyn of Wales for aid,

Erring therein—since no true Englishman

Who had seen our Marches harried by the Welsh

Could stomach such alliance.

                Nine wasteful days

Earl Simon lay at Hereford, waiting for news,

That came not, of his son. But young Prince Edward,

Being swifter and more forthright in strategy

And warned by a certain woman, who, with the guile

Of Rahab, lurked in Kenilworth, broke from Worcester,

Fell on young Simon unawares and worsted him

Ere he could join his father. But of this

The Earl knew naught; and, on the second day

Of August, marching from Hereford, crossed Severn

At Kempsey, where my master, Bishop Cantelupe,

Lodged him within our manor. There I saw him,

And marked how cares had aged him, though his mien

Was calm and noble as ever, and his eye

Bright as a boy’s beneath his grizzled brow.

There as we sate that evening, I heard him speak

With my lord, Bishop Walter, of how he planned

To mould a better England, when the legionary

Factions that rent her had been exorcised,

Saying: “There is none other land nor folk

Worthier of peace than ours, nor yet more temperate

In the uses of their freedom, be they but left

To its unvexed enjoyment. Such a firm peace,

Under such guidance, it is my intent,

By God’s good grace, to give them.” Then he spoke

Of his counsel for the morrow: how he would march

By Avonside to Evesham, where his friend,

Henry the Abbot, would house him till he could join

Young Simon at Kenilworth, and they together

Circle the Prince with greater force and scatter

The embers of rebellion. Then Bishop Walter

Bade me march with Earl Simon, being himself

Too feeble for such adventure—though I, in truth,

Was older than he.

         That night we tramped fifteen miles,

And came footsore to Evesham as the dawn

Broke over Cotswold; and I, beside the king

(Who told me he remembered how once I had sung

Before him, but I, though flattered, disbelieved him)

Heard the monks’ Mass, and broke my fast. But Simon

Would neither eat nor pray with us, but climbed

To the tower’s top to meditate alone,

Brooding upon the kingdoms of this earth

As Christ in his temptation; and fairer kingdom

No mortal eye could see than that ripened vale

Caught in the loops of Avon. It was noon

Ere he rejoined us; and even as his foot

Touched earth, there came a message: that the woods

To northward were alive with marching men

And bright with banners. One whose sight was keener

Than ours, his barber, Nicholas, clomb the tower

To see those banners blazoned with the bearings

Of Simon the Younger—and then he cried again

That this was true, but that the men who bore them

Were none of ours, but our sworn enemies.

And now, as they drew nearer, we could see

That those who led them wore the blood-red cross

The barons of the King had borne at Lewes,

And that the advancing host outnumbered ours

By three to one. Then would a feebler heart

Have quailed, but Simon’s quailed not; for he smiled,

Saying: “By the arm of Saint James, they come on bravely,

But it was I who taught them this order! Let us commend

Our souls to God, for surely our bodies are theirs.”

Then the monks thronged about us, urging Simon

To flee while there was time; and he himself

Begged his son, Henry, and Hugh Despenser, to ride

Over the bridge behind us; but already

The horsemen of Mortimer had swum the river

And barred their crossing. And when they told him this:

“Come then,” he said, “and let us die like men,

For if we have fasted here we shall breakfast in Heaven!”

Then called he me by name, and did enjoin me

Not to adventure my brittle bones in battle

But to seek sanctuary. And I, in sorrow,

Turned from him, slowly climbing to the parapet

Of the great bell-tower; and from that vantage-point

Saw, though I was no soldier, the hopelessness

Of our case; for we were snared in the deep loops

Of the river, that embraced us on every side

Save one, where the road to Worcester ran between

The scarps of Crawcombe and the impassable ditch

Of Avon—one narrow sleeve of watermeadow.

And, as I stood there gazing, the sky darkened

To raven blackness, and a baleful blight

Settled upon the scene, as on that day

When Christ was crucified, and the temple veil

Was rent asunder. So, of that awful slaughter

(For battle none may call it) I saw little

But a tumult of living waves, tossed back and forth

From the bases of the hills to that bloody river

Choked with the carrion of the fugitive Welsh

Drowned in their thousands, whom William de Beauchamp’s men

From his castle of Elmley clubbed with pikes and staves,

So that those few who floundered to the bank

Were drowned no less. But of the tempest’s heart

Where Simon, like a strong tower, rose above

The cowering king, with his two-handed sword

Sweeping a deadly circle, I saw naught,

And only heard thereafter how he had fallen

Crying ‘Dieu merci’, while the royal craven

Uncovered by his falling, whined and whimpered:

‘I am Henry of Windsor, your king—for God’s sake strike not:

I am too old to fight’—though, in very truth

He was younger than Earl Simon. And at the hour

When Montfort fell, the western sky grew dark,

So that we could not see to chant out vespers

In the abbey quire—as though the sun itself

Disdained to show so foul a deed; but fouler

Was yet to come, when the Prince’s butchers dragged

His naked corpse to Evesham, and Maltravers—

Cursed be his memory!—lopped off limbs and head.

And with a grosser obscenity mutilated

Those venerable loins, making a laughing-stock

Of the grisly members, as do the Saracens

Who know no better; but this man was called Christian.

And the young prince, now King, sent that grey head

To Mortimer’s wolfish mother Maud, at Wigmore,

As a warning to the Welsh. Such was the end

Of Montfort, the strong mountain of our freedoms

And fortress of our hopes . . .

                  So, sorrowfully,

I tottered home to Worcester, broken in spirit

And stricken in years, to end my dwindling days

In the service of God and Our Lady, and humble prayers

For the rest of that great soul; for never again

Did I leave this cloister, and never more will leave it

Till they carry my light bones to the charnery,

And I pray that it be soon—for, even in the telling,

This tale hath mortally wearied me. Give me a sip

Of water, my son, and leave my side . . . For now

I fain would sleep.

We were the fools that trudged away

From ridge and furrow of chalk and clay,

From scythe and mattock and plough and cart

To follow King Richard Lionheart:

The plodding, patient English foot

That got no wage but drink and loot

And the glory promised to them that fell

Fighting against the infidel.

We knew hunger and we knew sweat

And the scorpion desert’s blinding heat;

But never once did we know dread—

We were too slow-witted, the Frenchmen said.

And never did our uncurious eyes

Widen with wonder or surprise;

For whatever they saw in foreign parts

We still had England in our hearts.

We bawled our snatch and cracked our joke

In the reek of Etna’s brimstone smoke,

And coughed in clouds of sand that hid

The feet of sphinx and pyramid;

Yet ever mid alien sand and stone

Nursed a green vision of our own,

And through the hot mirage of Nile

Saw the cool watermeadow smile.

We groused and bickered and swore and wenched

And roared our bawdy songs, and drenched

Our fiery throats with Cyprus wine

And the sun-warmed fruits of Palestine;

Yet each would willingly have given

His days on earth and hopes of heaven

To plunge his cracked mouth in a pail

Of Worcester perry or Stratford ale,

And thrown their peach and fig to rot

With the sun-freckled apricot

If but his teeth might crunch the fresh

Cool crispness of a pippin’s flesh;

And each would gladly have cast aside

The dusky, amorous, almond-eyed

Women of Asia, once to quench

His want in the arms of an English wench!

But they shipped us North and matched our skin

With the Damascene blades of Saladin;

So we sacked Acre and trudged on

Through sleet and snow to Ascalon,

And hunted the Saracen like a fox

From cover to cover in Hebron’s rocks

Till we’d shut the heathen seed of Shem

In the blood-red walls of Jerusalem;

Where we held them girdled with steel and fire

And took an oath we would not tire

Till we set the Cross we had sworn to bear

On the brink of the Holy Sepulchre.

But while we laid that siege, the sun

Clomb to the Lion’s flaming zone,

And the parched soil was cracked and cleft

Till not a blade of green was left;

And the meat we butchered, blown with flies,

Grew quick with maggots beneath our eyes;

And the drinking-pools where our water stood

Curdled and stank and turned to mud;

And the air we gaped was like the breath

Of a jackal’s throat that smells of death;

For a secret murrain that had no cure

Rotted the flesh of great and poor;

And many with madness in their eyes

Stared gibbering at the white-hot skies

Where foul birds, circling overhead,

Shadowed the living and the dead,

So high they seemed no bigger than flies—

But or ever men reached their agonies

The air was thrashed by the flutterings

Of a hundred hungry noisome wings.

And the secret murrain that none could stay

Wasted and wore our strength away,

Till the Lion Heart, that had beat so bold,

Suddenly faltered and then grew cold;

And he sailed and left us to pine away

Within sight of sad Gethsemane:

Not even Christ in those darkest hours

Knew passion more desolate than ours!

While they that had lured us forth rode home

Shriven and blessed by all Christendom,

To boast of the sacrifice they made

When they bore the Cross in Christ’s crusade;

And their bones lie snug in the hallowed earth

Of the villages that gave us birth,

Covered by carven effigies

With their mailed legs crossed beneath the knees;

While ours, that earned no meaner fame,

Are lost in graves without a name,

Or bleached on the unhallowed sand

Of a waste miscalled the Holy Land:

The plodding, patient English folk

That never wavered and never broke,

And knew not why they fought and fell

In the deserts of the Infidel;

That had no crown but a crown of thorn

And perished unshriven and forlorn,

And gained no glory and won no wage

But the toil of a fruitless pilgrimage.

The Scene—though one would hardly recognise it after the intervening centuries—is the slope of Bredon Hill, a few hundred feet below the ramparts of the Iron Age Herdsmen’s camp, and not far from the site of the garrulous Centurion’s villa. All traces of this have long since disappeared beneath thorns and brambles, which, undisturbed by superstitious hands, have formed an impenetrable thicket. The plain, too, has changed. It is noticeably less densely wooded; and where the forest of scrub-oak once stretched unbroken, a number of clearings can now be seen, each occupied by a village in which humble buildings of daub and wattle are clustered about a church and tower and manor, and surrounded by the cultivated land of the ‘common field,’ divided into elongated strips by linchet-ridges. Although there are no hedgerows and few elms, the landscape has lost much of its ancient wildness, and a great part of it is now deforested. On the northern horizon the choir and nave of the Abbey of Pershore rise above the roofs of the little town which has grown about it, and a tall tower, as yet uncompleted, shows that this foundation has not yet reached the full pitch of its pride. At the point where the Centurion and his visitor halted for a while to observe the view, there now stands the dwelling of Hob the Shepherd, a free labourer on the roll of the Abbot of Pershore. His home is little more than a hut consisting of a framework of rough-hewn timber filled in with mud, with a single door and two unglazed windows. There is no chimney: the smoke of the fire which serves for heating and cooking escapes as best it can from a hole in the thatch. The room’s only furniture is a trestle-bed, a long narrow table made of one plank of oak, and two settles of the same wood. It is a mild May evening, the still air is drenched with the heavy odour of hawthorn-blossom whose whiteness powders the flank of Bredon like a snowstorm, and the birds are in full song. A lazy smoke rises through the hole in the thatch from the fire on which Hob’s supper is seething, and mingles a faint reek of woodsmoke with the breath of the may. The owner of the house sits on a wooden settle before his door and idly contemplates the wide landscape which stretches beyond Severn to the serrated ridge of the Malverns. Hob is a lanky old man, with a mop of white hair, an unkempt beard, and craggy features, of a certain rugged nobility. He is dressed in a coarse woollen tunic, and his long legs are strapped with thongs of leather. The blue eyes which brood on the distance become suddenly aware of a solitary figure toiling up the slope of the hill towards him. It is that of a spare man, as lanky as himself, tonsured, and clothed in a torn cassock which is tucked about his loins with a girdle of rope. Over his shoulder he carries a long staff, with a bundle slung from it; but in spite of his shambling gait, he is evidently a man of unusual strength; for he makes nothing of the steep pitch and climbs it without slackening his pace. As he draws near, his ill-shaven face lights up, and he waves his free hand to Hob. It is a grim, sad face, but marked by a curious innocence and simplicity and an air of refinement hardly in keeping with his personal uncouthness. Hob returns his salute and rises to meet him.

Good evening to you, friend. Can you spare a traveller

Shelter from storm and harbourage for the night?

Black clouds are massed on Malvern, and the tempest

Will soon be on us.

I have no great liking for strangers. From your habit

I see you are clerkly. You should rather have rapped

At the rich Abbey of Pershore than thrust your company

On poor folk who know you not.

                              When I was a lad

Hearts were warmer in Worcestershire. Am I so aged

That you know me not, Hob of the Hill?

                        My sight is dimmed,

And my heart grown cold with sorrows. You have my name,

But your face is strange to me.

                    Cast your thought backward

To an evening such as this thirty years ago

And one who halted here on his road from Malvern

To his father’s at Wychwood on Cotswold. Do you not mind

A lanky lad whom people called Long Will?

What? Bist thee William Langland? That is a name

Known to the ears of many; but little I thought

To see you again in these parts, though I should have known you

By your lambering gait and your gown. Ay, your face is not changed;

But I reckoned you had turned Londoner for good and all

And forsook old friends in Worcestershire. Come, sit you down;

Ease those long shanks and tell me how you have fared;

And then we will share a snack of boiled bacon and drink

A pint of perry together. That’s the best I can offer;

But you’re welcome to all I have. What brings you here

In these changeful times?

                    Alas, I am trudging back

To my prison-house in London, the land of strangers,

With empty belly and purse. But why I am here

Is a different matter. When April came, and I saw

The sally-buds puffed with silk in the water meadows

By Fleet and Tyburn, the sap began to stir

In my limbs and irked my feet, that are corned by the cobbles

Of stone-paved streets, to tread on green grass again;

And my head was ravished in sleep by taunting visions

Of Temeside cherry-blow, and white clouds sailing

Over dappled Malvern, and primrose-banks

And nodding daffodils and the smell of the may,

Till I could abide it no longer; and so, one morning

When Spring blew through the city, I stuffed my pack

And kissed my dear wife Kitty and little Calotte,

And strode out over Chiltern, blithe as a bee

Winging to clover verges. And when I had trudged

Four days on end, with a gay and humble heart

And my muddled brain washed crystal by clean air

And sweet verse chiming in time to my step, and I saw

From Cotswold’s brow those hills I loved as a boy,

Then fell I down on my knees and gave Heaven thanks

That God still bides in Worcestershire. Yet this paradise

Dures but the breath of Spring; and when the daffodil

Hung his gold head, and the cherry-blow was dashed

And hawthorn rusted on Malvern—then I knew

That this miracle was over, with one more Spring

Notched on my dwindling tally, and turned my face

Like Adam, from the angel-guarded gates,

Home to my dusty livelihood.

                    What make you there, Will?

My bare living, by murmuring of Placebos

And Domine diriges and the Seven Psalms

For the good of my lean purse and better men’s souls.

Sometimes I toil at copying of crabbed texts

In Paul’s Walk for fat lawyers, that like leeches

Suck blood from quarrelsome fools; but oftenest

I stray the idle streets, telling the rosary

Of beaded words that I have strung together,

Year after year and bead on bead, to fashion

My vision of Piers Plowman—which is but the vision

Of poor Long Will. Often folk gape to see me

Go muttering on my way, and in the stews

Of Tyburn raddled Flanders bawds will set

Their curs to snap my ankles, and rock to see

My draggled hems in tatters. Often I lean

By tavern-doors to catch the blasphemies

Of sots and gluttons. Often my cheek is spattered

With mud thrown from the horses’ hooves of lords

Riding to Westminster. Often I mingle

With chaffering crowds on Garlic-hythe, and routs

Of holiday prentices making cudgel-play

Or roaring to the cock-fight—yet all these folk,

Gentle or simple, fair or foul, are meat

For my imaginings, and find their place

In the stringing of my rosary, though many

Defy my cunning. Sometimes, when I have lain

Starven with cold in my garret of Cornhill,

A brave line sparks the night with lettering

Of fire, and I must rouse my wife and light

A rush to set it down by—but, like as not,

By dawn the gleam has faded, and the faggots

That flared so bright have fallen to grey tinder.

Yet still my rosary lengthens, and by long fingering

I think the beads grow smooth. ’Tis a strange life

We poets live; for half the things we dream

Slip back into the darkness whence they flickered

Like marsh-lights from the swamp of sleep to lure

Our minds in muddy flounderings. I had been happier

If I had not been learned, and had kept sheep

On Bredon Hill like you, Hob. I have grown old,

And wearier than my years warrant: a gnarled thorn,

Niggard of blossom now . . .

                      Yet your Spring’s burgeons

Bloomed not in vain. Piers’ coulter has driven deep,

And the wordy seed you scattered, borne on the breath

Of common men and blown from mouth to mouth,

Hath fallen in fertile furrows, and sprouted valiant

As winter wheat in a mild season. Rightly

You dub yourself a thorn: your spines have pricked

A mort of bloated bubbles, and made folk laugh

Who had little stomach for laughter—or much else

In these unhappy days.

                  Enough, enough

Of Piers and him who made him! Tell me, friend,

How you have fared these many years, and your wife

And your three lads? You see my memory

Is not so flimsy, though by now I reckon

They have children of their own.

                  All gone, all gone . . .

A careworn man am I, who pines alone

Like an old stag in the thickets. It was the Death,

The Black Death, that widowed and bereft me

Of wife and child.

            That was the deadliest frost

That ever nipped green England. Well do I know it;

For I was lodged in Cornhill when the Pestilence

First broke on London—where the dead lay drifted

Like Autumn leaves in Wychwood, and Winter’s snow

Fell on them yet unburied: street and alley,

Charnel and graveyard, clogged with Christian carrion,

Till Bishop Ralph, out of Paul’s patrimony,

Bought No Man’s Land in Spittle Croft, and dug

Plague-pits to hold the nameless. Fifty thousand

Had perished by Pentecost. Yet I moved among

The mounds of dead unscathed,—having made strict vows

To Blessed Saint Petronel—ay, and carried many

On my bent back to heave them in the pits,

With my mouth and nostrils muffled in singed rags

To stem the stench of death. In those dread months

I saw strange sights, and listened to stranger words;

For, mark you, Bishop Ralph, seeing how multitudes

Went straight to hell unshriven, gave power to clerks

Of lesser orders to hear the last confessions

Of folk in dread of death—and I, who hearkened,

Reeled back in horror from the brimstone pits

Of black iniquity that yawned in souls

Of innocent-seeming men. Yet ever my mind,

Being given to tale-making, strained at the shackles

Of secrecy; and, but that my lips were locked,

I could have writ such tales as young Dan Chaucer,

With his new-fangled measures, never dreamed of;

Such loves, hates, lusts, torments and vanities

As would have made all Christendom hang on my lips

And plead for more.

                  There is another story

I might have made had I been younger, telling

Of how the Death began: how, in mid-Asia,

The hordes of Tartary besieged a city

Called Caffa, and, as they lay encamped about it,

Sudden the Pestilence smote them—how, in revenge

For what they deemed a hostile magic, they loaded

Their catapults with corpses, and hurled their dead

Into the leagured town; how certain merchants

Of Genoa, fleeing from that terror, carried

The seeds to Italy, and how thence it crept

By Avenon, through Gascony, to Bordeaux,

And so by ship to Melcombe in the shire

Of Dorset. That would have made a tale to freeze

The blood of generations, and stamped my fame

So deep, King Richard might have granted me

The boons he gave Dan Chaucer and his Philippa:

A pitcher of wine a day, ten pounds of pension,

And the Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London!

But that will never be. You see how fond

Ambition’s dreams have made me: the very pestilence

Brings grist to my mind’s millstones . . .

                               Forgive me, friend

I had not guessed the Death had dealt so foully

With you in Worcestershire.

                          Raise but your eyes

And scan the fields; the half our fathers won

By the patient plough has fallen back to grass,

A waste of riotous weeds: pass through our villages

And mark the sagging thatch, the mess of nettle

And bramble tangling hearths where homely gleeds

Once burned! Go to the mills of Avon and see

The broken sluices, the still wheels shagged with moss,

The rumbling gritstones moveless, the very rats

Grown gaunt for lack of grain. See how the tower

Of Pershore bites the sky like a broken tooth

As witness of our want. There is no dwelling

Nigh Bredon Hill but mourns the ruthless reaping

Of that black harvest and its aftermath

Of misery. We have neither will nor strength

To mould our sorry world anew. All England

Goes mourning to the grave of all her hopes

And hears no passing bell—for they that tolled

Lie mouldering with the rest; and there’s no remedy

That men can see. The kite has built her nest

In the Tree of Life and caws for carrion,

While lords in London drown her hungry scritches

With drunken song—and you—you sniff the may

To mask the taint of death.

                        You humble me.

Tell me your tale; I’ll make a song of it

To prick uneasy consciences.

                          Songs? Songs?

Throats that are clemmed with hunger have no spittle

For aught but Dies Irae! Yet will I tell you

How this fair-seeming roseland, on which May smiles

So soft, within is cankered.

                    You know well

How in old time, we villeins of each manor

Paid our lords’ dues in labour—so many days

At plough, haysel and harvest—and, in return,

Held our own strips of field, and shared the commonage

In the waste; and none complained—we were merry folk,

With ale a penny a gallon and hogs in plenty

Routing the woods for acorns. Then some lords

Impatient of our slow husbandry, made bargains

To pay our toil in silver. Such was the poison

First marred our peace; for hired men, over-spending

The pence they earned, light-headed with false freedom,

Forsook their forbears’ settled ways and left

Their plots to fallow; and much good land lay waste

While they that should have tilled it went their ways

As labourers, bound neither to lord nor land

But to their new-filled purses, faring wastefully

In prodigal seasons, and in years of want

Sullen and starved . . .

                    Then came the winnowing

Of the Black Murrain: when not one man in three

Was spared to drive a plough. The dwindled tilth

Shrank yet more piteously. That year’s harvest stood

Unreaped and sprouting on the stalk. Loose cattle,

Straying unherded, trampled through fields of grain

Rotted untimely and unground, while Famine

Grinned at our door, and money earned or saved

By those who had boasted freedom (having lost

The land that made them free) was not enough

To buy bread for their brats. And, mark you, their lords

Were in no better case, seeing that the King

Still swinged them with fierce taxes to arm and feed

His fighting-men in France—and not one farthing

Dropped in their coffers save they sold their corn!

But when they called for reapers, the landless folk

Laughed in their faces: “What? You would pay us twopence

For a day’s harvesting, when our children starve

And corn is scarce and rye-bread costs us treble

Of what we gave before the Pestilence?

Nay, sixpence is our hire; and if you grudge it,

Then let your harvest rot!”

                          Then all the gentry

Huddled together, and rode forth to London,

Cozening Parliament to frame a Statute

That bound all labourers to take the wage

They had won in days of plenty, and their masters

To pay no more—a penny a day for haymaking,

Threepence, at most, for reaping—and if they bowed not

To this decree, then should the lords pay forfeit

And labourers, bond or free, be haled to justice

And cast in prison. Yet still the harvest lay

Ungarnered; for land-bound folk were few, and landless

Had naught to lose, while they that were clapped in jail

Could swing no sickle. So the Hunger grew,

While houses fell to rubble, and the fallows

Lay foul with dock and thistle, and clogged ditches

Turned land in good heart sour. Then our taskmasters,

Still vexed by the King’s taxes, grew ever more greedy

Of petty tolls and penalties: each man must render

A fine when his daughter wedded; all must carry

The corn they grew to their lord’s mill, and pay

A monstrous fee for grinding; none could oppose

Oppression—since no land-bound serf might plead

Against his lord in the King’s courts, or leave

The land that failed to feed him. Thus, desperate men

Banded themselves together and took flight,

Straying from town to town and shire to shire

In search of labour where none knew their names

Nor whence they came—so half England was harried

By homeless, lawless men, who dwelt like wolves

In the woods, and preyed on simple villages

To filch a livelihood; and our empty fields

Became a wilderness . . .

                      Yet you bode here on Bredon?

I was too old and sad for such adventuring,

And had no land to bind me; yet my roots

Are so deep-set that, if they had been wrenched

From this dear soil that bred me, I should have pined

And perished.

                      Tell me, then: what is the cure

For all these ills?

                There is no sovereign remedy

That I can tell, nor counsel save the cold comfort

That old wives give to a young girl in labour:

“You must be worse before you are better!” And yet

I feel the first pangs of a great travail begin

To shake me. Mark how yon storm shadows the Chase

From Malvern foot to Ripple, and how the wind

That runs before it tosses the hawthorn-blow

And turns the hornbeam white with terror! Thus

Restless, the storm-wind wafts through England now—

Though whence it comes and whither it will carry us

I know not. But this I know: there is no secret

Cranny or nook it has not pierced; no bush

Nor humble bent but feels it. First it bore

But a vague whispering, such as those measured words

Minted by Piers your Plowman, that kindle the mind

And smoulder there unquenched, like a red ember

Kindling unquiet heat. But of late we have heard

Words homelier than yours, pointed with rhymes

That stamp them on the memory, which are made

By one called ‘Jack the Miller’—such as these:

        ‘John the Miller hath ground small, small, small.

        The King’s son of heaven shall pay for all.

        Be ware or ye be wo;

        Know your friend from your foe.

        Have enough, and say “Ho!”

        And do well and better and flee sin

        And seek peace and hold therein

        And so bid John Trueman and all his fellows.’

These are lame verses, with neither sense nor measure.

Jack Miller is no poet.

                          For the measure,

I have but little knowledge; but the sense

Is plain to common folk. There is another

Word that has passed through all the countryside,

Whispered from mouth to mouth:

‘John Schep, some time Saint Mary’s priest of York, and now of Colchester, greeteth well John Nameless and John Miller and John Carter, and biddeth them that they beware of guile in the borough and stand together in God’s name, and biddeth Piers Plowman go to his work, and chastise well Hob the Robber, and take with you John Trueman, and no mo; and look you sharp to one-head and no mo.’

He has borrowed my Piers Plowman without leave.

The rest is windy raving; I can see

No meaning in it.

                      Then you are duller-witted

Than ever I thought. I will tell you its meaning:

That the withers of common folk, who till for others

The soil that is their birthright, are galled to the bone

By the bonds that fetter them; and that some few

Who boast more wits than the many have asked this question

“Since we are one in Christ, and in his Kingdom

There are neither bond nor free, but Adam’s heritage

Is rightly shared by all his breed, how comes it

That most men fare afoot, perished with hunger,

While others ride full-fed and spend the substance

Won by their brethren’s toil in waste and gluttony?

Answer us that!”

                  This has been fully answered

By Master John Wycliffe of Oxford, in the treatise

De Dominio Civili. All things, he says,

Belong to God, and are held of him directly;

Yet what men hold is only truly held

If they be righteous. The tenure of the wicked

Is unsubstantial; and what they seem to hold

Is never theirs in truth—seeing that the righteous

Already, in virtue of their righteousness,

Are seized of all God’s heritage. Wherefore

It is idle for the righteous to dispute

Possession of what the wicked seem but to hold,

And have no seizin in. Further: if righteous men

Serve wicked lords and masters, for all that wickedness

They owe no less obedience; since it is written:

Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s

And unto God the things that are God’s.

                                  That is no answer

To stop mouths clemmed with famine, but a mere juggling

With words and twisting of scripture that sounds strange

On the lips of one whose tongue was once as sharp

As a crab-apple and rough as a perry-pear

That would rasp the roof from your mouth!

                              Both brew good liquor . . .

Yet you are right: when I was young I was teart

As Tewkesbury cider; but marriage melloweth man,

And the sweets of cities are as raisins or honey

Dropped in the cask; so, when the froth of youth

Hath bubbled from the bung-hole, the liquor softens

To a cheerful smoothness—though, mark you, with age

It may grow ropey and turn again to vinegar

That hath no virtue but to pickle neats’-tongues

And sets men’s teeth on edge.

                          A rougher answer

Will yet be given, and sooner than you guess,

By men who deal in deeds, and having known

Hunger in freedom, deem it preferable

To plenty in slavery. The wind bloweth

Whither it listeth; and this wind bloweth strong

And shrewd out of the East, where Jack the Miller

And his bitter kith have sworn to stand together

To see the new wrongs righted, and give men back

The ancient liberties wrested at Runnymede

From John Sansterre. And when that wind has gathered

And the storm breaks, the towers of privilege

Will crash before it as the walls of Jericho

Fell when God’s people shouted. They shall no more

Withstand it than fond Canute could quell the tide,

Or we two, perched on Bredon, stay those ranks

Of heaped cloud charging on us. (Hark! Already

Low thunder rumbles in the Vale, and lightning

Rips their black bellies! We had best take shelter

Before we are caught.) But mark you this, Long Will!

Though this storm sweep all England, and in its wake

Tall oaks and elms lie toppled, torn from their roots

Or lopped of rotten timber, lowlier growths

And nearer to the soil, as we and ours,

Shall lose no leaf; and when the tempest passeth,

Stand glistening with raindrops in the May sun

And watch the coloured span of God’s bow arching

Blue Cotswold . . .

        Come, then. Hasten! The first drops fall.

John Ball was moulded from the clays

Of the cold vale of Ouse,

Blunt of speech and bold of gaze

Great of bone and thews,

And through his bitter blood there ran

The gall of a lonely, landless man.

He dwelt in plenty among the priests

In Saint Mary’s Abbey of York,

But had no stomach for their feasts

Nor patience for their talk

Of heaven, when pestilence and dearth

Painted hell on English earth,

Where he saw the ermined gentry ride

Warm-clad as they had lain,

While folk that furnished them their pride

Trudged cold through wind and rain—

And their very dogs were better fed

Than the brats of the poor who whined for bread;

Where logs that warmed fur-slippered feet

Were hewn by frozen hands,

And the wealth they spent on wine and meat

Was wrung from stolen lands

By landless folk whose sires had won

Those very fields from barren stone,

But were now serfs, bounden to the soil

And galled beneath the yoke

Of the few who battened on their toil

Till body and soul were broke,

And their starved carcases at last

Into the nameless charnels cast,

While orphans gleaned the hungry lands

In ragged multitudes,

And fugitives in lawless bands

Like wolves lay in the woods,

Prowling forth at night to prey

On folk no better fed than they.

So from Ball’s anguished heart there broke

At length a gathering tide

Of long-pent anger, and he spoke

His bitter mind, and cried:

“When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

“For we are all God’s sons by birth,

And save for mortal sin

Each one inheriteth God’s earth

And all that is therein;

And if, in this, we flout God’s will,

What wonder that the world goes ill?”

Then (for this doctrine touched their greeds)

The monks arose in wrath;

They stripped John Ball of his clerkly weeds

And drove him from the North,

Bounden to silence by the strict

Ban of their Bishop’s interdict.

So he kicked the clods of his native clay

From his shoes and sought the South;

And they reckoned themselves well-rid that they

Had stopped this blabbing mouth

That dared to speak forth without fear

The truths they hated most to hear.

Southward he wandered without haste

To the agued Essex fen,

Lurking in hovels of the waste

With landless, hopeless men

Whose thoughts, for utter want, had grown

Darker and bitterer than his own;

And though no bishop would let him preach

In temples made with hands,

Men flocked to hear the forthright speech

That a plain folk understands

Better than mumbled Latin read

By priests who give them stones for bread;

For his rede was no fine-tempered sword,

But a bludgeon of tough oak

That hammered-in each uncouth word

Till those down-trodden folk,

Dumb with toil and blind with pain,

Blinked their bleared eyes and saw again;

Till hapless men in hundreds heard

The words John Ball had said,

Till from the fens the ferment stirred

Like brewsters’ barm in bread,

And spreading forth from East to West

Leavened the hearts of the oppressed.

And the hapless hundreds all agreed

As one man to maintain

The bare rights gained at Runnymede

And take their own again,

That freedom of their native earth

Be given to men of English birth;

Till, when the young king’s officers

Sent his tax-gatherers forth

For gold to feed their foreign wars,

All Essex rose in wrath

And beat them from the shire, and sent

Word to their brother-men in Kent;

And starved serfs gathered everywhere

As the shire of Kent awoke,

And Canterbury and Rochester

Roared to heaven in smoke

While half the harvest’s garnered stores

Lay spilt upon the threshing-floors;

And starven Kent, with pike and flail,

Swept through the Medway plains,

To break the walls of Maidstone jail

Where John Ball lay in chains,

And set him free and bore him on

To the barred gates of London town,

Where, on the bank of Thames, the rout

Surged like a foamy sea:

They burnt the palace of Lambeth out

And sacked the Marshalsea,

Calling on them that kept the gate

To give up London to its fate.

Then did the folk of London cower,

Seeing they were bestead;

For the King was shut within the Tower,

And the Queen, his mother, fled,

And the merchants had no spunk to fight

Against a cause they knew was right;

So Alderman Sybele, who stood alone

And was scared for his own skin,

Sent the great drawbridge rattling down

To let the rabble in:

And the gutters bubbled with a flood

Of broached wine frothed with human blood.

For dazed men knew not what they did

And cared not whom they slew,

And nothing recked so they be rid

Of the stony-hearted crew

That had docked them of their dwindled wage

And robbed them of their heritage.

So, with no lust but to destroy,

Fierce Kent surged through the street

To burn the Palace of Savoy

And the Flemings of the Fleet,

While, from the North, the turbid spate

Of Essex thundered through Aldgate;

Till London was a shambles lit

With flame and drenched in gore,

And blood and fire in fury beat

On the bastions of the Tower,

Where the King, with his craven court,

Huddled in fear, but could do naught.

Then young King Richard rose and spoke:

“How should a king disown

These rude, benighted countryfolk

Who are subjects of his crown?

Rather will I ride forth to find

What maggot rots my people’s mind.

“And if I deem their wrongs well-found,

Then will I do them right;

For so I swore when I was crowned,

And must fulfil the plight

I pledged them as their lawful king

To give them justice in everything.”

So the King, by Aldersgate, rode out

To Smithfield Square; and when

They saw this noble child, that rout

Of simple, hapless men

Forgot their bitter wrongs, and cried:

“The King, the King is on our side!”

And Walter Tyler, who was their chief,

Set forth their just demands;

And the young king promised them relief

From tax, and that the lands

And forests should be theirs once more,

And lords no longer grind the poor.

But while he spoke this soothing word

And granted them their due,

The Mayor of London stripped his sword

And ran Wat Tyler through;

And when they saw their leader dead,

The crowd, bewildered, broke and fled;

And his aldermen called out the wards

To smite them in the rear,

And the men of London drenched their swords

In such a massacre

As the shambles of Smithfield had never seen

And never will know again, I ween;

And through all England the butchers rode

From Suffolk to Somerset

Wherever a feeble ember glowed

Of the gleed John Ball had lit;

And summer fields, from York to Kent,

Smoked with the blood of the innocent.

They caught John Ball in Coventry

And dragged him South in shame,

They broke his neck on the gallows-tree

And quartered his lean frame;

And they brought his carcase to London, and set

His head on the bridge-house parapet;

It grinned there, shrivelling day by day,

That mouth of speech bereft,

Till weather had sloughed the lips away

And naught but bone was left,

And careless folk who passed the gate

Thought no more of John Ball’s fate.

And now the guard-house gate is gone

And razed the parapet;

But that mouth still asks the question

That none dares answer yet:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

Behold a more tempestuous age

Than England ever yet hath known:

See the embattled Roses rage

In tumult round a redeless throne:

See all her braggart chivalry

Driven from Gascony and Maine

Headlong to the narrow sea,

Dragging in their dishevelled train

The louts that laughed to burn the Maid,

Yet faltered when the shining lance

Of bold Dunois and Guesclin’s blade

Flashed and smote them out of France:

Whose rustic wits could understand

No cleaner trades than rape and plunder;

Who fell upon their native land

And tore her living limbs asunder,

Who sold their mercenary might

To them that bid the most, and bled

Till the Red Rose was blanched white

And the White Rose blotched with red!

See the fierce falcons from the harsh

Eyries of Mortimer soar to fling

Their terror from the Powys March

To Verulam, where the hapless King

In predatory talons caught

Is rapt and caged and set at naught!

Yet while that changeful battle swayed

The bells of Alban’s minster rang

For Vespers, and the barley-blade

From Verulam’s buried ruins sprang

Enriched with death anew to yield

Life from the trampled battlefield.

See how the angry queen bereft

Rallies her broken host and falls

On York and Neville in Ludford cleft

And holds them locked in Ludlow’s walls,

And the fierce Red Roses whirl away

The White Rose and the Ragged Staff

Like vapours blown at break of day

From Temeside, or wind-winnowed chaff

That is flurried from a threshing-floor:

Till Teme is sullied with the stain

Of death, as when dense waters pour

From Corvedale red with Lammas rain!

Yet even in that bitter hour

When York was broken and betrayed,

The masons perched on Ludlow Tower

Plied their patient craft, and laid

Course upon course the quarried stones

That made that miracle of grace

To bear the mellow chime whose tones

Waver above the market-place.

But see: the Ragged Staff returning

Ravages the midland plain:

See Northampton sacked and burning

And the crazed King caught again!

See the resurgent White Rose wilt

At Wakefield, where the rebel blood

Of stubborn York himself is spilt—

While March, last hawk of that fierce brood,

Wings to the West and whets the sword

That shall avenge his father’s loss

On Pembroke’s levies, where the ford

Straddles the Lugg at Mortimer’s Cross!

Yet even as the fallen hopes

Of Lancaster lay drowning there,

The woodman’s axe on Lingen’s slopes

Rang through the February air,

And in the frosty folds that lie

On Lingen’s sheepwalks, shepherds kept

Their starlit vigil, till the sky

Grew dim with dawn, and turned and slept

In peace, with neither ruth nor cares

For a quarrel that was none of theirs.

Once more on Verulam see the wrath

Of the Red Rose flame—as Neville reels

Driven in terror to the North

With Lancaster upon his heels,

Nor stays his rout nor stands his ground

Till the royal roses are laid low

By York’s usurper, newly crowned,

At Towton in the crimson snow;

Till Neville’s bitter brother slew

Percy at Hedgeley Moor, and caged

That fierce Queen, Margaret of Anjou!

So, for a while, the fires that raged

Through England’s length and breadth are spent

In a smoulder of sullen discontent.

Yet even as the arrowy hail

Mingled with snow on helm and shield,

The plowmen of the Towton Vale

Led their patient teams afield;

And shepherds on the heathery moor

Of Hexham heard the plaintive bleat

Of yeanling lambs above the roar

Of battle raging at their feet,

Carried the orphans in their arms

To the warm ingles of their farms,

And laid them by the smoking peat.

See how the germ of vengeance breaks

From bloody seed at Hexham sown,

When Neville’s treachery unmakes

The king he made, and on the throne

Plants the weak fool he first forswore!

See, nourished by the dynast’s hand,

The Rose of Lancaster once more

Flaunt above a sullen land—

Till York, supplanted and betrayed,

Rides from the North to claim his right

And the Kingmaker is unmade

On Easter Eve in Barnet fight,

While his vanquisher pursues the rout

Of Barnet to the Severn Sea,

And stamps the last red embers out

In the bloody meadow at Tewkesbury!

Yet, while the sun of Lancaster

Blood-red in Severn’s bosom sets,

The fishermen from Tewkesbury weir

Launch their boats and stake their nets

In channels where allice and salmon run

To seek their gravelly spawning-redd,

And little recked who lost or won

The battle so their mouths were fed;

And graziers from the wattled folds

Of Cotswold carried bales of fleece

To stow them in the greedy holds

Of Flanders gaping at the quays,

And rode back to their windy wold

On horse-packs stuffed with Flemish gold.

So, for long time, a bloodless truce

Broods on an exhausted realm—

Till dying York in death lets loose

His crippled brother, to overwhelm

Kinsman and foe in one red flood

Of indiscriminate slaughter, wading

To climb the throne knee-deep in blood;

Till the White Rose with the Red Rose fading

Fell together on Bosworth field,

Where the cold craft of Richmond brought

The savage Crouchback to his knees,

And in his brain’s shrewd smithy wrought

The double emblem that annealed

Those two tempestuous flowers in one,

And with a kindlier wisdom sealed

His merciful dominion

In the long Tudor peace.

Yet while those barbarous warriors died

At Bosworth for a tawdry gage,

The patient printer Caxton plied

His craft, and from the virgin page

The magic of immortal words

Shone with a beauty to outlast

The scars their transitory swords

Graved on the tablets of the past;

And while ambitious dynasts broke

Their thews to prop a transient throne,

The spirit of the common folk

Flowered in imperishable stone—

When men whose names will ne’er be known,

The rude, anonymous builders, raised

Their village belfries to the skies

That God might be the better praised;

And master-glaziers’ jewelled dyes

Shot the gloomy Norman vault

With shafts of sapphire and cobalt,

And from their silvery clerestories

Shed floods of radiance and fires

Of ruby on the shadowy quires;

And while the ruthless baronage

Flew at one another’s throats,

The folk who paid the builders’ wage

Gathered within their manor-moats

The meed of husbandry that heaped

Their granaries with the spoils of peace,

And shepherded their flocks and reaped

The harvest of the golden fleece;

And when the flames of that fierce age

With Bohun and Mortimer were spent,

These plain folk claimed the heritage

Of honourable toil, content

To see a soberer England rise

From the charred ruins of the old,

And welcome, with undazzled eyes,

The dawning of an Age of Gold.

On the second day of the month of May

When the cuckoo cried in the woods of Leigh,

The Matthew shipped her trade and slipped

Her mooring-cable from Bristol Quay.

Bristol-made and Bristol-manned,

With a crew as tough as any afloat,

She sailed that day in search of land,

And her captain’s name was John Cabote:

A salty, swarthy Venetian,

Born of that race of roving men

That know the seas from Matapan

To the whirlpool of the Lofoden,

From the hungry fangs of Finisterre

And the sun-white sands of the Azores

To the banks of dripping fog that blear

The crags that girdle Iceland’s shores.

Yet they who watched the Matthew drift

Baremasted on the falling tide

That ebbed through Avon’s oozy cleft,

And hailed us from the waterside

To speed our parting, little guessed

(And we, her crew, no more than they)

The hazards of the lonely quest

That lured John Cabote on his way:

How, cold as was his outward eye,

There ever burned within his brain

A vision of new lands that lie

Westward of the Spanish main,

And a lust for landfalls stranger still

Than fiery Hecla’s girdling ice:

For he saw the island of Brazille

And far Cipango’s Isles of Spice,

Where, in a palace paved with gold

The Great Khan wields his awful sway

On slavish multitudes untold

In the seven Cities of Cathay.

Over Avon’s oozy bed

We drifted seaward mile on mile

Till we cleared the bluffs of Portishead

And weathered Lundy Isle;

And hoisted sail at the tide’s turn

Where the last known headlands one by one

With the loom of Lundy fell astern,

And we laid our course on the sinking sun

That set with never a sail in sight

Nor ever a single landward gleam

As the Matthew bore on through the night

With the lodestar dipped on her starboard beam.

Through empty leagues, with never a speck

Of sail, a week we ran close-hauled,

And a short sea spewed the after-deck

With icy sheets of emerald,

Till, where a haze of shredded spray

Whitened the fringes of Cape Clear,

The brisk North Easter died away

And the cold wind began to veer;

And for a second week, the wrath

Of a warm gale in the tropics bred

Drove us reeling to the North

With the drunken lodestar full ahead.

The hot wind in the halyards screamed

The wild wind stripped the shrouds,

The reefed sails split because of it

And were blown away like clouds;

It carried the foremast by the board

And cracked the mainsail-boom:

We could do naught but thank the Lord

At least we had sea-room.

Too dazed were we to care or ask

How soon our end might be,

As the Matthew, like a broken cask,

Plunged in the pits of sea,

Or like a spar of driftwood clung

To the wave’s glassy cheek,

And climbed, and for a moment hung

Poised on the combing peak,

Straddled with bow and stern in air,

Enough to break her back:

And as the Matthew shuddered there,

We heard the keelson crack;

We looked to see the whole hull riven

And her timbers fly apart,

And vowed our sinful souls to heaven

With fear in every heart;

Till, strange as was the miracle

Christ wrought in Galilee,

The gale that so misused us fell,

And with it fell the sea

To a creaming swell as gentle grown

As a mother that rocks her babe;

And we checked our course anew, by stone

And needle and astrolabe.

Into the empty West we had sailed,

Three hundred leagues almost,

When the soft breeze from the South’ard failed,

And I smelt the breath of frost;

An icy Arctic current set

Upon our starboard bow,

Till the limp sails with fog were wet

And sprent with flurried snow.

The breath of yet-unfallen snows

Stiffened our clammy hair;

It crept into our mouths and froze

Our breath upon the air.

Blindly through fog the Matthew lurched

Till Cabote’s cabin-boy

Sebastian, in the crow’s nest perched,

Shouted ‘Land ahoy!’

Then all the crew with one accord

Ran to the bows and blessed

Sweet Mary, Mother of our Lord,

Who loves poor seamen best;

But as I peered and arched my hand

To shade my straining eyes,

I knew this landfall was no land

But isles of floating ice.

Like the risen ghosts of mountains vast

In deeps of ocean drowned,

Their white-robed shapes came drifting past

Without a sigh or sound:

Without a sigh, without a sound

That ears of man could hear,

Those silent spectres gathered round

Like mutes about a bier;

And the seeping vapours that they shed

From icy flank and peak

Fell like the fingers of the dead

Upon each bloodless cheek.

Shrouded in snow and cered in veils

Of mist they loomed above:

They stole the wind from our slack sails

So that we could not move;

And the foolish whispered words we spoke

To bate our mortal dread

Backward in mocking echoes broke

And bellowed overhead.

So, clamped within that cruel vice,

We floated as the snow-light fell,

And waited for the grinding ice

To crunch us like a filbert-shell.

Huddled on the glazing deck,

We brooded on our hopeless plight,

And heard the riven icebergs crack

Like thunder round us in the night,

Till the dim snow-light paled again,

And a huge phantom of the sun

Rose wanly from the watery plain,

And lo!—the ice was gone!

A warm waft filled the frozen sails

And shed their crusted rime,

As the Matthew dipped her bows and crept

Into a kindlier clime.

Two hundred leagues and more we sailed

On the same westward course,

Till, through a haze of surf, we hailed

The sight of unknown shores,

Where the tall shape of a lonely cape

Shadowed a woody strand;

And the Master christened the cape, St. John’s,

And the shores the New Found Land.

So we broached a keg of Gascony

To drink John Cabote’s health,

Who had brought us safe through the icy seas

To lands of untold wealth

Where our eyes, he told, might soon behold

Those fabled Cities of Cathay

Where common streets were paved with gold

And flowers bloomed alway;

Where fruits hung down from blossomed trees

And bright wings flashed through groves of spice,

And sea-worn men might take their ease

In airs of paradise.

Such were the vain delights we planned

And such the empty hopes we nursed,

And guessed not that our New Found Land

Was desert and accurst:

For naught was there but a wilderness

Of barren rock, and trackless wood

Where no sound broke the silences

Of a deathlike solitude

But the boom of rollers on the beach

And the scream of seabirds overhead;

That awful silence muted speech

And crushed our hearts with dread.

Yet, though we spake not, every man

Saw panic written plain

In his comrades’ eyes, and turned and ran

Back to the boats again.

Three weeks the Matthew southward bore,

Hugging that haunted coast;

Yet none that landed ever saw

So much as a man’s ghost,

Nor any footprint but his own,

Nor any work of human hands

But a netting-needle of carved bone

Cast on the wave-ribbed sands;

Nor any curl of smoke by day

Nor glint of fire by night:

And our greedy visions thinned away

Like phantoms, out of sight.

Thus in our hearts a hatred grew

For this homeless faring without end

And a longing for the ways we knew,

For wife and child and friend.

So we begged our captain John Cabote

To cease his fruitless quest,

And he gybed and put the ship about

And set the course due East.

The elder bloomed on Clifton Down

And the cuckoo was flown from the woods of Leigh

When we saw the roofs of Bristol Town

And stepped ashore on Bristol Quay,

Where merchant folk that thronged the port

Stood agape on every hand

To see what booty we had brought

Back from the New Found Land.

But their curious faces fell, to know

That booty we had none,

And that all the treasure we could show

Was a netting-needle of bone;

And that all the marvels we could bring

Their eager ears was nothing more

Than a tale of bootless voyaging

And of a barren shore.

And now the Matthew of Bristol plies

A trade of greater gain,

For she carries the rich merchandise

Of Gascony and Spain;

But though Cabote his pension got

And we had but our wage,

Yet would I fain put forth again

On such a pilgrimage:

For oft, as in my bunk I dream,

Rocked within hail of friendlier land,

I hear the homeless seabirds scream

Above that haunted strand,

And I smell the mould of the forest sod

That never human eyes nor feet

Save ours alone have seen or trod,

And find it strangely sweet;

And my nights are lit by the wild gleam

Of the passion that beguiles

The hearts of islanders to dream

Of undiscovered isles,

Of chasms that no lead can sound

And deserts never crossed,

And the search for what no man hath found

And the finding of the lost;

And in those dreams I grope my way

North-westward through the grinding ice

To the Seven Cities of Cathay

And the fabled Isles of Spice.

Once more the Scene is Worcestershire. To the skylark’s eye the face of the land on which Hob of the Hill and Will Langland looked down does not seem greatly changed in a hundred and forty years. In the foreground the tower of Pershore Abbey, then unfinished, has now reached its full height, and the extent of the monastic buildings betokens the dignity of a rich and powerful community—already doomed, did they but know it, to untimely dispersal. The wild region of Malvern Chase remains much as it was, and the area of tilth in the valleys of Severn and Avon does not appear larger than it was before the Black Death, although the landscape has grown generally paler through the thinning of trees for fuel. Only North of Avon the great Mercian woodlands remain: the forests of Arden and Feckenham stretching in a dark band from East to West and merging, in the neighbourhood of Bewdley, into the dense oakwood of Wyre, which here embraces and overflows the course of Severn to peter out on the less hospitable flanks of the Clees. Through the midst of this forest the Dowles Brook lapses quietly over its ledges of sandstone to join Severn; and, roughly parallel with its meanderings, through a shallow valley choked with brushwood, a sled-scored track penetrates the lonely recesses of aboriginal oak.

It is an early morning in middle June, with the cuckoo abroad, and though the oaks have broken into leaf, their foliage has not yet darkened to the opacity which, in late Summer, fills the forest with gloom. Yet Wyrewood lies strangely silent. No sound can be heard but the murmur of the brook, the sudden screeches of jays and magpies, or the laugh of the stock-eagle. Over the track, already invaded by springing bracken, there slowly advances a horseman, on a shaggy pony, leading a packhorse, laden with two ill-balanced saddle-bags. The rider is a sturdy, black-bearded young man in maroon trunk-hose and doublet. He wears a velvet cap of the same colour furnished with a silver medal of Saint Christopher, whose protection he might well feel the need of in such an outlandish spot—the more so in that he rides unarmed. At the end of several miles of collar-work the track opens into a clearing occupied by two thatched hovels protected by a stone wall on which the flayed hides of deer are stretched out to dry in the sun. Outside this wall, within a circle of black ash, the mound of a charcoal-burner smoulders, emitting from its summit a thin spiral of milk-blue smoke.

At the sight of these signs of habitation, the rider, Hugh Baker, son of James Baker, the famous shipwright of Southampton, cautiously pulls up, and the led horse immediately lowers his head to crop the grass that springs between the bronze croziers of unfolding bracken; then tosses it abruptly, startled by his master’s shout, in response to which an uncouth figure stalks out of the nearer hut. It is that of a gigantic man, clothed from neck to foot in leather. The parts of his face left uncovered by his shaggy blond beard, are blackened by charcoal-dust which intensifies the whiteness of his eye-balls and teeth and gives his craggy face a ferocious aspect. In his enormous left hand he grasps a long-bow, to whose string he has fitted an arrow. He is Adam Woodward, servant of Sir William Compton, lately appointed Rider and Verderer of the royal forest of Wyre. From the shelter of his stone wall he challenges the intruder.

Who bist thee, stranger—and what makest thou

In the king’s woodland without leave or warrant?

I am called Hugh Baker, shipwright of Southampton,

And travel in the king’s service by the leave

Of your master, Sir William Compton, to make a tally

Of the wood’s standing timber. For my warrant:

It is here . . . But for Christ’s sake first unstring that arrow!

I cannot read.

              See, then, the sheriff’s signet

Stamped on the seal.

                    What would you of me?

                                        Your counsel,

And what charity you can spare—against just payment—

For a stomach that is empty these fifteen hours.

Here is no hostelry. Better you had filled it

In the inn at Bewdley.

                    So had I, but that I came

To the bridge-house after nightfall and found it barred,

Nor would they loose the bolt.

                            Came you thither from Worcester?

Ay, and so told them.

                  Then there is little wonder

The folk misliked you: there is disaccord

Twixt Bewdley and Worcester over the water-traffic

Of Severn—though had you passed the bridge I doubt

You would have gotten bed or victual; for the Council

Bides now in Bewdley, and the town’s beset

With greedy gizzards like a carrion

Pestered by wood-ants. Within another month

The Lady Mary cometh to dwell at Tickenhill,

And swarms of bustling tradesmen flock to fettle

The palace for her court: there has not been

So foul a press in Bewdley since Prince Arthur

Her brother’s corpse lay there upon the way

To burial in Worcester! Hobble your horses:

If they should range in the woods no eye could track them

Save mine. Then, if you will, you shall eat with me

A mess of venison, and slake your gullet,

So it be not too mimping, with a swill

Of the teart liquor that we forest-folk

Crush from choke-pear and crab-apple.

                                  Were it verjuice

My throat would relish it. I give you thanks,

Woodward.

        You owe me none. I give no welcome

To meddlesome trespass save a goose-winged shaft;

But you, who come in peace and with right warranty,

I reckon as my guest till you have stepped

Beyond the forest’s liberties. Come, sit you down

Till the pot seethe.

                  I have told you my name.

But yours I do not know.

                      I am called Adam,

Woodward of Wyre.

              You have dwelt long in this forest?

I was born and bred in it, like my father before me

And his again. My grandfather was servant

To the Mortimers of Wigmore who once held

This chase. He fell at Tewkesbury . . .

                                    You dwell alone?

Alone? Alone? How should my days be lonely

Amid the living multitude of creatures

That bear me company? There is no tree

In all Wyrewood but knows me for his neighbour

And one that loves him! I have fleeter friends:

Hart, hind, hare, wolf and boar, the five wild beasts

Of venery, and a mort of humbler folk

That list my step but fear not: the russet squirrel

Who chitters on the bough and fearless fills

His garner at my threshold; fitchet, weasel

And spitfire catamount—and those shy rievers

That slink by night: vixen and brindled brock,

And the sleek-skinned otter-bitch that dives to snatch

The great lax swimming in her golden livery

Of Michaelmas to find my Lenten fare.

All these are my familiars; yet I do reckon

I love the tall trees best: they are no runagates,

And quiet best befits this wilderness.

Quiet? Knew I no livelier company

I should go mumping-mad. My tongue would shrink

For want of wagging, and my ear-drums thicken

Till I grew adder-deaf.

                    Friend, you are wrong.

What? Can these dumb stocks mark your word or make

Articulate answer?

                Ay, and with many voices,

So you but hearken and the ear be tuned

To catch their tone and cadence. Every tree

Has its own speech in season: the showery abele

That sighs when all are hushed and the weak air

Stirreth no other leaf; the timid whitebeam

That whispers faint alarm when the wind blenches

Her ravelled tresses; why, even the stiff holly,

That broodeth mute and sullen in her thickets

Till mightier boughs be bared, breaketh her silence

In brittle chatter when November strips

All other leaves but hers. That is the season

When, in their nakedness, the great oaks stand

Girt with such godlike majesty that a heathen

Who knew not Christ might sink upon his knees

And worship them.

              This is idolatry!

Surely your mind must have been mazed by solitude

To breed such wicked blasphemies.

                              Behappen

It is sounder than you reckon. I do but tell

The wild thoughts it has harboured in that season

Of deathlike stillness when the starlight falls

On a world cered in snow, and even the brooks

Ice-muted cease their babbling. There is no silence

Holier than this, or stranger. Yet I confess

I love my woodland best when all its voices

Are raised in riot: as when Lammas gales

Roar through the huddled treetops, and torn boughs

Leaf-burdened crash into the shuddering brake

With shrieks of rending anguish—and there is war

In heaven, as when the winged archangels battled

With the dark hosts of Lucifer and swept

His fiends into the pit. Then my brave oaks

Unbent proclaim their majesty, defying

The demons of the air. Oft have I leaned

With my ear pressed against them, striving to share

That fierce aerial tumult—yet not a tremor

Shaketh their steadfast boles! No progeny

Of earth is nobler or mightier than these—

No, nor yet wiser.

                Wiser? That is too much

For a plain man to stomach! Would you maintain

That these familiars partake the natures

And passions of mankind?

                      Did you but know them

As I, you would not doubt it. For their natures:

These are as manifold in variety

As their hues, shapes and statures. Some are frail—

Witness the frightened aspen that for ever

Shivers with needless fear, and is so cold

At heart she will not burn—while some are gay

And light of utter innocence, like the birch

That laughs when the wind fondles her, yet is bold

To loose her shift of satin and stand poised

In slim and silvery nakedness, like a maid

Upon the river’s brink. Others are gracious

As the honey-dripping and bee-haunted lime

Whose tender leaves my gentle fallows nip

With lips of velvet. Some, though seeming fair,

Are jealous—as the shallow-rooted beech,

Whose greed, for all her graces, will not brook

Consort or rival—so that no blade of green

Can thrive beneath her, and the very oak

Pines in her company. Some are treacherous—

Witness the elm, whose brittle branches fall

To build a coffin for the fool who trusts

His life to her false shelter. Some are crabbed

And stony-hearted—as the grudgeful yew

That dwells apart, black-visaged and withdrawn

Like a Welshman of the marches, and hath no joy

But in her length of days. Others are spiteful—

As is the poison-dripping ash that sheds

Death on the sward beneath her. There are many

Lesser and lowlier trees with neither malice

Nor virtue in their natures: the rugged alder

That sways her ravelled rootlets in our brooks

And smoulders into charcoal; the tough hornbeam,

That like a candle flares, yet is so stubborn

She dints the axe—and all the pliable tribe

Of water-loving withies whose silver buds,

Breaking in floss of palest primrose, kindle

The first cold fires of Spring. Yet, of all these,

I love the oak most dearly . . .

                              Your wise oaks!

How should he not be wise who hath outlived

Mankind’s allotted span before he sets

A single acorn, and is not meet for timber

Ere he hath doubled it? There are oaks in Wyre

That had weathered their first winters when the Roman

Set foot in Britain, and had but reached their prime

When Harold fell at Hastings, yet still stand

Hale to the root.

              I am too staid to follow

Such lightfoot fancies; yet I do confess

They are lordly trees: as pretty a standel of timber

As I have seen this twelvemonth. In the South

We have no such forests now. The Wealden woods

Have fed the smelters’ furnaces and slaked

Their charcoal-mounds with sap. Our slips lie empty

For lack of sizeable timber-trees to build

The hulls this realm needs most. I think your oaks

Might end their days more nobly than by drowsing

To death in this dim cloister. Lay me that giant,

And from his fallen carcase the adze will fashion

Garboard, strakes, ribs and knees for such a ship

As never took salt water! From yonder elm

Sawyers will shear planking to case her decks

And carve both keel and kelson. Cross-grained knots

Shaped by the turner’s chisel-edge shall furnish

Dead-eyes and pulley-blocks; your stubborn hornbeam

Yield tree-nails that shall marry oak to elm

So the twain be one flesh; your springy ash

Find yards and cross-trees. From the pliable poplar

Coopers will hammer water-butts and kegs

For gunpowder—whereof the fieriest

Is mixed with alder-charcoal. Thus your staid forest

Wrought by man’s artifice shall sweep the seas

In a more splendid shape and prouder guise,

Dight with new dread and beauty!

                              I have never

Beheld the sea, nor any vessel nobler

Than the great drags and trowes that float our cordwood

Down Severn to Gloucester.

                  You would not count such craft

Great were you seaward-bred, or had you but seen

The huge bark Princess Mary, that my father,

James Baker, built at Hampton. Six hundred tons

Of portage, manned by seven hundred souls:

Of mould so clean beneath, of sail so swift,

Above so sweet-proportioned—castles, coins

And fights so cunningly disposed for majesty

And terror of the enemy—yet withal

So weatherly and maniable! Ah, had you watched her

Upon the day she thundered from the slips

And floated on the water like a swan

Amid a flight of mallard—then had you granted

The empire of the Hampton shipwrights’ artifice

Above all others. Yet the Princess Mary

Seems but a shallop to me, whose eyes have seen

The Henry Grace à Dieu, that seamen lovingly

Call the Great Harry, lately launched at Erith,

Whose portage is a thousand, and her crew

Double the Princess Mary’s, manning five tiers

Of brazen ordnance—cannons, demi-cannons,

Culverins, sakers and falcons, to say naught

Of her iron slings, fowlers and hail-shot pieces

And murderous hand-guns. There is no battle-ship—

Be she galleasse of Portugal or galleon

Of Spain or Venice—that can quench the fire

Of this formidable paragon. Yet now we plan

To build a greater.

                I cannot understand

Why we, a comfortable folk, should court

The perils of unquiet waves, or seek

Dominion of the seas that God hath set

To guard our natural liberties.

                            There speaks

The landsman! Know you not that the fickle waters

Which fend us can prove traitor, giving passage

To jealous foreigners? So first came the Danes;

So came the Normans—and, now we are at odds

With our King’s false uncousinly cousin France,

Our watery moat is narrowed, and the arm

Of enmity grows longer. But for the eyes

Our prowling fleet has given us, we should lie

Helplessly blinded by the mists that cloak

The Dover strait in Summer. This is a lesson

You land-bound folk have ever been loth to learn

And, once learnt, soon forgotten—though your forbears

Knew better than yourselves, as when the Fifth Harry,

Of Monmouth, from the yards of Portsmouth launched

His three great dromonds: the first Grace à Dieu,

The Trinity and the Holy Ghost, to guard

His passage to Picardy; and when Henry Tudor

(The huckster, as the witless called him) built

Four mightier yet—the Sweepstake, Mary Fortune,

Sovereign and Regent; ships that in their prime,

Sailed without any peer, yet now have lost

Their admiralty.

              Why so?

                    These were but round-ships,

Cumbersome and slow-paced, that had neither power

To hold the water nor sail close by the wind:

Their upper decks o’erburdened by the weight

Of their iron ordnance—and so ill-found

That one smart squall in a high sea could catch them

Unbalanced, and founder them. Since then, a Frenchman,

One Master Descharges, of Brest in Brittany,

Has dropped his cannon to the cargo-decks

That lie above the orlop, thrusting their muzzles

Through apertures called portes—bating thereby

That perilous lack of ballast and augmenting

His tale of ordnance fourfold. Thus, the Great Harry

Casts from her teeming belly such a weight

Of deadly metal as would stave and sink

The Regent in one broadside, and if by chance

She were outnumbered, show such nimble heels

No foe could catch her—for this kingly ship

Is limber as a greyhound. It is strange

That an instrument of war so terrible

Should be so beautiful. When first I saw her

Towed on the flood-tide of the Thames from Erith

To Barking Creek (for there my father had sent me

To spy upon her) I judged her lines uncomely

Beside our race-built Hampton craft—and once

She all but grounded on the shelving silt

Eastward of Roding river. That was jealousy

Feeding false hope: she was not yet rigged or sparred

With the tall masts of tapered spruce-wood felled

In the forests of the Hansa; and I told

My father she was but a monstrous drone,

Paunchy and sluggard. But when next I saw her

Put forth from Dover, carrying the King’s Grace

To parley with his royal cousin Francis

Twixt Guynes and Arde in Flanders, then, suddenly,

My heart leapt to my mouth, like a young lad’s

When first he sees his love, of sheer delight

In her perfection: for this huge hulk steered

Light as a pinnace and made our Princess Mary

Seem but a slut beside her. Never was ship

More gloriously apparelled; for all her sails

Were damasked cloth-of-gold. Upon the cagework

Of her high castles flew four royal standards,

Each flagstaff tipped with a gold fleur-de-lys,

And from her four mast-heads the golden tongues

Of flame-like pennants flickered. From the quarters

Of her main deck hung four white banners bearing

The red cross of St. George, that drooped athwart

A tier of heater-shields or targets charged

With the same blood-red ensign, alternate

With France’s silver lilies and the rose

Of Tudor, and a gold portcullis blazoned

Upon a field of green; while on her forecastle,

Carven beneath a lion figure-head,

She bore the arms of France and England, quartered

And crowned within the Garter, and supported

By the Lion and the Dragon. These things I saw

But at a venture; for my eyes were fixed

Upon the crowded main-deck, where King Harry,

Ruddy and stalwart, towered above the press

Of halberdiers and courtiers, clad in gold

Edged with pied ermine: I had never guessed

He was so lofty, but that the snow-white plume

Which bound his bonnet over-topped the tallest

A double hand’s-breadth. Smiling, he gave the word

To sound the trumpets and to hoist the sails,

And the Great Harry, like a tower of gold,

Bore on her course to Calais, leaving me

Rocked in the wash of her tremendous wake

And dazzled by her glory. When she had faded

Beyond my envious sight, I could have wept

For pride—not envy—that such a miracle

Should have been wrought in England . . . I rode home

Wildered and shaken, yet the more determined

To drain my utmost wits and match this beauty

Before I perished. Five years have I bowed

Above my draughtsman’s board, bemused and haunted

By that rich vision: five years have I laboured

Seeking that vision’s shape; and now, at last,

My plans are finished: all I need is timber

To give them substance. Let us be done with talk!

Find me oak, ash and elm—and in a twelvemonth

Your moveless forest shall be winged with sail

And float till fire or water give it burial

Beneath the waves. Come then, for I am burning

To make my choice!

Rosy-pale the Palace lies

Mute beneath the moon:

It is the season of the rose

And a night of June;

Honey-sweet the jasmine’s breath

Mingles with the musk

Of néw-mówn hay

In the midsummer dusk;

Milky down the winding walk

Steals the mist of Thames—

You can hear the petals fall

From the bent rose-stems;

Softly through the alleyed yew

A moth’s wings move:

It is the season of the rose

And the hour of love—

When woven out of moon and mist,

In silver and white,

The ghosts of the Long Gallery

Dance by candle-light.

The maids of the Long Gallery

Are dust these many years,

And none that listens now may hear

Their laughter or tears;

The twang of lutes and virginals

Or the rustle of their shoon

As their feet brush the flooring

With swéet-rúsh strewn;

The dry swish of taffetas

And whispering mousseline

As their skirts sweep the daīs

Of the great, cold Queen.

Stiff in her jewelled robe she sits,

Austere and pale,

While Perrico, the little dog,

Peeps from her farthingale;

A ruff of cambric picarded

Props her pointed chin;

A stomacher of seed-pearls girds

Her proud heart in;

Her cheeks are drawn parchment

Blotched with crimson dyes,

And in that raddled mask there burn

Her hot Tudor eyes;

While, shrewd behind their smoulder,

The cool Tudor brain

Sifts and winnows word and look

And gives them shape again.

Hopes, ambitions, treacheries,

Envies, loves, lusts,

Shame and honour—all she sees,

Yet none she trusts.

Soft-tongued ambassadors

Tempt her with their wiles

And strive to pry her secrets out:

The cold Queen smiles.

Captains and counsellors

Cluster round her throne:

The Queen’s eyes see them all,

Her heart heeds none:

Wise Burleigh and Walsingham

Wait on her command,

While Raleigh grips the sudden sword

Hilted in his hand,

While Leicester plies his flatteries

To keep the favourite’s place,

And Sidney leans to catch the light

From Stella’s starry face

As through their mazy galliards

In silver and white

The limber maids-of-honour dance

Deep into the night;

And the cold Queen’s lonely heart

Is troubled as they dance

By many a sweet, unspoken thought

And shy, secret glance;

Her heart is warmed and troubled—

But all that she sees

Is the face of Robin Devereux

Crouched by her knees:

That young face and the other

Of parchment and of bone:

An old raddled woman

Sitting on a throne . . .

Down the darkening gallery

Fades the phantom rout:

The moon sinks in the river-mists,

The candles burn out;

The river-mist thickens,

It droops upon the lawn;

Slowly over Richmond Hill

Creeps a grey dawn.

Gaunt and grim the palace lies

Mere brick and stone:

The ghosts of the Long Gallery—

All, all are gone.

Thus to begin: In the third week of July,

And the one-and-thirtieth year of the Queen’s reign,

We saw the Golden Hind pinnace scudding up-channel,

With a strong tide making and a following wind

From the South West, into Plymouth. And Fleming, her captain,

Stumping uphill to the Hoe in his sodden seaboots,

Told Lord High Admiral Howard how, South of the Lizard,

He had sighted ten great galleons of Andalusia

Quartering the empty waves like a cry of hounds

That are strayed or shed from the pack, and go feathering

For scent at the covert-side. And this, indeed,

Was their case—for the Duke of Medina-Sidonia

Had mistook his tryst and lagged fifty miles astern

In the stormy loom of the Scillies; so here was a prize

To be snapped up with little ado if but we might pounce

On this portion before they were whipped together, though we

Were ill-placed for the spring, our English fleet being crowded

To leeward within the Sound and held there enleashed

By the freshening gale.

            Yet no sooner had Fleming told

His tale than the happy news, like storm-water, ran

From the Hoe, where our captains were gathered, down every street

To the Barbican and the Cattewater: the bells of St. Andrew’s

Clashing forth: “They are come . . . They are come!” and a hundred beacons

Casting their flames down-wind like the swaling-fires

Of Spring from headland to headland and hill to hill—

Till this wildfire swept all England, and farming folk

That watched for the morrow’s weather saw the dark land

Lit like a star-pricked firmament.

                         But we in Plymouth

Had more instant work on hand; for had we been trapped

In that leeward haven, we knew we should fare no better

Than the Spaniards, a year before, when Sir Francis Drake

With Elizabeth Bonaventure, Rainbow and Lion,

Ran into the gullet of Cadiz, raked by the guns

Of Matagorda, and left that roadstead cluttered

With sixty ships, sunk, grounded, or set adrift

With fire in their bellies. So, all that night, we toiled

By torch and cresset, cramming our ships with shot

And warping them out with hawser-work, one by one,

Until, by dawn, there were fifty-four of them clear

Of the land, strung out abreast of the Eddystone

And tacking into a wind which began to weaken

As rain fell steadily—so that the waves that ran

In a long swell out of Biscay grew smooth and sullen,

Flattened by the grey drizzle. So there we lay

Heaving, mist-blinded, with lowered sails, and waited

For what should next befall us, hearkening

To the cries of the wild mews and knowing naught

Of where the foe might be . . .

                   But, as night neared,

A fishing-smack that had stolen from the Sound

With plashing sweeps, gave hail; and her skipper, hoisted

On board the Ark Royal, blinking in the light

Of her cuddy’s lantern, stammered a halting tale

Of how certain fisherfolk that watched on the Dodman,

(Which like the blunt snout of a basking whale

Juts forth from Mevagissey) had suddenly spied

Through an opening in the mist, a spectacle

Of innumerable majesty: Spain’s embattled might

Hove-to four leagues off-shore, in a half-moon

Seven mile from tip to tip. How many there were

They could but roughly reckon, for the haze

Thickened and thinned so swiftly, and by times

Their substance seemed but phantoms; yet one man swore

To a hundred and thirty sail, and of these no less

Than forty ships of battle, and half a hundred

Armed galleons of the Gold Fleet, with a swarm

Of fly-boats, pinnaces, and such nimbler craft,

Which, like torn fleeces of a thundercloud,

Trailed from the main fleet’s denser heart to guard

The rearward hulks and transports. And at one moment,

When shafted sunlight pierced the rack and smote

Upon their vanguard, one huge ship had broken

Her banner at the main—an oriflamme

Whose gold burned through the mist; and they that heard

Guessed her Sidonia’s ship, the great St. Martin,

And her banner the standard that the Pope of Rome

Had blessed, bearing the images of Christ Crucified

And his Mother, the Holy Virgin.

                      Yet all that day

We could do nothing, being at the pleasure

Of a moveless air, but lay with sodden sails

Listlessly flapping, and whistled for a breeze

To waft us seaward of the Spaniard’s rear;

And all that night enshrouded in dense mist,

Unseen and blind as we, the Armada crept

Past us upon the tide.

                It was still dark

When the dank air freshened somewhat, and the wind

Veered to the North of Westward, dissipating

The watery haze that hid them, so that by dawn

No shred of cloud was left between the blues

Of sky and sea. Then, through the crystalline

Of rain-washed air, at last we saw that vision

Of dread and of desire: the Spanish fleet

In order of battle standing up the sleeve

With the wind on their port quarter. Slowly they moved

(Or so it seemed) as though the very wind

Grew tired with carrying them, and the sea groaned

Under their wallowing bulk. Four galeasses

Of Naples, with sweep of flashing oar-blades, cleft

The unfurrowed deep before them; next there came

Sidonia’s main battle-fleet: weathermost,

Ten galleons of Portugal, their greatest

The vast Grangrina, eleven hundred tons;

Starboard of these, ten of the Indian Guard

With four ships of New Spain—and, in between,

Sidonia’s own flagship, the St. Martin;

Next, four fleet pinnaces, that like snapping curs

Roved in and out, busily shepherding

The sluggard flock of hulks and victuallers

That floundered in the midst, and behind these

Four squadrons of their rearguard battle, ships

Of Biscay, Guipuscoa, the Levant

And swarthy Andalusia: twenty galleons

Of vast lading and armament; and a fifth,

Lighter of burthen, moving in a cloud

Of agile pinnaces where, last of all,

Two watchful galeasses closed the rear,

Looking to windward.

            When the Spaniards saw us

Heeled over on the port tack and sweeping down

Fast on their rear, Sidonia gave orders

To haul in sheets and beat towards the land,

With a cunning of double purpose; first to waylay

The remnant of our force, which, one by one,

Still straggled out of Plymouth, and next to weather

Our main fleet—neither guessing how nimble-heeled

And maniable were we, nor yet how slovenly

Were his own lumbering hulks. So, as they beat

To windward of the Cornish coast, we swept

Athwart their rearguard’s starboard quarter, raking

The Levantiska of Leyva as we passed,

With a hot broadside of cannon-shot. Then we gybed

And closed upon their windward flank, where none

But that grim sea-dog Recalde, who, not long since,

Crossed wits and blades with Drake in Lisbon River,

Defied us, boldly bringing into action

The Santa Ana and the great Grangrina

Of Biscay; for they that followed fell away

In a piteous huddle, but these twain stood up to us

Till the Santa Ana’s forestay was cut through

And two roundshot lodged in her mainmast; when Sidonia

Bore up beside her, right into the wind,

While Valdes, with the squadron of Andalusia,

Formed up behind him. So Lord Howard bade

The battle to be broken, albeit the day

Had scarce begun. But this he reckoned shrewdly:

That the Spaniards now had beat too far to leeward

To trouble Plymouth; that, in those pregnant hours,

Forty fresh sail had swelled our complement

To five-score fighting-ships—not thirty less

Than theirs—and that no craft in all the Armada

(Save for the great Grangrina, the Santa Ana,

The Raggazona, and the admiral ship

Of Andalusia) was of greater portage

Than our White Bear and Triumph; nay, even more,

That none of theirs could match our best in swiftness

Or weight of deadly metal—to say naught

Of seamanship, while, in the narrow seas,

Where that grim lion Parma waited, crouching

To spring upon our shores, a second fleet

Under Lord Henry Seymour stood to bar

The straits. Therefore we let Sidonia fly

Up-channel, dragging on his windward flank

The wounded Santa Ana, through the smoke

Of burnt-out beacons smouldering on the cliffs

Of the South Hams, and we hung upon his heels

Like an ambling wolf-pack that has tasted blood

And gotten the measure of its prey, but waits

Until the victim tires before it falls

To ravening. And, in mid-afternoon,

It seemed that hour had come: for suddenly

Their galleon San Salvador, of the squadron

Of Guipuscoa, blew up—her fighting-decks

Flying into the air and her shattered poop

Blown clear; but, as we closed on her, the Spaniards

Sent in their galeasses, and we drew off.

Next, by the Start, Pedro de Valdes’ flagship

Our Lady of the Rosary fell foul

Of two Biscayans. The first broke her foreyard,

The next her bowsprit—and when Valdes boldly

Put up his tiller to come into the wind,

The mainmast snapped close by the board and crashed

Athwart her bulwarks, draping her with torn sails

And cordage; so once again we closed, until

The San Cristóbal and the San Francisco

Covered her, and a Naples galeasse

Took her in tow—yet cravenly forsook her

When a pert London coaster, the John and Margaret

Of a bare two hundred tons, challenged their escort;

And we laughed to see so huge a victim falling

Into such puny hands.

              But now, since wind

And sea were rising, the Lord Admiral

Bade the whole fleet heave-to, and called a council

On board the Ark to plan the strategy

Of the morrow’s battle; and there it was determined

That our Vice Admiral, Drake, should lead the van,

His lantern on the poop of the Revenge

Guiding our course, with hope to overhaul

Sidonia and bring his fleet to action

West of the Needles, thereby heading him

From off Southampton. So, at midnight, we sailed

With a stiff Westerly breeze and a short sea

That made the spark on the Revenge’s poop

Dance like a graveyard corpselight dizzily

Amid the sober stars; till, of a sudden,

That drunken light went out like a snuffed candle

And left us guideless; so we slackened sail

And hove-to, baffled, blinded, and perplexed,

While the Lord Admiral, in the Ark Royal,

With the Mary Rose and the White Bear, held on

The selfsame course, and the main fleet lay scattered

To rearward in the waste of troubled water

That foams above the Skerries; and when daylight

Broke over Berry Head, these three bold ships

Found themselves uncompanioned, without the topsail

Of a friend in sight, and the Armada’s rearguard

A culverin-shot ahead—so that the Spaniards,

Had they been abler seamen, could have borne up

And utterly destroyed them. But of this

They failed: their jealous captains being busied

With licking of their wounds and bickering

One with another, so this pregnant hour

Was wasted, and by noon our nightbound stragglers

Drew up to the Ark Royal—save for the squadron

Of Drake, who (if his tale were true) had chased

Five great ships of the Hansa which, in the dark,

He had mistook for Spaniards; but Martin Frobisher

In his blunt Yorkshire tongue flatly maintained

This was a lie, and that naught but pirate greed,

O’er-mastering Drake’s scant honour, had tempted him

To slip us in the dark and search the rear

For Valdes’ galleon that, hulled and mastless,

Lagged there adrift. Yet Drake stuck to his tale,

Admitting, howbeit, that on the windward reach

Home from that fruitless chase he had fallen in

With Our Lady of the Rosary, and thought fit

To send her into Dartmouth with a prize-crew

Aboard her. And now, seeing both words and looks

Grow heated and hands fly to hilts, Lord Howard

Bound these two fiery captains to keep peace

Between themselves, and their malice for the Spaniards.

So Drake, being well-contented with his prize,

Laughing, consented, and the other grudgingly

Bated his jealousy, while we bore on

Eastward before a weakening wind that died

At nightfall—yet not before Sidonia

Had shed a second ship, the San Salvador,

Which, maimed and burning, he turned loose to drift

Athwart our course; and Hawkins, in the Victory

Towed her charred hulk to Weymouth . . .

                           All that night

The two fleets lay becalmed beneath the moon

Just out of gunshot: the warm air so still,

We could hear the Spaniards’ voices, and the boom

Of a weary groundswell pounding on the stones

Of the Chesil Beach. At dawn the dead wind quickened

To a brisk North-easter, giving Sidonia

The weather-gauge; whereat he tacked about

To bear upon us, but Howard turned aside

On a long board to the North-West, thereby hoping

To fetch to East between them and the land

And steal the weather from them; and the Spaniards

Now showed their seamanship, sailing on the same tack

To cheat us; so Howard went about and beat

Close-hauled to Eastward, with the Victory,

Nonpareil and nine others close astern.

Yet these held on their board too long and left

Their admiral at the mercy of Recalde,

Who now came bowling down, with sixteen sail

In line abreast, abaft the Nonpareil—

All but their greatest ship, the Raggazona,

The mighty Levantisca—that held straight on

To cut off the Ark Royal.

                      And now Lord Howard

Lay in great jeopardy—for the Ark Royal’s portage

Was but two-thirds the Spaniards’, and her crew

But half; and had the Raggazona grappled

And thrown aboard her pikemen, he had been lost

And the fight ended. Yet, though he could not weather

The Levantisca, Howard’s ship was handier

And, with her rapid firing, so confused

The Spaniard that he faltered—and the Ark

Stood off unscathed.

                But now a greater peril

Threatened our fleet; for in that windless night

Our left wing, led by Frobisher, had been caught

In the Portland Race and carried far inshore

To windward of the Armada; and Sidonia,

Seeing the Triumph, with five armed merchantmen

Of London, helpless on the leeward shore,

Thrust his oared galeasses into the wind

To make an end of them, while he, in haste,

Pursued our broken vanguard—yet was so blinded

By lust of easy conquest and the reek

Of our rapid gunfire that he failed to spy

Drake’s wing of fifty fast sail weathering

Recalde’s rearward squadron, and coming up

Upon them through the smoke—the wind having backed

To South-South-West. Thus, while Recalde turned

And fled to join Sidonia, Lord Howard,

Freed from that instant menace, sailed inshore

With the Elizabeth Jonas, Leicester, Victory,

Dreadnought and Swallow, to succour Frobisher,

And as Sidonia ran towards Portland Bill

To intercept, Howard bore up, until

He had the wind upon his starboard quarter

And the St. Martin’s fo’c’sle straight ahead.

Three times he crossed Sidonia’s bows, and thrice

Landed a thumping broadside, then, returning,

Gave her the other; and now, as he swept on

Toward Frobisher, Drake followed in his rear

With a fierce weight of metal that pierced her hull—

That ripped the holy standard from her main

And left her making water fast and groaning

With half a hundred dead and sixty more

Bloodily wounded—while the galeasses

Whose teeth were in the Triumph dropped their prey

And fled in terror. Thus ended the fourth day

Of that running battle, and the first encounter

Of the main fleets, which, but for our sore lack

Of shot and powder, and the crippling wind,

Might well have ended all . . .

                    That day we swam

Like wildfowl on a glassy mere becalmed

While the friendly Portsmouth folk replenished us

With bread and shot and powder, and Lord Howard

Re-formed us in four squadrons: on the larboard

Frobisher in his war-scarred Triumph; next

John Hawkins in the Victory; and to starboard

Lord Thomas Howard in the Golden Lion

And Drake in the Revenge.

                      Now on the morrow

(It being St. James’s Day) two Spanish ships

The Santa Ana, that had been winged off Plymouth,

And the San Luis, limping fell astern;

And a cloud of petty English craft, like ants

Ravening a beetle’s carcase, swarmed about them

And would have boarded—but that four galeasses

Like proudly-swerving peregrines swept between

And scattered them. Then Howard, in the Ark

And his cousin in the Lion towed their two ships

Into the tussle with longboats, and shot away

The lantern of one galeasse and the beakhead

Of her sister, while a third drifted away

With the crippled Santa Ana, heavily listing,

And might have fallen to us but that our launches

Were so peppered by the Spanish musketry

They could not tow us further; and as we stood

To hoist them all aboard, the wind arose

Once more out of the South, casting Lord Howard

To leeward of Sidonia, who now bore down

In the St. Martin with the fourth galeasse

And, having got the weather, so fiercely mangled

Both Lion and Ark Royal that they were fain

To fall away inshore, while Frobisher

Took up the fight—but paid dear for his daring;

For, as the wind veered West, Recalde ran

Twixt him and Howard, and with a chance shot splintered

His rudder; and though eleven launches strove

To tow the Triumph out of range, it seemed

She (and the Ark no less!) was lost—until,

In the article of doom her shipwrights botched

The broken rudder, and at the same moment

The fickle wind backed South—and Frobisher

Cast off the launches and so slipped away

On a long reach to Westward . . .

                      But already

The Spaniards had found cause to rue their rashness:

For Drake and Hawkins, profiting by that shift

Of wind that saved the Triumph, stole about

Their larboard wing, and with the Nonpareil,

Revenge and Mary Rose, drove their St. Matthew,

The weathermost of Sidonia’s squadron, crashing

Into their huddled rearguard, crowding them

To leeward on the sandbank of the Owers,

Where they had grounded—but that, in the fury

Of that hot fight we had burnt up all our powder

And emptied our shot-lockers. Thus, when they lay

Confused, we could not press them, and the promise

Of victory slipped from us as they cleared

The shoals and fled on Eastward up the sleeve—

Not without scathe: for, by this day, the rumour

Of the running battle had crept along the coast;

And many spirited gentlemen that were fain

For heart-love of their country to adventure

Their skins upon salt water, hired themselves

At their own charge boats, shallops, skiffs and hoys,

And sallied forth in haste, like jolly ploughmen

To a bout of cudgel-play or London prentices

That go roaring to the bear-pit: yet the quarrey

They baited was no sullen bruin, chained

And spiritless, but a horned fighting-bull

Of Andalusia, that these picadors

And pert banderilleros boldly pestered

With pricks and lances—running in and out

Of the stately Spanish fleet like dabchicks darting

Amid a game of swans. But, though we laughed

To see their reckless daring, yet were we troubled

By their impudent seamanship, that often placed

Themselves and us in peril. But no counsel

Could quell their gallant mischief; and, as both fleets

Stood up the channel wafted by the wind

That in the dog-days blows from the South-West

We soon outsailed them . . .

                    So, by evening

Of the seventh day, we had cleared Dungeness

To see the chalk-white cliffs of Dover dyed

By a red sunset, and the friendly topsails

Of Seymour fleck the straits. Whereat Sidonia

Veered towards France, hoping thereby to gain

The forty Flemish flyboats he had begged

Of Parma, that, so strengthened, he might cover

The Spaniards’ crossing; but not one sail came forth

From Dunkirk or Ostend: so, being counselled

That if he ventured further the fierce tide

Might carry him beyond the straits, he cast

Anchor in Calais roads—with Howard’s fleet

A culverin-shot to windward, full astern,

And, on the lee, the sunken sandbanks stretching

From Sandettie and Outer Ruytingen

To the Wandelaar—a treacherous berth for such

As knew those soundings ill. Hither, at nightfall,

Fenton and Seymour, with six-and-thirty sail

Thirsting for battle, beat up from England, bearing

Meat and munitions, and the heartening news

That in the port of Dover they had made ready

A fleet of fireships that, loosed upon the tide

And sent down in the dead of night, might smoke

Or burn the foxy Spaniard from his holt

Ere Parma’s pikemen mustered—but since no moment

Was to be lost (for the tide turned at midnight)

Lord Howard called for ships out of the fleet

So to be cast away. Then Drake, free-handed,

Offered the Thomas, and John Young the Bear,

A bark of seven-score tons; and other captains

Made up the tale to eight, which, being besmeared

With wildfire, pitch and resin, their bellies crammed

With brimstone, and every piece of ordnance charged

With cannon-balls and chain-shot, Young himself

Led them into the wind, with the tide racing

At full—nor loosed his tiller ere their decks

Were lit from stem to stern, and hot flames licked

The longboats lashed beside them. Thus they swept

Unhelmed into the black heart of the fleet

Of Spain, with cannon thundering and roundshot

Hurling on every hand; and when the Spaniards

Woke to this fiery peril they were cast

Into utter panic, reckoning it the work

Of the devil or Drake his offspring, in confusion

Hastening this way and that, incontinently

Hacking their anchor-cables and running foul

Each of his helpless neighbour—and, in a wrack

Of splintered spars and ragged cordage, swept

Out of the roads of Calais, through the straits,

Into the wild North Sea—while Howard’s fireships

Burnt themselves out to leeward, and denser darkness

Fell on the deep . . .

               Now, as the great St. Martin

Lay tangled in that tide-borne rout, Sidonia

Signalled the scattered galleons to re-form

About him—but none obeyed save the San Marcos

And a handful more. Thus, when the break of dawn

Whitened the shoalings, this mean force appeared

Head to the wind, and all the rest astraggle

Six mile astern, off Gravelines. Then Lord Howard

Re-formed our line: himself, in the Ark Royal,

Midmost; to port, Seymour and Frobisher;

To starboard, Drake and Hawkins—but, as they swooped,

Five squadrons all abreast, his watch espied

Spain’s last unwounded galeasse, San Lorenzo,

Dragged Eastward, rudderless, under the guns

Of the castle of Calais; so, close-hauled, he drew

Out of the line to take her, while the rest

Swung smart to starboard, hoping thus to run

Between Sidonia and Dunkirk and throw

His left wing on his centre, driving both

Upon the Flemish sandbanks. But Sidonia,

Albeit a lame seaman, had no lack

Of manhood, and stood firm till the Revenge

Came within musket-shot, shattering his forecastle

With her bow-guns, then luffed, poured in her broadside,

And so bore on into the very midst

Of the huddled rearguard beating up to aid him;

While Hawkins, Winter, Seymour and Frobisher,

Swept past the great San Martin one by one,

Pounding her with their cannon till she heaved

With yards and rigging torn, and hull shot through

By one great ball of fifty pounds that holed

Her bowels upon the waterline. Yet still

She fought them off undaunted; and the squadrons

Of Lisbon, Guipuscoa, and Andalusia

Gathered about her in a huge half-moon

That slowly beat to the North Westward, striving

Not to o’ershoot Dunkirk, where Parma’s force

Lay fretting (as they reckoned) to embark

For the assault on England; and so stoutly

Did they persist that, ere the sun had soared

Half way towards the zenith, fifty ships

Had gained their battle-stations—with Recalde

In the San Juan keeping the weather flank,

Sidonia in the centre, and, to leeward,

Oquendo and Leyva in the Levantiscas

And Guipuscoans. Thus, while Hawkins held

Sidonia’s mainguard, where the great St. Martin,

Shaken, but dauntless, thundered through the smoke

Of her own sullen broadsides, Seymour’s squadron

Harried the wing to windward, and sheared off

Two ships, the San Felipe and San Matteo,

Which, though Recalde strove to cover them,

Lay so shot-riddled they could neither hold

Water nor wind, and, helpless, fell astern

Crippling two more—Our Lady of Begona

And the San Juan of Sicily; and these four

With yards and ropes entangled drifted down

Under the fire of Winter, in the Vanguard,

Whose nimble squadron charged in and went about

Like dancers in a galliard. Twice the Matteo

Shook herself free and turned on them; twice more

They closed upon her, firing their culverins

Point-blank at musket-range—but the San Juan

Had no fight left in her, being so shattered

That through her gaping portholes one could see

Her decks awash with blood. Nor could Sidonia

Come to her aid, being even more bitterly

Beset, with Drake and Hawkins placed athwart

Both bows and stern, and hanging on his flanks

Like grim bear-baiting mastiffs in the pit

At Southwark, while the wind, suddenly veering

Into the West, brought up three more great ships,

The Ark, the Bonaventure, and the White Bear,

Which, having sacked their crippled galeasse

Upon the beach at Calais, now bore down

Like monstrous phantoms towering through the reek

Of battle—which having seen, Drake put about,

Leaving the great St. Martin to their charge,

And while the San Matteo, and San Felipe

With the San Marcos, drifted to their doom

On the deadly Zealand sandbanks, the Revenge,

Like to a cunning sheepdog, singled out

The stragglers of their left wing, one by one,

And shed them on the shoalings: fifteen ships

Out of Sidonia’s fifty—the bold remnant,

Outpaced, outsailed, outnumbered and outgunned

By four to one, and, in God’s grace, delivered

Into our hands by such a miracle

As we had prayed for! Yet, in the article

Of victory, that same wind that had so blessed us

Snatched from our mortal hands the means to strike

The death-blow—for suddenly a black squall leapt

From the South-West and beat upon the sails

Of both embattled fleets, heeling them over;

And every captain cried: “All hands aloft!

Reef topsails, or we founder!” And we who served

The reeking culverins cast away our tinder

To be sodden by the rain, and clomb the shrouds

To shorten sail, as our ships held to the wind;

And from the lofty stations where we swayed

Like wind-tossed rooks, through sheets of icy rain

And stinging spindrift, our bleared eyes beheld

A sight most strange and terrible; all that was left

Of that proud Armada, the pomp and boast of Spain,

Scudding like windlestraws upon the foam

Of the Zealand banks—a mightier hand than ours

Having compassed their destruction.

                        Yet, even as we watched

Those doomed ships driven to their end, the wind

Veered to full South, and, as they gybed, it spewed them

Out of the very throat of death to seaward,

Nor could we overhaul them or come to grips

Again that day: for now they had sea-room,

And we no press of sail to clip their heels

As they fled before us. Nor had we any comfort

But that their spite was foiled, and that no Spaniard

Could now set foot on England. Of the rest

I can but speak by hearsay—for we were set

To guard the straits again and keep a watch

On Parma at Dunkirk. But I have heard

That, on the morrow, an even mightier gale

Rose from the West and drove them on the coasts

Of Norway; that there the foulest pestilence

Raged in their sweltering down-battened holds

And stinking cockpits, where the wounded lay

Festering above the dead, and that the lack

Of water and food so weakened them that few

Had strength to man the ropes. Therefore Sidonia

Decreed the Northern course to Spain, and led them

Through the fierce Pentland Firth, rounding Cape Wrath

And slinking through the Hebrides, where some

Were cast upon those iron coasts and gutted

Of life and treasure, while others staggering

Westward of Ireland, and falling on the fangs

Of Connemara, sank in sight of land;

And the sorry remnant of starved, sullen men,

In their maimed galleons, brought their anguish home

To Lisbon and to Vigo and the Groyne

And Port St. Mary, where Sidonia

Sulked in his orange-groves until he died,

A broken, ageing man . . .

                       As for the memory

Of this great mercy: men may read the medal

That the Queen stamped, saying—He blew with His wind

And they were scattered: and doubtless it is just

To give to God the glory—yet I do reckon

That we, her seamen, had some small part in it.

Musing Meleáger once

In Gádara a garland made

Of herbs and blossoms that the suns

Of envious Time shall never fade:

Gifts of the Galilean meads

And Hermon’s lonely hill, where slain

Adonis in the springtime bleeds,

With drifts of fierce anemones

Staining anew the Syrian plain.

Thus I, with neither grace nor powers

To match that orient music, twine

A chaplet lowlier than his:

A coronal of English flowers

The more beloved that they are mine.

Pluck first those eager Celandines

Whose gay, new-minted metal shines

In February hedgerows where

Hooded Lords and Ladies peer

From out their pallid wimples. Next

Gather me catkins of wind-vext

Hazel, and, ere the petal-snow

Be shed, a sprig of thorny sloe,

Scentless though it be. To these

Marry me frail Anemones

Ruffled in the copse when March

Crimsons the tassels of the Larch

And the first venturous Primrose frees

Her frozen heart. Now search the leys

For mealy Cowslip-bells that fill

Poor pastures, where the Daffodil

Dances, with perfumes headier yet

Than wafts of the White Violet

That shyly droops her head within

Grass-tussocks newly-fledged; and when

In glimmering pools the Bluebells lie

(But pluck not these, because they die

So soon) and turbulent Hawthorn floods

The air with spices—from the woods

Bear me one branch of living snow

From the Wild Cherry’s bridal-show;

And see you tarry not—for now

The warm earth’s bounties spring so fast,

They are no sooner seen than past

Their prime: so haste, before June suck

May’s moisture from the marsh, to pluck

The valiant King-cup’s globes of gold,

And in her sappy leaves enfold

Flags and Forgetmenots, and heads

Of plumy Meadowsweet that sheds

High Summer’s drowsiest incense

Over the musky hayfield. Thence

Skirt me the standing wheat to glean

Black-pollen’d Poppies, and, between,

Cornflowers, whose royal azures dim

The Speedwell’s bright eyes till they seem

Lustreless as the cooler blues

Of Alkanet. Next I bid you choose

From the dank ditch Hemp-Agrimony

And pungent Horse-Mint; from the sunny

Verges, where Broom-pods in the heat

Of noonday snap, bring honey-sweet

Claws of White Clover—nor despise

The Scarlet Pimpernel whose eyes,

Widened in sunlight, blink in shade,

With silvery Mulleins arrayed

In silk sleek as a leveret’s ear,

And spendthrift Ragwort-stems that wear

Their gold like harlots; dock and sorrel

Decked in their panicles of coral,

And brittle Teazle-heads that slake

Their drought with dewdrops. Now forsake

The trampled verge’s needy sward

To gather Foxglove spires that guard

Rampant hedgerows flaunting high

Their ivory trophies of July:

Where hemlocks, and the greeny-white

Elder-flowers conspire at night

With feathery kexes to imprison

Moonlight ere the moon be risen

And starshine when the stars have set

In Summer’s timeless twilight; yet

I pray you let not evening end

In these enchantments ere you bend

One trailer of the Briar down—

And see her buds be not o’erblown,

Lest the faint-flushed petals fall

From the arching spray, and all

Her attar waste. Here, too, untwine

The rosy fingers of Woodbine

That, though her waxen trumpets breathe

Ravishment, will crush to death

The Hazel-rods round which they climb.

Next, from bare downlands, gather Thyme,

And, from their beechen hangers, green

Flowers of pallid Helleborine,

And, stippled on the high sheep-walk,

Orchises that love the chalk;

While from granite moors aglow

With the imperial lava-flow

Of August’s Tyrian, you shall bring

Bunches of purple Heath and Ling

And Harebells, dim as dusk, that seem

To dance when no wind stirreth them:

Yet cull not these till you have found

By peaty pools on marish ground

Nodding above the emerald moss

Grass of Parnassus and the floss

Of milk-white Cotton-grass, where, bent

To pick them, you may catch the scent

Of Buck-bean and Bog Asphodels,

Or stoop to pick the violet bells

Of frosted Butterwort; and descending