The Visions of England Part 6

_The Blood-lake_; Senlac; Hastings.

THE BLACK SEATS

1348-9

Blue and ever more blue The sky of that summer's spring: No cloud from dawning to night: The lidless eyeball of light Glared: nor could e'en in darkness the dew Her pearls on the meadow-gra.s.s string.

As a face of a hundred years, Mummied and scarr'd, for the heart Is long dry at the fountain of tears, Green earth lay brown-faced and torn, Scarr'd and hard and forlorn.

And as that foul monster of Lerna Whom Heracles slew in his might, But this one slaying, not slain, From the marshes, poisonous, white, Crawl'd out a plague-mist and sheeted the plain, A hydra of h.e.l.l and of night.

--Whence upon men has that horror past?

From Cathaya westward it stole to Byzance,-- The City of Flowers,--the vineyards of France;-- O'er the salt-sea ramparts of England, last, Reeking and rank, a serpent's breath:-- What is this, men cry in their fear, what is this that cometh?

'Tis the Black Death, they whisper: The black black Death!

The heart of man at the name To a ball of ice shrinks in, With hope, surrendering life:-- The husband looks on the wife, Reading the tokens of doom in the frame, The pest-boil hid in the skin, And flees and leaves her to die.

Fear-sick, the mother beholds In her child's pure crystalline eye A dull shining, a sign of despair.

Lo, the heavens are poison, not air; And they fall as when lambs in the pasture With a moan that is hardly a moan, Drop, whole flocks, where they stand; And the mother lays her, alone, Slain by the touch of her nursing hand, Where the household before her is strown.

--Earth, Earth, open and cover thy dead!

For they are smitten and fall who bear The corpse to the grave with a prayerless prayer, And thousands are crush'd in the common bed:-- --Is it h.e.l.l that breathes with an adder's breath?

Is it the day of doom, men cry, the Judge that cometh?

--'Tis the Black Death, G.o.d help us!

The black black Death.

Maid Alice and maid Margaret In the fields have built them a bower Of reedmace and rushes fine, Fenced with sharp albespyne; Pretty maids hid in the nest; and yet Yours is one death, and one hour!

Priest and peasant and lord By the swift, soft stroke of the air, By a silent invisible sword, In plough-field or banquet, fall: The watchers are flat on the wall:-- Through city and village and valley The sweet-voiced herald of prayer Is dumb in the towers; the throng To the shrine pace barefoot; and where Blazed out from the choir a glory of song, G.o.d's altar is lightless and bare.

Is there no pity in earth or sky?

The burden of England, who shall say?

Half the giant oak is riven away, And the green leaves yearn for the leaves that die.

Will the whole world drink of the dragon's breath?

It is the cup, men cry, the cup of G.o.d's fury that cometh!

'Tis the Black Death, Lord help us!

The black black Death.

In England is heard a moan, A bitter lament and a sore, Rachel lamenting her dead, And will not be comforted For the little faces for ever gone, The feet from the silent floor.

And a cry goes up from the land, Take from us in mercy, O G.o.d, Take from us the weight of Thy hand, The cup and the wormwood of woe!

'Neath the terrible barbs of Thy bow This England, this once Thy beloved, Is water'd with life-blood for rain; The bones of her children are white, As flints on the Golgotha plain; Not slain as warriors by warriors in fight, By the arrows of Heaven slain.

We have sinn'd: we lift up our souls to Thee, O Lord G.o.d eternal on high: Thou who gavest Thyself to die, Saviour, save! to Thy feet we flee:-- s.n.a.t.c.h from the h.e.l.l and the Enemy's breath, From the Prince of the Air, from the terror by night that cometh:-- From the Black Death, Christ save us!

The black black Death!

_That foul monster_; The Lernaean Hydra of Greek legend.

_From the marshes_; The drought which preceded the plague in England, and may have predisposed to its reception, was followed by mist, in which the people fancied they saw the disease palpably advancing.

_From Cathaya_; The plague was heard of in Central Asia in 1333; it reached Constantinople in 1347.

_The City of Flowers_; Florence, where the ravages of the plague were immortalized in the _Decamerone_ of Boccaccio.

_The pest boil_; Seems to have been the enlarged and discharging gland by which the specific blood-poison of the plague relieved itself. A 'muddy glistening' of the eye is noticed as one of the symptoms.

_The common bed_; More than 50,000 are said to have been buried on the site of the Charter House.

_Albespyne_; Hawthorn.

_Half the giant oak_; 'Of the three or four millions who then formed the population of England, more than one-half were swept away': (_Green_, B.

IV: ch. iii).

THE PILGRIM AND THE PLOUGHMAN

1382

It is a dream, I know:--Yet on the past Of this dear England if in thought we gaze, About her seems a constant sunshine cast; In summer calm we see and golden haze The little London of Plantagenet days; Quaint labyrinthine knot of toppling lanes, And th.o.r.n.y spires aflame with starlike vanes.

Our silver Thames all yet unspoil'd and clear; The many-b.u.t.tress'd bridge that stems the tide; Black-timber'd wharves; arcaded walls, that rear Long, golden-crested roofs of civic pride:-- While flaunting galliots by the gardens glide, And on Spring's frolic air the May-song swells, Mix'd with the music of a thousand bells.

Beyond the bridge a mazy forest swims, Great spars and sails and flame-tongued flags on high, Wedged round the quay, a-throng with ruddy limbs And faces bronzed beneath another sky: And 'mid the press sits one with aspect shy And downcast eyes of watching, and, the while, The deep observance of an inward smile.

In hooded mantle gray he smiled and sate, With ink-horn at his knees and scroll and pen.

And took the toll and register'd the freight, 'Mid noise of clattering cranes and strife of men: And all that moved and spoke was in his ken, With lines and hues like Nature's own design'd Deep in the magic mirror of his mind.

Thence oft, returning homeward, on the book,-- His of Certaldo, or the bard whose lays Were lost to love in Scythia,--he would look Till his fix'd eyes the dancing letters daze: Then forth to the near fields, and feed his gaze On one fair flower in starry myriads spread, And in her graciousness be comforted:--

Then, joyous with a poet's joy, to draw With genial touch, and strokes of patient skill, The very image of each thing he saw:-- He limn'd the man all round, for good or ill, Having both sighs and laughter at his will; Life as it went he grasp'd in vision true, Yet stood outside the scene his pencil drew.

--Man's inner pa.s.sions in their conscience-strife, The conflicts of the heart against the heart, The mother yearning o'er the infant's life, The maiden wrong'd by wealth and lecherous art, The leper's loathsome cell from man apart, War's h.e.l.l of l.u.s.t and fire, the village-woe, The tinsel chivalry veiling shame below,--

Not his to draw,--to see, perhaps:--Our eyes Hold bias with our humour:--His, to paint With Nature's freshness, what before him lies: The knave, the fool; the frolicsome, the quaint: His the broad jest, the laugh without restraint, The ready tears, the spirit lightly moved; Loving the world, and by the world beloved.

So forth fared Chaucer on his pilgrimage Through England's humours; in immortal song Bodying the form and pressure of his age, Tints gay as pure, and delicate as strong; Still to the Tabard the blithe travellers throng, Seen in his mind so vividly, that we Know them more clearly than the men we see.

Fair France, bright Italy, those numbers train'd; First in his pages Nature wedding Art Of all our sons of song; yet he remain'd True English of the English at his heart:-- He stood between two worlds, yet had no part In that new order of the dawning day Which swept the masque of chivalry away.

O Poet of romance and courtly glee And downcast eager glance that shuns the sky, Above, about, are signs thou canst not see, Portents in heaven and earth!--And one goes by With other than thy prosperous, laughing eye, Framing the rough web of his rueful lays, The sorrow and the sin--with bitter gaze

As down the Strand he stalks, a sable shade Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train, In silver samite knight and dame and maid Ride to the tourney on the barrier'd plain; And he must bow in humble mute disdain, And that worst woe of baffled souls endure, To see the evil that they may not cure.

For on sweet Malvern Hill one morn he lay, Drowsed by the music of the constant stream:-- Loud sang the cuckoo, cuckoo!--for the May Breathed summer: summer floating like a dream From the far fields of childhood, with a gleam Of alien freshness on her forehead fair, And Heaven itself within the common air.

Then on the mead in vision Langland saw A pilgrim-throng; not missal-bright as those Whom Chaucer's hand surpa.s.s'd itself to draw, Gay as the lark, and brilliant as the rose;-- But such as dungeon foul or spital shows, Or the serf's fever-den, or field of fight, When festering sunbeams on the wounded smite.

No sainted shrine the motley wanderers seek, Pilgrims of life upon the field of scorn, Mocking and mock'd; with plague and hunger weak, And haggard faces bleach'd as those who mourn, And footsteps redden'd with the trodden thorn; Blind stretching hands that grope for truth in vain, Across a twilight demon-haunted plain.

A land whose children toil and rot like beasts, Robbers and robb'd by turns, the dreamer sees:-- Land of poor-grinding lords and faithless priests, Where wisdom starves and folly thrones at ease 'Mid lavishness and l.u.s.ts and knaveries; Times out of joint, a universe of lies, Till Love divine appear in Ploughman's guise

To burn the gilded tares and save the land, Risen from the grave and walking earth again:-- --And as he dream'd and kiss'd the nail-pierced hand, A hundred towers their Easter voices rain In silver showers o'er hill and vale and plain, And the air throbb'd with sweetness, and he woke And all the dream in light and music broke.