The poetical works of Robert Stephen Hawker Edited from the original manuscripts and annotated copies together with a prefatory notice and bibliography by Alfred Wallis |
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THE SISTERS OF GLEN NECTAN. |
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 | The poetical works of Robert Stephen Hawker |  |
THE SISTERS OF GLEN NECTAN.
The foamy waters flash and leap:
It is where shrinking wild-flowers grow,
They lave the nymph that dwells below.
The reliques of a human cell?
Where the sad stream and lonely wind
Bring man no tidings of his kind.
'Twas told him by his grandsire dead:
“One day two ancient sisters came:
None there could tell their race or name;
Their garb had signs of loftier days;
Slight food they took from hands of men,
They withered slowly in that glen.
Gushed till the fount of tears was dry;
A wild and withering thought had she,
‘I shall have none to weep for me.’
Bent in the shape wherein she passed;
Where her lone seat long used to stand,
Her head upon her shrivelled hand.”
The grandame's tale for winter hearth:
Or some dead bard, by Nectan's stream,
People these banks with such a dream?
To think such wild things here have been:
What spot more meet could grief or sin
Choose, at the last, to wither in?
In a rocky gorge, midway between the castles of Bottreaux and Dundagel, there is a fall of waters into a hollow cauldron of native stone, which has borne for ten centuries the name of St. Nectan's Kieve. He was the brother of St. Morwenna, and like her is one of the storied names along this northern shore. He founded the Stations, now the Churches, of Hartland and Wellcombe; and bequeathed his name to other sacred places by the “Severn Sea,” in the former ages of Cornish faith.
When I first visited his Kieve, in 1830, the outline of an oratory, or the reliques of a cell, stood by the brook, on a knoll, just where the waters took their leap. There is a local legend linked with this ruined abode, which was told me on the spot; and which I expanded at the time into the above ballad. I have recognized the coinage of my brain in the prosaic paraphrases of Wilkie Collins, Walter White, and other subsequent writers; but with regard to any claimant for the original imagination, I must reply, in the language of Jack Cade, “No, no; I invented it myself.”
| The poetical works of Robert Stephen Hawker | |