 | Poems by Hartley Coleridge |  |
163
NAWORTH.
When English lords and Scottish chiefs were foes,Stern on the angry confines Naworth rose;
In dark woods islanded its towers look'd forth,
And frown'd defiance to the growling North;
With donjon-keep and long embattled wall,
Portcullis, portal, and wide-echoing hall,
Where erst the warrior carved in gloves of steel,
And the stone pavement clang'd with iron heel.
The very type was Naworth of a time
Whose sins and woes by age are made sublime.
There came the vagrant minstrel—not in vain,
For ladies loved, and lords repaid his strain.
What though his song was oft of loves unholy,
And fights,—fantastic brood of restless folly?
What though the plaudits, clatter'd on the stones,
Bemock'd and deafen'd the poor captive's groans,
Doom'd in sad durance pining to abide
The long delay of hope from Solway's further side?
164
Because such things have been, and are no more:
Nor let a Queen, a matron pure and young,
And sweet as e'er by vagrant bard was sung,
Conspire with those who would, with eyeless rage,
Deface the relics of ancestral age;
But, as her duty, be it still her joy
All to improve, and nothing to destroy.
So Naworth stands, still rugged as of old,
Arm'd like a knight without, austerely bold;
But all within bespeaks the better day,
And the bland influence of a Morpeth's sway.
| Poems by Hartley Coleridge | |