The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

From nine to twelve my guest was eloquent
In anger, mixed with sorrow, at the things
He saw around us; lands half marsh, half weeds,
Gates from the gate-posts miserably divorced,
Hovels ill-thatched, wild fences, fissured roads—
‘Your people never for the future plan;
They live but for the moment.’ Thus he spake,
A youth just entering on his broad domains,
A senator in prorogation time
Travelling for knowledge, Oxford's accurate scholar,
A perfect rider, clean in all his ways,
But by traditions narrowed. As the moon
Turns but one side to earth, so showed that world
Whereon he gazed, for stubborn was his will,
And Ireland he had never loved. ‘You err,’

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I answered, taking in good part his wrath,
‘Our peasant too has prescience; far he sees;
Earth is his foreground only, rough or smooth;
In him from seriousness the lightness comes:
Too serious is he to make sacrifice
For fleeting good; the battles of this world
He with the left hand fights, and half in sport;
He has his moment—and eternity.’
‘Ay, ay,’ exclaimed my guest, ‘your Church, she does it!
Your feasts and fasts and wakes and social rites,
With “Sir,” and “Ma'am,” and usages of Court:—
I've seen a hundred men leave plough and spade
To take a three weeks' infant to its grave,
A cripple pay two shillings for a cart
To bear him to the Holy Well. Sick Land!
Look up! the proof is round you written large!
Your Faith is in the balance wanting found:
Your shipless seas confess it; bridgeless streams;
Your wasted wealth of ore, and moor, and bay!
Beneath the Upas shade of Faith depraved
All things lie dead — wealth, comfort, freedom, power—
All that great Nations boast!’ ‘Such things,’ I answered,
‘The Gentiles seek; and you new tests have found;
“Ecclesiæ stantis vel cadentis,” friend;—
“Blessed the rich: blessed whom all men praise:”
New Scriptures, these; the Irish keep the old!
Say, are there not diversities of gifts?
Are there not virtues—Industry is one—
Which reap on earth, whilst others sow for heaven?
Faith, hope, and love, and purity, and patience,
Humility, and self-forgetfulness,

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These too are virtues; yet they rear not States.
What then? Of many Nations earth is made:
Each hath its function; each its part for others:
If all were hand, where then were ear or eye?
If all were foot, where head? You rail, my friend,
Not at my country only but your own.
The land that gave us birth our service claims,
The suffering land our love. Yet England, too,
They love, and they the most, who flatter not.
A thousand years of nobleness she lived
Whereof you rob her! In this isle are men
By ancient lineage hers. Such men might say,
“My England was entombed ere yours had birth.”
Dates she from Arkwright only? Rose the Nation
With Alfred, or those Tudor Kings who built
The Golden Gate of England's modern time,
But built it upon liberties annulled,
Old glories quenched, the old nobles dead or quelled—
Ay, wrecks more sad?’ His host, I could not use
Words rough as his albeit to shield a land
For every shaft a targe; so changed the theme
To her he knew—thence loved.

He loved his country;
An older man than he for things less great
Had loved that land. Yet who could gaze, unmoved,
From Windsor's terraced heights o'er those broad meads
Lit by the pomp of silver-winding Thames
Dropping past templed grove, and hall, and farm,
Toward the great City? Who, unthrilled, could mark
Her Minsters, towering far away, with heads
That stay the sunset of old times; or them,
Oxford and Cambridge, England's anchors twain,

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That to her moorings hold her? Fresh from these
Who, who could tread, O Wye, thy watery vale
Where Tintern reigns in ruin; who could rest
Where Bolton finds in Wharf a warbling choir,
Or where the sea-wind fans thy brow discrown'd,
Furness, nor love and wonder? Who untouch'd,
When evening creeps from Scawfell toward Black Combe,
Could wander by thy darkly gleaming lakes
Embayed 'mid sylvan garniture and isles
From saint or anchoret named, within the embrace
Of rural mountains green, or sound, scent, touch,
Of kine-besprinkled, soft, partitioned vales,
Almost domestic? Shadow-haunted land!
By Southey's lake Saint Herbert holds his own!
The knightly armour now by Yew-dale's crag
Rings loud no longer: Grasmere's reddening glass
Reflects no more the on-rushing clan: yet still
Thy Saxon Kings, and ever-virgin Queens
Possess thee with a quiet pathos; still,
Like tarnished path forlorn of moon that sets
Over wide-watered moor and marsh, thy Past
A spiritual sceptre, though deposed, extends
From sea to sea—from century-worn St. Bees
To Cuthbert's tomb under those eastern towers
On Durham's bowery steep!

He loved his country:
That love I honoured. Great and strong he called her:
But well I knew that had her greatness waned,
His loved had waxed.

As thus we talk'd the sun
Launched through the hurrying clouds a rainy beam
That smote the hills. My guest exclaimed, ‘Come forth:

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We waste the day! Yon ridge my fancy takes;
Climb we its crest!’ The wolf-hound at our feet,
Our drift divining, bounded sudden on us
In rapture of prospective gratitude.

We passed the offending gate; a plank for bridge,
We passed the offending stream which dashed its spray
Contemptuous on us, proud of liberty.
I laughed; ‘Our passionate Ireland is the stream;
Seven hundred years at will it mocks or chides;
You have not made it turn your English mill!’
We scaled the hills; we pushed through miles of trees
Which, sire and son, had held their own since first
The tall elk trod their ways. Lightning and storm
Had left large wrecks: election wars, not less,
Or hospitalities as fierce, when home
A thousand chiefless clansmen dragged the bride,
Or danced around a cradle,—ah, brave hearts!
Loyal where cause for loyalty was scant!
Vast were those woods and fair; rock, oak, and yew,
Grey, green, and black, in varying measures striking
That three-stringed lyre which charms not ear but eye.
Long climbing, from the woodland we emerged
And paced a rocky neck of pale green pasture,
The limit of two counties. Full in face
Rushed, ocean-scented, the harmonic wind:
Round us the sheep-bells chimed; a shower late past
With jewelry had hung the blackberry bush,
And gorse-brake half in gold. On either side
Thin-skinned, ascetic, slippery, the descent
Down slanted toward the creeping mists. Our goal

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We reached at last—a broad and rocky mass
Forth leaning, lordly, unto lands remote,
The lion's head of all those feebler hills
That cowering slunk behind it. Far around
Low down, subjected, stretched the sea-like waste
Shade-swept, unbounded, like infinity.
An hour before his time the sun had dropped
Behind a mountain-wall of barrier cloud
Wide as the world: but five great beams converged
Toward the invisible seat of his eclipse;
And over many a river, bay, and mere
Lay the dull red of ante-dated eve.

That summit was a churchyard. Cross-engraven
Thronged the close tomb-stones. Each one prayed for peace;
And some were raised by men whose heads were white
Ere selfless toil had won the hoarded coins
That honoured thus a parent. In the midst
A tomb-like chapel, thirty feet by ten,
Stood monumental, with stone roof and walls
The wrestling centuries slid from. Nigh we sat
While, by the polished angle split, the wind
Hissed like a forkèd serpent. Silent long
My friend remain'd; his sallies all had ceased,
A man of tender nerve though stubborn thought.
The scene weighed on him like a Prophet's scroll
Troubling some unjust City. Far and near
He scanned the desolate region, and at last
Prayed me the hieroglyphic to expound.
‘Yon tower which blurs the lonely lake far off,
What is it?’ And I answered, ‘Know you not?
He built it, he that Norman horsed and mailed,

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Who, strong in Henry's might and Adrian's bull,
Rent from the Gaelic monarch half his realm;—
The rest came later, dowry of the bride.’

Once more he mused; then, westward pointing, spake:
‘Yon lovely hills, yet low, with Phidian line,
That melt into the horizon:—on their curve
A ruined castle stands; the sky glares through it,
Red, like a conflagration?’ I replied:
‘Four hundred years the Norman held his own:
He spake the people's language; they in turn
His war-cry had resounded far and wide;
Their history he had grown, impersonate.
The land rejoiced in him, and of his greatness
Uplifted, glorying, on a neck high held
The beautiful burden, as the wild stag lifts
O'er rocky Torc his antlers! Would you more?
The Desmond was unloved beside the Thames;
The right of the great Palatine was trampled;
His Faith by law proscribed. O'er tombs defaced,
In old Askeaton's Abbey, of his sires
He vowed unwilling war. Long years the realm
Reel'd like a drunken man. Behold the end!
Yon wreck speaks all!’

Thus question after question
Dragged, maimed and mangled, dragged reluctant forth
Time's dread confession! Crime replied to crime:
Whom Tudor planted Cromwell rooted out;
For Charles they fought;—to fight for Kings, their spoilers,
The rebel named rebellion! William next!

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Once more the Nobles were down hurled; once more
Nobility as in commission placed
By God among the lowly. Loyalty
To native Princes, or to Norman chiefs
Their lawless conquerors, or to British Kings,
Or her the Mother Church that ne'er betrayed,
Had met the same reward. The legend spake
Words few but plain, grim rubric traced in blood;
While, like a Fury fleeting through the air,
History from all the octaves of her lyre
Struck but one note! What rifted tower and keep
Witnessed of tyrannous and relentless wars,
That shipless gulfs, that bridgeless streams and moors,
Black as if lightning-scarred, or curst of God,
Proclaimed of laws blacker than brand or blight—
Those Penal Laws. The tale was none of mine;
Stone railed at stone; grey ruins dumbly frowned
Defiance, and the ruin-handled blast
Scattered the fragments of Cassandra's curse
From the far mountains to the tombs close by,
Which muttered treason.

That sad scene to me
Had lost by use its pathos as the scent
Which thrills us while we pass the garden palls
On one within it tarrying. To my friend
It spake its natural language: and as he
Who, hard through habit, reads with voice unmoved
A ballad that once touched him, if perchance
Some listener weeps, partakes that listener's trouble
Even so the stranger's sorrow struck on mine,
And I believed the things which I beheld,
There sitting silent. When at last he spake

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The spirit of the man in part was changed;
The things but heard of he had seen: the truths
Coldly conceded now he realized:
Justice at last with terrible recoil
Leap'd up full-armed, a strong man after sleep,
And dashed itself against the wrong! I answered:
‘Once more you speak the words you spake this morn,
“Look up, the proof is round you, written large:”
But in an altered sense.’

I spake, and left him:
Left him to seek a tomb which three long years
Holds one I honoured. Half an hour went by;
Then he rejoined me. With a knitted brow,
And clear vindictiveness of speech, like him
Who, loving, hates the sin of whom he loves,
He spake against the men who, having won
By right or wrong the mastery of this isle
(For in our annals he was versed, nor ran
In custom's blinkers save on modern roads),
Could make of it, seven hundred years gone by,
No more than this! Then I: ‘No country loved they:
Her least, the imperial realm! 'Tis late to mourn;
Let past be past.’ ‘The Past,’ he said, ‘is present;
And o'er the Future stretches far a hand
Shadowy and minatory.’ ‘Come what may,’
I said, ‘no suffering can to us be new;
No shadow fail to dew some soul with grace.
The history of a Soul holds in it more
Than doth a Nation's! In its every chance
Eternity lies hid; from every step
Branch forth two paths piercing infinity.
These things look noblest from their spiritual side:

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A statesman, on the secular side you see them,
And doubt a future based on such a past.
'Tis true, with wrong dies not the effect of wrong,
Or sense thereof: 'tis true stern Power with time
Changes its modes, not instinct: true it is
That hollow peace is war that wears a mask:
Yet let us quell to-day unquiet thoughts:
She rests who lies in yonder tomb: sore pains
She suffered: yet within her there was peace:
In God's high Will she rests, and why not we?’

Thus we conversed till twilight, thickening, crept
Compassionate, o'er a scene to which we said
Twilight seemed native, day a garish vest
Worn by a slave. Returning, oft my friend
Cast loose in wrath the arch-rebel Truth; I answered:
‘She rests, and why not we? O suffering land!
Thee, too, God shields; and only for this cause
Can they that love thee sleep.’—
Holy were all as she, the wrongs long past
Would rack our age no longer: for that cause
The blinder they who mock her country's Faith.
Thousands are like her! Ireland's undergrowths—
Her hope is there, and not in cloud or sunshine
That beat her mountain-tops. The maiden's tale
He sought with instance. 'Twas not marvellous,
I told him: yet to calm his thoughts perturbed,
Thus, while the broad moon o'er the lonely moor
Rose, blanching as she soared, till pools, at first
With trembling light o'erlaid, gave back her face,
And all the woodland waves as eve advanced
Shone bright o'er sombre hollows, I recounted
The fragments of a noteless Irish life,

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Not strange esteemed among us. Such a theme
I sought not. Ill it were to forge for friend
A providence, or snare him though to Truth.
Yet I was pleased he sought that tale. 'Twas sad
But in its dusky glass—and this I hid not—
Shadowed a phantom image of my country,
Vanquished yet victor, in her weal and woe.

University of Virginia Library