The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Becket, Herbert of Bosham, Llewellen, abbot and monks.
Bec.
Praise be to God, and praise to her, His daughter,
This abbey chaste and kind of Pontigny,
That washed the wanderer's weary feet, and found
A country for the exile! Reverend abbot,
I longed for this immersed in secular cares,
I longed for this throned on Augustine's seat,
A still retreat for penitence and prayer,
A quiet cell for books and meditation:
These things are mine.

Abbot.
My lord, your holy joy
To us is both a kindling and a warning:
Our life is hard; you teach us hardest life
Should be the sweetest. Heavenly is our hope;
Your joy reminds us heaven is round us ever,
Had we but faith to feel it. O my lord!
God grant that custom harden not in you
That sense to-day so tender; for, the edge
Of spiritual sensibilities made blunt,
Our spiritual world becomes a leaf frost-curled;

226

Not all the songs of angel hosts can charm us;
We starve 'mid manna showers.

Bec.
I have put aside
The canon law, and study lore dogmatic:
It better feeds the soul. I see once more
Paris, that holy city!

Abbot.
Once 'twas holy.

Bec.
My mother, when I went to Paris first,
A slender scholar bound on quest of learning,
Girdling my gown collegiate, wept full sore;
Then laid on me this hest;—both early and late
To love Christ's Mother and the poor of Christ,
That so her prayer in heaven and theirs on earth
Beside me moving as I walked its streets,
Might shield me from its sins.

Abbot.
Men say your mother
Loved the poor well, and still on festivals,
Laying her growing babe in counter-scale,
Heaped up an equal weight of clothes and food,
Which unto them she gave.

Bec.
She trained my sister
To live an angel on the earth. Lo, there!
The red morn widens through the falling snows,
And the storm rocks your towers! What then? The spring
Once more will come and wake that earliest flower
Whose white is purer for its rim of green;
The thrush will sing again.

Her.
Your sycamore,
Large-leaved, once more will roof you as you read
Those psalms that shook the Solomonian Temple,
The Apostolic letters which made glad
The young and foe-girt churches of the Lord,
And, dearer yet, the Gospels whose warm lips

227

Still kiss the Saviour's footsteps as He moves
O'er earth.

Bec.
And learn at last to be a Christian!

Monk
(entering).
The Holy Father
Has sent that promised habit to his Grace,
Likewise these letters.

Llew.
By Saint David, good!
The hood is filled with snow! The Pope knows well
Some heads are hot!

Bec.
I kiss this habit's edge;—
Herbert, what say the letters?

Her.
(reading).
‘At one blow
King Henry confiscates the primate's goods,
Farms, manors, castles, rents.’

Bec.
Now God be praised!

Her.
(reading).
‘His name is blotted from the service-books;
Lastly, his friends are banished, kith and kin,
The old, the young, the cleric and the lay,
Widows and babes in arms, four hundred all;
His sister, sickness-worn; the nun Idonea;—
This day they plough the bleak, snow-blinded sea,
Oath-bound to bear their wail beneath the gates
Of him their exile's cause, so named.’

Monk.
Hark! hark!

Another Monk
(rushing in).
A famished English host is wailing round us!
They beat the gates; they swarm into the courts;
They bear with them a woman three hours dead,
Demand my lord the primate.

University of Virginia Library

Scene IV.—A room in the Abbey of Pontigny.