By Severn Sea and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

BY SEVERN SEA

The rolling moorland russet-dun
With all its gold and purple bloom
Made fragrant by the summer sun,
Climbs from the softly-curving combe
Above dark wood and whitening lea
And orchard green by Severn Sea;

A noble flood, more proudly wide,
From our dear island's mother breast
Pours none, nor swirls a fuller tide
To barter with the boundless West
For many a costly argosy
Than this broad stream of Severn Sea.

A dateless gulf whose wave of old
Yet fervent from the central flame,
By tropic jungle steaming rolled,
Or foamed around the monstrous frame
Of flying, creeping, swimming things
With serpent gorge and dragon wings;

Lands that a mystic glamour fills,
The after-glow of sunken stars,
Where the old tongues murmur to the hills
Dead loves, dead hates, forgotten wars,
And Arthur's phantom glories haunt
The shadowy scene of high romaunt.

What life, what death of brute and man
Have scarred your earth and stained your wave,
Where pirate horde and robber clan
Have reared and ravaged home and grave,
And gorgeous wrecks of stately Spain
Mix with the bones of Celt and Dane!

Now all is peace from shore to shore,
Mourns Avalon in ruined state
Beneath her silent-watching tor,
And holy Cleeve thy sculptured gate
Sees but the glittering runnel pass
Beside thy cloister-guarded grass;

While towered hall and castle stand,
Their ancient wont and fashion yet

Unchanged, as if some fairy hand
'Mid their green oaks of Somerset
Had lulled them to such drowsihood
As chained erewhile the Slumbering Wood,

So sleep they, only through their dream
At times the merry bugles wind,
When hound and horse and horseman gleam
By ferny haunts of hart and hind,
And pride of olden venerie
The antlered stag goes wildly free.

Nought hear they else, but from its well
Deep in the dim heart of the glen
The secret stream from dell to dell
Rustling by ways apart from men,
Till in some cool and shadowed cave
It wed the quiet-waiting wave.

O charmèd realm, O storied scene,
What echoes whisper on your tide,
What memories mingle with your sheen,
Of lives that here have breathed and died,

Of lips whose unforgotten lays
Made beauty lovelier by their praise!

Here sojourned erst the lyric three,
Whose wandering made a classic ground
From Quantoxhead to Dunkery,
Where they by height or hollow found
Fountains that carol for all time
In tune to their own deathless rhyme;

And here that nearer dearer tongue
Mourned his dead friend and sang the dirge—
More sadly sweet was never sung—
Of him who on your murmurous verge
Wind-wafted from Italian land
Hath rest by his own Severn strand.

Ah western winds and waters mild!
Others your vaporous languors chide;
They have not loved you from a child,
Nor grown to strength your shore beside.
Ye speak of youth and hope to me,
Ye airs, ye floods of Severn Sea!

For I was native to your mood
And apt to take your influence,
To muse and pause, to pore and brood,
To doubt the shows and shapes of sense,
To dream how not to dream away
The long large hours of boyhood's day.

And when high noon on many a sail
Was bright along the brimming flow,
Or when the westering sun must fail
Blood-red, and from the shifting glow
Of lilac-citron skies the queen
That sways your motion glimmered green,

One lesson still my spirit learned
From flood and daylight fleeting past,
And from its own strange self that yearned
Like them to lapse into the vast,
And merge and end its vague unrest
In some wide ocean of the West;

Ere we can find true peace again,
Our being must have second birth,

Purged and made one through joy and pain
With Him Who rules and rounds the earth,
Beyond the dark, behind the light,
In mystery of the Infinite.

And we like rivers from their source
Through cloud and shine, by deep or shoal,
Must follow that which draws our course,
The Love that is its guide and goal;
Of life, of death, ye made me free,
Waters and hills of Severn Sea!

Minehead: August, 1892.