The Collected Poems of Lord De Tabley :: :: University of Virginia Library

And the gray King strode fiercely from the board,
And wrench'd away and trampled on his crown:
But she, the princess, arm'd his neck and clung
With quivering lips and dreamy staring eyes.
And down the board the level feasters, each

And all, one impulse, rose like that long wave
When tide-flood takes a river. Vassal peers
Enring'd their muttering knots; but, midmost, knelt
A knight who bled between his shattered mails.

He, reeling from his saddle, sick and blind,
Scared thro' the courts with missive, blank as death—
Had burst their feast like Pestilence, and cried
Their frontier army broken, back and edge,
In ambush: all its bravest mown away:
And, woe the while, their prince—the rumour gave
Lost in the trammell'd tangle of the slain,
Or wounded—yet unfound—but likelier slain.

So all that night the gray King and his child
Clomb a high chamber o'er the woods, and watch'd
That way their army went by mountains based
In shelves of ilex—went, but when should come?
And, ere heaven's stubborn bar and sable screen
Crumbled in purple chains of sailing shower
And bared the captive morning in her cell,—
Their lean hope wasted on the watchers' eyes
And fleeted from the impenetrable mask
Dead, as the new light lingered.

That wan king
Leant to each palm a hoary cheek, and sate,
His owl-white hairs shed out, his reedy beard
Held what he wept and thro' its woof each moan
Trembled in vapour, and his lids were set.
But she, an eloquent presence of despair,
Drew, regal, all her height: her lordly eyes,
Robed in the morning that she sought in vain
Beyond the casement, rested on the void
Gazing thro' distance: horn and hoof were dumb
Between the sightless woods, but darkness held
Blind as her soul was darkened.

Last, she turned
And found the old King moaning in a trance,
Not wholly wakeful, drowsy in his pain,
Mowing and whispering; and she said,

“My Liege,
I cannot taste thin morning from the downs.
A grieving wind is on the troubled cloud,
But here it comes not thro' the woolly mist.
A false red dawn hath yonder ridge bestrid
To cheat the midnight of her dotard hours:

Watch'd morning loiters from the watchers' eyes.
No throbbing clarion melts against the wall
Of this cool dark: the gray night round is dumb,
And ear and eyeball tingle with the strain
Of void and silence: from the inmost heart
Of woodland fails all motion: calm the hills
As flaky tossings frozen in nebulous seas.
I will not cheat thy comfort that they come.”

She shook her accents from her as she stood
With raised and lucent elbows; here declined
Her rich and languid head against her palms;
Tight fingers counter-knit behind the black
And banded hair, convulsive in their close,
So strained it in her passion and her pain.
Not less the wild expectance in her eyes
Refrained their tears, as mute the smooth pure lips
Tighten'd in restless workings on the pearl,
Barrier of their lost music.

So they twain
Spake nothing, yet in gloom the old King's eyes
Glitter'd with beaded anguish, for his age
Was as an infant's with an honest face
Denying not its weakness: and the nails
Of his lean fingers grated on his robe
Crackling the furry velvets, fold on fold,
And his vein'd wrists were palsied as they strove
Among the foldings, till his voice came low
As a weak wind is scared and faint among
The heavy clusters of primeval woods,
And crisps but never lifts them till the rain
Utterly stamp it dead,—

“Dissolve and die,
My withered brain: the tide is set; the dust
Is on my temples. Empire of dumb Sleep,
Thine I am owed and thine I come. The change
Is terrorless, my rule a crumbled dream.
Look in my face, O daughter, search it well,
I live to speak a blind and horrible word,
Ay so, as you to hear it: lo! 'tis said—
He will return no more and yet no more!
Why so it is, the silent hand takes all.
There is no mercy that the flower is fair
But speedier scythes of ambush. What revenge
Is there against the inevitable? Lift
Thy prophet eyes, usurp the right to see

Harvest of curses on the harmless dead,
The vermin dregs of war's encrimson'd cup
Spilling confusions on our wholesome land—
All in this bitter word ‘my son is dead!’”
She moved not as he ended in her calm,
She would not weep, she could not comfort him,
But at her eyes the chamber spun, and fierce,
Fierce as a scathe, the wrestle at her heart
Tightens and throbs, or subtler shudders rive
The disunited, desolated hands
Listless of use and nervelessly disspread;
At length she labour'd tremulous reply,
Passionate answer, and her lips were pale.

“Die not, great heart, unfinish'd ere thy noon,
Fail not, firm star of glory, from thy seat
Aerial, rapt above our shallow dreams.
So many barren things grow fat and thrive
And taste no evil all their barren days,
That this, our love, can never quench so soon,
Whose course was on the shoreless seas of fame,
His wake one tremulous glory, and full stars
Leapt in the rolling amber at his prow.
Die and we die: our breath is nothing worth;
We are but shadows moving in Thy will,
Thine intercepted radiance makes us be.
The empire of thy worship is not dead,
But prospers growing rich in fruit and sign.”

And now the broad and sunless vapour-downs
Shook their sloped limbs from coiling haze: behind
From cloud to cloud the purple caught, one star
Crept to the void before it: ragged lights
Struck in the crowded peaks and cloudy zones,
And then the full round splendour of the day.

Till there was warning mutter'd thro' the stems
Of storied pines, and trailing drips of yews,
Drench'd moistures of all fragrance, where the sound
Clung deadened as it leapt from armed feet.
They heard it and they started with fierce eyes
Father and maiden as irresolute,
Wearily, scared to face the thing they knew.
Wail was there none, and barely any moan;
They on each other gazed, touch'd hands, and went
With pause from stair to stair on shivering limbs,

And, issuing thro' the column'd archway, stood,
Pale in great light and paler from its power.
Then from the leaves there wended shield and helm:
It seemed the flower of knights with some great wrong
Concluded, for no power was in their tread;
But they crept on like walkers from their sleep,
Staring and thronging, knot by knot, they came:
And in the midmost core of that dumb band
A something propt in slumber on a bier,
Or, slumber's sequel, death; where paced besides
Sorrowful lords in frequence with fixt gaze
Sward-rooted, shapes of still dismay; not all
The crowded twitters of the tender year,
The moving vapour lights, the tremulous sheaths
Of ardent petals, the glazed under-shades,
The free divine excess of such a morn,
Could lift one careless eyelid, or give pulse
And burnish to their miserable brows.

Fast by the portals of that ancient pile
They laid their burden down, and bared the face
And bared the breast-plate where the spear-head lay
Broken, the turncheon on an inch of stave.
But all the face seem'd noble, for the Knight
Lay with the shadow of an earthly smile
Between his severed lips; the high brow calm,
And passing calm the frozen cheek of death.

Then the old King cried out and turn'd and sank,
Prone reeling all his bulk across the bier,
And wildly finger'd at the dead man's wound,
Or cherish'd, vainly pleading, the limp hands:
Moaning and whispering out his soul; and fast
His moving pupils wandered in a gloom
Of eyebrow: Then he bow'd himself and ceased,
Stifled in silence with his wrinkled face
And craving touch yet stedfast on the dead.

But she his daughter in her glistering hair
Moved up and dropt no tears and made to speak,
Bound in the calm that shows excessive pain
Most awful, and her accents faltered not:

“Come ye thus laden from the shock of spears,
Mute faces once heroic, and moist eyes

That coped with fame in the fierce sun and glare
Of danger blenching nothing. Is this all
Ye warrior hands to bring me? Some far time
Shall chronicle upon you full dispraise
Deep, bitter, unforgotten in this word—
‘These came unwounded home, but brought their Lord
Dead, and forgot due vengeance for the slain.’
Ye are angry now: 'tis something; I would hurl
Your recreant footsteps to old fields, and tear
The victory from the victors, as Remorse
Should stand a flaming demon in your rear
Flame-sworded, barring off retreat, till blood
Be paid in kind, and this perpetual shame
Transfigured to a trophied sign, which bays
And myrtle wreath for ever.

I have said
My bitterness: forgive me. Ye are brave:
Your vengeance will not loiter, is most sure.
This is my grief that speaks, and not my heart.”

“And now, O brother, thou that hearest not
What love I murmur o'er thee, nor the lips
Which tell it, but, if thou couldst hear, no sense
Could word my inmost sorrow: chilly sleep
Hath bound thee as the lichen clasps the rock;
Desolate sleep that holds us from the lips
We most desire; the long hour fades the tree,
But hard when cruel April plays the game
Of autumn in the tender starry green.
Brother, the full deep look of love is thine,
Clouding, and, ere it cloud, the tranquil flower
Shall move above thee to the sun, and cup
Mirrors of dew, and roof about thy head
With whispering undulation. We remain
For lonely winters and our hearth is bare;
And homeless home is strangered with a shade,
That moves us weeping from familiar doors.

“Pale brow, pale hand, and sweet unlustrous eyes,
Farewell: hereafter, when this memory lives
How once you were, be gentle, my great grief,
Upon the retrospect, let me endure
To tell new days some dwarfish chronicle
Of thy triumphal honour, and hold bright
The burnish of thy deeds in alien times.

Now, once his comrades, raise this fallen length
Of all we loved, your leader, ere it fade.
And thou, old King, have comfort and arise,
Or feign some mock of comfort till this grave
Close in with rite and ritual of the dead,
Then—then weep out your measure, frail old eyes.”

She said, and raised her trembling father; they
Bent to their burden with no voice and feet
Of solemn pacing, two on two they wound
Thro' that domed archway, till the place was void
And very still, save when a hoarse black bell
Croak'd out a raven requiem on the slain.