 | The Works of Thomas Love Peacock |  |
SONG OF THE WIND.
Bring whispers from the shores they sweep;
Voices of feast and revelry;
Murmurs of forests and the deep;
Low sounds of torrents from the steep
Descending on the flooded vale;
And tumults from the leaguered keep,
Where foes the dizzy rampart scale.
Are borne to gifted ears alone;
For them it ranges unconfined,
And speaks in accents of its own.
It tells me of Deheubarth's throne;
The spider weaves not in its shield:
And Nonnus, whom no poetical image escaped: (Dionysiaca, L. xxxviii.)
Βακχιας εξαετηρος αραχνιοωσα βοειη.
And Beaumont and Fletcher, in the Wife for a Month:
“Would'st thou live so long, till thy sword hung by,And lazy spiders filled the hilt with cobwebs?”
A Persian poet says, describing ruins:
“The spider spreads the veil in the palace of the Cæsars.”And among the most felicitous uses of this emblem, must never be forgotten Hogarth's cobweb over the lid of the charity-box.
Already from its towers is blownThe blast that bids the spoiler yield.
When the young lion quits his lair:
Sharp sword, strong shield, stout arm, should tend
On spirits that unjustly dare.
To me the wandering breezes bear
The war-blast from Caer Lleon's brow;
The avenging storm is brooding there
To which Diganwy's towers shall bow.
This poem has little or nothing of Taliesin's Canu y Gwynt, with the exception of the title. That poem is apparently a fragment; and, as it now stands, is an incoherent and scarcely-intelligible rhapsody. It contains no distinct or explicit idea, except the proposition that it is an unsafe booty to carry off fat kine, which may be easily conceded in a case where nimbleness of heel, both in man and beast, must have been of great importance. The idea from which, if from any thing in the existing portion of the poem, it takes its name, that the whispers of the wind bring rumours of war from Deheubarth, is rather implied than expressed.
| The Works of Thomas Love Peacock | |