University of Virginia Library

Seven days and nights the Queen sat by the couch
With cooling cup and pillow-smoothing hand,
And propped the wild and matted head that throbbed
With fiery veins. In watches of the night
She weeping heard, like some clock out of gear
Striking strange hours, the cool and temperate lips
Rave of a battle lost and hasty flight,
And of a hate that chased him o'er the land,
And of a stone without a traitor's gate,
And of a spirit that did prophesy
Of ruined thrones rebuilt and deaths of kings,
And of a promised something yet to come
With universal change. The wasteful sea
Of ancient sorrow which was pushed far back
By dyke and laboured mole, till but a sound
Haunted with grief the shores of happiness,
Broke down its barriers, drowning cot and town,
Tillage and blossomed wood, until the caves
Which summer had o'erspread with leaf and bloom,
And all the old sea margins heard again
The wild waves welter and the sea-birds cry.
Seven days and nights the Queen sat by his couch
The while her tears and kisses were unknown.
The lords, who were to him right hand and left,
On whom he built as on the solid ground,
Were strangers; and the people thronged the doors
Devouring every morsel of the news
Brought from the sick room where the King was laid,
For they were helpless as a town whose walls
Have fallen when the foe is in the field.
On the eighth night he fell in slumber deep,
And Donegild and Bertha o'er him hung,
For he lay moveless as the sea at full
Ere the tide 'gins to turn; and, when he woke
He knew the tear-wet faces and the lips
And pressing hands; and slowly glimmered back,
Like something coming out of racking mist,
The man who cried for justice, and the blow,
And then the sharp pain of his unhealed wound.
Each day thereafter like a fairy brought
The King some gift of health, some red to cheek,
Some lustre to the eye. When passed a week
And, gathering strength he lay within the hall,
The Queen upon a low stool at his feet
Played with his wasted hand, far dearer now,
In that it had been neighbour unto death,
Than when 'twas her's upon her marriage morn,
And in the childishness of her delight
She covered it with kisses. Then the hand,
Warm with the loving roses of her lips,
Slipped from her grasp, and in love's silence stroked
Bright golden hair and happy cheek that leaned—
And, as she spake she smiled at the caress.
“Husband, within the palace of thy heart
I have free range of audience hall, and room
Where people throng, or where thou sitt'st alone
Holding a thoughtful session in thy soul,
Whither each deed is summoned. Well I know
Each door is wide. But tell me, is there not
Some little private closet in the place
For which I have no key? Is there not one?
A little one? When that dark visitress,
Delirium, through the silent chamber stalked
The sad and sovereign mistress for the time,
She left a door ajar, where horror lay
And perturbation, and a fear that looks
And listens for calamity that moves
Somewhere within the future with no shape.
What spirit was it that did speak with thee?
And what will on a sudden step from air,
To change the world?” Thereat the sick King's hand
Stayed on the hair and on the nestling cheek,
And Bertha's heart beat thick before he spoke.
“I would, my Bertha, thou hadst never known,
Or that the knowledge and the thing had come
Together. That were better far. For oft
When on me blows the cold foreboding wind,
The clearness of my spirit is made gross
By its own sands. For long my mood of mind
Is that of one on expectation's edge,
Who, having heard a herald's trumpet blow,
Doth wait for what 'tis blown for. Seated once,
Years bygone now, without thy father's gate,
At midnight a strange man stood at my feet
And told me that in battle huge and wide
King Ethelbert would fall with all his lords,
That I should call thee wife, and that my throne
Would be rebuilt, that I should teachers have
Who knew the secrets in the hand of death,
That once more he would come,—and then like mist
He melted, and again I sat alone.
King Ethelbert and all his nobles fell;
Thou art the truest wife that ever breathed
Or shared the joys and sorrows of a man;
My throne is 'stablished, and a little hand
Is growing for my sceptre when it falls,
Be that day soon or late. But where are they,
The teachers? And the apparitional man,
When will he reappear? I cannot doubt
The end will prove as the beginning, true.
No Summer ever yet did midway pause
And without wheaten sheaf return to Spring.
Who knows, it may be that this same Lord Christ
Of whom thou heard'st, this Christ that seems to break
O'er me like a strange dawn, within whose light
The world takes other hues, may have to do
With that for which I wait.” And then the Queen,
With a poor trembling cheer upon her lips
Upbubbling through her blank astonishment,
“Ah, husband, husband! though our lives are wrapt
Within a cloud of wonder, do not fear;
The voice hath only half fulfilled itself;
Good hath its half fulfilment been; much good
For us is on the way.” And, as she leaned
Her head against his side, she hardly felt
The gaunt hand wandering over hair and cheek.

But ere King Edwin's bitter hurt was whole
He hungered for the whirr of windy mills
And din of carpenters among the ships.
While chained with weakness to a painful couch
It irked him to be like a mossing stone
Within the hearing of the running stream.
Cooped up, his thirst for noble action towered
At times unto the captured lion's mood,
When all his waste of burning sand and sky
Shrinks to a twilight den, which his disdain
Can measure at a stride. Once, as he lay
Stretched weak in hall, there came a hasty man,
Astonishment depictured on his face,
And told the King a ship lay on the sands,
And from it issued strange and foreign men.
Unknowing what the strangers might portend,
Straightway he rose from couch and sat on steed,
Gaunt, fever-wasted, pale with conquered pain;
And, as he rode adown the narrow street,
His lords behind, he broke the silent air
To murmured blessings, for at unwonted sound
Of hoofs, each window was with faces crammed;
The black-browed armourer on the anvil left
His hammer, and stood gazing from the door,
The woman held her child up as he passed,
The beggar's hand forgot to stretch for alms,
The girl laid down her pitcher. With an eye
That softened, slowly through the town he rode,
And, slowly issuing from the gate, he spurred
Along a rude sea bank of mounded sand
'Gainst which the universal glitter flowed,
With a sharp face that reddened in the wind.
But ere the foam was churning on the bit,
He saw a crowd of people sea-ward look,
As at some strange thing happening on the earth:
And, riding down upon a yellow bay,
From which the unseen moon had drawn the tide,
He drew the rein with wonder. In the bright
Fringe of the living sea that came and went
Tapping its planks, a great ship sideways lay,
And o'er the sands a grave procession paced
Melodious with many a chaunting voice.
Nor spear nor buckler had these foreign men;
Each wore a snowy robe that downward flowed;
Fair in their front a silver cross they bore;
A painted Saviour floated in the wind;
The chaunting voices, as they rose and fell,
Hallowed the rude sea-air. On these the King
Stared wonder-stricken—marble horse and man
Not more bereft of motion. All the lords
Sat silent and wide-eyed. The foremost man,
Who seemed the leader of the white-robed train,
Unbent, although his beard was white as snow,
And the veins branched along his withered hands,
Spake, while to Edwin he obeisance made.
“To thee, who bear'st the likeness of a king,
Tis fit that I should speak, that thou may'st know
What is the business of thy servants here.
We come to traffic not in horse or man,
Corn, wine, or oil; nor yet to gather gold,
Nor to win cities by the force of arms.
O King! we came across the dangerous seas
To win thee and thy people from the gods
Who cannot hear a cry or answer prayer,
Unto the worship of the heavenly Christ,
Of whom thou art the eldest son of all
That in this nation dwell. We are unarmed;
'Tis in thy power to strike us through with spears,
To stake us in the pathway of the tide,
To burn us in the fire. Within thy hands
Thou hast our lives. But yet we trust in Christ,
From whose pure hand each king derives his crown,
And in whose keeping are the heavenly worlds,
No harm shall us befall. We bring thee Christ—
The Christ before whose coming devils flee,
Idolatrous fires burn low, and horrid drums,
Beaten to drown the shrieks of sacrifice,
Are covered o'er with silence.”

Then the King
Stirred from his marble trance, and colour flashed
Across his face, as something in his soul
Murmured, like a reverberating cliff,
The apparition's words without the gate
Of Redwald on the night he sat alone;
But straightway he possessed himself and spake:

“Within my realm no harm shall thee befall;
And as thou hast into my kingdom come
So far, and art desirous to make known
Thy spirit's dear inheritance of truth,
Or what thou deem'st its dear inheritance,
Thou shalt have sustenance within my towns,
And lodgement as is fit. Nay, more than this—
To-morrow, here, beneath the open sky,
Where magical arts are powerless, will I bring
In council all my lords, and ancient men
Who have inherited wisdom with their snows,
To give thee patient hearing. For myself,
Although not minded to desert the gods
My fathers followed, and beneath whose sway
The happy seasons still have come and gone,
I keep an open door for thoughts and men
That wear strange clothes and speak with foreign tongues;
Such hospitality befits a King.”

Thereat the King and all the knights returned:
Them the procession followed, with the folk
Dispread on either side in cloudy wings;
And when the priests, the cross before them borne,
Beheld the city in the yellow light,
And all the King's train riding to the gate,
Sudden a choir of silver voices rose:—
“Lord Christ, we do beseech Thee in Thy grace,
Let not Thine anger 'gainst this city burn,
Nor 'gainst Thy holy house, for we have sinned!”
And so they sang until the gate was reached.
There, like a stream, that fretting on a stone
Is on itself pushed back, the tumult grew;
At last, from out the struggle and the press,
Adown the street the white procession flowed,
And, like a rookery that starts on wing,
And hangs a noisy blackness in the air,
The town was uproar, till a courteous knight
Sent by the King, into a dwelling wide,
Right opposite the palace, brought the priests,
And closed great doors upon a crowd close pressed
And jammed like wethers in a fold. And then
As the tumultuous rookery that wheels
Above its ancient trees, subsides at last,
Each bird beside its nest upon the bough,
And caws itself to silence, all the mass
Dense wedged, split like an ice-floe in a thaw,
Then gathered into clumps of twos and threes,
And, ere the evening, from the street withdrew
To babble of the wonder by the fire.

And, when the town had brawled itself to rest,
Edwin went privately unto the priests
To further learn of Christ, and stayed a space.
Then he came back and sat beside the Queen,
And talked of all the wonders of the day;
But, with a mind confused, and blurred by doubt,
And indistinct, as in dim-weeping dawns
When wreaths of mist are stretched from tree to tree,
The landscape which a man knows as himself!
And, when she like a star had set, he turned
The matter o'er and o'er within his mind,
And broke out with a touch of fretfulness,
For his deep wound twinged sharply. “If 'twere but
The building of a city, or a ship,
Defence of threatened frontier, anything
That may be compassed by apparent means,
And, being compassed, brings apparent good!
This Christ has ne'er been seen by living eye,
His voice has ne'er been heard by living ear,
And if beneath his banner I enlist,
Service life long, obedience absolute,
Strict abstinence from all ambitious thoughts,
Stern curbing of the war-horse in the heart,
Are needed; and long years of purity,
That shame the honour of a knight, that shame
The nobleness of kings. War is forbid;
I must forgive the man that injures me.
What if, when I am on a death-bed laid,
Hoary with painful years, no Christ should be?
I have my spirit tortured for a dream;
The man who wrongs me insolently laughs;
And unenlarged my kingdom for my son;
And unembalmed by victories, my name
Will perish like a nothing from the earth,
Unrescued by a harpstring. Could I place
This Christ within the temple of the gods?
One must be right! But then this man brings Christ
To save me from the worship of the gods,
To smite in dust their shrines. Divinities
Are jealous of divinities. They may
Forgive the worshipper; they ne'er forgive
The proud thing praised and worshipped. It is kill,
Kill, kill, and overturn!” So thus and thus
From divers points the King's mind blew until
The lamp was fading, and forgetful sleep
Hung on the weary eyelid. Then he rose,
Stepped to his boy and kissed him, as he lay,
Round, rosy cheeked, beneath a cloud of curls;
And sought his couch until the early dawn.

But till the dawn he slumbered not, for—like
A rude petitioner that presses suit
In the market-place, and, urgent, dogs the heel
Of him, whose word is grace, to audience hall
And thence to private chamber—yet unlaid
By an irrevocable yea or nay,
The thing pursued him to his couch, unchanged,
Confronted him in dream. So, when the town
Was growing white with dawn, the King, to 'scape
The tyranny of thought that made him toss
From deep to deeper fever, and suborned
Against his peace the motions of the blood
That beat and surged against his ear, arose
And clothed himself and hasted out to bathe
In cool grey light soft flowing from the east,
Scented with dewy woods, and in its heart
The chirrupings of newly wakened birds.
Dawn struck on fevered forehead, and on eyes
Reddened with watching, as he paused to look
Upon the glimmering city, stretching out
In slumber's silent trustfulness; no sound—
The white light pouring down on wall and roof,
The secure raven flying low—that lit,
And from the temple croaked. “Ah little town,
Round which I am a wall, which I have fed
As tenderly as e'er a parent bird
Its nest of callow young, which I have kept
As shepherd keeps his sheep—the thing I do,
The way I turn in this grave matter scoops
A channel for thy flow to good or ill.
This thing, though clamant, is ungraspable,
Bodiless, airy, and transacts itself
In spiritual regions all unbreathed,
And strange, as is a new-created world
Unprinted by a foot. I am a staff
Placed upright on the ground, and have no power
To fall this way or that, but fall I must,
And by the way I fall shall Deira grow.
Unwise, irresolute, it is my doom
To lift on high my voice, and at my voice
A future with an unimagined face
Will break on thee and me.” Thereat the King,
(As on the night he sat without the gate)
With unknown terror shook from head to heel,
And lo, there stood within a lane of dawn
A folded shape that, slow advancing, laid
A hand upon his head, and at the sign
So well remembered, waited for through years
With a desire that called it, and again
With blood chill-streaming and a cowering heart,
Edwin fell on his knees, and then the Shape—
“Kneel not to me, but to the heavenly Christ!
Have not the things I promised come to pass?
Have I not sent Paulinus as I said?
To his instructions give attentive ear,
And bring thy people also unto him,
That Christ may be the Lord of all. And know
This fertile island in the narrow seas
Parcelled in seven states that fret and fume
Fiercely against each other, shall grow one,
And a far distant son of thine shall sit
Within its capital city high enthroned,
The crown upon his head. The crown from Christ
He will receive on coronation day.
The kingdoms and the nations of the earth
Are tools with which Christ works; and many He
Hath broken, for the metal faithless proved;
And many He hath thrown aside to rust
In a neglected corner; many worn
With noble service into nothingness:
This England, when 'tis tempered to His need,
Will be His instrument to shape the world
For many a thousand years. O mighty Prince,
Within the East is born a day of days,
For Christ this day will to thy kingdom come
And seek therein to dwell. Be faithful thou,
That faithfulness may live from king to king.”
At this a ray smote Edwin on the face,
Each dew-drop twinkled gem-like on the thorn,
And with wet wing from out the fields behind
A lark rose singing, and when Edwin looked
He was alone with sunrise on the hills.

The town that morning was all ear and eye,
There was no sound of shipwrights on the beach,
The wind twirled empty mills, the armourer's fire
No bellows blew to crimson. Like a stream
On which frost lays his hand, all work stood still.
The child looked up into its father's face,
And, seeing what it could not understand,
Sat still and played not. As the morn drew on,
A voice, the clatter of a passing hoof,
Crammed every door with faces. Then the folk
Gathered in groups to stare upon the house
In which the priests were lodged, and strove to shape,
In ignorant wonder what event was ripe;
And now the stirring palace took the pulse,
And raised the flying rumour which o'er-swept
The crowd, as wind a wheat field. Now one rode
As if in haste adown the narrow street,
One oped a palace window and looked forth,
One tightened girth of steed. Conjecture made
These nothings monstrous as the shade that stalks
Along the shining vapour 'mong the hills
When the red sun is at the herdsman's back.
Then, while the crowd was growing more and more,
The knight went from the palace for the priests:
And then King Edwin and his nobles rode
Adown the street and issued from the gate,
And half the people thither ran; and now
From out the dwelling streamed the holy priests,
With silver cross and Saviour raised in air,
Each clad in snowy vestments, and they sang.
The clear sweet voices and the gleam of white
Drew mothers forth that held their babes to breast,
And tottering children, and infirmest men
That by the fire had sat for many a year
Discoursing querulously of stitch and ache,
Till, like a hay-field reft of all its cocks,
Or like a beach at ebb with yawning caves
Silent and tenantless, the town was left.
Awhile the crowd surged at the narrow gate,
And then it poured upon the ample down
Beyond, where by commandment of the King
They all were seated crescent-wise on grass.
He and his lords and gray-haired counsellors,
Dismounted stood within the tapering rings,
With them the white-robed priests. In front the sea
Stretched leagues of frosted silver; on one side
The temple stood, dark with a passing cloud.

And then the King spake out right clear and loud,
Heard by the multitudes on either side.
“Demons and gods have power beneath our roofs,
But not beneath the azure. Pure soft light
Disarms them, makes them innocent; and so
I've brought my people here to list thy words.
Friends, a strange bird has flown from o'er the sea
Into this air of England. Here it sits,
And here it meditates to build a nest.
'Tis in our power to scare the bird away,
'Tis in our choice to let it build and breed.
What say ye? Shall it go or shall it stay?”

There was a silence for some minutes' space:
At last from out the circle of the priests
Stood Coifi, giant-moulded, bred of priests,
And highest 'neath the gods: and though debarred
The use of spear or steed, his soul was aye
A broad-disked flower at gaze on battle's sun.
He never knew contentment, and his mood
Was stormful, passionate, as the mountain land
Where 'gainst the rocky barrier streams the blast,
Where the red torrent flays the gorge's throat,
The passing sunbeam smites the rainy ledge
Making it wildly shine,—and thus he spake
Fiercely, but with the fierceness curbed and reined.
“O King, consider well what shall be said,
For truly the religion we uphold
Seems to me, barren, virtueless, and dead.
What benefit is there in churlish gods
That take our rolling incense and our prayers
And give us nothing in return? The dogs
That follow at our heels we now and then
Requite with a caress, and throw them bits
From out the very dish on which we sup.
No one of all thy people more than I
Hath worn his knees, but brighter many know
Thy countenance than I; more prosperous
In all their undertakings are than I.
Now if the gods are good for any thing
They would advance their faithful worshipper.
The man that season after season tills
A field that yields no crop, grows tired at last,
Curses its barrenness and lets it stand,
And takes to others; of his mind am I.
Giftless the rich churl's as the beggar's hand:
Whether the gods are churls or beggars, this
I know that they have given nought to me,
Nor do I think their hands will e'er relax;
And so, if these new doctrines promise more,
We should accept them, King, without delay.”

Thus Coifi, visaged like the thunder-cloud
That steeps the crag in lurid purple. Then
Rose Ella hoary with a hundred years,
Who dreamed his life away, afar from men
As glimmering wraiths of twilight in old woods
That into nothing flit from oak to oak
Whene'er comes human footstep; and his smile
Put all in memory of those days in Spring
With sunshine covered, but whose sunniness
Foretells an earlier coming on of tears
Than even gloom itself. “To me,” he said,
“To me, O King, this present life of man
Seems in comparison of unknown time
Like a swift sparrow flying through a room,
Wherein thou sitt'st at supper with thy lords,
A good fire in the midst, while out of doors
In gusty darkness whirls the furious snow
That wall and window blocks. The sparrow flies
In at one door, and by another out,
Brief space of warm and comfortable air
It knows in passing, then it vanishes
Into the gusty dark from whence it came.
The soul like that same sparrow comes and goes;
This life is but a moment's sparrow-flight
Between the two unknowns of birth and death:
An arrow's passage from an unknown bow
Toward an unknown bourne. O King, I have
This matter meditated all my days,
And questioned death, but with no more effect
Than if I shouted 'gainst a stormy wind
And had my words dashed back in my own face.
If therefore these new doctrines bring me light,
All things I would renounce to follow them.”

He ceased: then at a signal from the King,
The gray Paulinus in his robe of white
In front of all his white-robed followers
Upraised a hushing hand, and all was still.
“Fair island people, blue-eyed, golden-haired,
That dwell within a green delicious land
With noble cities as with jewels set—
A land all shadowed by full-acorned woods,
Refreshed and beautified by stately streams—
We heard this island with its climate pure
Was given o'er to heathen deities:
That these were worshipped with the bended knee,
Unholy fire, and smoke of sacrifice.
And we are come to smite the deities,
And to the idolatrous temples set the torch.
For this we took our lives within our hands,
For this we drew a furrow through the sea,
And this we will accomplish ere we die.
And furthermore we come to speak of Christ,
Who from his heaven looked down, and saw a world
Crimson with stains of wicked battle-fields,
And loud with the oppressions of the poor.
And, moved with gracious pity, wrapt the sun
Of his Divinity in a mortal cloud
Till it was tempered to our human sight.
And, for the love he bore the race of men,
Full thirty years ungrudgingly he breathed
Our human breath, endured our human needs,
Hungered and thirsted, oft without a home.
Though but a man he seemed, such virtue dwelt
Within the compass of his mortal frame,
That poor and forlorn creatures near their death
Touched by his garments were made instant whole.
And all the time he lived upon the earth
He cast out devils, gave the blind their sight;
With slender store of loaves and fishes fed
A hungry multitude close-ranged on grass;
And, walking on the waters, with a word
Made all the roaring lake of Galilee
Sink to a glassy mirror for the stars.
Yea at his word a three days' buried man
Came forth to light with grave-clothes on his face.
And, when the times of wickedness were full,
When by the vilest city in the world
Nailed to a cross upreared against the sky
He hung with malefactors—dismal sight
The sun dared not to look on—with a prayer
For him who pierced his body with the spear,
For him who tore his temples with the thorns,
For him who mocked his thirst with vinegar,
The Lord Christ bleeding bowed his head and died;
And by that dying did he wash earth white
From murders, battles, lies, ill deeds, and took
Remorse away that feeds upon the heart
Like slow fire on a brand. From grave he burst;
Death could not hold him, and ere many days
Before the eyes of those that did him love
He passed up through yon ocean of blue air
Unto the heaven of heavens, whence he came.
And there he sits this moment man and God;
Strong as a God, flesh-hearted as a man,
And all the uncreated light confronts
With eye-lids that have known the touch of tears.
Marvel not, King, that we have come to thee.
If but one man stood on the farthest shore,
Thither I would adventure with the news—
News that undungeons all from sin and fear.
The glimmering wisp, the sprite that haunts the ford,
The silent ghost that issues from the grave
Like a pale smoke that takes the dead man's form
Can scare us never more, for Christ made all,
And lays His ear so close unto the world
That in lone desert, peril, or thick night,
A whispered prayer can reach it. In the still
Abyss of midnight lives a human heart,
And therefore all the loneliness and space
And all the icy splendours cannot freeze.
Coifi, I bring to thee no churlish God:
A heaven-full of reward he has for those
That love and serve. And thou, most ancient man,
For ever musing on a grassy grave,
Death is a dinted couch; for there a space
Christ's limbs have rested, and that knowledge takes
The loneliness, which is death's fear away.
And in the light beyond earth's shade He sits
With all the happy spirits of the dead
Silent as garden flowers that feed on air,
And thither thou wilt join Him in due time.
O King! O City! seated on the grass
We have unpacked our bales. Christ cannot come
Where any idol is; so burn them down.
King, be the wind to blow these clouds away,
That Christ's clear sky may over-arch thy land.”

He ceased; but on the hem of his address
Ere yet a man could say that he had ceased,
Cried Coifi, while his face in splendour broke,
And shone among the others dark with doubt;
As, when a day of rolling vapour dims
A waste of congregated pool and mere,
One, smit by sunshine from a cloudy rift,
Glitters among the gloomy brotherhood,
And wears the gleam while all the rest are dark:
“O King, give ear unto the stranger's words,
Surely the truest, best that ever ear
Gave welcome habitation to. For long
To me the worship of the native gods
Was emptiness and vapour: and if truth
In that religion dwelt, 'twas spectre-like
And fleeting as the rainbow in the shower,
That ever shifts its place and flying smiles.
In this new doctrine, if I judge aright,
Truth lives not like an unbroke skittish colt
That never yet has known the touch of man;
That starts, and whinnying flies, if but a head
O'ertops its pales, or any noise is made—
But in contentment like the paddocked steed
That has a life of noble service led
And fears not the approach of any man,
May saddled be and used. The deities
Are but the mighty shadows of ourselves,
And reach no higher than our highest moods.
But this Christ has existence all untouched
By fond imagination or belief:
And, being Lord, the richly furnished world
Is an unemptied treasury of gifts
For those He loves; and, on rebellious men,
He has for executioners the sea,
Snow-drift, and sun-fire, blast, and thunderstone,
Earthquake and shivering lightnings red with haste:
All good is resident within His smile,
All terror in His frown. And, therefore King,
It seems to me expedient that the gods,
Voiceless and empty-handed as our dreams,
Should be at once forsaken, and the torch
Be set unto the temples we have built.”

And, when the full heaped wave of Coifi's words
Broke sudden in a wreath of dying foam,
The King arose, and with him rose a sound.
“Ye strangers who have come across the sea,
Ye people who have known me all my days,
I here, in seeing of the earth and sky,
Unclothe myself of the religion dark
Which I and all my forefathers have worn,
And put on Christ like raiment white and clean.
To this I am not urged by wantonness,
Nor by a weak and giddy love of change.
This thing I have considered o'er and o'er,
And, when my spirit wavered, it was fixed
And clamped unalterably as with iron
By spiritual visitors and signs;
And that these spiritual signs and shapes
Were offspring of no over-heated brain,
This kingdom I am king of is the proof.
Ye priests, I take allegiance unto Christ;
My crown I wear as vassal unto Him:
This day I Christ as my commander take,
And as His faithful soldier will I live,
And as His faithful soldier will I die.
And, as the dawn from out the heaven comes
And on the craggy mountain's highest peak
Kindles a fire, then, falling lower, breaks
In splendour on the fortress on the crag,
Then rosy makes the solitary mere
Deep in the wrinkled armpit of the hill,
Then strikes a rainbow on the cataract,
Then with a sunbeam wakes the misty vale,
Till in the light the little children laugh
And over all the world is morning—so
From me, who am the highest in the state,
This new religion will step down to priest,
From priest to noble, and from thence through all
The ranged degrees that make a commonwealth
Until it reach the labourer soiled with clay,
And Christ will o'er us rule in perfect peace.
But, being now His soldier, it is meet
That I make war upon His enemies;
Who of my priests and nobles standing round
Will first profane the temples of the gods
And all the dark enclosures sacred held?”
Then Coifi without pausing answered, “I,
For surely of thy people it befits
No one so well as him who was their priest.
If I the dwellings of the gods outrage,
With a forbidden horse, unlawful spear,
And smite them and return again unhurt,
What then? Yon ancient boulder on the hill,
That wears obscure the features of a man,
Is strong, divine, and worshipful as they.
But, if the blow and clangour of my lance
Should pierce the stony calm, and draw a voice
And lightnings that will blast me, I but die,
And by my death I bring the gods alive,
And in the fairer summers that will come
My name will be remembered oft with praise.
The profanation of the gods is mine;
Provide me, King, a stallion, and a spear.”
Thereat arose confusion manifold,
And one perched on an eminence might see
That through the crowds that stood stock-still there ran
Meandering currents, like the ruffled belts
That bend and waver through the oily calm
When noonday lies in slumber on the deep.
Soon from the tumult running footmen broke
Leading the coal black stallion of the King
That plunged and neighed, his knee and counter dashed
With foamy flakes, and on him Coifi sprang
Priest-vested as he was, and curbed and reined
The mighty brute as though his heels were armed,
And loud cuirass and greave his daily wear.
While with his hooves the stallion bruised the turf,
Coifi leaned sideways, stretched a hand and caught
A glittering spear, and, poising it, gave rein
And rode toward the temple, and the crowd,
Deeming the priest stark mad or brain-distract,
In that he was so covetous of death,
Broke after him in wild and shrieking lines;
But Coifi struck them marble as he crashed
Through the enclosures ever sacred held,
And gained the central space unharmed, and rode
Thrice round and round, then in his stirrup stood,
And, with a high defiance on his lip,
Smote, with a clang, an Idol, monster-faced;
And, as he smote, the foul thing reeling, fell,
Fell Dagon-like, face downwards on the grass.
And, when from every heart the icy hand
Of fear was lifted, sea-like grew the noise.
And Coifi shouted something from the place,
And, as in answer to the half-heard shout,
King Edwin's voice the mighty uproar clove,
“Consume with fire the idols and their homes:
Burn stake and god together!” And the cries
Within the crowds a sacred fury wrought,
The deities were tumbled on the grass,
The pales and the enclosures were torn down
By naked hands, and flung into a heap,
And one a torch applied; and through the smoke
There flickered here and there the fiery tongues
That crackled, spread, and ever higher climbed;
Till the scorched beam came thundering down, and towers
Of flame rushed up, then licked the air and died.
And when the world was quivering through a film
Of furnace heat that shook in welling lines,
And a great smoke rolled off and sea-ward spread,
And dimmed the gleam from headland on to cape,
And ever louder grew the swarming crowds,
The white-robed priests together standing sang,
“Down falls the wicked idol on his face,
So let all wicked gods and idols fall!
Come forth, O light, from out the breaking East,
And with thy splendour pierce the heathen dark,
And morning make on continent and isle
That thou may'st reap the harvest of thy tears,
O Holy one that hung upon the tree.”

So, when the temple lay a ruined mass,
And the gorged flames were low upon the brand,
And a great vapour breathed across the sea,
King Edwin called his people; and they came
Long line on line as tide sets to the shore.
And then he pointed to the smoky blot
Athwart the sea-light and the peaceful sky.
“Behold our old religion hanging there,
Behold it dying in the heavenly ray;
So dies the error of a thousand years!
Thee would we thank, Paulinus, but the top
And pinnacle of our indebtedness,
No language e'er can scale. Yet would we know
Whose hand it was that reached us o'er the sea.”
Then to the King Paulinus answered straight,
“I gladly shall instruct thee, mighty King.
The holy Pontiff Gregory sent us here;
The saintliest spirit after Christ, whose soul
In clearest light and meditation dwells,
And is of his corporeal body free
As is the lark in heaven of its nest;
One day it happed that to the market-place
In Rome, Pope Gregory went, and, through the crowds
Of buyers and of sellers walking, saw
A crowd of lovely boys exposed for sale;
Fair-faced were they, white-skinned, and azure-eyed,
And to their shoulders hung the yellow hair.
Moved by their beauty, Gregory enquired
Who were they? from what country they were brought?
And some one said they came from Britain. Then
He marvelled if the isle that bred such youth
Was Christian, or lay yet in pagan dusk;
And those around him told that never yet
That island's tongue had shaped the name of Christ.
Then sighed he from the bottom of his heart;
‘Alas!’ he said, ‘that Darkness and its King
Should such fair creatures in possession hold!
Alas, that creatures as the morning fair
Should live with darken'd spirits!’ Then he turned,
And went home musing o'er this island's good;
And the desire grew powerful that the tongue
Of Britain, which could modulate alone
Dark idol-prayer and hoarse battle-cry,
Should utter Hallelujah. So when time
Was ripe, at his behest we sailed from Gaul,
Freighted with prayer and the name of Christ;
And landed here. The holy Pontiff's heart,
That aches with the great darkness of the world,
Is this day lightened, for among the tongues
That rise to heaven in prayer, there is one
Ne'er heard by Christ before; another string
Is to the world-harp added, praising Christ.
For what has been accomplished on this day,
Fragrant will Gregory's memory be held
By every race of Englishmen to be.
From out the twilight of unnoted time
The history of this land hath downward come
Like an uncitied stream that draws its course
Through empty wildernesses, and but hears
The wind sigh in the reed, the passing crane;
But Christ this day hath been upon it launched,
Like to a golden barge with burnished oars,
Whose progress makes the lonely waters blush,
And floods the marshes with melodious noise.
And, as that river widens to the sea,
The barge I speak of will dilate and tower,
And put forth bank on bank of burnished oars,
And on the waters like a sunset burn,
And roll a lordlier music far and wide,
And ever on the dais a King shall sit,
And ever round the King shall nobles stand.”

Thereafter in a stream that ran to sea
The King and all his nobles and his priests,
Were by Paulinus in Christ's name baptised
And solemnly unto his service sealed.
And then Paulinus lifted up his hands,
And blessed them and the people. But by this
The congregated clouds along a sea
From every fret and wrinkle smoothed began
To wear their evening colours, and the King
Turned homeward priest and noble in his train,
With all the people following full of awe.
And from that day, filled with strange fire, he rode
A mighty Idol-breaker, far and wide
In battle-gear, Christ following in the print
Of his war-horse's hooves. The fanes he burned
At Goodmanham, at Yeverin, and York,
And Cateret where the Swale runs shallowing by.
To Redwald and his sons he bore the faith,
And sent Paulinus to the neighbouring Kings.
Near his own city, where the temple stood,
He raised to Christ a simple church of stone,
And ruled his people faithfully, until
Long-haired and hoary, as a crag that looks
Seaward, with matted lichens bleached by time,
He sat in Hall beholding, with dim eyes
And memory full of graves, the world's third bloom;
Grand-children of the men he knew in youth;
And dying, pillow-propped within his chair,
The watchers saw a gleam upon his face
As from an opened heaven. And so they laid
Within the church of stone, with many a tear,
The body of the earliest Christian King
That England knew; there 'neath the floor he sleeps,
With lord and priest around, till through the air
The angel of the resurrection flies.