The visions of England :: :: University of Virginia Library

Blue and ever more blue
The sky of that summer's spring:
No cloud from dawning to night:
The lidless eyeball of light
Glared: nor could e'en in darkness the dew
Her pearls on the meadow-grass string.
As a face of a hundred years,
Mummied and scarr'd, for the heart
Is long dry at the fountain of tears,
Green earth lay brown-faced and torn,
Scarr'd and hard and forlorn.
And as that foul monster

The Lernaean Hydra of Greek legend.

of Lerna
Whom Héraclés slew in his might,
But this one slaying, not slain,
From the marshes,

The drought which preceded the plague in England, and may have predisposed to its reception, was followed by mist, in which the people fancied they saw the disease palpably advancing.

poisonous, white,
Crawl'd out a plague-mist and sheeted the plain,
A hydra of hell and of night.
—Whence upon men has that horror past?
From Cathaya

The plague was heard of in Central Asia in 1333; it reached Constantinople in 1347.

westward it stole to Byzance,—
The City of Flowers,

Florence, where the ravages of the plague were immortalized in the Decamerone of Boccaccio.

—the vineyards of France;—
O'er the salt-sea ramparts of England, last,
Reeking and rank, a serpent's breath:—
What is this, men cry in their fear, what is this that cometh?
'Tis the Black Death, they whisper:
The black black Death!

The heart of man at the name
To a ball of ice shrinks in,
With hope, surrendering life:—
The husband looks on the wife,
Reading the tokens of doom in the frame,
The pest-boil

Seems to have been the enlarged and discharging gland by which the specific blood poison of the plague relieved itself. A ‘muddy glistening’ of the eye is noticed as one of the symptoms.

hid in the skin,

And flees and leaves her to die.
Fear-sick, the mother beholds
In her child's pure crystalline eye
A dull shining, a sign of despair.
Lo, the heavens are poison, not air;
And they fall as when lambs in the pasture
With a moan that is hardly a moan,
Drop, whole flocks, where they stand;
And the mother lays her, alone,
Slain by the touch of her nursing hand,
Where the household before her is strown.
—Earth, Earth, open and cover thy dead!
For they are smitten and fall who bear
The corpse to the grave with a prayerless prayer,
And thousands are crush'd in the common bed

More than 50,000 are said to have been buried on the site of the Charter House.

:—
—Is it Hell that breathes with an adder's breath?
Is it the day of doom, men cry, the Judge that cometh?
—'Tis the Black Death, God help us!
The black black Death.

Maid Alice and maid Margaret
In the fields have built them a bower
Of reedmace and rushes fine,
Fenced with sharp albespyne

Hawthorn.

;
Pretty maids hid in the nest; and yet
Yours is one death, and one hour!
Priest and peasant and lord
By the swift, soft stroke of the air
By a silent invisible sword,
In plough-field or banquet, fall:
The watchers are flat on the wall:—
Through city and village and valley
The sweet-voiced herald of prayer
Is dumb in the towers; the throng
To the shrine pace barefoot; and where
Blazed out from the choir a glory of song,

God's altar is lightless and bare.
Is there no pity in earth or sky?
The burden of England, who shall say?
Half the giant oak

‘Of the three or four millions who then formed ‘the population of England, more than one-half were swept away’: (Green, B. IV: ch. iii).

is riven away,
And the green leaves yearn for the leaves that die.
Will the whole world drink of the dragon's breath?
It is the cup, men cry, the cup of God's fury that cometh!
'Tis the Black Death, Lord help us!
The black black Death.

In England is heard a moan,
A bitter lament and a sore,
Rachel lamenting her dead,
And will not be comforted
For the little faces for ever gone,
The feet from the silent floor.
And a cry goes up from the land,
Take from us in mercy, O God,
Take from us the weight of Thy hand,
The cup and the wormwood of woe!
'Neath the terrible barbs of Thy bow
This England, this once Thy beloved,
Is water'd with life-blood for rain;
The bones of her children are white,
As flints on the Golgotha plain;
Not slain as warriors by warriors in fight,
By the arrows of Heaven slain.
We have sinn'd: we lift up our souls to Thee,
O Lord God eternal on high:
Thou who gavest Thyself to die,
Saviour, save! to Thy feet we flee:—
Snatch from the hell and the Enemy's breath,
From the Prince of the Air, from the terror by night that cometh:—
From the Black Death, Christ save us!
The black black Death!