To deal with the late sovereign’s disappearance.
I doubt if they’d believe in interference
From Heaven direct—a plain, Old Testament
Annihilation on the tyrant sent . . .
But, short of that, we either must produce
The corpse, or else some plausible excuse.
What do you think? The matter’s in your line
And suited to your office more than mine.’
The Bishop answered, ‘Any man in the world200
Has more right to rebuke these words than I.
But I believe—I know you could not know
That I believed—in God. I dare not lie.’
The General answered, ‘I should hope you do;
I’m a religious man as well as you,
But now we’re talking politics. You say
That you believe; the point is, so do they,
Which makes all doctrines easy to digest.
Come, now; I’ve made a very small request.’
‘I cannot tell them more than I believe.210
I dare not play with such immeasurables.
I am afraid: yes, that’s the truth, afraid,
Put it no higher. Fear would stop my tongue.’
The Leader said, ‘Oh Lord, to have a fool
To deal with. God Almighty, keep me cool!
What do you fear? Have I not made it plain,
You and your Church have everything to gain?
Be loyal to the Leader and I’ll build
Cathedrals for you, yes, and see them filled,
I’ll give you a free hand to bait all Jews220
And infidels. You can’t mean to refuse?’
‘I must: for He of whom I am afraid
Esteems the gifts that [you] can promise me
Evil, or else of very small account.’
‘Silence!’ The Leader said, ‘Silence, I say!
You never talked like this before to-day,
And now to make religion your pretence,
Frankly, I hold it sheer irreverence.
If you look down from such a starry height
As that, upon all earthly power and might,230
Why, in God’s name, have you not told us so
A year, or ten, or fifteen years ago?
Why was your other-worldliness so dumb
When every office went for sale in Drum,
When half the people had no bread to eat
Because the Chancellor’d cornered1 all the wheat,
When the Queen played her witchery nights, and when
The old King had his women nine or ten?
All this you saw, unless you were asleep.
God! to sit still beside the course and keep240
Your malice hid, till at the race’s end
You dart your leg out to trip up a friend
Just at the goal. I’d counted upon you—
The thing so dangerous and my friends so few,
Would I have risked it if I thought the Church
Was going to turn and leave me in the lurch?
What? Silent still? Why then, damnation take you!
I’ve begged enough, I’ll find a way to make you.
You’ve played a dirty trick, and now you’ll rue it!’
He called his men and said, ‘Boys! Put him through it.’250
5
The raw-boned boy, meanwhile, was with the Queen.
She led him in the short way between
The great hall and her private tower,
—A little terrace, at that hour
A solitary place. And there
She knew that they would pass a stair
Down which she had scampered many a night
Into the garden by star-light.
Upon her arm she had a ring,
The bridal gift of the old King,260
Hard, heavy gold that twists to take
The likeness of a tangled snake.
She works it downwards as they walk,
Little she heeds her jailor’s talk.
She works it till that golden worm
Is round her knuckles and held firm.
And now they reached the stairway’s head.
Never a word the lady said;
Out from her shoulder straight she flung
Her arm, so strong, so round, so young;270
His wits were much too slow to save him—
It was a lovely blow she gave him.
Right in his mouth with all her strength
He got the gold. He sprawled his length,
Bloodied and blubbering; and when
He scrambled to his feet again,
He saw the wide, smooth lawn between
Himself and the swift-footed queen,
He saw her raiment flickering white
Against the hedge—then out of sight.280
6
About the Bishop, with lead pipe and sticks,
As foresters about a tree with the axe,
With belts and bludgeons and with jibes and jokes.
His breath comes grunting under heavy shocks,
He pants so loud, they think that he still talks,
And rail upon him crying Plague and Pox!
Ever a bone breaks or a sinew cracks.
They beat upon his stomach till its wall breaks. Aoi!
In his imagination he seems to hang290
Upon a cross and be tormented long,
Not nailed but gripping with his fingers strong.
With the toil thereof all his muscles are wrung,
Great pains he bears in shoulder, arm and lung.
He fears lest they should jolt the cross and fling
His body off from where he has to hang. Aoi!
Ever he calls to Christ to be forgiven
And to come soon into the happy haven.
Horrible dance before his eyes is woven
Of darkened shapes on a red tempest driven.300
Unwearyingly the great strokes are given.
He falls. His sides and all his ribs are riven,
His guts are scattered and his skull is cloven,
The man is dead. God has his soul to heaven. Aoi!
CANTO V
Wing’d with delight and fear, the Queen
Was running on the ridgy green.1
Up the first field that gently slopes
Towards the hills of all her hopes,
Happy the man who might have seen
The unripe breasts of that young Queen
So panting, and her face above
So flushed and eye-bright for his love,
As in this unregarding place
She breathed, she brightened, with the chase.10
Up the long field in open view
Only to get her lead she flew,
But in the next she hugged the edge
Well hidden by the blackthorn hedge,
Then through the spinney chose a track
Still up, not daring to look back,
Then forty yards of sunken lane
Up hill, then to her left again,
Half level, and half losing ground
—For so she must to sidle round20
A big ten-acre field where men
Were still at work, though even then
Looking with welcome in their eyes
To the slow-yellowing2 western skies.
It was the hour when grass looks greener
And hay smells sweeter. None had seen her,
When up beyond the fields she came
Where three parts wild and one part tame
Old horses roll and donkeys bray
And geese in choleric cohorts stray30
About the common land, that now
Springs steeply to the foot-hill’s brow.
Here as she breasted the hot track
Baked with the sun, she first looks back
And sees the squat-built castle stand
Spider-like amid smooth Drum-land,
And from it, spreading like a fan,
The hunt she fled from—horse and man
Already dark and dwarf’d as ants
But creeping, nearing. While she pants,40
Hard labouring up the stony ground
And slippery grass, above the sound
Of her blood hammering in her ears,
Music of baying dogs she hears.
Her wind is good, her feet are fast,
She knows how long they both will last,
On hounds and horses she has reckoned.
She gains that crest, and towards the second
Swifter she runs, yet not too swift.
Here the whole earth begins to lift50
Its large limbs under robes of green
Higher, and deepening gaps between
Sink in warm shadow, and the sky,
Jostled with peaks, shows small and high.
The land of Drum is seen no longer,
The world is purer, the light stronger
And streams and falls and everywhere
More streams sound on the quiet air.
Here well she knew her way, to turn
And find an amber-coloured burn60
That musical with myriad shocks
Of water leaped its stair of rocks:
And up the stream from hold to hold
She clambered—the knife-edge of cold
Deliciously now reached her waist,
Now splashed her lips with earthen taste,3
There wading, leaping in and out
She climbed to throw the trail in doubt,
And reached the head. High moorland lay
Before her, and peaks far away70
And over them the broad sun sinking.
She stood to breathe a moment, thinking
Of many small things, many a place
Far from that evening’s toil and chase,
Until the bloodhounds’ noise behind
Came louder on a change of wind,
And quelled her spirit as she hearkened,
And drove her on.
The world was darkened.4
And still she runs, but slowly now, and yet80
More slowly, and pain burns her feet, and sweat
Tangles her hair on smarting eyes and brow;
And still she runs; only of running now
She thinks, not of the ending of the chase,
But always runs. There is a wretched place
Beyond the moor, right underneath the fells,
The last of homesteads, where a miser dwells—
A huddle of trees, a cottage under thatch,
A meadow and a cultivated patch.
Often in her night wanderings before90
She had seen old Trap, and often from his door
He had shouted at her shadow ‘Witch!’ and ‘Whore!’
Thither she ran and entered the low wood,
Sure-footed, silent as a beast pursued,
And from the covert, shaping both her lips
A way she knew, pressed with her finger tips,
Sent such a cry that no man in the dark
But would have sworn it was a vixen’s bark.
It worked! Old Trap had poultry to defend;
That eldritch sound had hardly time to end100
Before the miser with his gun was out
To shoot the varmint dead. But round about
The shadowy Queen had gone to his back door,
Lifted the latch and trod on his cool floor,
And in a trice his pan of creaming milk
Down her dry throat went travelling smooth as silk;
Two apples and a lump of his goat cheese
She snatched,5 and laughed, and under darkening trees
Stole on—now let him guess what nightly fairy
Or catamountain has enjoyed his dairy!110
And up his meadow grass she glided,
The last green place before the world of rocks,
And all the lives of darkness sided
With her: the veritable fox
Welcomed with joy his hunted sister,
The small things of the ditches bade her
Good fortune, glad that man had missed her,
The mountains spread their slopes to aid her;
The world was changing: night was waking
And mountain silence, all-estranging.120
Now as she ran she saw the meadow
Darkened before her with her shadow,
Because the moon grew strong.6 She turned;
Brittle and bright the crescent burned,
The thin and honey-coloured bow
Of the pure Huntress riding low.
Then to that sight her arm she raised,
Asking no favour, while she praised
The queen whose shafts destroy and bless
All wild souls of the wilderness,130
Dark Hecate, Diana chaste,
Virginal dread of woods and waste,
Titania, shadowy fear and bliss
Of elf-spun night, great Artemis.
Deep her idolatry, for all,
Body and soul, beyond recall
She offered there: and body soon
Was filled all through with virtue of the moon,
That, like a spirit, in each tender vein
Flowed with nepenthe’s power and eased all pain,140
All weariness; and faster now she ran
Than when the toilsome chase began,
If it were running, for she seemed to glide
Over rough scree and rocky shelf
Smooth as a floating ship, through wide
And silvery lakes, or (like the moon herself,
Lapped in a motion which is also rest)—
To see the pale world’s moonlit vest
Flit past beneath her—glimmering rocks
And tufts of grass like snowy locks,150150
Rivers of mercury, and towers
Of ebony, and stones like flowers.
Far over the piled hills, and past
The hills she knew, she travelled fast;
She found a valley like a cup
With moonshine to the brim filled up,
So pure a sweep of hollow ground,
Treeless, with turf so short around,
That not one shadow there could fall
But, smooth like liquid, over all,160
Night’s ghastly parody of day,
The lidless stare of moonlight lay.
Down into it, and straight ahead,
A single path before her led,
—A mossy way; and two ways more
There met it on the valley floor;
From left and right they came, and right
And left ran on out of the light.
And near that parting of three ways
She thought there was a silver haze,170
She thought there was a giant’s head
Pushed from the earth with whiteness spread
Of beard beneath and from its crown
Cataracts of whiteness tumbling down.
Then she drew near, tip-toed in awe,
And looked again; this time she saw
It was a thornbush, milky white
That poured sweet smell upon the night.
And nearer yet she came and then,
Bathed in its fragrance, looked again,180
And lo! it was a horse and rider,
Breathing, unmoving, close beside her
More beautiful and larger
Than earthly beast, that charger,
Where rode the proudest rider;
—Rich his arms, bewitching
His air—a wilful, elfin
Emperor, proud of temper,
In mail of eldest moulding7
And sword of elven silver,190
Smiling to beguile her;
A pale king, come from the unwintered country
Bending to her, befriending her
, and offering white
Sweet bread like dew, his handsel at that region’s entry,
And honey pale as gold is in the moonlit night.
When his lips opened, poignant as the unripened note
Of early thrush at evening was his words’ deceiving,
The first few notes a-roving, then a silver rush.
‘Keep, keep,’ he bade her, ‘On the midmost moss-way,
Seek past the cross-way to the land you long for.200
Eat, eat,’ he gave her of the loaves of faerie.
‘Eat the brave honey of bees no man enslaveth.
Heed not the road upon the right—’twill lead you
To heaven’s height and the yoke whence I have freed you;
Nor seek not to the left, that so you come not
Through the world’s cleft into that world I name not.
Keep, keep the centre! Find the portals
That chosen mortals at the world’s edge enter.
Isles untrampled by the warying legions
Of Heaven and Darkness—the unreckoned regions210
That only as fable in His world appear
Who seals man’s ear as much as He is able . . .
Many are the ancient mansions,
Isles His wars defile not,
Woods and land unwounding
The want whereof did haunt you;
Asked for long with anguish,
They open now past hoping
—All you craved, incarnate
Come like dream to Drum-land.’220
Warm was the longing, warm as lover’s laughter,
Strong, sweet, and stinging, that welled up to drift her
Away to the unwintry country, softer
Than clouds in clearest distance of Atlantic evening.
Warm was the longing; cold the dread
That entered after it. On her right hand
Descends8 the insupportable. She turned her head,
But saw no more the air and moonlit land.
On all that side the world seemed falling,
From her own side the flesh seemed falling.230
Dying, opening, melting, vanishing.
Yet to the sagging torment of that dissolution
She clung, contented with the vanishing
If only the fear’d moment never would arise
Of being commanded to lift up her eyes
And to see that whose dissimilitude
To all things should, in the first stare9
Of its aloofness,10 make the world despair.
And that world was falling,
And her flesh was falling240
And she was small; oh! were she small enough for crawling
Into some cranny under some small grass’s root—
Rolled to a ball, dead-still beneath the Terror’s foot;
To cover her face, close eyes, bury the closed eyes, and though
All hope to be unseen were madness, not to see,
Never to see, not to look up, never to know . . .