Percy returns to England and reaches Gypsy Dell at the very moment when ‘the Schollard,’ maddened by the discovery that Rhona is to meet Percy that night, has drawn his knife upon the girl under the starlight by the river-bank. Percy on one side of the river witnesses the death-struggle on the other side without being able to go to Rhona’s assistance. But the girl hurls her antagonist into the water, and he is drowned. There are other witnesses—the stars, whose reflected light, according to a gypsy superstition, writes in the water, just above where the drowned man sank, mysterious runes, telling the story of the deed. For a Romany woman who marries a Gorgio the penalty is death. Nevertheless, Rhona marries Percy. I will quote the sonnets describing Rhona as she wakes in the tent at dawn:—
The young light peeps through yonder trembling chink
The tent’s mouth makes in answer to a breeze;
The rooks outside are stirring in the trees
Through which I see the deepening bars of pink.
I hear the earliest anvil’s tingling clink
From Jasper’s forge; the cattle on the leas
Begin to low. She’s waking by degrees:
Sleep’s rosy fetters melt, but link by link.
What dream is hers? Her eyelids shake with tears;
The fond eyes open now like flowers in dew:
She sobs I know not what of passionate fears:
“You’ll never leave me now? There is but you;
I dreamt a voice was whispering in my ears,
‘The Dukkeripen o’ stars comes ever true.’”She rises, startled by a wandering bee
Buzzing around her brow to greet the girl:
She draws the tent wide open with a swirl,
And, as she stands to breathe the fragrancy
Beneath the branches of the hawthorn tree—
Whose dews fall on her head like beads of pearl,
Or drops of sunshine firing tress and curl—
The Spirit of the Sunrise speaks to me,
And says, ‘This bride of yours, I know her well,
And so do all the birds in all the bowers
Who mix their music with the breath of flowers
When greetings rise from river, heath and dell.
See, on the curtain of the morning haze
The Future’s finger writes of happy days.’
Rhona, half-hidden by ‘the branches of the hawthorn tree,’ stretches up to kiss the white and green May buds overhanging the bridal tent, while Percy Aylwin stands at the tent’s mouth and looks at her:—
Can this be she, who, on that fateful day
When Romany knives leapt out at me like stings
Hurled back the men, who shrank like stricken things
From Rhona’s eyes, whose lightnings seemed to slay?
Can this be she, half-hidden in the may,
Kissing the buds for ‘luck o’ love’ it brings,
While from the dingle grass the skylark springs
And merle and mavis answer finch and jay?[He goes up to the hawthorn, pulls the branches
apart, and clasps her in his arms.Can she here, covering with her childish kisses
These pearly buds—can she so soft, so tender,
So shaped for clasping—dowered of all love-blisses—
Be my fierce girl whose love for me would send her,
An angel storming hell, through death’s abysses,
Where never a sight could fright or power could bend her?
But Rhona is haunted by forebodings, and one night when the lovers are on the river she reads the scripture of the stars. I must give here the sonnet quoted on page 29:—
The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush-spears,
And all the flags and broad-leaved lily-isles;
The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles,
Then smoothed them back to happy golden spheres.
We rowed—we sang; her voice seemed in mine ears
An angel’s, yet with woman’s dearer wiles;
But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles
And ripples shook the stars to fiery tears.What shaped those shadows like another boat
Where Rhona sat and he Love made a liar?
There, where the Scollard sank, I saw it float,
While ripples shook the stars to symbols dire;
We wept—we kissed—while starry fingers wrote,
And ripples shook the stars to a snake of fire.
The most tragically dramatic scene in the poem is that in which Percy confronts the cosmic mystery, defying its menace. The stars write in the river:—
Falsehold can never shield her: Truth is strong.
Percy reads the rune and answers:—
I read your rune: is there no pity, then,
In Heav’n that wove this net of life for men?
Have only Hell and Falsehood heart for ruth?
Show me, ye mirrored stars, this tyrant Truth—
King that can do no wrong!
Ah! Night seems opening! There, above the skies,
Who sits upon that central sun for throne
Round which a golden sand of worlds is strown,
Stretching right onward to an endless ocean,
Far, far away, of living, dazzling motion?
Hearken, King Truth, with pictures in thine eyes
Mirrored from gates beyond the furthest portal
Of infinite light, ’tis Love that stands immortal,
The King of Kings.
The gypsies read the starry rune, and, discovering Rhona’s secret, secretly slay her. Percy, having returned to Gypsy Dell, vainly tries to find her grave. Then he flies from the dingle, lest the memory of Rhona should drive him mad, and lives alone in the Alps, where he passes into the strange ecstasy, described in the sonnet called ‘Natura Maligna,’ which has been much discussed by the critics:—
The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold
Followed my feet with azure eyes of prey;
By glacier-brink she stood—by cataract-spray—
When mists were dire, or avalanche-echoes rolled.
At night she glimmered in the death-wind cold,
And if a footprint shone at break of day,
My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say:
‘’Tis hers whose hand God’s mightier hand doth hold.’
I trod her snow-bridge, for the moon was bright,
Her icicle-arch across the sheer crevasse,
When lo, she stood! . . . God made her let me pass,
Then felled the bridge! . . . Oh, there in sallow light,
There down the chasm, I saw her cruel, white,
And all my wondrous days as in a glass.
This awful vision, quick with supernatural seership, is unique in poetry. Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in the ‘Athenæum’ of February 5, 1881: “Even in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a Hindu Puritan (Saivite) would address to Kali (‘the malignant’) or Parvati (‘the mountaineer’). It is to be delivered from her that Hindus shriek to God in the delirium of their fear.”
Then we are shown Percy standing at midnight in front of his hut, while New Year’s morning is breaking:—
Through Fate’s mysterious warp another weft
Of days is cast; and see! Time’s star-built throne,
From which he greets a new-born year, is shown
Between yon curtains where the clouds are cleft!
Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft
Of all that was its music—stand alone,
Remembering happy hours for ever flown,
Impatient of the leaden minutes left—The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure,
The chidings of mankind that once gave pain,
Seem in this hermit hut beyond all measure
Barren and foolish, and I cry, ‘No grain,
No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!’
And yet I cannot join the dead—and live.Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New
In England, heedless of the knells they ring
To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling
Each to the other ere you say adieu!—
I seem to hear their chimes—the chimes we knew
In those dear days when Rhona used to sing,
Greeting a New Year’s Day as bright of wing
As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears
Could bring the past and make it live again,
Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain,
And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears—
And with the past bring her I weep in vain—
Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.[The clouds move away and show the
stars in dazzling brightness.Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating
Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove
My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove—
They bring the mighty Mother’s new-year greeting:
‘All save great Nature is a vision fleeting’—
So says the scripture of those orbs above.
‘All, all,’ I cry, ‘except man’s dower of love!—
Love is no child of Nature’s mystic cheating!’And yet it comes again, the old desire
To read what yonder constellations write
On river and ocean—secrets of the night—
To feel again the spirit’s wondering fire
Which, ere this passion came, absorbed me quite,
To catch the master-note of Nature’s lyre.New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!
And yet they say to me, most sorely stung
By Fate and Death, ‘Nature is ever young,
Clad in new riches, as each morning’s gold
Blooms o’er a blasted land: be thou consoled:
The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung;
The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung;
The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;The Past has given to man a wondrous world,
But curtains of old Night were being upcurled
Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona; things sublime
In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight
Of Youth’s fresh runners in the lists of Time.
Arise, and drink the wine of Nature’s light!’
Finally, a dream prepares the sorrowing lover for the true reading of ‘The Promise of the Sunrise’ and the revelation of ‘Natura Benigna’:—
Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear:
Last night came she whose eyes are memories now;
Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how
Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.
‘Sorrow,’ I said, ‘has made me old, my dear;
’Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow:
Beneath my load a seraph’s neck might bow,
Vigils like mine would blanch an angel’s hair.’
Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!
I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes—
I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove
Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise;
But when upon my neck she fell, my love,
Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.
And now ‘Natura Benigna’ reveals to him her mystic consolation:—
What power is this? What witchery wins my feet
To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,
All silent as the emerald gulfs below,
Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?
What thrill of earth and heaven—most wild, most sweet—
What answering pulse that all the senses know,
Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow
Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?
Mother, ’tis I, reborn: I know thee well:
That throb I know and all it prophesies,
O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell
Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!
Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell
The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.
This is not the pathetic fallacy. It is the poetic interpretation of the latest discovery of science, to wit, that dead matter is alive, and that the universe is an infinite stammering and whispering, that may be heard only by the poet’s finer ear.
The extracts I have given are sufficient to show the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry, both in subject and in form. The originality of any poet is seen, not in fantastic metrical experiments, but rather in new and original treatment of the metres natural to the genius of the language. In ‘The Coming of Love’ the poet has invented a new poetic form. Its object is to combine the advantages and to avoid the disadvantages of lyrical narrative, of poetic drama, of the prose novel, and of the prose play. In Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ and in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s other lyrical drama, “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid,’” the special functions of all the above mentioned forms are knit together in a new form. The story is told by brief pictures. In ‘The Coming of Love’ this method reaches its perfection. Lyrics, songs, elegaic quatrains, and sonnets, are used according to an inner law of the poet’s mind. The exaltation of these moments is intensified by the business parts of the narrative being summarized in bare prose. The interplay of thought, mood, and passion is revealed wholly by swift lyrical visions. In Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’ a method something like this is adopted, but there the links are in a kind of poetical prose akin to the verse, and as Dante’s poems are all sonnets, there is no harmonic scheme of metrical music like that in ‘The Coming of Love.’ Here the very ‘rhyme-colour’ and the subtle variety of vowel sounds from beginning to end are evidently part of the metrical composition. Wagner’s music is the only modern art-form which is comparable with the metrical architecture of ‘The Coming of Love,’ and “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid.’” No one can fully understand the rhythmic triumph of these great poems who has not studied it by the light of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s theory of elaborate rhythmic effects in music formulated in his treatise on Poetry in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’—a theory which shows that metrical and rhythmical art, as compared with the art of music, is still developing. Both these lyrical dramas ought to be carefully studied by all students of English metres.
The novelty of these forms is not a fortuitous eccentricity, but an extremely valuable experiment in a new kind of dramatic poetry. It is remarkable that in this new and difficult form the poet has achieved in Rhona Boswell a feat of characterization quite without parallel under such conditions. Rhona is so vivid that it is hardly fair to hang her portrait on the same wall as those of the ordinary heroines of poetry. But if, for the sake of comparison, Rhona be set beside Tennyson’s Maud, the difference is startling. Maud does not tingle with personality. She is a type, an abstraction, a common denominator of ‘creamy English girls.’ Rhona, on the other hand, is nervously alive with personality. One makes pictures of her in one’s brain—pictures that never become blurred, pictures that do not run into other pictures of other poetic heroines. How much of this is due to the poetic form? Could Rhona have lived so intensely in a novel or a play? I do not think so. At any rate, she lives with incomparable vitality in this lyrical drama-novel, and therefore the poetic vehicle in which she rushes upon our vision is well worth the study of critics and craftsmen. Mr. Kernahan has called attention to the baldness of the enlinking prose narrative. Perhaps this defect could be remedied by using a more poetic and more romantic prose like that of the opening of ‘Aylwin,’ which would lead the imagination insensibly from one situation or mood to another.
In connection with the opening sonnets of ‘The Coming of Love,’ a very interesting point of criticism presents itself. These sonnets, in which Mr. Watts-Dunton tells the story of the girl who lived in the Casket lighthouse, appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ a week after Mr. Swinburne and he returned from a visit to the Channel Islands. They record a real incident. Some time afterwards Mr. Swinburne published in the ‘English Illustrated Magazine’ his version of the story, a splendid specimen of his sonorous rhythms.
Mr. Watts-Dunton’s version of the story may interest the reader:—
LOVE BRINGS WARNING OF NATURA MALIGNA
(THE POET SAILING WITH A FRIEND PAST THE CASKET LIGHTHOUSE)Amid the Channel’s wiles and deep decoys,
Where yonder Beacons watch the siren-sea,
A girl was reared who knew nor flower nor tree
Nor breath of grass at dawn, yet had high joys:
The moving lawns whose verdure never cloys
Were hers. At last she sailed to Alderney,
But there she pined. ‘The bustling world,’ said she,
‘Is all too full of trouble, full of noise.’
The storm-child, fainting for her home, the storm,
Had winds for sponsor—one proud rock for nurse,
Whose granite arms, through countless years, disperse
All billowy squadrons tide and wind can form:
The cold bright sea was hers for universe
Till o’er the waves Love flew and fanned them warm.But love brings Fear with eyes of augury:—
Her lover’s boat was out; her ears were dinned
With sea-sobs warning of the awakened wind
That shook the troubled sun’s red canopy.
Even while she prayed the storm’s high revelry
Woke petrel, gull—all revellers winged and finned—
And clutched a sail brown-patched and weather-thinned,
And then a swimmer fought a white, wild sea.
‘My songs are louder, child, than prayers of thine,’
The Mother sang. ‘Thy sea-boy waged no strife
With Hatred’s poison, gangrened Envy’s knife—
With me he strove, in deadly sport divine,
Who lend to men, to gods, an hour of life,
Then give them sleep within these arms of mine!’
Two poems more absolutely unlike could not be found in our literature than these poems on the same subject by two intimate friends. It seems impossible that the two writers could ever have read each other’s work or ever have known each other well. The point which I wish to emphasize is that two poets or two literary men may be more intimate than brothers, they may live with each other constantly, they may meet each other every day, at luncheon, at dinner, they may spend a large portion of the evening in each other’s society; and yet when they sit down at their desks they may be as far asunder as the poles. From this we may perhaps infer that among the many imaginable divisions of writers there is this one: there are men who can collaborate and men who cannot.
Many well-known writers have expressed their admiration of this poem. I may mention that the other day I came across a little book called ‘Authors that have Influenced me,’ and found that Mr. Rider Haggard instanced the opening section of ‘The Coming of Love,’ ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken,’ as being the piece of writing that had influenced him more than all others. I think this is a compliment, for the originality of invention displayed in ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ and ‘She’ sets Rider Haggard apart among the story-tellers of our time, and I agree with Mr. Andrew Lang in thinking that the invention of a story that is new and also good is a rare achievement.
I can find no space to give as much attention as I should like to give to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s miscellaneous sonnets. Some of them have had a great vogue: for instance, ‘John the Pilgrim.’ Like all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sonnets, it lends itself to illustration, and Mr. Arthur Hacker, A.R.A., as will be seen, has done full justice to the imaginative strength of the subject. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a simple grandeur in this design which Mr. Hacker has seldom reached elsewhere, the sinister power of Natura Benigna being symbolized by the desert waste and nature’s mockery by the mirage:—
Beneath the sand-storm John the Pilgrim prays;
But when he rises, lo! an Eden smiles,
Green leafy slopes, meadows of chamomiles,
Claspt in a silvery river’s winding maze:
‘Water, water! Blessed be God!’ he says,
And totters gasping toward those happy isles.
Then all is fled! Over the sandy piles
The bald-eyed vultures come and stand at gaze.‘God heard me not,’ says he, ‘blessed be God!’
And dies. But as he nears the pearly strand,
Heav’n’s outer coast where waiting angels stand,
He looks below: ‘Farewell, thou hooded clod,
Brown corpse the vultures tear on bloody sand:
God heard my prayer for life—blessed be God!’
‘John the Pilgrim.’ (By Arthur Hacker, A.R.A.)
This sonnet is a miracle of verbal parsimony: it has been called an epic in fourteen lines, yet its brevity does not make it obscure, or gnarled, or affected; and the motive adumbrates the whole history of religious faith from Job to Jesus Christ, from Moses to Mahomet. The rhymes in this sonnet illustrate my own theory as to the rhymer’s luck, good and ill. To have written this little epic upon four rhymes would not have been possible, even for Mr. Watts-Dunton, had it not been for the luck of ‘chamomiles’ and ‘isles,’ ‘chamomiles’ giving the picture of the flowers, and ‘isles’ giving the false vision of the mirage. The same thing is notable in the case of another amazing tour de force, ‘The Bedouin Child’ (see p. 448), where the same verbal parsimony is exemplified. Without the fortunate rhyme-words ‘pashas,’ ‘camel-maws,’ and ‘claws’ in the octave, the picture could not have been given in less than a dozen lines.
The kinship between Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry and that of Coleridge has been frequently discussed. It has the same romantic glamour and often the same music, as far as the music of decasyllabic lines can call up the music of the ravishing octosyllabics of ‘Christabel.’ This at least I know, from his critical remarks on Coleridge,—he owns the true wizard of romance as master. I do not think that any one of his sonnets affords me quite the unmixed delight which I find in the sonnet on Coleridge, and his friend George Meredith is here in accord with me, for he wrote to the author as follows: ‘The sonnet is pure amber for a piece of descriptive analogy that fits the poet wonderfully, and one might beat about through volumes of essays and not so paint him. There is Coleridge! But whence the source of your story—if anything of such aptness could have been other than dreamed after a draught of Xanadu—I cannot tell. It is new to me.’
After that flash of critical divination, it is fitting to present the reader with the ‘pure amber’ itself:—
I see thee pine like her in golden story
Who, in her prison, woke and saw, one day,
The gates thrown open—saw the sunbeams play,
With only a web ’tween her and summer’s glory;
Who, when that web—so frail, so transitory,
It broke before her breath—had fallen away,
Saw other webs and others rise for aye
Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.Those songs half-sung that yet were all divine—
That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh—
Had been but preludes from that lyre of thine,
Could thy rare spirit’s wings have pierced the mesh
Spun by the wizard who compels the flesh,
But lets the poet see how heav’n can shine.
Here again the verbal parsimony is notable. I defy any one to find anything like it except in Dante, the great master of verbal parsimony. There are only six adjectives in the whole sonnet. Every word is cunningly chosen, not for ornament, but solely for clarity of meaning. The metrical structure is subtly moulded so as to suspend the rising imagery until the last word of the octave, and then to let it glide, as a sunbeam glides down the air, to its lovely dying fall. Metrical students will delight in the double rhymes of the octave, which play so great a part in the suspensive music.
I have frequently thought that one of the most daring things, as well as one of the wisest, done by the editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ was that of printing Rhona’s letters, bristling with Romany words, with a glossary at the foot of the page, and printing them without any of the context of the poem to shed light upon it and upon Rhona. It certainly showed immense confidence in his contributor to do that; and yet the poems were a great success. The best thing said about Rhona has been said by Mr. George Meredith: “I am in love with Rhona, not the only one in that. When I read her love-letter in the ‘Athenæum,’ I had the regret that the dialect might cause its banishment from literature. Reading the whole poem through, I see that it is as good as salt to a palate. We are the richer for it, and that is a rare thing to say of any poem now printed.” And, discussing ‘The Coming of Love,’ Meredith wrote: ‘I will not speak of the tours de force except to express a bit of astonishment at the dexterity which can perform them without immolating the tender spirit of the work.’ Indeed, the technical mastery of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry is so consummate that it is concealed from the reader. There is no sense of difficulty overcome, no parade of artifice. Yet the metrical structure of the very poem which seems the simplest is actually the subtlest. ‘Rhona’s Love Letter’ is written in an extremely complex rhyme-pattern, each stanza of eight lines being built on two rhymes, like the octave of a sonnet. But so cunningly are the Romany words woven into a naïve, unconscious charm that the reader forgets the rhyme-scheme altogether, and does not realize that this spontaneous sweetness and bubbling humour are produced by the most elaborate art.
I have emphasized the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry. There can be no doubt that he is the most original poet since Coleridge, not merely in verbal, metrical, and rhythmical idiosyncrasy, but in the deeper quality of imaginative energy. By ‘the most original poet’ I do not mean the greatest poet: the student of poetry will know at once what I mean. Poe’s ‘Raven’ is more ‘original’ than Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion,’ but it is not so great. In my article on Blake in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ I pointed out that there are greater poets than Blake (or Donne) but none more original. There are many poets who possess that ordinary kind of imagination which is mainly a perpetual matching of common ideas with common metaphors. But few poets have the rarer kind of imagination which creates not only the metaphor but also the idea, and then fuses both into one piece of beauty. Now Mr. Watts-Dunton has this supreme gift. He uses the symbol to suggest ideas which cannot be suggested otherwise. His theory of the universe is optimistic, but his optimism is interwoven with sombre threads. He sees the dualism of Nature, and he shows her alternately as malignant and as benignant. Indeed, he has concentrated his spiritual cosmogony into the two great sonnets, ‘Natura Maligna’ and ‘Natura Benigna,’ which I have already quoted.
All the critics were delighted with the humour of Rhona Boswell. Upon this subject Mr. Watts-Dunton makes some pregnant remarks in the introduction to the later editions of the poem:—
“But it is with regard to the humour of gypsy women that Gorgio readers seem to be most sceptical. The humourous endowment of most races is found to be more abundant and richer in quality among the men than among the women. But among the Romanies the women seem to have taken humour with the rest of the higher qualities.
A question that has been most frequently asked me in connection with my two gypsy heroines has been: Have gypsy girls really the esprit and the humourous charm that you attribute to them? My answer to this question shall be a quotation from Mr. Groome’s delightful book, ‘Gypsy Folk-Tales.’ Speaking of the Romany chi’s incomparable piquancy, he says:—
‘I have known a gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale impromptu. She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand with “a lot o’ real tip-top gentry”; and “Reia,” she said to me afterwards, “I’ll tell you the comicalest thing as ever was. We’d pulled up to put the brake on, and there was a púro hotchiwitchi (old hedge-hog) come and looked at us through the hedge; looked at me hard. I could see he’d his eye upon me. And home he’d go, that old hedgehog, to his wife, and ‘Missus,’ he’d say, ‘what d’ye think? I seen a little gypsy gal just now in a coach and four horses’; and ‘Dabla,’ she’d say, ‘sawkumni ’as varde kenaw’” [‘Bless us! every one now keeps a carriage’].’
Now, without saying that this impromptu folklorist was Rhona Boswell, I will at least aver, without fear of contradiction from Mr. Groome, that it might well have been she. Although there is as great a difference between one Romany chi and another as between one English girl and another, there is a strange and fascinating kinship between the humour of all gypsy girls. No three girls could possibly be more unlike than Sinfi Lovell, Rhona Boswell, and the girl of whom Mr. Groome gives his anecdote; and yet there is a similarity between the fanciful humour of them all. The humour of Rhona Boswell must speak for itself in these pages—where, however, the passionate and tragic side of her character and her story dominates everything.”
Second in importance to ‘The Coming of Love’ among Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poems is the poem I have already mentioned—the poem which Mr. Swinburne has described as ‘a great lyrical epic’—“Christmas at the ‘Mermaid.’” The originality of this wonderful poem is quite as striking as that of ‘The Coming of Love.’ No other writer would have dreamed of depicting the doomed Armada as being led to destruction by a golden skeleton in the form of one of the burnt Incas, called up by ‘the righteous sea,’ and squatting grimly at the prow of Medina’s flag-ship. Here we get ‘The Renascence of Wonder’ indeed. Some Aylwinians put it at the head of all his writings. The exploit of David Gwynn is accepted by Motley and others as historic, but it needed the co-operation of the Golden Skeleton to lift his narrative into the highest heaven of poetry. Extremely unlike ‘The Coming of Love’ as it is in construction, it is built on the same metrical scheme; and it illustrates equally well with ‘The Coming of Love’ the remarks I have made upon a desideratum in poetic art—that is to say, it is cast in a form which gives as much scope to the dramatic instinct at work as is given by a play, and yet it is a form free from the restrictions by which a play must necessarily be cramped. The poem was written, or mainly written, during one of those visits which, as I have already said, Mr. Watts-Dunton used to pay to Stratford-on-Avon. The scene is laid, however, in London, at that famous ‘Mermaid’ tavern which haunts the dreams of all English poets:—
“With the exception of Shakespeare, who has quitted London for good, in order to reside at New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, which he has lately rebuilt, all the members of the ‘Mermaid’ Club are assembled at the ‘Mermaid’ Tavern. At the head of the table sits Ben Jonson dealing out wassail from a large bowl. At the other end sits Raleigh, and at Raleigh’s right hand, the guest he had brought with him, a stranger, David Gwynn, the Welsh seaman, now an elderly man, whose story of his exploits as a galley-slave in crippling the Armada before it reached the Channel had, years before, whether true or false, given him in the low countries a great reputation, the echo of which had reached England. Raleigh’s desire was to excite the public enthusiasm for continuing the struggle with Spain on the sea, and generally to revive the fine Elizabethan temper, which had already become almost a thing of the past, save, perhaps, among such choice spirits as those associated with the ‘Mermaid’ club.”
It opens with a chorus:—
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
Then Ben Jonson rises, fills the cup with wassail and drinks to Shakespeare, and thus comments upon his absence:—
Then he calls upon Shakespeare’s most intimate friend—the mysterious Mr. W. H. of the sonnets—to give them reminiscences of Shakespeare with a special reference to the memorable evening when he arrived at Stratford on quitting London for good and all.
To the sixth edition of the poem Mr. Watts-Dunton prefixed the following remarks, and I give them here because they throw light upon his view of Shakespeare’s friend:—
“Since the appearance of this volume, there has been a great deal of acute and learned discussion as to the identity of that mysterious ‘friend’ of Shakespeare, to whom so many of the sonnets are addressed. But everything that has been said upon the subject seems to fortify me in the opinion that ‘no critic has been able to identify’ that friend. Southampton seems at first to fit into the sacred place; so does Pembroke at first. But, after a while, true and unbiassed criticism rejects them both. I therefore feel more than ever justified in ‘imagining the friend for myself.’ And this, at least, I know, that to have been the friend of Shakespeare, a man must needs have been a lover of nature;—he must have been a lover of England, too. And upon these two points, and upon another—the movement of a soul dominated by friendship as a passion—I have tried to show Shakespeare’s probable influence upon his ‘friend of friends.’ It would have been a mistake, however, to cast the sonnets in the same metrical mould as Shakespeare’s.”
Shakspeare’s friend thus records what Shakespeare had told him about his return to Stratford:—
As down the bank he strolled through evening dew,
Pictures (he told me) of remembered eves
Mixt with that dream the Avon ever weaves,
And all his happy childhood came to view;
He saw a child watching the birds that flew
Above a willow, through whose musky leaves
A green musk-beetle shone with mail and greaves
That shifted in the light to bronze and blue.
These dreams, said he, were born of fragrance falling
From trees he loved, the scent of musk recalling,
With power beyond all power of things beholden
Or things reheard, those days when elves of dusk
Came, veiled the wings of evening feathered golden,
And closed him in from all but willow musk.And then a child beneath a silver sallow—
A child who loved the swans, the moorhen’s ‘cheep’—
Angled for bream where river holes were deep—
For gudgeon where the water glittered shallow,
Or ate the ‘fairy cheeses’ of the mallow,
And wild fruits gathered where the wavelets creep
Round that loved church whose shadow seems to sleep
In love upon the stream and bless and hallow;
And then a child to whom the water-fairies
Sent fish to ‘bite’ from Avon’s holes and shelves,
A child to whom, from richest honey-dairies,
The flower-sprites sent the bees and ‘sunshine elves’;
Then, in the shifting vision’s sweet vagaries,
He saw two lovers walking by themselves—Walking beneath the trees, where drops of rain
Wove crowns of sunlit opal to decoy
Young love from home; and one, the happy boy,
Knew all the thoughts of birds in every strain—
Knew why the cushat breaks his fond refrain
By sudden silence, ‘lest his plaint should cloy’—
Knew when the skylark’s changing note of joy
Saith, ‘Now will I return to earth again’—
Knew every warning of the blackbird’s shriek,
And every promise of his joyful song—
Knew what the magpie’s chuckle fain would speak;
And, when a silent cuckoo flew along,
Bearing an egg in her felonious beak,
Knew every nest threatened with grievous wrong.
He heard her say, ‘The birds attest our troth!’
Hark to the mavis, Will, in yonder may
Fringing the sward, where many a hawthorn spray
Round summer’s royal field of golden cloth
Shines o’er the buttercups like snowy froth,
And that sweet skylark on his azure way,
And that wise cuckoo, hark to what they say:
‘We birds of Avon heard and bless you both.’
And, Will, the sunrise, flushing with its glory,
River and church, grows rosier with our story!
This breeze of morn, sweetheart, which moves caressing,
Hath told the flowers; they wake to lovelier growth!
They breathe—o’er mead and stream they breathe—the blessing.
‘We flowers of Avon heard and bless you both!’
When Mr. ‘W. H.’ sits down, the friend and brother of another great poet, Christopher Marlowe, who had been sitting moody and silent, oppressed by thoughts of the dead man, many of whose unfriends were at the gathering, recites these lines ‘On Seeing Kit Marlowe Slain at Deptford’:—
’Tis Marlowe falls! That last lunge rent asunder
Our lyre of spirit and flesh, Kit Marlowe’s life,
Whose chords seemed strung by earth and heaven at strife,
Yet ever strung to beauty above or under!
Heav’n kens of Man, but oh! the stars can blunder,
If Fate’s hand guided yonder villain’s knife
Through that rare brain, so teeming, daring, rife
With dower of poets—song and love and wonder.
Or was it Chance? Shakspeare, who art supreme
O’er man and men, yet sharest Marlowe’s sight
To pierce the clouds that hide the inhuman height
Where man and men and gods and all that seem
Are Nature’s mutterings in her changeful dream—
Come, spell the runes these bloody rivulets write!
After they have all drunk in silence to the memory of Marlowe, Marlowe’s friend speaks:—
Where’er thou art, ‘dead Shepherd,’ look on me;
The boy who loved thee loves more dearly now,
He sees thine eyes in yonder holly-bough;
Oh, Kit, my Kit, the Mermaid drinks to thee!
Then Raleigh rises, and the great business of the evening begins with the following splendid chorus:—
Raleigh
(Turning to David Gwynn)
Wherever billows foam
The Briton fights at home:
His hearth is built of water—Chorus
Water blue and green;
Raleigh
There’s never a wave of ocean
The wind can set in motion
That shall not own our England—Chorus
Own our England queen. [427]
Raleigh
The guest I bring to-night
Had many a goodly fight
On seas the Don hath found—Hath found for English sails;
Raleigh
And once he dealt a blow
Against the Don to show
What mighty hearts can move—Chorus
Can move in leafy Wales.
Raleigh
Stand up, bold Master Gwynn,
Who hast a heart akin
To England’s own brave hearts—Chorus
Brave hearts where’er they beat;
Raleigh
Stand up, brave Welshman, thou,
And tell the Mermaid how
A galley-slave struck hard—Chorus
Struck hard the Spanish fleet.
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?
Upon being thus called forth the old sea-dog rises, and tells a wonderful story indeed, the ‘story of how he and the Golden Skeleton crippled the Great Armada sailing out’:—
‘A galley lie’ they called my tale; but he
Whose talk is with the deep kens mighty tales:
The man, I say, who helped to keep you free
Stands here, a truthful son of truthful Wales.
Slandered by England as a loose-lipped liar,
Banished from Ireland, branded rogue and thief,
Here stands that Gwynn whose life of torments dire
Heaven sealed for England, sealed in blood and fire—
Stands asking here Truth’s one reward, belief!And Spain shall tell, with pallid lips of dread,
This tale of mine—shall tell, in future days,
How Gwynn, the galley-slave, once fought and bled
For England when she moved in perilous ways;
But say, ye gentlemen of England, sprung
From loins of men whose ghosts have still the sea—
Doth England—she who loves the loudest tongue—
Remember mariners whose deeds are sung
By waves where flowed their blood to keep her free?I see—I see ev’n now—those ships of Spain
Gathered in Tagus’ mouth to make the spring;
I feel the cursed oar, I toil again,
And trumpets blare, and priests and choir-boys sing;
And morning strikes with many a crimson shaft,
Through ruddy haze, four galleys rowing out—
Four galleys built to pierce the English craft,
Each swivel-gunned for raking fore and aft,
Snouted like sword-fish, but with iron snout.And one we call the ‘Princess,’ one the ‘Royal,’
‘Diana’ one; but ’tis the fell ‘Basana’
Where I am toiling, Gwynn, the true, the loyal,
Thinking of mighty Drake and Gloriana;
For by their help Hope whispers me that I—
Whom ten hours’ daily travail at a stretch
Has taught how sweet a thing it is to die—
May strike once more where flags of England fly,
Strike for myself and many a haggard wretch.True sorrow knows a tale it may not tell:
Again I feel the lash that tears my back;
Again I hear mine own blaspheming yell,
Answered by boatswain’s laugh and scourge’s crack;
Again I feel the pang when trying to choke
Rather than drink the wine, or chew the bread
Wherewith, when rest for meals would break the stroke,
They cram our mouths while still we sit at yoke;
Again is Life, not Death, the shape of dread.By Finisterre there comes a sudden gale,
And mighty waves assault our trembling galley
With blows that strike her waist as strikes a flail,
And soldiers cry, ‘What saint shall bid her rally?’
Some slaves refuse to row, and some implore
The Dons to free them from the metal tether
By which their limbs are locked upon the oar;
Some shout, in answer to the billows’ roar,
‘The Dons and we will drink brine-wine together.’‘Bring up the slave,’ I hear the captain cry,
‘Who sank the golden galleon “El Dorado,”
The dog can steer.’
‘Here sits the dog,’ quoth I,
‘Who sank the ship of Commodore Medrado!’
With hell-lit eyes, blistered by spray and rain,
Standing upon the bridge, saith he to me:
‘Hearken, thou pirate—bold Medrado’s bane!—
Freedom and gold are thine, and thanks of Spain,
If thou canst take the galley through this sea.’‘Ay! ay!’ quoth I. The fools unlock me straight!
And then ’tis I give orders to the Don,
Laughing within to hear the laugh of Fate,
Whose winning game I know hath just begun.
I mount the bridge when dies the last red streak
Of evening, and the moon seems fain for night
Oh then I see beneath the galley’s beak
A glow like Spanish auto’s ruddy reek—
Oh then these eyes behold a wondrous sight!A skeleton, but yet with living eyes—
A skeleton, but yet with bones like gold—
Squats on the galley-beak, in wondrous wise,
And round his brow, of high imperial mould,
A burning circle seems to shake and shine,
Bright, fiery bright, with many a living gem,
Throwing a radiance o’er the foam-lit brine:
‘’Tis God’s Revenge,’ methinks. ‘Heaven sends for sign
That bony shape—that Inca’s diadem.’At first the sign is only seen of me,
But well I know that God’s Revenge hath come
To strike the Armada, set old ocean free,
And cleanse from stain of Spain the beauteous foam.
Quoth I, ‘How fierce soever be the levin
Spain’s hand can hurl—made mightier still for wrong
By that great Scarlet One whose hills are seven—
Yea, howsoever Hell may scoff at Heaven—
Stronger than Hell is God, though Hell is strong.’‘The dog can steer,’ I laugh; ‘yea, Drake’s men know
How sea-dogs hold a ship to Biscay waves.’
Ah! when I bid the soldiers go below,
Some ’neath the hatches, some beside the slaves,
And bid them stack their muskets all in piles
Beside the foremast, covered by a sail,
The captives guess my plan—I see their smiles
As down the waist the cozened troop defiles,
Staggering and stumbling landsmen, faint and pale.I say, they guess my plan—to send beneath
The soldiers to the benches where the slaves
Sit, armed with eager nails and eager teeth—
Hate’s nails and teeth more keen than Spanish glaives,
Then wait until the tempest’s waxing might
Shall reach its fiercest, mingling sea and sky,
Then seize the key, unlock the slaves, and smite
The sea-sick soldiers in their helpless plight,
Then bid the Spaniards pull at oar or die.Past Ferrol Bay each galley ’gins to stoop,
Shuddering before the Biscay demon’s breath.
Down goes a prow—down goes a gaudy poop:
‘The Don’s “Diana” bears the Don to death,’
Quoth I, ‘and see the “Princess” plunge and wallow
Down purple trough, o’er snowy crest of foam:
See! see! the “Royal,” how she tries to follow
By many a glimmering crest and shimmering hollow,
Where gull and petrel scarcely dare to roam.’Now, three queen-galleys pass Cape Finisterre;
The Armada, dreaming but of ocean-storms,
Thinks not of mutineers with shoulders bare,
Chained, bloody-wealed and pale, on galley-forms,
Each rower murmuring o’er my whispered plan,
Deep-burnt within his brain in words of fire,
‘Rise, every man, to tear to death his man—
Yea, tear as only galley-captives can,
When God’s Revenge sings loud to ocean’s lyre.’Taller the spectre grows ’mid ocean’s din;
The captain sees the Skeleton and pales:
I give the sign: the slaves cry, ‘Ho for Gwynn!’
‘Teach them,’ quoth I, ‘the way we grip in Wales.’
And, leaping down where hateful boatswains shake,
I win the key—let loose a storm of slaves:
‘When captives hold the whip, let drivers quake,’
They cry; ‘sit down, ye Dons, and row for Drake,
Or drink to England’s Queen in foaming waves.’We leap adown the hatches; in the dark
We stab the Dons at random, till I see
A spark that trembles like a tinder-spark,
Waxing and brightening, till it seems to be
A fleshless skull, with eyes of joyful fire:
Then, lo: a bony shape with lifted hands—
A bony mouth that chants an anthem dire,
O’ertopping groans, o’ertopping Ocean’s quire—
A skeleton with Inca’s diadem stands!It sings the song I heard an Indian sing,
Chained by the ruthless Dons to burn at stake,
When priests of Tophet chanted in a ring,
Sniffing man’s flesh at roast for Christ His sake.
The Spaniards hear: they see: they fight no more;
They cross their foreheads, but they dare not speak.
Anon the spectre, when the strife is o’er,
Melts from the dark, then glimmers as before,
Burning upon the conquered galley’s beak.And now the moon breaks through the night, and shows
The ‘Royal’ bearing down upon our craft—
Then comes a broadside close at hand, which strows
Our deck with bleeding bodies fore and aft.
I take the helm; I put the galley near:
We grapple in silver sheen of moonlit surge.
Amid the ‘Royal’s’ din I laugh to hear
The curse of many a British mutineer,
The crack, crack, crack of boatswain’s biting scourge.‘Ye scourge in vain,’ quoth I, ‘scourging for life
Slaves who shall row no more to save the Don’;
For from the ‘Royal’s’ poop, above the strife,
Their captain gazes at our Skeleton!
‘What! is it thou, Pirate of “El Dorado”?
He shouts in English tongue. And there, behold!
Stands he, the devil’s commodore, Medrado.
‘Ay! ay!’ quoth I, ‘Spain owes me one strappado
For scuttling Philip’s ship of stolen gold.’‘I come for that strappado now,’ quoth I.
‘What means yon thing of burning bones?’ he saith.
‘’Tis God’s Revenge cries, “Bloody Spain shall die!”
The king of El Dorado’s name is Death.
Strike home, ye slaves; your hour is coming swift,’
I cry; ‘strong hands are stretched to save you now;
Show yonder spectre you are worth the gift.’
But when the ‘Royal,’ captured, rides adrift,
I look: the skeleton hath left our prow.When all are slain, the tempest’s wings have fled,
But still the sea is dreaming of the storm:
Far down the offing glows a spot of red,
My soul knows well it hath that Inca’s form.
‘It lights,’ quoth I, ‘the red cross banner of Spain
There on the flagship where Medina sleeps—
Hell’s banner, wet with sweat of Indian’s pain,
And tears of women yoked to treasure train,
Scarlet of blood for which the New World weeps.’There on the dark the flagship of the Don
To me seems luminous of the spectre’s glow;
But soon an arc of gold, and then the sun,
Rise o’er the reddening billows, proud and slow;
Then, through the curtains of the morning mist,
That take all shifting colours as they shake,
I see the great Armada coil and twist
Miles, miles along the ocean’s amethyst,
Like hell’s old snake of hate—the winged snake.And, when the hazy veils of Morn are thinned,
That snake accursed, with wings which swell and puff
Before the slackening horses of the wind,
Turns into shining ships that tack and luff.
‘Behold,’ quoth I, ‘their floating citadels,
The same the priests have vouched for musket-proof,
Caracks and hulks and nimble caravels,
That sailed with us to sound of Lisbon bells—
Yea, sailed from Tagus’ mouth, for Christ’s behoof.For Christ’s behoof they sailed: see how they go
With that red skeleton to show the way
There sitting on Medina’s stem aglow—
A hundred sail and forty-nine, men say;
Behold them, brothers, galleon and galeasse—
Their dizened turrets bright of many a plume,
Their gilded poops, their shining guns of brass,
Their trucks, their flags—behold them, how they pass—
With God’s Revenge for figurehead—to Doom!’
Then Ben Jonson, the symposiarch, rises and calls upon Raleigh to tell the story of the defeat of the Great Armada. I can give only a stanza or two and the chorus:—
Raleigh
The choirboys sing the matin song,
When down falls Seymour on the Spaniard’s right.
He drives the wing—a huddled throng—
Back on the centre ships, that steer for flight.
While galleon hurtles galeasse,
And oars that fight each other kill the slaves,
As scythes cut down the summer grass,
Drake closes on the writhing mass,
Through which the balls at closest ranges pass,
Skimming the waves.Fiercely do galley and galeasse fight,
Running from ship to ship like living things.
With oars like legs, with beaks that smite,
Winged centipedes they seem with tattered wings.
Through smoke we see their chiefs encased
In shining mail of gold where blood congeals;
And once I see within a waist
Wild English captives ashen-faced,
Their bending backs by Spanish scourges laced
In purple weals.[David Gwynn here leaps up, pale and panting, and
bares a scarred arm, but at a sign from Raleigh
sits down again.The Don fights well, but fights not now
The cozened Indian whom he kissed for friend,
To pluck the gold from off the brow,
Then fling the flesh to priests to burn and rend.
He hunts not now the Indian maid
With bloodhound’s bay—Peru’s confiding daughter,
Who saw in flowery bower or glade
The stranger’s god-like cavalcade,
And worshipped, while he planned Pizarro’s trade
Of rape and slaughter.His fight is now with Drake and Wynter,
Hawkins, and Frobisher, and English fire,
Bullet and cannon ball and splinter,
Till every deck gleams, greased with bloody mire:
Heaven smiles to see that battle wage,
Close battle of musket, carabine, and gun:
Oh, vainly doth the Spaniard rage
Like any wolf that tears his cage!
’Tis English sails shall win the weather gauge
Till set of sun!Their troops, superfluous as their gold,
Out-numbering all their seamen two to one,
Are packed away in every hold—
Targets of flesh for every English gun—
Till, like Pizarro’s halls of blood,
Or slaughter-pens where swine or beeves are pinned,
Lee-scuppers pour a crimson flood,
Reddening the waves for many a rood,
As eastward, eastward still the galleons scud
Before the wind.
The chief leit-motiv of the poem is the metrical idea that whenever a stanza ends with the word ‘sea,’ Ben Jonson and the rest of the jolly companions break into this superb chorus:—
The sea!
Thus did England fight;
And shall not England smite
With Drake’s strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour—
The sea?
Raleigh leaves off his narrative at the point when the Armada is driven out to the open sea. He sits down, and Gwynn, worked into a frenzy of excitement, now starts up and finishes the story in the same metre, but in quite a different spirit. In Gwynn’s fevered imagination the skeleton which he describes in his own narrative now leads the doomed Armada to its destruction:—
Gwynn
With towering sterns, with golden stems
That totter in the smoke before their foe,
I see them pass the mouth of Thames,
With death above the billows, death below!
Who leads them down the tempest’s path,
From Thames to Yare, from Yare to Tweedmouth blown,
Past many a Scottish hill and strath,
All helpless in the wild wind’s wrath,
Each mainmast stooping, creaking like a lath?
The Skeleton!At length with toil the cape is passed,
And faster and faster still the billows come
To coil and boil till every mast
Is flecked with clinging flakes of snowy foam.
I see, I see, where galleons pitch,
That Inca’s bony shape burn on the waves,
Flushing each emerald scarp and ditch,
While Mother Carey, Orkney’s witch,
Waves to the Spectre’s song her lantern-switch
O’er ocean-graves.The glimmering crown of Scotland’s head
They pass. No foe dares follow but the storm.
The Spectre, like a sunset red,
Illumines mighty Wrath’s defiant form,
And makes the dreadful granite peak
Burn o’er the ships with brows of prophecy;
Yea, makes that silent countenance speak
Above the tempest’s foam and reek,
More loud than all the loudest winds that shriek,
‘Tyrants, ye die!’The Spectre, by the Orkney Isles,
Writes ‘God’s Revenge’ on waves that climb and dash,
Foaming right up the sand-built piles,
Where ships are hurled. It sings amid the crash;
Yea, sings amid the tempest’s roar,
Snapping of ropes, crackling of spars set free,
And yells of captives chained to oar,
And cries of those who strike for shore,
‘Spain’s murderous breath of blood shall foul no more
The righteous sea!’
The poem ends with the famous wassail chorus which has been often quoted in anthologies:—
Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?Raleigh
’Tis by Devon’s glorious halls,
Whence, dear Ben, I come again:
Bright with golden roofs and walls—
El Dorado’s rare domain—
Seem those halls when sunlight launches
Shafts of gold through leafless branches,
Where the winter’s feathery mantle blanches
Field and farm and lane.Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?Drayton
’Tis where Avon’s wood-sprites weave
Through the boughs a lace of rime,
While the bells of Christmas Eve
Fling for Will the Stratford-chime
O’er the river-flags embossed
Rich with flowery runes of frost—
O’er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed—
Strains of olden time.Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?’Tis, methinks, on any ground
Where our Shakspeare’s feet are set.
There smiles Christmas, holly-crowned
With his blithest coronet:
Friendship’s face he loveth well:
’Tis a countenance whose spell
Sheds a balm o’er every mead and dell
Where we used to fret.Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
Where?Heywood
More than all the pictures, Ben,
Winter weaves by wood or stream,
Christmas loves our London, when
Rise thy clouds of wassail-steam—
Clouds like these, that, curling, take
Forms of faces gone, and wake
Many a lay from lips we loved, and make
London like a dream.Chorus
Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place
Where?Ben Jonson
Love’s old songs shall never die,
Yet the new shall suffer proof;
Love’s old drink of Yule brew I,
Wassail for new love’s behoof:
Drink the drink I brew, and sing
Till the berried branches swing,
Till our song make all the Mermaid ring—
Yea, from rush to roof.Finale
Christmas loves this merry, merry place:—
Christmas saith with fondest face
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Ben! the drink tastes rare of sack and mace:
Rare!’
This poem, when it first appeared in the volume of ‘The Coming of Love,’ fine as it is, was overshadowed by the wild and romantic poem which lends its name to the volume. But in 1902, Mr. John Lane included it in his beautiful series, ‘Flowers of Parnassus,’ where it was charmingly illustrated by Mr. Herbert Cole, and this widened its vogue considerably. There is no doubt that for originality, for power, and for music, “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid’” is enough to form the base of any poet’s reputation. It has been enthusiastically praised by some of the foremost writers of our time. I have permission to print only one of the letters in its praise which the author received, but that is an important one, as it comes from Thomas Hardy, who wrote:—
“I have been beginning Christmas, in a way, by reading over the fire your delightful little ‘Christmas at the “Mermaid”’ which it was most kind of you to send. I was carried back right into Armada times by David Gwynn’s vivid story: it seems remarkable that you should have had the conjuring power to raise up those old years so brightly in your own mind first, as to be able to exhibit them to readers in such high relief of three dimensions, as one may say.
The absence of Shakespeare strikes me as being one of the finest touches of the poem: it throws one into a ‘humourous melancholy’—and we feel him, in some curious way, more than if he had been there.”