Locksley Hall

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.

'T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.--

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young,
And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.

And I said, "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,
Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee."

On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light,
As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.

And she turn'd--her ***** shaken with a sudden storm of sighs--
All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes--

Saying, "I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong";
Saying, "Dost thou love me, cousin?" weeping, "I have loved thee long."

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring,
And her whisper throng'd my pulses with the fulness of the Spring.

Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,
And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips.

O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!

Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!

Is it well to wish thee happy?--having known me--to decline
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.

As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

What is this? his eyes are heavy; think not they are glazed with wine.
Go to him, it is thy duty, kiss him, take his hand in thine.

It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought:
Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought.

He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand--
Better thou wert dead before me, tho' I slew thee with my hand!

Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace,
Roll'd in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace.

Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!

Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the fool!

Well--'t is well that I should bluster!--Hadst thou less unworthy proved--
Would to God--for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.

Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit?
I will pluck it from my *****, tho' my heart be at the root.

Never, tho' my mortal summers to such length of years should come
As the many-winter'd crow that leads the clanging rookery home.

Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind?
Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind?

I remember one that perish'd; sweetly did she speak and move;
Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love.

Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?
No--she never loved me truly; love is love for evermore.

Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,
In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall,
Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.

Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep,
To thy widow'd marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep.

Thou shalt hear the "Never, never," whisper'd by the phantom years,
And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears;

And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain.
Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow; get thee to thy rest again.

Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry.
'T is a purer life than thine, a lip to drain thy trouble dry.

Baby lips will laugh me down; my latest rival brings thee rest.
Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast.

O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due.
Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two.

O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,
With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart.

"They were dangerous guides the feelings--she herself was not exempt--
Truly, she herself had suffer'd"--Perish in thy self-contempt!

Overlive it--lower yet--be happy! wherefore should I care?
I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.

What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys.

Every gate is throng'd with suitors, all the markets overflow.
I have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do?

I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground,
When the ranks are roll'd in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound.

But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour feels,
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.

Can I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page.
Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age!

Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,
When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;

Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,
Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,

And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;

And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,
Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men:

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:
That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

So I triumph'd ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry,
Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;

Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint:
Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point:

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.

Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.

What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,
Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's?

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.

Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,
They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn:

Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd string?
I am shamed thro' all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.

Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain--
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine--

Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat
Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat;

Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starr'd,--
I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward.

Or to burst all links of habit--there to wander far away,
On from island unto island at the gateways of the day.

Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,
Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,
Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag;

Droops the heavy-blossom'd bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree--
Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.

There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind,
In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.

There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing space;
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

Iron-jointed, supple-sinew'd, they shall dive, and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;

Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks,
Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books--

Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,
But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.

I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!

Mated with a squalid savage--what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time--

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon!

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun:
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun.

O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet.

Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall!
Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall.

Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.

Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

Thou stock-dove, whose echo resounds thro’ the glen,
Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den,
Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear,
I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair.

How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills,
Far mark’d with the courses of clear winding rills;
There daily I wander as noon rises high,
My flocks and my Mary’s sweet cot in my eye.

How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below,
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow;
There oft, as mild Ev’ning sweeps over the lea,
The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me.

Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides,
And winds by the cot where my Mary resides,
How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave,
As gathering sweet flowrets she stems thy clear wave.

  Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays;
My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

Day opening, the blind’s tug and lift,
there on the counterpane, cards,
a nest of gifts tied with golden thread
serrated to the touch, bowed too
with deft hands, a box when un-papered
reveals a (stone-like shell-like) form
picked from a south-facing beach
and woven round to make
(harp-like warp-like) a loom
to weave the waves play.


Holding in her small hands,
the still-to-be-given gift
(beyond all gifts this bright day)
the stroke, the brush
of fingertips on the harvest field
of a bare arm, she unbows,
pulling preciousness so close
that between themselves
a shared to and fro comes
to the very moment of joy.


To walk out
on the springiest day
closing the door
on house and home,
taking off to a near-
distant hill now glowing
in greens and holding above
itself a tableau of blue and white
and grey clouds bringing
cool wind to bare knees.


Never an intrusion
on nature’s ambience
(our footfall on the path,
the wind breezing
through sun-dapple trees)
your voice’s song
sings out in the crisp air.
Quite under your spell words
turn and fall like the flowers
from a blossomed pear.


Once over the river
and up the glen,
following a stream,
passing self-sheared sheep,
a gradual climb with a
view forming behind us.
Horses relaxed in fields
then galloping furiously.
Cries of curlews now,
chuckles of grouse.


Lapwing
Flop and flap wing
Tumble over bird
In the moorland
Sky turning the
Cold May wind
Over and over
No steady state
In this brisk air
Lapwing.


On to the moor
and we stop,
backs to a rock
for a baked brownie treat -
coffee and cake and a vista of valleys.
Alone in the sunshine
we celebrate her success
(with smiles and a kiss)
of this chocolate confection
(a high 9.6 on the outdoor scale).


This empty place
so full of sky,
so rich in views
across and over and
down to folding valleys,
then up to far far-distant hills.
Stopped by a circle  
of twelve standing stones,
cold fingers reach
for a warm hand.


A stanza-ed stone
straddling a stream,
a paragraphed poem
breaking the unbroken thread
where water unbinds
and hangs at the waterfall face.
Pleased to be found
(and after a trek)
this stanza-ed stone
at Backstone Beck.

15

The Guest is gold and crimson—
An Opal guest and gray—
Of Ermine is his doublet—
His Capuchin gay—

He reaches town at nightfall—
He stops at every door—
Who looks for him at morning
I pray him too—explore
The Lark’s pure territory—
Or the Lapwing’s shore!

Let me humbly introduce to you Lee,
A Mortal servant with much to see,
Yes that's right, Mr.Hegsten knew it all:
The risk of rising before the fall;
How the Light's mask brought a yawn,
One to applaud for prior to dawn.

The six o'clock spring P.M, jolly celebration for a true king
But who of course? None other than Lee's most desired, Lapwing.
Seph waves his wand, the desk beneath him trembles a victory
The shadow of his picture, believes it is contradictory,
To the one lost love, to the frozen life of long ago...
But the mid hour does not recall his callous beau.
Because she now remains, as his traitor, his foe.

The feathers flitter and the sound escapes,
And in the distance, you could see the shapes
Of the Wind turning and the leaves changing,
Leist' face and the lines nearly aging,
From deep-rooted stubborness, no one could persuay
Gehen to attend his dreams, and leave the light of day.

"Y. Step away from that baton and come give me your hand.
We can spend the day inside, sure it's small and crammed,
but we have each other, look, we can turn on the gramophone
and dance alone in my living room, all without a chaperone!"
The words still whisper in the birds narrow wind,
but each time reaching Kejodin's ear, very much thinned.

"But I have gotten off track", says the mighty Redshank,
as she encircles the swelling of the pure white cloudbanks.
Lee lets down his pen, and closes his well-rehearsed book,
The notes firmly pressed in Hegston's shiny round hook.
"Do not answer to the call of a yawn,
Each downward head is a moment gone!
Without the Moon's curse, our lives-doubled
and our immortality, is left almost untroubled!"
With three taps on his music stand,
Commencement for the falling sand.

Thunder in the air-- no wait, it's a brass bark
Opening lines performed by most esteemed: Skylark.
The audience, is one in total behind Lieg Stehen's back
She stands behind him, silent in the harmonious black.
The last Soprano sounds a dark whistle through a rusty pipe,
Stehen motions the break of silence from gusty Madame Snipe.
With an inviting warm brown eye, Lieg beckons the timpani
With one echoing stroke, he concludes time-defying Sephany.

"It was you, you the conductor,
You stood between two crowds,
And you chose one to impress the other.
But now you've seen the clouds,
Is there anything left to discover?
Except the cloth of your shrouds?
These notes cannot warmly cover."  

"I've lived far longer than you,
Many an itcus I've come to cue,
My heart and mind remains stronger
No one can say that they have lived longer,
I'm sorry Tes, but I've prospered over you
the happy one loved was not worth the Coo
Over the words that to you were Adieu.
I've lived with half a soul and it was right,
Because unlike you, life has taught me to fight."

Madame Lenhige Stood over Y.'s spirit,
and she grew aware to openly fear it,
because Mr.Kejodin left behind his key,
the only item he swears set him free,
She knew he had not left her forever,
because you see, it did not matter, where ever
though the night did not solve, his child's mother
she and him belonged solely to one another.

A CURSING rogue with a merry face,
A bundle of rags upon a crutch,
Stumbled upon that windy place
Called Cruachan, and it was as much
As the one sturdy leg could do
To keep him upright while he cursed.
He had counted, where long years ago
Queen Maeve's nine Maines had been nursed,
A pair of lapwings, one old sheep,
And not a house to the plain's edge,
When close to his right hand a heap
Of grey stones and a rocky ledge
Reminded him that he could make.
If he but shifted a few stones,
A shelter till the daylight broke.
But while he fumbled with the stones
They toppled over; "Were it not
I have a lucky wooden shin
I had been hurt'; and toppling brought
Before his eyes, where stones had been,
A dark deep hollow in the rock.
He gave a gasp and thought to have fled,
Being certain it was no right rock
Because an ancient history said
Hell Mouth lay open near that place,
And yet stood still, because inside
A great lad with a beery face
Had tucked himself away beside
A ladle and a tub of beer,
And snored, no phantom by his look.
So with a laugh at his own fear
He crawled into that pleasant nook.
"Night grows uneasy near the dawn
Till even I sleep light; but who
Has tired of his own company?
What one of Maeve's nine brawling sons
Sick of his grave has wakened me?
But let him keep his grave for once
That I may find the sleep I have lost."
What care I if you sleep or wake?
But I'Il have no man call me ghost."
Say what you please, but from daybreak
I'll sleep another century."
And I will talk before I sleep
And drink before I talk.'
And he
Had dipped the wooden ladle deep
Into the sleeper's tub of beer
Had not the sleeper started up.
Before you have dipped it in the beer
I dragged from Goban's mountain-top
I'll have assurance that you are able
To value beer; no half-legged fool
Shall dip his nose into my ladle
Merely for stumbling on this hole
In the bad hour before the dawn."
Why beer is only beer.'
"But say
""I'll sleep until the winter's gone,
Or maybe to Midsummer Day,''
And drink and you will sleep that length.
"I'd like to sleep till winter's gone
Or till the sun is in his srrength.
This blast has chilled me to the bone.'
"I had no better plan at first.
I thought to wait for that or this;
Maybe the weather was accursed
Or I had no woman there to kiss;
So slept for half a year or so;
But year by year I found that less
Gave me such pleasure I'd forgo
Even a half-hour's nothingness,
And when at one year's end I found
I had not waked a single minute,
I chosc this burrow under ground.
I'll sleep away all time within it:
My sleep were now nine centuries
But for those mornings when I find
The lapwing at their foolish dies
And the sheep bleating at the wind
As when I also played the fool.'
The beggar in a rage began
Upon his hunkers in the hole,
"It's plain that you are no right man
To mock at everything I love
As if it were not worth, the doing.
I'd have a merry life enough
If a good Easter wind were blowing,
And though the winter wind is bad
I should not be too down in the mouth
For anything you did or said
If but this wind were in the south.'
"You cty aloud, O would 'twere spring
Or that the wind would shift a point,
And do not know that you would bring,
If time were suppler in the joint,
Neither the spring nor the south wind
But the hour when you shall pass away
And leave no smoking wick behind,
For all life longs for the Last Day
And there's no man but ***** his ear
To know when Michael's trumpet cries
"That flesh and bone may disappear,
And souls as if they were but sighs,
And there be nothing but God left;
But, I aone being blessed keep
Like some old rabbit to my cleft
And wait Him in a drunken sleep.'
He dipped his ladle in the tub
And drank and yawned and stretched him out,
The other shouted, "You would rob
My life of every pleasant thought
And every comfortable thing,
And so take that and that." Thereon
He gave him a great pummelling,
But might have pummelled at a stone
For all the sleeper knew or cared;
And after heaped up stone on stone,
And then, grown weary, prayed and cursed
And heaped up stone on stone again,
And prayed and cursed and cursed and bed
From Maeve and all that juggling plain,
Nor gave God thanks till overhead
The clouds were brightening with the dawn.

on a dark road
below a black hill
headlamped vision
gritty verge littered
with insect road ****
husk moth bodies
beetle shell   mud
defiled ox-eye daisy
dumb weight tramping
the treadmill night
day-shot with the memory
of those lapwing hundreds
wheeling in ascent to fall
on folded wing and again
gyre up to the brink
of abandonment
green silent fields away
as when in advent there
the hills rose up before me
and the thirst for their
awesome green

loth to return
to that vortex drawn
down ice-pocket ruts  
my city captive goes

(homage to Ogden Nash)

See the buzzard soar, the swallow skim a lake, the kestrel hover;
observe the skylark pouring his little heart out in the sky;
admire the flapwing, lapwing flight of a flock of plover;
what birds do is fly.

At least they oughter,
because once birds get onto the water
they can't help looking absurd
– except the swan, for which nobody I know has an unkind word,
or, mostly, seagulls,
who fly with almost the grace of eagulls,
and in their silvery-white uniforms are impeccably neat,
even if my admiration for their manners is incomplete –
but, shucks,
look at ducks.

And for something really silly,
shaggy-winged, fluffy-headed, and disproportionately
                                                                ­                   neck-and-bill-y,
consider the pelican, for heaven's sake.
Surely Nature made a mistake,
or left the designing of it to a particularly inept committee,
it's so unpretty.
But once in the air he can soar like a buzzard, though maybe lower,
and skim over the waves with more perfect control
                                                                ­        than a swallow, and slower,
and dive for a fish like a living javelin, that clumsy pelican.
By helican!

No, for a shapeless, hapless caricature, created to be comical,
the epitome of what a bird shouldn't be, the penguin
                                                             must be the most epitomical.
As he does his impression of a Charlie Chaplin waiter,
you know he'll fall off the ice sooner or later.
But before a warning can escape your lips
he trips
(and slips).
Then, as he slides beneath the waves, ah! See the happy penguin fly,
A graceful bird in his greenblue underwater sky.

We are wild and raw for it
Here, in a blazing land,
Sand-burning beaches,
The low colossal sky,
The slow fading of our evenings into night.

Night, when the lapwing calls the world home again
And out of the bay the white gulls fall
Into the ocean, the sea's crawling surge,
Northwards, by currents temperate
And tropical,
The long winding range
That loses its footing in the coastal flats,
In the desert's vast and undulating stride
We are wild and raw for it.

With a sky so blue that you could fall forever
And falling, never fall so far as into its red heart,
Its pumping core, and the majesty
Of bodies skin-tight, raw and moving
In this distant nether-world.
Where the real world ends, our hearts
Plunge fountain-flow into the dance of dreams,
We hold the dancer close, we spin,
Star-tipped and wild beyond the clasp and call,
Beyond the river's bend,
Beyond the treeless hill,
We are wild and raw for it.