DREGINIABETH
Lo!
We have found the tale of the former age
And the lore and the legends like eagles’ wings.
We have read of royalty on many a rich page
And heard in the harping, of heroes and kings.
As we picture again the wars they wage
Deep strains are touched from our own heart-strings:
Recorded virtue and valour assuage
The pain that a peaceable era brings
When, thrive as we may, the thrones and rings
Are gone, with the Guardians, the spears and the embossed
Elven-shields: word-wielders, we shape these things
In song that abides though battle be lost.
And lost, or so it appeared, was the Lord
Of the South – outnumbered his knights, the flower
Of the Southern Realm – when a Saviour restored
The odds of their battle at the bitterest hour.
The darkest, most dangerous land he explored
With purity of purpose, no other power,
To get rid of the Sceptre of Sorgrim the Abhorred
And thus to destroy his terrible tower.
But for Fortinbras, what followed was sour –
Unreal cure, unrecognised cost –
And though he and his helpers did save and scour
The Demesne, their home, all his happiness was lost.
And lost, long lost, as the legends agree,
Are the earlier kingdoms of this fair Earth,
The evergreen realms where the Elves lived free,
In highland and forest, by river and firth,
Until Eastern Midyard was sunk in the sea
After Sorgrim had quelled its music and its mirth.
Then the isle was given by the Gods’ decree,
The marvellous gift of matchless worth
For the bravest Men, where was brought to birth
A sea-going nation that cruised and crossed
On the glittering seas, to the globe’s vast girth:
Yet Atalantis also was lost,
Lost when the maddest and mightiest king,
Seduced by Sorgrim, set sail for the West,
Driven by dread, and attempting to cling
On to life by invading the Land of the Blessed.
The ban he would flout, his fleet he would fling
Recklessly and unto himself would wrest
The mountain-valleys, the meadows of Spring
And the green brightness of Yavanna’s breast.
When the vessels of violent mortals pressed
On that shining shore, they were shaken, tossed
And overwhelmed by the Wave with crest
Of terror. The Isle down-tilted and was lost.
Altogether lost since then, say they
Who venture in vessels, is Pellanor:
Green ships and woven winds betray
All ships that would shelter on that shore.
But still the sea-path runs, we say:
The Lost Straight Road of Elven-lore.
Now, noble warriors, listen to my lay,
And each lovely lady and lord’s paramour,
As I sing you the history, hidden before
In speech unwritten and spells unglossed,
Of that wonderful craft in the dragon-war
Which reconstituted the King you had lost.
For lest it be lost I learned it myself
From the mouth of the Maid of the Motherhood,
The witch Calendis, who worked for the welfare
Of birds in the City and beasts in the wood.
In full she told it me, Findir the Elf:
The Flight of the Goddess, Yavanna the Good.
From the farther shore to the ocean shelf
She came to befriend us as best she could,
And to wield her weapons as well she should,
Her fresh green spears for our snow and frost;
And at last restored, be it understood,
To the Gods, what they never knew they had lost.
*
Lost in the mist were the twinkling lights
Of Mithlond’s tower and wave-washed wall.
All night, and for nine more days and nights
The ship fared forward through rise and fall
Of waves with dark-green depths and heights
Of white foam weltering: wind and squall
And storm-cloud stayed her never: flights
Of white birds, wide-winged, gladdened all
On board, till the curve of the cloud-wrapped ball
Was touched by the dawn of a timeless day
And the years of yearning and sad recall
With the murmuring waves and mist fell away.
For the way of the ship overshoots the curve
As the Helmsman steers and holds to the Road
With helm unswivelling: never a swerve
Disturbs the magically peaceful mode
Of her silent passage; the high airs serve
To bear her towards the blest abode
And to cleanse the breath, and to calm each nerve,
Until Fortinbras hopes that his heavy load,
With the tears of his torment that ought to have flowed,
By some mercy and means of Pellanor, may
Be loosed indeed, no longer owed,
Wept out, all wept and all wiped away.
Not long now, the way, what is left of the line
To be drawn by the keel through the cool blue air.
The waves of the air-surge whisper and whine
And a second Ocean lies open there
Under glorious stars that glitter and shine
On the Evening’s bosom spread broad and bare;
And faint sweet singing is heard, for a sign.
Then a rain sweeps down like rippling hair
Through a long grey night of near-despair
Till, as tresses are tied back, torrent and spray,
Falling behind in the wake, gleam where
The rising sun makes a red-gold way.
And the clouds roll away, for the winds are swift,
Bring a fragrance from the land
That lies ahead, where the last waves lift
And fall in lines on the silver sand.
Bright castles of coral waver and shift
In the brilliant brine. Now boats that are manned
By minstrels set forth, making melodies drift
And fade, and then strengthen along the strand
To a song like the swell of a sea-organ grand
As the ship of the Exiles enters the bay.
Now the arch of the haven is near at hand,
And ropes are cast, and the wooden way
Is down. The way through the harbour is wide
And paved with pearl, and pillared and chained
With sea-green bronze; and soon here stride
The firstborn folk who of old remained
Within Midyard’s boundaries, now to abide
In freedom from strife, in joy unconstrained.
But Fortinbras stays, with old Staffal his guide,
To draw breath of delight, unforced, unfeigned,
On sight of the swan-white city, unstained
Metimalonde. We leave them to stay
There in peace: we follow the others, deep-pained
With more-piercing delight as they wend their way.
*
Away to the West, once the mountains are passed,
A dome and a distant Mound in bloom
Are beheld with heart-springing tears at last,
Like gleaming floods after winter’s gloom.
Now Quendil’s folk go galloping fast
Through shimmering mead and shadowy combe
To Pelmar the verdant city, the vast
Gold gate of the Gods, and the House of Doom.
Alas, for this homing I’ve neither room
Nor words to attempt to tell of the scene –
The welcome that Serna now weaves on her loom,
Of Quendil the Elf-lord and Aglariel the Queen.
Then, a queen no longer, but quiet in mood
She wanders the meads, unclad, like a maid
Amid flowers in myriads, many-hued,
Where gaily, aforetime, she gadded and played,
Till her health is young, and her heart renewed;
Then, blossom-crowned, barefoot ’mid bells of the glade,
She wends to Pelmar, for thither she’s wooed
By doves and finches and fawns unafraid.
And merrily sought, and with mirth waylaid,
She is found by the Fair-elves, brought home to the green
City, embowered and bathed and arrayed
For an interview with Vanna the Queen.
This Queen is a Goddess, the Giver of Fruits
On heavy bough, in fragrant heap,
And bringer-forth of the young of the brutes
From the flames of love that within them leap.
Her power, arising in rugged roots
From unknown waters and wellsprings deep,
Is shown in the buds and the shining shoots,
The ripening grape and the gift Men reap,
And their harvest-home, and the feasts we keep:
Hail Yavanna, heroine
Of this age of war and desert: we weep
For joy, when thus festally joined by our Queen!
Quickly to the Queen comes Aglariel
And mounts to the throne on the Sacred Mound
Where the stocks of the Trees still stand and dwell
Though of old their branches were withered and browned
By the hateful Spy and the Spider of hell.
The Lady curtseys low to the crowned
Goddess, who graciously greets her. ‘Tell
Me,’ she says, ‘whom rumours and fears confound,
The tale of the herbs that grow in the ground,
All the lore of the regions where long you have been
And those wildernesses where wolves abound.
I request full word, being also their Queen.’
*
The Queen listens while the Lady speaks
Of Midyard’s wasting and wounding and woe
And the blood of the Goddess blooms in her cheeks
And ever her grief and anger grow
And her anger searches and her sorrow seeks
For counsel: how some help might go
Beyond the sheer blue-shining peaks
Of the mountain-borderland barred with snow,
To the long-abandoned Earth below,
Where Elves have dwindled, but Dwarves are strong,
And a wicked Wizard has leagued with the foe,
And Men are too blind to know right from wrong.
But the wrong that rankles most in her mind,
The ulcer-like fact and ugly offence
That might be mater for mirth unkind,
Is the fate of her eldest people, the Ents:
The wise old giants, the wardens assigned
To the broad-leaved woods, the brakes and the dense
Thickets, domain of the hart and hind,
Most needing, most worthy of care. Whence,
Then, came it, against all common-sense,
All wisdom and law that to life belong,
That mad mistake, that folly intense –
Race-wide separation? How wrong,
How woefully wrong those wise ones were,
The Ent and the Entwife, to end their troth,
Undoing the bond betwixt Him and Her
And living apart in loin-bound sloth;
How foolishly, fatally wrong to defer
All procreation: they proving so loth
And lazy, how could not that Loss but occur –
The absurd mislaying, at last, of both
By the other? And now that the greenwood’s growth
Is threatened by axe-wielding Dwarves in throng,
The Goddess feels like some girl to whom oath
Has been pledged by a lover of play and wrong.
*
Well, the wrong must be amended. The Goddess arises
And gives the Lady her leave to go,
And the Lady goes, and the look in her eyes is
A gleam of compassion, a pitying glow.
And the last on the list of our goodbyes is
Now to be said: we cannot know
Her goals hereafter and elven-guises:
Lady Aglariel, farewell – but lo,
Your leaven’s at work in the lump of dough,
A purpose rising though your part is done,
A faith new-forming in embryo;
And now is my narrative truly begun.
For the Goddess has begun to desire to go
Herself to the Earth, as she erstwhile went,
To walk in those woods where the blossoms blow
And the leaves decay with a lingering scent.
But for now, with steady steps, although
Fierce thistle and horn spring up to prevent
Much speed, with the spikes of the purple sloe,
She moves to a mountain-side where, blent
With smithy-smoke, red sparks are spent
In the snow; and her brambles writhe and run
Through passage and chamber and arch, to the pent,
The shop of Auland. She has begun
*
To speak, begun to assail her Spouse
With words, before he has risen from his work,
From his anvil-blows and blast, with brows
Blackened and bent in a questioning quirk;
And his sparks fly among her spiky boughs
And the thorns of her thought catch fire in his mirk.
‘Lord Auland,’ she cries, ‘Arise and rouse
Thyself to thy duty, nor longer lurk
In smoky labour; ’tis shame to shirk
Thine intervening when the Earth grows ill,
Which thy merciless Dwarves, and Men berserk,
Are wounding with thine own too-well-taught skill!’
*
‘This skill,’ he replies, ‘for the which thou scoldest,
They have learned indeed of me, who am Lord
Of all moulds and all matter, the chief and oldest
Of metal-makers and miners. To unheard
The Almighty’s bounty I deem the boldest
Of worshipful acts, of works that accord
With His compassion: yea, here thou beholdest
The saw, the axe, the scythe and the sword,
My fruits indeed, such as friendship may afford
To humble Children whose chances are ill
In a world in which thy thought is ignored
Not by me, but by Sorgrim’s murderous will.
‘For his will continueth, working alone
Like a mole or a worm in the minds of men,
Though he himself be thrust from his throne
And yarded in darkness beyond our ken;
And at whiles that hidden will is shown
When the parasite creepeth out of its pen
To gnaw the brain, the bowel, the bone
And to inflame both the grief and the greed once again.
Blame not the weapons, O Lady, when
The axemen cut and the bowmen kill
And wound thy forest and waste thy fen;
Nay, pity the Men, thus maimed in will.’
*
‘I will not pity them,’ and she pauses,
‘Until the tale of their pitiless crime
Against my loved ones and my laws is
Ended, or else, until such time
As the Ents’ Divorce, whatever its causes,
Be healed: for this I hold the prime
Betrayal. And since no citing of clauses,
No wordsmith’s wile, no lawyer’s lime,
No cooking of blame with reason and rhyme
Will save the wilds that will soon be attacked
Though the beavers build and the birds still climb,
It surely is needful now to act!’
‘What act of ours,’ he angrily asks,
With fires arising and furnace roaring,
‘Can touch them from here? O Vanna, some tasks
No extent of need, no tearful imploring
Can rouse to knighthood: their noble masks
Of pity, of passion, of wrath’s outpouring
Are covers for dust, mere empty casques!
Thy wish, as I guess, is to go a-warring
In Midyard’s realms once more, restoring
Thy fok by the force of our arms, but the fact
Is this, what thou art so strangely ignoring:
Added to our law is a Limiting Act.
‘Enacted thereby are the bounds that we
Must keep, and humankind endure
Lest, though their dreaming be drowned in the sea,
Our shimmering shore once more allure
Them hither; nor shall such Hatred be,
No second Sorgrim of malice pure,
No strife beyond strength, as might make plea
Once more, and move us to aid them. Newer
Commandment biddeth thee bide as a viewer
While frailest children, whose freedom is racked
With pain and weakness, work their own cure
And forge their adulthood, act by act.
*
‘And I would act with an iron hand,
Would eagerly punish, with equal wrath,
The stoning and smiting my Dwarves withstand
And the lethal fires that lay them in swath,
Nor stew the blame with reasonings bland
But sup on darker, saltier broth –
Vengeance on vicious men, dragons, orcs and
Elves – if such wishes weren’t mere froth!
Shall we fret against Mindir’s law, like a moth
Fretting his garment? Or shall we gird
Ourselves as rivals, rebels in cloth
Of steel? Nay, nay. My story thou hast heard:
‘How once I heard the voice of the All-Highest
That spake reproof on my younger pride
And reckless rivalship, rashest and wryest
Of moods, when I made my folk and defied
His order, as thou now also defiest
Him in thy heart, maybe? Cried
I for mercy, ashamed, and since, have been shyest
Of going against His will. To provide
For their help and luck, be it His, enskied
As ultimate Monarch, with Mindir preferred
As His lieutenant. The world is wide
But Mindir seëth, all sorrow is heard –’
‘Thou hast not heard a word I have said.’
Thus brashly breaking into his speech
And turning away with a toss of her head,
She leaves him to glower and be glum, in breach
Of wedlock banned from her bosom and bed.
Then planting herself in the plain, like a beech
With crown of copper and crimson-red,
She lets her longing and sadness reach
Upward in her leaves, her bitterness leach
Downward through her roots, till a beautiful bird
Ascends from her crown, with a cry to beseech
High Heaven. Her prayer, no doubt, is heard;
But no voice is heard, no vigorous tone
As when in former time the tongue
Of the Loftiest questioned Auland alone
In secret cell, deep-mined, among
The new-made Dwarves... And time unknown
Elapses, while bindweed-bells are strung
And grasshoppers chirp, and chafers drone
In whirring flight, with wings outflung;
And the bee laments, and the psalm is sung
On the bough. Can it be that her heart has erred?
Are those yearning leaves, no longer young,
Thus restlessly sighing and rustling unheard?
*
We have heard of the House of Doom, the Halls
Of Marbaug the mighty Jailer and Judge,
Where the ages pass in funeral palls,
The seconds traipse and the centuries trudge.
For the pitiful ghosts in their sheets and shawls
His doom is a bar that no pleading can budge;
He fastens the guilt for each blow that falls
And traces the ground of each feud and grudge.
Hither Yavanna hies, through sludge
And marshy slime, with measured tread,
To the one who assuredly will not fudge
On the doom of the Earth, the Lord of the Dead.
The courts of the Dead have a dark way in
With ponderous door-valves, wide apart,
But the gap, to the Goddess, seems low and thin
As she crosses the threshold with a throbbing heart.
Down dusky aisles, her eyes begin
To descry vast screens and hangings, the art
Of Serna the Weaver, whoses work is to spin
The warp of the tapestry of time, and to chart
Each birth, kingdom, battlefield, engine and cart
In wool and wire on the dull black thread.
At length a step makes Yavanna start:
Behind her looms the Lord of the Dead.
From a dead-white countenance, ’neath the cowl
Of a dull black robe, queer rays emerge:
His eyes, vividly violet, scowl
And burn, as they glance on skin, like a scourge.
He smells of the tomb; his feet are foul,
His vesture ragged, and rusty his verge;
And he bows, but speaks reproof: ‘This prowl
Is imprudent, O Queen.’ Then in deeper, more dirge-
Like tones: ‘What wouldst thou terminate? Purge
Thy womanhood, wouldst thou – be sterile instead
Of fruit-giving Soil? What frenzy might urge
The Lady of Life to encroach on the Dead?’
‘Almost dead, though it dimly burneth,
Is hope in my heart,’ she responds, ‘and ’tis fitting
That doubt be determined. Darkness returneth,
Ugly and murderous, unremitting,
In Midyard now, where Mankind spurneth
Restraint on greed, of my ways unwitting.
O Seer and Sentencer, whose sight discerneth
The wards of the future, say: When will the pitting
And burning be ended, the hacking and hitting
Restrained? Will they learn this, or will they be led
To go on shamefully abusing, beshitting
And harming the land till it lieth dead?’
Slowly, with deadly assurance, he shakes
His head, thus thoroughly quenching hope;
And his eyebeam, waxing merciless, makes
Her blench, half-blinded, turn and grope
For the exit. Cries of choughs and crakes
Mock her march on the muddy slope
Down into night. When a new dawn breaks
In skirts of amber and scarlet cope –
Vestments that vanish as cloud-veils ope
On the light of a limb ungarmented –
She stands on a sea-cliff, too stubborn to mope,
Like a splintered pine you’d suppose quite dead.
*
With deadened eyes she watches the waves,
Dim lines of blue, almost lost to sight
In the azure gulf; and the gunlike caves
At the water’s edge, exploding white,
Can hardly be heard. But what liquid laves
Her bark – what balm is this? The light
Of the lengthening sun-track so behaves
That the breadth of the bay now glitters bright;
What inkling is it, can thus excite
Her sap, be-needling her senses numb?
And now a great wave mounts, with might
And comb of majesty. She watches it come.
Now comes to the surface a wading wight
Who shoves up this wave with his shoulders and chest
Till it crashes and surges and seethes to her height
And shiningly showers her, as if in jest,
And then forms a tall mist, foamy and slight,
Whose hangings dissolve at the wind’s behest
To reveal his dark divinity, dight
With a dazzling crown like a silver crest
And virid gems on kirtle and vest.
And the voice of the God of the Sea is like some
Unasked-for gift, some answer unguessed:
‘Hail Yavanna! Why hast thou come?’
Her tears are coming, her cones are dripping
With resinous fuel and glistening fire;
And he gravely stands his ground, unslipping
’Mid fury of surf and the sudden ire
Of the deep. By degrees, her grievance gripping,
She ceases sobbing and speaks him: ‘Sire,
Fain would I leave this land, but shipping
There’s none: fain would I help them, but higher
Or further than Mindir I falter, in mire
Of apostasy stumbled and steeped in scum!
Yet what good? Since Marbaug’s meaning is dire
And doom he foreseëth must certainly come.’
‘Come come, take comfort,’ he makes reply:
‘The walls of doom (as thy doubt bewrayeth)
Are breached; and captive spirits may spy
The chink, or a link in the chain, that allayeth
Their suffering. So shall it be while I
Endure, a secret voice that gainsayeth,
A light in the depths, who dare defy
That law and fate which the land obeyeth,
For this my appointed part. Who prayeth
From depth of spirit, where truth be not dumb,
May move my pity: ’tis my hand, swayeth
The deep: it shall carry thee downward. Come!’
His fingers come, fearsomely big,
With weed-grown knuckles and rust-coloured nails,
Around her bole, and each bough, and each twig,
And like a wave they uplift her. She wails
In her rapture: bereft, her rootlets dig
The sand, as he sets her down, and exhales.
And now, behold! In herald’s rig,
Escutcheon and mirroring armour, one scales
The steep and stands in the light, which assails
Her damaged sense. Indifferent, mum,
She muses while Mindir’s messenger hails
With a trumpet-call, and the admonishments come:
‘What will become of thee, Goddess unwary?
How wilt thou plan, how attend to thy plot?
By means chaotic, with method contrary,
Will it not run to decay and rot?
The plans of the Viceroy do not vary:
His thought is clear, without cloud or clot:
But thou, in thy mist of mind and vagary,
Shalt learn that light of thine own thou hast not.
Thy truth is blackness, a formless blot,
A slough of passion, a fertile slum:
Then go not forth! The form thou hast got
Would, yonder, be forfeit: as Chaos thou shouldst come.’
*
The third that comes, while she struggles to think,
Comes riding the water, a thing like a whale
Abreast of the breakers, the dangerous brink,
But leaving a slick, a long calm trail.
All mottled and stained, as with mauve-brown ink,
Are its lithe torso and oily tail,
And now can be spied the round spire, all pink
And mother-of-pearly, glimmering pale.
In glides the enormous glass-shelled snail
And the Sea-god says: ‘Thou shalt not lack
A vessel, Lady: his strength will avail
For an earthward voyage. Let him bear thee back.’
Turning her back on the Herald, she touches
A helping hand, not much higher than hers –
The Sea-god, Holmo’s size being such as
His mood, as the moment demands, avers.
She cries in the shimmering shallows, clutches
His arm as he guides her going, demurs
’Mid the ridges and mounds of sea-weed, as much as
If it bore the bitterest spikes and burrs.
The snail Ingolmo snuffles and stirs
And the skirt of his lip goes slimy and slack
And his horns thrust high, as the passengers
Approach and rise to embark on his back.
With a sad look back, now sundered from home,
She seats herself on the curving bench
That winds in and up through the whorls of the dome,
The clear and the pearly that tighten and clench.
And now Ingolmo is footing the foam
And her window is washed as the billows drench,
And he holds the slope, through the coral-comb
And the deepening green, and does not blench
Until he comes to the terrible trench,
The border-abyss, without beam or track,
Between the worlds... And she feels like a wench,
A virgin-lover now laid on her back.
Backwards and forwards, unfathomably weltering,
Swimming writhingly, rolling and sprawling,
Slipping and sliding and helter-skeltering,
Down through intimate darkness falling,
Spiralling inward, sweating, sweltering,
Melting, merging, moaning and bawling:
Deep in the shell more quietly sheltering,
Feeling the threatened Forfeiture crawling
Over her limbs like lichen, galling
And swelling in tumours and turning black:
Travelling onward, heaving and hauling
The ark of the Damned on the deep way back.
Back at last, at the opposite ledge,
On a solid surface, the wall of the crags,
The marches of Midyard, thus the edge
Of Time and Entropy, riches and rags,
Through weed-portcullis and hanging hedge,
Surmounting vicious vertical snags,
The clinging snail then climbed. What pledge,
What ribboned oyster-shell, tied with tags,
Did she hurriedly hide in mysterious bags?
What pain whas Holmo’s, watching her pack
And rummage and grope, the grimmest of hags,
With bent body and bulging back?
Taken aback by the terrible change
Now plain to be seen in the sea-green light,
The Sea-lord sombrely looked at her strange
Dark lips, from doglike teeth pulled tight;
Her soil-black skin, part scabbed with mange,
Part tumid and blistered with leprous blight;
Her hair grey as roots, and as hard to arrange,
Over eyes that gazed in the Gods’ despite:
A demoness-like darkness, a fright,
Invested with many a vile black sack,
Lo! Chaos she sat, in accursed plight,