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 was 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,
Self-tangled beyond all turning back.
Glimpsing her back, Men gloomily curse
The cheapskate, chance, and the trash of Weird:
But we discern her as nature’s Nurse
And many-wombed Mother, in darkness revered.
Yavanna, the high-elven name I rehearse
Befits not thy new form: the endeared
Name YABETH henceforward be used in this verse
To thy honour. So onward they steadily steered
While a crowd of spirits and creatures appeared
O’er the glimmering downlands of dulse and wrack,
And romped and rollicked and plunged and reared
To welcome the Lord of Waters back.
When the way back is the best way forward:
When the star of ambition, by which you steered,
Guides but more barrenly, bitterly Norward:
When the Western voyage, that you chartered and cheered,
Has ended in wreckage and rowing shoreward:
When the rind of the World is all wrinkly and seared,
And the seeds of hope lie hidden, coreward:
Then the gate of the Navel should not be feared,
Nor that backward path up which you have peered,
In your personal life and your public too!
Though the eyes of Yabeth are bloody and bleared,
She sees, in that vileness, a something new.
The Moon was new, the Sun having set
Amid murky masses and splotches of cloud
On a beryl-green backdrop, starless as yet:
Yellow he gleamed there, glad and proud.
Rain had finished; the wind was wet;
The reeds of the shoreline shivered and bowed,
And birds were hidden and hushed, while the fret
Of the little, lapping waves was loud.
Inland, the craggy hills, like a crowd
With fissured faces falling askew –
Shaly, shadowy, shaggy-browed –
Stood watching, waiting for something new.
For nothing new had arrived on this shore –
The Neraegrast, as it now is known –
Since the Island suddenly sank to the floor
Of the sea, and through, causing waves to be thrown
With tumult, tempest-onslaught that tore
At massive rocks, and laid mountains prone,
And clove the unclimbable cliffs of yore
To open this gulf with a fiord of its own
Whose water lay like luminous stone
In the twilight, until a turbulence grew
Into spreading circles, preceding the Crone
Who came with burden and baggage of the new.
Renewed, reaffirmed and feeling better,
She set her foot in the soiling clay
And squelched forward, released from the fetter
Of self-mistrust; and her track, next day,
A wandering zigzag through firmer and wetter
Ground, and up through the broken grey
Of the cold hill’s side, resembled a letter,
A sudden-blossoming signal, an A
In pinks and lavenders, gorgeous and gay,
With mallows blooming and sea-stars blue;
Which Holmo read, in the Sun’s bright ray,
As notice and sign of her starting anew.
‘Harvest new,’ he declared, ‘is at hand,
The Sky and the scathéd Earth between:
Jar and jagging, unpleasant, unplanned,
Will shake the germen and shock the gene
And bring forth mutants, a monstrous band;
Yet these will serve us well, I ween,
And defend her glade, where the quickening gland
Will shoot with tawniest, shiniest green
And the springs of passion run pure and clean.
Now loyalty serfish and deep is due
To Yabeth, since yesterday made your queen:
Yea, Earth and Sea have made nuptials new.’
Fabulous news for the Sea-lord’s folk!
The merry dolphin, the merman and maid,
With those sportive creatures of whom I spoke,
The crab, the kraken with spines displayed,
The sexy selkie in sealskin cloak,
The nix and the naiad of fresh cascade –
Dispersed with many a jest and joke,
Yet resolving, loyal to the Lord they obeyed,
To give his Partner all possible aid.
But the valiant vassal and vessel drew
His weary stretched-out horns in, and strayed
In the rich kelp-pasture, his powers to renew.
Newly, gravely, tenderly greeted,
The awakened woods, the astonished hills,
The very Earth, so viciously treated,
Throbbed and quivered and quickened with thrills.
Dewdrops twinkled, nestlings tweeted
And jubilant skylarks scattered their trills
While, seeking a place where she might be seated,
Beyond the gulleys and wooded ghylls,
And the rising ridge, and the rocky sills,
She lavishly strewed on the land forlorn
Fresh roses, new grasses and clear bright rills
In her progress. Thence, to the precipice-thorn,
The writhen thorn on the ruggedest beak
Of rock, she fared; and it foamed into bloom
As, blinking, she gazed at the granite bleak
And the waterfall’s wavering downward plume
On the nearing wall of the narrowing creek,
The head of the Bay of Undor. The boom
Of churning billows she heard, and her cheek
Was chilled and spattered with flying spume.
Here would she house and herself inhume,
Yes, hide from Heaven and the Herald’s scorn;
And hence, from the heavy kernel and womb,
Put forth her fierceness in fang and in thorn.
For the thorns descended in thickening clumps
To the edge of Erynvorn, the immense
Forest that lay like silk on the lumps
Of the legs of rock, with ladders and rents.
Steep gorges and hollows below the humps
She then perceived, and soon to her sense
Appeared the Entwives like frightened frumps,
Themselves aware of her, waiting in suspense
In their fallow bowers and falling tents.
There, in the vaults of the Erynvorn,
’Mid caves and chasms and deep sea-vents,
Would she find some grotto and grow out her thorn.
Thorniest brambles lunged and leaped,
Sought for, seized and savagely whipped
The woeful Entwives. Warm wind swept
Through the branchy coverings, broke them and stripped,
And thistledown flew, and thunderclouds crept
On darkening bellies that bulged and dripped.
All animals crouched: none cried, none slept.
Lightning wrathfully stabbed and ripped,
Blasting and rending the roof of her crypt
Till the niche was riven, the nucleus torn
And the delicate double coil unzipped
For fusion of lion, ant, lizard and thorn,
So that thorny beetles and thorn-tailed bugs
Came buzzing and zooming and zanily bumbling:
Slimily slithering, yard-long slugs
And venomous toad-things hopping and tumbling.
Strong lianas like strangling thugs
With giant poppies and thorn-apples jumbling
Would offer a vintage of dreadful drugs.
Then tyrant-lizards came towering and stumbling,
Reptile warriors snarling and rumbling,
And long-beaked gliders, on bat-wings borne
Up out of the mouth of her cave, where the mumbling
One probed still further through fingers of thorn,
Thumbs of thorn and a thousand sharp-
Thorned wrists: a roller of red-barbed wire,
A wavelike hedge came, wide as the scarp
Of a swiftly swelling Mound... Admire
The whole of her magic, nor morally carp
At chaos and contrast, the rose and the briar;
Let the harshest horn and the merriest harp
Be loud in her homage, with hautboy and lyre;
Let the flawless flower of the bramble aspire
With the bloody prickle, the proud tormentor,
To blackness and sweetness, the bliss all desire,
The fruit that ripens as we reach the centre.
Out from the centre, from the serried loops
Of the hedge that had run, then slowed to a halt,
The militant Earth-mother urged her troops
And thrust them through it, to begin the revolt
With huge advances and horrible swoops.
Had now her feelings, so fierce, so at fault,
Been leashed with grammar and words in groups,
She thus would have spoken: ‘Speed now, bolt
To the dwellings of Men and Dwarves: assault
Their smithies and smite each mad inventor,
Each metal-minded masculine dolt –
Yea, smite them and smash them! And then, to the centre,
‘My centre of tasty reward, return.’
And so, as she wished, they wildly began;
But in no way might those legions learn
To wage war wisely, according to plan,
Nor even, though sturdy in battle and stern,
To recognise friend or foe as they ran!
A mellay of monsters ensued, like a quern,
A violent milling ’twixt rearguard and van
That ground out nothing but carnage. Can
You imagine, yourselves, those scenes, that sent a
Re-echoing noise from the end of the span
To the compass-point now piercing her centre?
Centrally gored by a goad of despair –
The thought of that Herald being really right
In his foul prediction, and Holmo’s fair
Being merely fond – with all the more might
Did she impatiently will and impel from each lair
Those few of her creatures still fit to fight.
Over the moorlands they scoured, to scare
The deer and kine, to catch and bite
Or clumsily claw with ferocious delight
The livestock of Men, and at last to enter
The square of the terrified town, where the sight
They sought for glared and flamed at the centre.
Centres of order and organisation,
Forges of cruelty, crime and creed,
Worms of counsel and complication,
Brightest brains are a dragonish breed.
Finding courage in co-operation
And nastier weapons to fit their need,
The Men then massacred the monstrous nation
By flinging tar with a flaming glede,
Pitch-black liquid that lit with all speed
And wrapped the invaders in red-orange dress...
Ah, fiendish cunning, fiery indeed,
And the cause of Yabeth lost, unless
Some counsellor, less naïve, should come
To furnish the wit and the wiles she lacked.
So there she was, all wizened and glum.
But a crepitant sounds, as of seed-pods cracked,
A distant rustle that rose to a hum,
Gave note of the legions that next would impact
And do great damage, a maximum,
To the fold, the field and the fertile tract.
Down they came in a cataract,
In glittering swarms, as if glad to express
Her anger... Such plagues and displeasures, in fact,
Would thenceforth afflict you but little less.
Nevertheless, her full wide lap
And bosom in ageless figure-of-eight
Had also their yearning, like yeast or sap
Or an itch in the loam of her country. ‘Late
In the season,’ she said to herself, ‘mayhap
I still shall help them to higher estate:
Stouten them, raise them and re-enwrap
Them in coals of green at the carbon-gate.’
So mightiest verdure, with marvellous weight
Of blossom and apple and berry, did bless
Her trees, and make, for tribes that would migrate,
Her realm a refuge where love should be less
Unproductive. The lesser and lowlier came
To this fold and forested groin, to embase
Themselves quite simply, without any shame:
The Woses, the wild aboriginal race,
Whose clans now throve; and Men, who would claim
A share of her bounty, and boldly efface,
Through bloody penance, their share of the blame,
And further, through filthiest ritual, embrace
Her luxuriant darkness. At a dawdling pace
The troubled Ents came, the Elves as well,
And among the latter that lady of grace
Whom we anciently knew as Nendorel.
This Nendorel is that same who never
Returned to her lover Dimorn, but tarried
All summer long, till the year did sever
Them finally, falling in tempest that carried
His vessel and him from harbour. Forever
Remorseful, unshriven (though immortal), unmarried,
She wandered away to the South, where a clever
Magician walked in the wastes of the Arid
Mountains, helping and healing those harried
By hideous Orcs. With him she would dwell
And learn how memory’s lunge might be parried
And named as the Conscience of Nendorel.
Nendorel learned his craft, the unlacing
Of mind, the massaging and moulding of mood,
And the making of dreams...until chariots, chasing
The soldiers of Kedral, themselves were pursued
By the sense of an Age, a new richness racing
And budding in redness of branch and brood.
Trusting the influence, slowly retracing
Her journey, she joined the Crone whose crude
Impolicy cried for some craft and shrewd
Advice. ‘Thou needest a Knight to fulfil
Thy desire, one with warrior’s wisdom endued:
Engage, O Goddess, with masculine skill!’
With skilful sayings that soothed the ear
Of the stubborn Goddess, she instilled this theme;
Meanwhile becoming, as she walked by the mere
Of the forest, or followed its inflowing stream
Northward, well known to the villages near
As a cunning healer. And she came to seem
To the farther towns, still possessed by fear
Of the woods, a double witch: they would dream
Of the dark Fuindis; Calendis they’d deem
A diamond of goodness with flickering flaws.
But she herself still searched for a dream,
A forecast figure, a man for the cause.
Cause and effect, like the carded fleece
Spun out to the spool of a spinning-wheel,
Unwound their yarn through the years of peace
To the Dragon’s coming and the dreadful deal
He made with the Men of the North. No release
From that bond might there be, unless some leal
Adventurer, scouring the verdigris
From helm and hauberk, the rust from old steel,
Should answer in shining armour the appeal
Of a kingdom scorched by the scathing jaws;
‘But a thane,’ she thought, ‘of such zest and zeal
Should be fighting also in the feminine cause.’
Now, because the yarn has become entwined
With story you know already, I need
Not lengthily tell how she at last divined
A certain red-haired churl as the seed
Of royalty; and picked him. Within rough rind
She sensed the savour, like honey or mead,
Of a singular aptness in manhood and mind
For the hard service of Yabeth. But heed
The summons and warning he would not, read
Political weather he could not, care
About danger he did not – till captured, to bleed
In the clutch of the Dragon, in dreary despair.
The despairing comrade who saw him killed
By those talons, lopped to a limbless hunk
And gelded in sport while his life-blood spilled,
Then kept the faith: with a feeble spunk
He picked up the pieces, all slimy and chilled –
Head, limbs, cock and balls, burst bowels and trunk –
And, lacking both time and tools to build
Any sepulchre, found a small boat, half-sunk
In stained black mud that gurgled and stunk,
Yet somehow unrotted and sound: it would bear
The body to deep sea-burial. Drunk
Were the whole cups now, of human despair
And chthonic despair: for the Sea-folk sought
Those pieces, which sank in the sewage-draught
Of the estuary; and, with effort, brought
Them, enwreathed in weeds, on a wreck-built raft,
All along the wild leagues of the coast, to the distraught
Earth-mother. Immediately, with a daft
Unthinking rawness, she freshly wrought
Each fragment back in the frame – yet, graft
And mend as she might, with magnificent craft,
The Soul was gone. It now sojourned where
(As she saw in her mind) the Lord Marbaug laughed
With an ugly smirk at her utter despair.
Despairing, dispirited, heavy and weak,
She fondled the hair of her champion: healed
And alive, he lingered in coma. His cheek
And chin felt wet, all at once: the unceiled
Roof-strata, it seemed, had a strange new leak
That dripped in puddle and pool, and revealed
At length, by the sliding kiss of a sleek
Low wave, her Partner – who presently appealed
To her thus: ‘Poor Yabeth, wilt thou not yield
To the prayer of the Gods, and the Elves aghast,
And the Land itself, thy lush green field
That hath wanned and withered, since from it thou passed?
‘For since thou passed, who wert part of them,
Is their stature not less? For they lack what is thine.
Diminished they walk, yea, and hold up the hem,
Lest it trouble and trip them, of raiment divine!
Each animal, gentle or fierce, like a gem
That loseth its lustre, doth languish and pine;
And thy grasses, do they not grieve on the stem,
Thy grapes grow shrivelled, thy shrubs decline?
And so I am sent, for they all combine,
Save one, in bidding me beg thee to recast
Thy loyalty: O Lady, return, and the wine
Of the joy of thy peers will be unsurpassed.’
A moment passed, while she brooded and muttered,
Re-energized by his love; but the lice
That rustled her scalp, with cockroaches that scuttered,
Seemed now to scoff at and scout the advice,
And queerly to scorn the request he had uttered.
(And hadn’t he known she’d be hard to entice?)
Yet, clear as a coin in a purse uncluttered,
Her sense of a possible sacrifice,
A private sorrow, an ultimate price,
Was like the last gold of a gambler outclassed
By some diabolical cheat. New dice
To avenge the loadedly logical past!
‘This errand-pastime and embassy-quiz,’
Quoth she, in a whispery wheeze, through a throat
Half-filled with dust, ‘all the Deities
Have authorised, all save one, I note:
And that one who abstaineth, I wot who he is:
’Tis Fate who foldeth his arms, and doth gloat
While regarding the Soul of my servant as his!
If their Lordships, for leverage gathered, will vote
To prise it from him – this price thou mayst quote,
This the bargain I offer – new-graced, new-grassed
Shall Pellanor be, with a beauty remote
From imagining: its former fashion surpassed
‘By far. Having passed the unfettered Soul
To me, good Mariner, thou shalt get
In trust, a treasure to ease their dole,
A cargo packed, that will pay my debt,
A parcel of me, that will make them whole.
Now get thee gone, for thy course is set:
Go make that Bastard give back what he stole.’
So, faithful, obliging and full of regret
For the adorable maiden he once had met,
The Lord of Waters went: with a swirl
That licked her body, he left her, and let
Her poke and search for a secret pearl.
This pearl, still closed in the enclasping shell,
Was the pledge that Yabeth received, as you
Remember, when she did marry and mell
With him. In the end she laid hand on it, drew
It forth from a feculent bag, and then fell
To clutching it tightly, with tears of rue;
And a dismal period passed. When the swell
Reflooded, there floated, glimmering, through
Her cavern, a silvery casket; she knew
That the subtle Soul of the slumbering churl
Was inside, and so then, payment being due,
She must loosen her grasp and release the pearl.
Catching the pearl in its case of shell
And returning with tidal strength, half-striding,
Half-surging through grotto and dark sea-dell,
Her Consort came to that chasm dividing
The worlds, where he swam untiringly and well.
But here the object of her confiding
Grew frightfully heavy, so fraught as to quell
His forward motion, and to force him, gliding
And floundering, horribly downward; while, hiding
Within his bosom, the case, with its curl
Of ribbonlike weed, in a weird betiding,
Was pulsing with colours of mother-of-pearl.
And a pearly radiance round him shone,
And flickered and flashed, as he pulled from his pocket
The scintillant burden, and saw thereon
A little bow like the clasp of a locket,
With tags of ribbon. He tugged them. Anon
Uprushing, up, up like an undersea rocket,
From the ooze and the abyssal wharf, into wan
Green light, it shot: with a dazzling shock it
Opened, and rode on the surface. The socket
Held, ball-like, encradled, a beautiful girl,
Now born into time to unclench and unclock it
As perfect present and priceless pearl.
Pearl and maiden whom naught will mar,
She uncurls, uncovers her face and smiles
At the brightening morn, like a more-bright star,
And the waves of Holmo waft her for miles;
Pearl and goddess, exchanged at par
As the Soul’s equivalent, seen by espials
In latest-born, loveliest vision far,
She develops wings, which enfold her at whiles:
Pearl and butterfly, she passes the isles,
And when those wonderful wings unfurl
They delight all senses, all souls she beguiles
With enchantment of odorous purple and pearl.
In the pearl-paved city, people are hurrying
Havenward, wanting to welcome thither
A flickering fleck that comes flirting, flurrying
And swirling the winds and waves in a swither
Of cloud and sparkling spindrift. Scurrying
Weather- and wave-forms wax and wither
At the edge of those flaring wings, mind-worrying
Patterns, impossible, all of a dither!
Her flight is seen now, her fluttering slither,
And the child of Chaos, ’mid cheers that resound,
Is hailed and hymned as VILVARIEL. Hither
And thither she randomly roves: to confound,
Refound, refix all possibility,
All that’s frustrated and awkwardly striving
Of beauty and bounty, is her facility,
Instant. Iridescently arriving
With perfumed power and volatility,
She recreates more richly the hiving
Of bees, the plumage of birds, the agility
Of sure-footed beasts: the barely surviving
Countryside kindles green, now thriving,
Ablaze, abloom and ablush all around
The path of her progress, her dancing and diving.
And now Vilvariel nears the profound
Gloom of that foundry and forge, long cold,
Where the Maker sits. A soft bright scattering
Gaily bespangles with sparks of gold
His moulds and hammer that haven’t been mattering.
Awestruck, but suddenly happy to behold
This child, and to hear her musical chattering,
Auland resumes his work. The wold
And the bronzéd heath, as with brilliant spattering
Of paint, reflower at her passing. Pattering
Gently now on that frontage which frowned
Once before on the boldness of Yabeth, no, battering,
Unshuttering, shattering darkness profound,
Vilvariel founds, with force irrefutable,
Logical charm and luminosity,
A mode of being, mixing the mutable
In with the issueless cold viscosity
Of time in those halls. The screens of the inscrutable
Tapestries glint, as her gleaming velocity
Effects new shifting and play in the shootable
Weft; with wonder and curiosity,
Timid ghosts in the tenebrosity
Peep and peer at those Charts which expound
Their whole past histories, charged with atrocity:
Changingly tinted the fabric is found,
Profoundly and gently transfigured. The jet
Of her gold now enlivens the large weak frame
Of Marbaug who lies half-swooning, in sweat
Of rape still-prising, still-present shame.
Surprisingly does she depose, like a pet
For a lonely person, as, tired now and tame,
She alights on his knee, that nothing is yet
In its final form. With Serna his dame
He will house this gayest and holiest flame
As a foster-daughter in darkness gowned;
But soon from the Sacred Mound, comes fame
Of a miracle, mightier and more profound:
For the Trees that foundered, that foes did slay,
Those two great stocks of touchwood all dry,
Are sprinkled with droppings of buttery spray,
The golden flux of a butterfly,
And arise in splendidest, greenest array:
Yes, resurrected they riddle the sky.
The genuine Good becomes truly gay.
The ruined stocks, and the roots that die,
Of meanings that literal minds deny,
Reflourish in legends loved and renowned:
May the Spell of that Good be regained thereby,
Through the tale and fantasy we have found. Amen.