Green Things Are Melancholy (Anniversarius 12)

Some say these winter hills are sad.
I think not so. 

              Gray bark and snow
are just the world in homespun clad,

plain and simple, honest and bare
to branch and root,
                  dry underfoot —
these are the ones who do not dare

rebellion or unruly flight.
The withered sleep,
                  the dream they keep,
to them is wisdom’s light.

Green is the melancholy hue:
seedling and twig,
                blossom and sprig,
rioting upward, askew,

climbing aslant in May’s folly
following one
             devious sun—
how can this be melancholy?

Just ride the suicidal breeze:
seed-spewing trees,
                 lecherous bees,
the wingèd birds’ hypocrisies —

These are false harbingers of joy.
What use are they?
                Their vernal play
is but a manic’s  fevered ploy.

Wait till the frost arrives — what then?
The birds fly south.
                  The wizened mouth
of fruit and flower saddens men

With bitter kisses youth should scorn —
the chill and numb
                  chrysanthemum
as blanched and dry as ravaged corn —

The maples shorn have been undone —
the barren vine
              a twisted line
of snake embracing skeleton —

The lily stalks are cripple canes.
The pale worm flees
                   the apple trees.
A gray mist fills the lanes.

Green is the hue
          betraying you
for a handful of earth
         or a moment of dew!

 — December 17, 1978, New York; revised 1981, 1993, rewritten in 1995.

A rare example of a Rutherford poem that rhymes.

Dead Leaves the Emblems Truest (Anniversarius 11)

 

Autumn
         love the Autumn
would fill the earth with perpetual
Autumn;
         if I were rich enough
I’d follow Autumn everywhere,
paint my home in Shelley’s orange
    and brown and hectic red;
rub tincture of turning leaves
onto my own limbs to motley
    my skin into a panoply
    of hues; buy potted trees
and fill my darkened rooms with them,
inject them full of October
until I lay ankle deep in fallings
of pages more wrinkled and withered
and crisped and sere than poor Poe’s

Spring
    I salute only as birth-of-death
Summer    its ripening
Autumn    the fruit
Winter       the ice-toothed bacchanal
    of rampant death

Dead leaves the emblems truest of what we are:
cut to a rasping skeleton by time,
best in our wormwood age,
most useful to our kind
when closest to verge of nothingness.

How wise you are, detached
    at last from your origins,
borne by a wind that will not betray you,
confident, sun-singed, beyond all pain,
surging toward heaven without an enemy
    to hold you back, assured of what
is written in your own veined hand —
that you are a particle of glory returning to god.

To god? What folly! like old men whose legs
cannot support them you tumble down in heaps.
You burn in hecatombs, boots crush you to dust;
you are composted until the merest speck of you
is salt for the cannibal taproots of Spring.

Magnificent folly! For what is there at the end
of a billion misled heartbeats but this putting on
of shrouds? Should we not deck ourselves as well
as the oak tree, as maples jubilant,
or triumph-touched in willow’s gold?

I think I shall be Autumn’s minister.
Instead of those hearts torn out for the Aztec god,
I offer up a basket of leaves; instead of blood
upon the butcher block of Abraham I slay
a wreath of myrtle and laurel boughs;
upon the thirsty cross I nail a scarecrow Christ,
a wicker man with leaf-catch crown of thorns —

It was the cross itself that died for us
    the man a nobody
         a tree-killing carpenter

And folly still!
    The lightning limns the bare branch elm
 The hollow trunk howls thunder of its own
         to oust the thunder of god

The slaked storm passes, the fire-striped
         masts of the earth-ship stand.
Ear to the tree trunk, I hear the echo
         of the storm, the last tree-
         spoken words:

   I bring you glad tidings —
                     There is no god.

There is no god, and when trees speak
the storm falls back in silence, shamed
    and reprobate.
There is no god, and when trees speak
    you kill them for the truth
    you cannot bear.

 — June 14, 1981, Madison Square Park, New York City, rev. 2011.

The Grim Reaper (Anniversarius 10)

Autumn, and none too soon for me.
Bitter blasts unshingle the trees
and scatter the birds — the diminution
to bone branch by gale’s tooth.

Ave! I welcome you, Red Harvester
of yet another year! I kindle fire
and hold my midnight watch atop a hill.

Ave! for everything awaits you:
the arbor picked clean of fruit,
the willows decked in banners of gold,
the windfall of currency
   from the abundant oaks.

Ave! Great Reaper who takes a year of everything.
Great Reaper who grinds the present to dust,
Great Reaper the only god (the others no more
than barricades you sweep aside, leaf dunes)

I see you. Your eyes play through me as easily
as sight itself moves through these barren trees.
You have no face. Two flames from out
your hooded darkness acknowledge me.
The scythe on which the world-end hone
but lately sang is in your hand.

My time is not yet come, thrice hailèd one.
I too must reap. I too must count the census
of lost leaves. My song must satisfy
before your hand can take the sheaf.
This space, this interstice between
the solstices is safe. My time
is not yet come.

 — December 17, 1978, New York; revised 1981

October Reckonings (Anniversarius 9)

The seasons merge: from a sunless autumn,
to winter without snow. What month it is,
is anybody’s guess. The yard goes dry,
the grapes cut back turn brittle; brown
sparrows tramp noisily for last desserts
on arbor top; ailanthus arms take on
a sere and whiter hue, no trace
of tropic sprays of verdure now, no flag
like native trees, of where the green had been
(perhaps they migrate and plant themselves
on other trees!) It is a time
of reckonings, to heap the harvest up
and count each gain against its cost.


Little it means to measure what was lost —
the never had’s a finer feast to sup.
It has a wine (whoever sees
the cask forgets himself and imitates
its salty plaint) from where the grapes had been,
of tears and rust and vanities, no flag
sincere of deeds or worth, no brace
of reason’s air; drinking us in it sprouts
its arrows from inside our hearts.
It speaks of love, its tendrils crown
arbors without leaves. What year is it?
All lonely autumns are alike
at winter’s verge.


— December 19, 1976, New York

This poem is a "mirror." The second stanza attempts, loosely, to write "backwards," echoing lines, sounds, and construction from the first stanza. Thus, the opening phrase "The seasons merge" shows up at the very end of stanza 2 as "at winter's verge." The final line of stanza 1, "and count each gain against its cost" becomes the first line of stanza 2 as "Little it means to measure what was lost." Even the actions in stanza 2 are backwards: arrows sprouting from inside hearts, a feast with an empty wine cask that drinks in the reveler, tendrils on a leafless arbor. Lack is everwhere from the first stanza: sunless autumn, snowless winter.

I Persist in Green

Here on this hill there was no blossom time.
Though all was green, no nectar bee went forth
to fetch his fellows for a harvesting.
The scavengers give me a bleak report,
avoid my limbs where neither fruit nor nut
nor even bitter berries fall to ground.
I wait, still green with poetry, still wrapped
this autumn in dreams of Eden’s April.
I am denied the killing kiss of frost —
one of a kind, I must stand sentinel,

 watching as all the other trees go gray,
stripped bare by teasing wind, their naked arms
a stark and spindly silhouette on clouds.
I listen to their brittle colloquy,
see through and beyond their herded huddling
the universe their summer glyph concealed.

 The sun and stars have dragged the fruiting urge
to climes unseen, but I persist in green.
I wave my rustling, needled arms aloft,
exude a youthful fragrance, still let the sap
fill my old head with springtime dalliance. 

I call in thousands of lonely sparrows,
converse with the unwanted beggar birds,
invite the nests of those who stayed behind,
ignoring the season’s bleak intelligence.
Stay here, hawk-free and sheltered from the storm!
Our wormless winter, though lean as a bone,
is spent with friend and feather, not alone.

 Should I envy the others — the red-flagged
maples, the golden willows, browning oaks?
Is nakedness to wind more honest, then?
Are roots more wise when bald of leaves above?

Look at those tattered and abandoned nests!
Read me — my rings can prove and testify
whose way of wint’ring is the better lot!

 The slanting, icy sun accuses me,
fringes with frostbite my emerald crown.
No fevered red, no golden rash, no brown
of rust has marred me — let winter come!
Should I not fear the hubris-humbling flood,
the thrust of fire from angry thunderers?

 Am I too boastful of my isolate,
self-centered endurance? No god has come
to topple me, no hatchet-man has climbed
to mark or cut me for cabin timber.

 One thing there is that can make me tremble:
I have dreamt of the distant mountain range,
of hill beyond hill, and peak surmounting
peak, of crags an eagle dares not soar to,
of nameless unscaled turrets of granite.
On each there grows, as here, an untamed tree,
alone and defiant,  giant and free.

 I dream, too, of an alpine wanderer,
whom I have ever loved, though never seen.
I bloom before the Passionate Stranger,
whose words bring news of my exiled brethren;
I bear strange fruit that falling, speaks and sings
new wonders to the astonished sparrows.
Then I blush red and amber and ochre,
shrugging my leaf-fall in a cry of joy.

 We hold a strange communion, traveler
and tree. Kings of our kind, we cannot bow,
but lean into the wind together, twined
till cloth and bark, flesh and root-tap mingle.
To him, I make the wind that is Autumn;
to me, he makes the hope that will be Spring.
Holding dead leaves in one another’s palms,
we are the sum of blossom, pollen, seed and fruit.
We are the thing we loved, the self made whole
by loss of self in love’s surrendering.

 — December 1973, Edinboro, Pennsylvania; rewritten in 1995

Night-Shift on Calvary

 by Brett Rutherford

adapted from Victor Hugo

 Lit by moon and starlight, they worked all night,
dig and hurl, dig and hurl, the stones and sand,
cross-diggers obscure in a morning fog
that blankets their labors from the unforgiving sky,

no one, even if up at dawn, can hear
the muffled sounds of their pick and shovel
from the clouded upslope of Calvary,
for the River Kidron roars angry below them,

swelling its flood-banks in rebellion.
They stop their work when they have dug two holes.
No one will ever know their importance,
how every wooden cross demands a brand new hole

 in which to stand it; how on this waste-place
of loose rock and shifting sand, earth swallows
up and fills again whatever one digs.
And there is engineering too, to raise a cross 

so that it does not lean and totter so
its passenger might be untied and freed,
the hole must be sufficient in its depth;
and vertical, to meet the centurion’s demands.

 “It’s done. It’s done. Let’s go to get our pay!”
one says to the other. — “I’d rather stay
on afterwards,” the younger one replies.
“Two thieves are going to be put up here today.

“That draws a crowd. I can double my lot
when the gambling starts. One bets on which dies
first. A lottery there is on whether
the crows come, and how many eyes they take.”

 “I am not so cruel,” the elder  protests.
“Work is work, and food is on the table.
Better this than to be the carpenter
who fashions these execution machines all day!”

 But then, like a crouching tiger, a shape
comes at them from the enveloping fog,
the shadowy form of a Joppa priest,
“I am Rosmophin, and I bring you good tidings.” —

 “We are gone, priest! You did not see us here,
and we did not see you. It is bad luck
to chatter and make idle conversation
on the place where the Romans turn men to corpses.” —

They turn to leave; the priest takes hold of shoulders
and spins them back. “You are not finished, fools!
I have come from the court, where I did hear
of great and coming judgments of the day. You men

shall be sent right back up here if you go home now.
Make haste. Take pick and shovel. The hill groans
for another cross.” — “Old man, we are done.
We have dug two holes as we were ordered.” —
The priest points down. — “Now dig a third one in between.”

 

 

Blackbirds and Mice

by Brett Rutherford

When they were grown and old
it seemed a dream to them,
or an oft-repeated
fairy-tale, so real, so
many times retold it seemed
as though they lived it through.

All dressed in dun color,
children, drilled in stillness
by the elders’ warnings —
be quiet as mice, swift
as the flying bird a-light.
Speak not a word, or wolves
might catch and eat you up!

The game they played was called
“Blackbirds and Mice.” Each would
repeat those syllables
at night like a bed-time prayer,
a mantra in the dentist’s chair,
until they no longer remembered
what language they said it in.

Huddled in straw in a hay-truck,
they rode without a cry
or whimper. The game was,
once they were led on out
to a small and dark opening
squared in by timbers,
the game was: you are mice.

Each mouse-child was given
a tiny crust of bread.
The tall figure ahead of you
is the Mouse-King himself.
His light will go on before you.
Follow it until you come
to the mouse-hole’s exit.
Eat breadcrumbs along the way
and say to yourselves,
We are mice … just tiny mice.
Bread-crumbs we nibble
as quietly we march.
It may be dark around.
Follow the light ahead
to come out the other side.

Children too big to be mice
were taken to a hillside
where they were turned into blackbirds.
Up, up the green hill they went,
(not flying, for none knew how),
led by two parent birds,
wings fluttering — hard to see
as it was not yet dawn,
dark figures up and over,
helping one another
they scrambled silently.
No one spoke, for fear of owls,
and ever-watching hawks.

Bird flock up and over
on tiny bird-feet, up and over
the green hillock to a warm hut.
Porridge and warm milk
was served by a red-faced lady.
The mice had already arrived,
coal dust and soot all over them.
The Mouse King, beaming,
stood in the back and drank beer.

And this is how they all
remembered it:
“Blackbirds and Mice,”
(or “Mice and Blackbirds”?)
in a game of silence.

When they were grown and old
they went back to the old country,
were shown the coal-mine entry
so small it seemed made for dwarves,
peeked at the way in, then on
the hill’s other side, the way out.

They climbed the alpine meadow
where nuns had led the blackbirds,
habits fluttering, to the cottage
where they had breakfasted.
It was all real: the German mine,
the German hill, the Swiss cottage.

In 1940, they were mice and blackbirds.
Most never saw their parents again.
Some home-towns bombed, no longer existed.
Blackbirds and Mice, they learned
new words, but never forget
the all-stakes game of silent flight.

The Secret of the Lake

 

by Brett Rutherford

Edinboro Lake, PA 

Day after day the sodden sky refills the lake, quenches the thirsty graveyard with migrant tears returning to the eye that wept them.

The used and tattered rainclouds come here like derelicts, like old dogs homing, revisiting one place — one secret lake which has berthed all waters (sea to sky to drawing mountain peak in flash of storm-drop —  this unassuming kettle of liquid clouds, gray-black beneath   the lidded heavens, shimmers at night  under the nodding Dipper,  the stars that empty it  of excess rainfall.

Now I come back to you, wait for respite of thunder, tread mud, walk flooded grass to the neglected graveyard, hark to the wind waves at your overfilled edge, the lapping song of your careworn banks, the hollow silence of your glacier-ground heart.

Elms and maples stand sentry. The ground is a riot of toppled tombstones, limbs torn by gale or lightning thrust, fence pickets torn off by age or vandals. The winds — or cautious townsmen —  have removed the old gray trunk that hoarded the shore like a sentinel (how its unmoving spindle arms alarmed the midnight visitor! how ravens and owls perched there to read the runes of the waveforms, the prophecy of wind and season! how poets and lovers sought it, the artist’s brush absorbed it as silhouette defining the lake beyond!)

I miss that tree. If one of the graves should vanish I would not miss it so much as that withered guardian.

It was the life work of a living thing, an epic of cambium in heartwood. Its wisdom was sublimated from soil, drunk from the lake of all waters, tapped from the abundance of sunlight, shielded from frost and lightning fire. It made itself sculpture, transcended its own passing, a defiant singularity, useless, unwanted, beautiful.

I shed my clothes to wade in the lake, letting the chill-cold waters accept me, sinking until the rippled plane of water licks at my shoulders, pacing with caution the rubble and sand of the lakebed. Not for a decade have I touched these waters, communed with the throwaway songs of the bullfrogs, the chirl of crickets, the paper-thin presence of curious insects, the nudge of fishes at my knees, the velvet black flurry and sonar symphony of the bats.

Cars hiss by on the distant roadway. House lights blink out. Water goes lull, takes on the hues of blueberries ripening — black and gray and Prussian blue.  The loudest of sounds  is the breath in my lungs, my voice as I call to you, lake of my youth: Remember me.

I too have come back to this navel of the world, this womb of the waters, this quencher of age and weariness.

Finally, your secret is revealed to me in God’s Eye weave of the thread of time:

The Eries came here for a winter festival, carried a gourd with the old year’s sadness, weighted it with stone, canoed and dropped it at your quiet center,  singing—

Hear us, O Lake of Little Snows — Heed not the crane, the fish, the deceitful song of the serpent — Heed us, mother of tears and rivers. We bring you a gourd, the gourd our ancestors taught us to make. Surely you are hungry, O Lake. We have come many days to offer it,  suffered such dangers to please you!

Calmly the lake accepted the present. The gourd sank fast and never returned. In silence, the men returned to the shore, banked their canoes and shouted with glee:

Jiyathontek! O Konneahti! Onenh, wete-wenna-keragh-danyon! Hear us, O Lake of Little Snows! Today we have made the signs. Again you ate the gourd and the stone. You did not know the gourd was hollow. You did not ask what was in it! Do not inquire, O Lake our mother.  We have promised never to tell you!

The gourd had passed a year in the longhouse. Each mother who lost an infant held it until the stream of her tears had dried. The father who watched the forest trail for the sight of the hunting party clenched it and wept for his eldest son. (They spoke of wolves at the council fire.)

In years of war or famine the gourd was heavy. Women put beads or locks of hair inside it, stained it with rust and blueberry paint. Feeble ones took it when their memory failed; it calmed the mad to sleep beside it.

Unburdened now of the Gourd of Sorrows, the Eries leave the forgiving lake, wash off their paint, their red-brown faces young with laughter and courage, their eyes as bright as the ardent sun, their strong legs running, running.

 

Maker of Stones

 

by Brett Rutherford

     After Magritte and for Barbara A. Holland

So many years of war,
of plagues and masks,
of fluctuating identity —
we all live now
in Magritte canvases
where anything can happen
and does, and anyone might turn
from flesh into solid granite. 

Has all New England
dropped all its glacial
detritus of a sudden
onto Manhattan? What gives
with all this geology?

You, of all people,
a slant-wise Medusa,
seem able to summon stones,
rock-hurler, caller-up
of hidden pebbles,
summoner of quarry blocks
as easy as hailing a cab. 

Almost without a thought
you are one of those poets
whose thoughts reshape the city.
For each one of your silences,
as we stroll through the Village
some quarry leaves off
another oblong obstacle
to reasonable walking.

Blithely you move forward,
while I must up-and-over
a never-ending hike-trail.

 Is the coast now smooth in Maine?
Are Vermont’s fields
now friendly to the plow
since all the impediments
have come on south?

 I am used by now
to the gravel you hurl
as periods; the shards
of gneiss that mark
your exclamations
(thank goodness they are few);

 but the small boulders
that pile around us
in the outdoor cafe
each time you leave a sentence
unfinished, are good
for no one but the pigeons.
I am not sure the waiter
will even find us again.

 The chalkless slate slab
you put up in front of us
is good for privacy
when a Jehovah’s Witness
comes leaflet-laden
with Biblical boredom;

 but it is all too much
for those of us unwise
in the ways of labyrinths
or masonry, inept
at making the rocks go
where they will serve
some purpose.

 When I go home,
I find my friend Steven petrified,
stiff as a Pharaoh
on a basalt throne.
The bowl of apples are marbleized;
whatever he had cooked
is dust on a plate of sandstone.
What am I going to do with him?

 And now some castle,
which huddled squat
on some peak of the Pyrenees,

hangs like the Goodyear blimp
just over Central Park,
and the stones of the Ramble
decide to evacuate vertically,
rock-root and trees and all
to form a hedge around it.

 Was this your doing, too?
Living as you do, one foot
in the surreal, you smile at this.
I guess you expect a ladder,
at some point, descending,
and an engraved invitation
from whomever it is up there
who is still flesh-and-blood.

 “Imagine the view!” you tease me.
“I wonder what they wear,
and from what century
their customs derive.” 

While that aberrant hulk
hangs like a dream-balloon
for your discourse
with air and lap-tongued clouds,
with whomever you choose as company
for your non-Newtonian discourse,

I stand below, confound with physics
what my eye receives,
and wait, with folded arms
its eventual fall.

 

Ruins

 by Brett Rutherford

     Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Passing the gutted neighborhood I think of you.
Your soul is that abandoned factory whose panes
lie shattered on its concrete floors. The pigeons roost
inside the eaves where keystone — and conscience — once held
the bricks into a nobler form. A high fence surrounds
you needlessly, braided with thorns. Yet any would-be
trespasser can see the sky clean through your vacant
casements. Unhindered rain comes through the roof and makes
dim lakes, unrippled glass in which your machinery
hunches, islands in an archipelago of rust.

Your doors hang twisted, the locks no longer deceiving
the feral packs who come to spray obscenities
upon the inner lining of your empty skull.
Rats nest in every orifice and gnaw at you.
The pink squeal of baby rodents fills the raw night;
your ivy beard clogs with their comings and goings.
Today your name. inscribed on the weathered billboard
totters face down upon the veined macadam lot;
today the pimpled scavengers shall peel your walls
of the last of copper and brass and chrome and wire.
They make off in a pickup through a brazen gap
in your fenced perimeter. Love, no one laments
your debasement — like Zion of old, you are stripped
bare of your finery by an unforgiving god.
One last time I pass you in the Boston-bound bus,
remembering vaguely how I once thought I loved you
before the empire of your fatal charm collapsed,
before your edifice of seeming goodness dropped,
before your calamitous default — oh, how you fell! —
no one has wanted you since (small comfort to me)
as you languish for unpaid taxes of the heart.

 

At the Walls of Troy

 by Brett Rutherford

Have you found Troy? Colossal walls, impregnable,

once fashioned here to rise and fall a dozen times,

fell for their last, gate opened in fatal error.

Do your hear clash of arms, the din of bronze on bronze

(oh deadly iron, you slept then, as yet unor’d

beneath the blood-red earth, unknown to Hephaestus!)

How the chariots rolled, crushing the spent arrows,

driving the gore-spewn breastplates and skull’d helmets down

into the mire and muck of the ungrass’d field,

rolled right on in, to triumph after sleight’s success!

Dare you to stand without a shudder, where a god —

— Yea! even a goddess — reeled and bled out ichor

as Diomedes thrust and thrust impudent metal

with the clear sight of reason — the perfect warrior

granted of all men the vision to mark and wound

the very gods themselves as they sat invisible

beside their chosen heroes. Apollo stopped him:

woe to the hand that ever again hurled a spear

at an Olympian! If ever a warrior

asks why the gods should condone war, avert your eyes!

Did you find that high parapet from which the Greeks

hurled Priam’s last infant son to a bone-crush ruin

so that no son’s son would one day raid fair Hellas?

Do cries still echo here of the wail of the Trojan

women — some doomed to the swift sword or self-murder

vainly offering their jewelry as ransom —

some chosen, war’s prize, for transport and servitude,

already-raped captives whose usurp’d wombs erase

the name of Troy? A place with all its women gone

is a place for dogs and vultures, without a name.

Have you found Troy? ’Mid all this dust and ruin,

can you raise one ghost from all the thousand warships

to ask him the why of this past and present misery,

the cause for fighting and dying so far from home?

Agamemnon hears you not. Menelaus went pale

when stories of the great war were told in Sparta.

Some of that scattered gray ash might be Patroclus.

You, with bowed head, recited from Homer and wept

as ghosts gave shout and answered why they went:

To see again the radiant face of Helen.

8/21/2021

Night Thoughts

 by Brett Rutherford

after Goethe

Ye Stars above, I do not now envy you,
there in the selfsame beauty and glory
as ever on high — the hope of sailors
when hurricane and tempest roaring come,
the one last ask when God and men all fail
their shouted prayers, and when “Stars above!”
leaps up from heart-felt humbleness from one
who sees Polaris in the waterspout’s eye —
And there! And there! Star upon star arrayed
telling in their count and coming how far
the harbor, how near the perilous reef —

No! Stars do not love, and have never loved!
Those whom they save, they save indifferently.
Your circling spheres unvarying tick on,
dragging your plows through Heaven’s black furrows.
You are the same! The same! Yet though you whirl,
in depths beyond the number of zeroes
that are and ever will be inscribed there
in that line that is infinity’s arc
for you, almost-eternal hours have passed,
while I, by love distracted, looked not out
the window, nor up amid my moonless
dark amours, bereft of sense and starless
over two eyes, dark brows and a mere mouth —

All memory of night and of burning stars
forgot! Wind back for me, o starry vault
and fill my bitter thoughts with luminance,
you wise ones who, immortal, do not love,
and I shall trade with you my illusion,
that one for another should be dizzy
and stumble about in one’s own orbit,
imagining some astral collision
that would not be mutually deadly,
dragging along all your friends and neighbors
until the cosmos is a billiards game.

Ye stars then, say that you envy me not!
Say: Men do not love, and have never loved!

From Michael Drayton's Nimphidia (1627) - Fleeing from Puck

MICHAEL DRAYTON (1563-1631)

These two excerpts are from Michael Drayton’s 1627 short epic poem, Nimphidia, concerned entirely with the jealousy of Fairy King Oberon over Queen Mab’s supposed infidelity with one “Pigwiggin.” This poet friend of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson is a worthy Elizabethan, and the spells and curses and descriptions of fairy coaches and weaponry in Nimphidia are a delight. Drayton also wrote long narrative poems on English history, and a multi-volume topographic work, Polyolbion, describing the landscape and historical landmarks of Britain. For these two excerpts from Nimphidia, I have modernized some spellings (mostly leaving verbs alone) and I have here and there made silent corrections for clarity in a few lines that did not make sense to today’s reader.

Blaming the Fairies

This Palace standeth in the Air,

By Necromancy placed there,

That it no Tempests needs to fear,

     Which way so e’er it blow it.

And somewhat Southward tow’rd the Noon,

Whence lies a way up to the Moon,

And thence the Fayrie can as soon

     Pass to the earth below it.

The Walls of Spiders’ legs are made,

Well mortised and finely laid,

He was the master of his Trade

     Who curiously that built:

The Windows are the eyes of Cats,

And for the Roof, instead of Slats,

Is cover’d with the skins of Bats,

     With Moonshine that are gilt.

Hence Oberon him sport to make,

(Their rest when weary mortals take)

And none but only Fayries wake,

     Descendeth for his pleasure.

And Mab his merry Queen by night

Bestrides young Folks that lie upright, (1)

(In elder Times the Mare that hight) (2)

     Which plagues them out of measure.

Hence Shadows, seeming Idle shapes,

Of little frisking Elves and Apes,

To Earth do make their wanton scapes,

     As hope of pastime hastes them:

Which maids think on the Hearth they see,

When Fires well near consumed be,

Their dancing Hayes by two and three, (3)

     Just as their Fancy casts them.

These make our Girls their sluttery rue,

By pinching them both black and blue,

And put a penny in their shoe,

     The house for cleanly sweeping:

And in their courses make that Round,

In Meadows, and in Marshes found,

Of them so call’d the Fayrie ground,

     Of which they have the keeping.

Thus when a Child haps to be got,

Which after proves an Idiot,

When Folk perceive it thriveth not,

     The fault therein to smother:

Some silly doting brainless Calf,

That understands things by the half,

Say that the Fayrie left this Elfe.

Queen Mab Pursued by Puck

In comes Nimphidia, and doth cry,

My Sovereign for your safety fly,

For there is danger but too nigh,

     I posted to forewarn you:

The King hath sent Hobgoblin out,  (4)

To seek you all the Fields about,

And of your safety you may doubt,

     If he but once discern you.

When like an uproar in a Town,

Before them every thing went down,

Some tore a Ruff, and some a Gown,

     ’Gainst one another jostling:

They flew about like Chaff i’ the wind,

For haste some left their Masks behind;

Some could not stay their Gloves to find,

     There never was such bustling.

Forth ran they by a secret way,

Into a brake that near them lay;

Yet much they doubted there to stay,

    Lest Hob should hap to find them:

He had a sharp and piercing sight,

All one to him the day and night,

And therefore were resolved by flight,

 To leave this place behind them.

At length one chanc’d to find a Nut,

In th’ end of which a hole was cut,

Which lay upon a Hazel root,

     There scatt’red by a Squirrel:

Which out the kernel gotten had;

When quoth this Fay: dear Queen be glad,

Let Oberon be ne’er so mad,

     I’ll set you safe from peril.

Come all into this Nut (quoth she)

Come closely in, be rul’d by me,

Each one may here a chooser be,

     For room ye need not wrestle:

Nor need ye be together heaped;

So one by one therein they crept,

And lying down they soundly slept,

     And safe as in a Castle.

Nimphidia that this while doth watch,

Perceiv’d if Puck the Queen should catch

That he should be her over-match,

     Of which she well bethought her;

Found it must be some powerful Charm,

The Queen against him that must arm,

Or surely he would doe her harm,

     For thoroughly he had sought her.

And listening if she aught could hear,

That her might hinder, or might fear:

But finding still the coast was clear,

     Nor creature had descried her;

Each circumstance and having scanned,

She came thereby to understand,

Puck would be with them out of hand

     When to her Charm she hid her:

And first her Fern seed doth bestow,

The kernel of the Mistletoe:

And here and there as Puck should go,

     With terror to affright him:

She Night-shade strews to work him ill,

Therewith her Vervayne (5) and her Dill,

That hindreth Witches of their will,

     Of purpose to despite him.

Then sprinkles she the juice of Rue, (6)

That groweth underneath the Yew: (7)

With nine drops of the midnight dew,

     From Lunary distilling:

The Molewarp's (8) brain mixed therewithal;

And with the same the Pismire’s gall, (9)

For she in nothing short would fall;

     The Fayrie was so willing.

Then thrice under a Briar doth creep,

Which at both ends was rooted deep,

And over it three times she leaped;

     Her Magic much availing:

Then on Proserpina (10) doth call,

And so upon her spell doth fall,

Which here to you repeat I shall,

     Not in one tittle failing.

By the croaking of the Frog;

By the howling of the Dog;

By the crying of the Hog,

     Against the storm arising;

By the Evening Curfew bell;

By the doleful dying knell,

O let this my direful Spell,

     Hob, hinder thy surprising.

By the Mandrake’s (11) dreadful groans;

By the Lubrican’s (12) sad moans;

By the noise of dead men’s bones,

     In Charnel houses rattling:

By the hissing of the Snake,

The rustling of the fire-Drake, (13)

I charge thee thou this place forsake,

     Nor of Queene Mab be prattling.

By the Whirlwind’s hollow sound,

By the Thunder’s dreadful stound, (14)

Yells of Spirits under ground,

     I charge thee not to fear us:

By the Screech-owl’s dismal note,

By the Black Night-Raven’s throat,

I charge thee, Hob, to tear thy Coat

     With thorns if thou come near us,

Her Spell thus spoke she stepped aside,

And in a Chink herself doth hide,

To see thereof what would betide,

     For she alone doth mind him:

When presently she Puck espies,

And well she marked his gloating eyes,

How under every leaf he spies,

     In seeking still to find them.

But once the Circle got within,

The Charms to work do straight begin,

     And he was caught as in a Gin; (15)

For as he thus was busy,

A pain he in his Head-peace feels,

Against a stubbed Tree he reels,

And up went poor Hobgoblin’s heels,

     Alas his brain was dizzy.

At length upon his feet he gets,

Hobgoblin fumes, Hobgoblin frets,

And as again he forward sets,

     And through the Bushes scrambles;

A Stump doth trip him in his pace,

Down comes poor Hob upon his face,

And lamentably tore his case,

     Amongst the Briars and Brambles.

A plague upon Queen Mab, quoth he,

And all her Maids where e’er they be,

I think the Devil guided me,

     To seek her so provoked.

Where stumbling at a piece of Wood,

He fell into a ditch of mud,

Where to the very Chin he stood,

     In danger to be choked.

Now worse than e’er he was before:

Poor Puck doth yell, poor Puck doth roar;

That wak’d Queene Mab who doubted sore

     Some Treason had been wrought her:

Until Nimphidia told the Queen

What she had done, what she had seen,

Who then had well-near crack’d her spleen

     With very extreme laughter.

— Extracted and modernized from Nimphidia (1627).

NOTES

1 That lie upright. Persons who sleep on their backs rather than turned to the side are more subject to visitations by fairies, incubi, and succubi.

2 Mare that hight. That was called Nightmare.

3 Dancing the Haye. In a winding and sinuous movement, in this case flames or sparks weaving around in a burnt-out log or coal.

4 Hobgoblin. Another name for Puck; also Robin Good-fellow.

5 Vervayne. Verbena. Sacred leaves or twigs from laurel, olive, or myrtle.

6 Rue. Ruta graveolens, an evergreen with bitter leaves.

7 Yew. A tree with dark green foliage often planted in graveyards.

8 Molewarp or Mouldwarp. Old French and Teutonic name for the common

garden mole.

9 Pismire’s gall. A foul-smelling extract from an anthill, mostly formic acid.

10 Prosperpine, or Persephone. In this instance, in her guise as the wife of Pluto in

the underworld.

11 Mandrake. The root of the mandrake is shaped like a human body, and was

used in magic spells.

12 Lubrican. Leprechaun, from Irish luchorpan. An unhappy pygmy sprite, said to

be always engaged in an unsuccessful repair of a shoe, and to carry in its purse a

single shilling.

13 Fire-drake. Most likely a reference to the mythical salamander, a lizard-like

creature said to be capable of living in fire.

14 Stound. A violent noise, a shock, producing a state of amazement.

15 Gin. In this instances, a snare or net.

FROM THE FORTHCOMING ANTHOLOGY, TALES OF TERROR, SUPPLEMENT 1.