Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

III. Faith: Hope: Love: Service

The Vision of Sir Launfal

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

OVER his keys the musing organist,

Beginning doubtfully and far away,

First lets his fingers wander as they list,

And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay;

Then, as the touch of his loved instrument

Gives hope and fervor, nearer draws his theme,

First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent

Along the wavering vista of his dream.

Not only around our infancy

Doth heaven with all its splendors lie;

Daily, with souls that cringe and plot,

We Sinais climb and know it not.

Over our manhood bend the skies;

Against our fallen and traitor lives

The great winds utter prophecies;

With our faint hearts the mountain strives;

Its arms outstretched, the druid wood

Waits with its Benedicite;

And to our age’s drowsy blood

Still shouts the inspiring sea.

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us:

The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in.

The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,

We bargain for the graves we lie in;

At the devil’s booth are all things sold,

Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;

For a cap and bells our lives we pay,

Bubbles we buy with a whole soul’s tasking:

’T is heaven alone that is given away,

’T is only God may be had for the asking;

No price is set on the lavish summer;

June may be had by the poorest comer.

And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days;

Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,

And over it softly her warm ear lays;

Whether we look, or whether we listen,

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;

Every clod feels a stir of might,

An instinct within it that reaches and towers,

And groping blindly above it for light,

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers;

The flush of life may well be seen

Thrilling back over hills and valleys;

The cowslip startles in meadows green,

The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice,

And there ’s never a leaf nor a blade too mean

To be some happy creature’s palace;

The little bird sits at his door in the sun,

Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,

And lets his illumined being o’errun

With the deluge of summer it receives;

His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,

And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;

He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,—

In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?

Now is the high tide of the year,

And whatever of life hath ebbed away

Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer,

Into every bare inlet and creek and bay;

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it;

We are happy now because God wills it;

No matter how barren the past may have been,

’T is enough for us now that the leaves are green;

We sit in the warm shade and feel right well

How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell;

We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing

That skies are clear and grass is growing;

The breeze comes whispering in our ear

That dandelions are blossoming near,

That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing,

That the river is bluer than the sky,

That the robin is plastering his house hard by:

And if the breeze kept the good news back,

For other couriers we should not lack;

We could guess it all by yon heifer’s lowing,—

And hark! how clear bold chanticleer,

Warmed with the new wine of the year,

Tells all in his lusty crowing!

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;

Everything is happy now,

Everything is upward striving;

’T is as easy now for the heart to be true

As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,—

’T is the natural way of living:

Who knows whither the clouds have fled?

In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake;

And the eyes forget the tears they have shed,

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache;

The soul partakes the season’s youth,

And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe

Lie deep ’neath a silence pure and smooth,

Like burnt-out craters healed with snow.

What wonder if Sir Launfal now

Remember the keeping of his vow?

“MY golden spurs now bring to me,

And bring to me my richest mail,

For to-morrow I go over land and sea

In search of the Holy Grail:

Shall never a bed for me be spread,

Nor shall a pillow be under my head,

Till I begin my vow to keep;

Here on the rushes will I sleep,

And perchance there may come a vision true

Ere day create the world anew.”

Slowly Sir Launfal’s eyes grew dim;

Slumber fell like a cloud on him,

And into his soul the vision flew.

The crows flapped over by twos and threes,

In the pool drowsed the cattle up to their knees,

The little birds sang as if it were

The one day of summer in all the year,

And the very leaves seemed to sing on the trees:

The castle alone in the landscape lay

Like an outpost of winter, dull and gray;

’T was the proudest hall in the North Countree,

And never its gates might opened be,

Save to lord or lady of high degree;

Summer besieged it on every side,

But the churlish stone her assaults defied;

She could not scale the chilly wall,

Though around it for leagues her pavilions tall

Stretched left and right.

Over the hills and out of sight;

Green and broad was every tent,

And out of each a murmur went

Till the breeze fell off at night.

The drawbridge dropped with a surly clang,

And through the dark arch a charger sprang,

Bearing Sir Launfal, the maiden knight,

In his gilded mail, that flamed so bright

It seemed the dark castle had gathered all

Those shafts the fierce sun had shot over its wall

In his siege of three hundred summers long,

And binding them all in one blazing sheaf,

Had cast them forth; so, young and strong,

And lightsome as a locust leaf,

Sir Launfal flashed forth in his maiden mail,

To seek in all climes for the Holy Grail.

It was morning on hill and stream and tree,

And morning in the young knight’s heart;

Only the castle moodily

Rebuffed the gifts of the sunshine free,

And gloomed by itself apart;

The season brimmed all other things up

Full as the rain fills the pitcher-plant’s cup.

As Sir Launfal made morn through the darksome gate,

He was ’ware of a leper, crouched by the same,

Who begged with his hand and moaned as he sate;

And a loathing over Sir Launfal came;

The sunshine went out of his soul with a thrill,

The flesh ’neath his armor ’gan shrink and crawl,

And midway its leap his heart stood still

Like a frozen waterfall;

For this man, so foul and bent of stature,

Rasped harshly against his dainty nature,

And seemed the one blot on the summer morn,—

So he tossed him a piece of gold in scorn.

The leper raised not the gold from the dust:—

“Better to me the poor man’s crust,

Better the blessing of the poor,

Though I turn me empty from his door:

That is no true alms which the hand can hold;

He gives only the worthless gold

Who gives from a sense of duty;

But he who gives but a slender mite,

And gives to that which is out of sight,—

That thread of the all-sustaining Beauty

Which runs through all and doth all unite,—

The hand cannot clasp the whole of his alms,

The heart outstretches its eager palms;

For a god goes with it and makes it store

To the soul that was starving in darkness before.”

DOWN swept the chill wind from the mountain peak,

From the snow five thousand summers old;

On open wold and hilltop bleak

It had gathered all the cold,

And whirled it like sleet on the wanderer’s cheek;

It carried a shiver everywhere

From the unleafed boughs and pastures bare;

The little brook heard it, and built a roof

’Neath which he could house him winter-proof;

All night by the white stars’ frosty gleams

He groined his arches and matched his beams;

Slender and clear were his crystal spars

As the lashes of light that trim the stars;

He sculptured every summer delight

In his halls and chambers out of sight;

Sometimes his tinkling waters slipt

Down through a frost-leaved forest crypt.

Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees

Bending to counterfeit a breeze;

Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew

But silvery mosses that downward grew;

Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief

With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf;

Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear

For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here

He had caught the nodding bulrush tops

And hung them thickly with diamond drops,

That crystalled the beams of moon and sun,

And made a star of every one:

No mortal builder’s most rare device

Could match this winter palace of ice;

’T was as if every image that mirrored lay

In his depths serene through the summer day,

Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky,

Lest the happy model should be lost,

Had been mimicked in fairy masonry

By the elfin builders of the frost.

Within the hall are song and laughter;

The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly,

And sprouting is every corbel and rafter

With lightsome green of ivy and holly;

Through the deep gulf of the chimney wide

Wallows the Yule-log’s roaring tide;

The broad flame pennons droop and flap

And belly and tug as a flag in the wind;

Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap,

Hunted to death in its galleries blind;

And swift little troops of silent sparks,

Now pausing, now scattering away as in fear,

Go threading the soot forest’s tangled darks

Like herds of startled deer.

But the wind without was eager and sharp;

Of Sir Launfal’s gray hair it makes a harp,

And rattles and wrings

The icy strings,

Singing in dreary monotone

A Christmas carol of its own,

Whose burden still, as he might guess,

Was “Shelterless, shelterless, shelterless!”

The voice of the seneschal flared like a torch

As he shouted the wanderer away from the porch,

And he sat in the gateway and saw all night

The great hall fire, so cheery and bold,

Through the window slits of the castle old,

Build out its piers of ruddy light

Against the drift of the cold.

THERE was never a leaf on bush or tree,

The bare boughs rattled shudderingly;

The river was dumb and could not speak,

For the weaver Winter its shroud had spun;

A single crow on the tree-top bleak

From his shining feathers shed off the cold sun;

Again it was morning, but shrunk and cold,

As if her veins were sapless and old,

And she rose up decrepitly

For a last dim look at earth and sea.

Sir Launfal turned from his own hard gate,

For another heir in his earldom sate:

An old, bent man, worn out and frail,

He came back from seeking the Holy Grail.

Little he recked of his earldom’s loss,

No more on his surcoat was blazoned the cross;

But deep in his soul the sigh he wore,

The badge of the suffering and the poor.

Sir Launfal’s raiment thin and spare

Was idle mail ’gainst the barbèd air,

For it was just at the Christmas-time;

So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime,

And sought for a shelter from cold and snow

In the light and warmth of long ago.

He sees the snake-like caravan crawl

O’er the edge of the desert, black and small,

Then nearer and nearer, till, one by one,

He can count the camels in the sun,

As over the red-hot sands they pass

To where, in its slender necklace of grass,

The little spring laughed and leapt in the shade,

And with its own self like an infant played,

And waved its signal of palms.

“For Christ’s sweet sake, I beg an alms:”—

The happy camels may reach the spring,

But Sir Launfal sees only the grewsome thing,

The leper, lank as the rain-blanched bone,

That cowers beside him, a thing as lone

And white as the ice-isles of Northern seas

In the desolate horror of his disease.

And Sir Launfal said,—“I behold in thee

An image of Him who died on the tree;

Thou also hast had thy crown of thorns,—

Thou also hast had the world’s buffets and scorns,—

And to thy life were not denied

The wounds in the hands and feet and side:

Mild Mary’s Son, acknowledge me;

Behold, through him, I give to thee!”

Then the soul of the leper stood up in his eyes

And looked at Sir Launfal, and straightway he

Remembered in what a haughtier guise

He had flung an alms to leprosie,

When he girt his young life up in gilded mail

And set forth in search of the Holy Grail.

The heart within him was ashes and dust:

He parted in twain his single crust,

He broke the ice on the streamlet’s brink,

And gave the leper to eat and drink;

’T was a mouldy crust of coarse brown bread,

’T was water out of a wooden bowl,—

Yet with fine wheaten bread was the leper fed,

And ’t was red wine he drank with his thirsty soul.

As Sir Launfal mused with a downcast face,

A light shone round about the place;

The leper no longer crouched at his side,

But stood before him glorified,

Shining and tall and fair and straight

As the pillar that stood by the Beautiful Gate,—

Himself the Gate whereby men can

Enter the temple of God in Man.

His words were shed softer than leaves from the pine,

And they fell on Sir Launfal as snows on the brine,

That mingle their softness and quiet in one

With the shaggy unrest they float down upon;

And the voice that was softer than silence said:—

Lo, it is I, be not afraid!

In many climes, without avail,

Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail:

Behold, it is here,—this cup which thou

Didst fill at the streamlet for me but now;

This crust is my body broken for thee,

This water His blood that died on the tree;

The Holy Supper is kept indeed

In whatso we share with another’s need.

Not what we give, but what we share,—

For the gift without the giver is bare;

Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,—

Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me.”

Sir Launfal awoke as from a swound:—

“The Grail in my castle here is found!

Hang my idle armor up on the wall,

Let it be the spider’s banquet-hall;

He must be fenced with stronger mail

Who would seek and find the Holy Grail.”

The castle gate stands open now,

And the wanderer is welcome to the hall

As the hang-bird is to the elm-tree bough;

No longer scowl the turrets tall.

The summer’s long siege at last is o’er:

When the first poor outcast went in at the door,

She entered with him in disguise,

And mastered the fortress by surprise;

There is no spot she loves so well on ground;

She lingers and smiles there the whole year round;

The meanest serf on Sir Launfal’s land

Has hall and bower at his command;

And there ’s no poor man in the North Countree

But is lord of the earldom as much as he.