FullReads

Sing it, sing it, tawny throat,
Upon the wayside tree,
How fair she is, how true she is,
How dear she is to me–
Sweetheart sigh no more!

Sing it, sing it, tawny throat,
And through the summer long
The winds among the clover-tops,
And brooks, for all their silvery stops,
Shall envy you the song–
Sweetheart, sigh no more.

‘T is said the Malays have an arrow steeped
In some strange drug whose subtile properties
Are such that if the point but prick the skin
Death stays there. Like to that fell cruel shaft
This slender rhyme was. Through the purple dark
Straight home it sped, and into Wyndham’s veins
Its drop of sudden poison did distill.
Now no sound was, save when a dry twig snapped
And rustled softly down from branch to branch,
Or on its pebbly shoals the meagre brook
Made intermittent murmur. “So, ‘t is he!”
Thus Wyndham breathing thickly, with his eyes
Dilating in the darkness, “Darrell–he!
I set my springe for other game than this;
Of hare or rabbit dreamed I, not of wolf.
His frequent visitations have of late
Perplexed me; now the riddle reads itself.
A proper man, a very proper man!
A fellow that burns Trinidado leaf
And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue!
A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts–
A murrain on him! Would Elizabeth
In some mad freak had clapped him in the Tower–
Ay, through the Traitor’s Gate. Would he were dead.
Within the year what worthy men have died,
Persons of substance, civic ornaments,
And here ‘s this gilt court-butterfly on wing!
O thou most potent lightning in the cloud,
Prick me this fellow from the face of earth!
I would the Moors had got him in Algiers
What time he harried them on land and sea,
And done their will with scimitar or cord
Or flame of fagot, and so made an end;
Or that some shot from petronel or bow
Had winged him in the folly of his flight.
Well had it been if the Inquisitors,
With rack and screw, had laid black claw on him!”
In days whose chronicle is writ in blood
The richest ever flowed in English veins
Some foul mischance in this sort might have been;
For at dark Fortune’s feet had Darrell flung
In his youth’s flower a daring gauntlet down.

A beardless stripling, at that solemn hour
When, breaking its frail filaments of clay,
The mother’s spirit soared invisible,
The younger son, unhoused as well he knew,
Had taken horse by night to London town,
With right sore heart and nought else in his scrip
But boyish hope to footing find at Court–
A page’s place, belike, with some great lord,
Or some small lord, that other proving shy
Of merit that had not yet clipt its shell.
Day after day, in weather foul or fair,
With lackeys, hucksters, and the commoner sort,
At Whitehall and Westminster he stood guard,
Reading men’s faces with most anxious eye.
There the lords swarmed, some waspish and some bland,
But none would pause at plucking of the sleeve
To hearken to him, and the lad had died
On London stones for lack of crust to gnaw
But that he caught the age’s malady,
The something magical that was in air,
And made men poets, heroes, demi-gods–
Made Shakespeare, Rawleigh, Grenvile, Oxenham,
And set them stars in the fore-front of Time.
In fine, young Darrell drew of that same air
A valiant breath, and shipped with Francis Drake,
Of Tavistock, to sail the Spanish seas
And teach the heathen manners, with God’s aid;
And so, among lean Papists and black Moors,
He, with the din of battle in his ears,
Struck fortune. Who would tamely bide at home
At beck and call of some proud swollen lord
Not worth his biscuit, or at Beauty’s feet
Sit making sonnets, when was work to do
Out yonder, sinking Philip’s caravels
At sea, and then by way of episode
Setting quick torch* to pirate-nests ashore?