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* Sir Francis Drake called this “singeing the King of Spayne’s beard.”

Brave sport to singe the beard o’ the King of Spain!
Brave sport, but in the end dreamed he of home–
Of where the trout-brook lisped among the reeds,
Of great chalk cliffs and leagues of yellow gorse,
Of peaceful lanes, of London’s roaring streets,
The crowds, the shops, the pageants in Cheapside,
And heard the trumpets blaring for the Queen
When ‘t was the wind that whistled in the shrouds
Off Cadiz. Ah, and softer dreams he had
Of an unnamed and sweetest mystery,
And from the marble of his soul’s desire
Hewed out the white ideal of his love–
A new Pygmalion! All things drew him home,
This mainly. Foot on English earth once more,
Dear earth of England his propitious fame
A thorn in none but crooked Envy’s side,
He went cross-gartered, with a silken rose
At golden lovelock, diamond brooch at hat
Looping one side up very gallantly,
And changed his doublet’s color twice a day.
Ill fare had given his softer senses edge;
Good fortune, later, bade him come to dine,
Mild Spenser’s scholar, Philip Sidney’s friend.
So took he now his ease; in Devonshire,
When Town was dull, or he had need at heart
For sight of Wyndham Towers against the sky;
But chiefly did he bask him by the Thames,
For there ‘t was that Young England froze and thawed
By turns in GLORIANA’S frown and smile.

As some wild animal that gets a wound,
And prescience hath of death, will drag itself
Back to its cavern sullenly to die,
And would not have heaven’s airs for witnesses,
So Wyndham, shrinking from the very stars
And tell-tale places where the moonlight fell,
Crept through the huddled shadows back to hall,
And in a lonely room where no light was,
Save what the moon made at the casement there,
Sat pondering his hurt, and in the dark
Gave audience to a host of grievances.
For never comes reflection, gay or grave,
But it brings with it comrades of its hue.
So did he fall to thinking how his day
Declined, and how his narrow life had run
Obscurely through an age of great events
Such as men never saw, nor will again
Until the globe be riven by God’s fire.
Others had ventured for the Golden Fleece,
Knaves of no parts at all, and got renown,
(By force of circumstance and not desert,)
While he up there on that rock-bastioned coast
Had rotted like some old hulk’s skeleton,
Whose naked and bleached ribs the lazy tide
Laps day by day, and no man thinks of more.
Then was jade Fortune in her lavish mood.
Why had he not for distant Colchis sailed
And been the Jason of these Argonauts?
True, some had come to block on Tower Hill,
Or quittance made in a less noble sort;
Still they had lived, from life’s high-mantling cup
Had blown the bead. In such case, if one’s head
Be of its momentary laurel stripped
And made a show of stuck on Temple Bar
Or at the Southwark end of London Bridge,
What mattered it? At worst man dies but once–
So far as known. One may not master death,
But life should be one’s lackey. He had been
Time’s dupe and bondsman; ever since his birth
Had walked this planet with his eye oblique,
Grasped what was worthless, what were most dear missed;
Missed love and fame, and all the sum of things
Fame gets a man in England–the Queen’s smile,
Which means, when she ‘s in humor, abbey-lands,
Appointments, stars and ribbons for the breast,
And that sleek adulation that takes shape
I’ the down-drooping of obsequious lids
When one ascends a stair or walks the pave.
Good Lord! but it was excellent to see
How Expectation in the ante-room
Crooks back to Greatness passing to the Queen–
“Kind sir!” “Sweet sir!” “I prithee speed my suit!”
‘T was somewhat to be flattered, though by fools,
For even a fool’s coin hath a kind of ring.
Yet after all–thus did the grapes turn sour
To master Fox, in fable–who would care
To moil and toil to gain a little fame,
And have each rascal that prowls under heaven
Stab one for getting it? Had he wished power,
The thing was in the market-place for sale
At stated rates–so much for a man’s soul!
His was a haughty spirit that bent not,
And one to rise had need to cringe and creep.
So had his brother into favor crawled,
Like slug into the bosom of a rose,
And battened in the sun. At thought of him,
Forgotten for a moment, Wyndham winced,
And felt his wound. “Why bides he not in Town
With his blond lovelock and wench-luring ways–
There runs his fox! What foul fiend sends him here
To Wyndham Towers? Is there not space enough
In this our England he needs crowd me so?
Has London sack upon his palate staled,
That he must come to sip my Devon cream?
Are all maids shut in nunneries save this one?
What magic philtre hath he given her
To thaw the ice that melted not for me?
Rich is he now that at his setting forth
Had not two silver pieces to his purse.
It is his brave apparel dazzles her.
Thus puts he bound and barrier to my love.
Another man were he abused as I…
I’ll have no more of him! If I but dared–
Nay, I dare not. I have fawn’s blood, I think;
I would, and dare not!” Thrice the hooded clock
Solemnly, like some old Carthusian monk
With meagre face half seen beneath his cowl,
Intoned the quarter. Memory went not back
When this was not a most familiar sound,
Yet as each stroke on the dead silence fell
Wyndham turned, startled. Now the sanguine moon,
To clouded opal changing momently,
Rose sheer above the pine-trees’ ragged edge,
And through the wide-flung casement reaching hand
With cold and spectral finger touched the plates
Of his dead father’s armor till it gleamed
One mass of silver. There it stood complete,
That august panoply which once struck dread
To foemen on the sunny plains of France,
Menacing, terrible, this instant stood,
With vizard down and jousting-lance at charge
As if that crumbled knight were quick within.