Brother Copas

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

"Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been filled with flowers,
And ye the walks have been
Where maids have spent their hours.
"You have beheld how they
With wicker arks did come
To kiss and bear away
The richer cowslips home.…
"But now we see none here—"

He broke off.

"Ah, there he gets at the pang of it! Other poets have wasted pity on the dead-and-gone maids, but his is for the fields they leave desolate."

This puzzled Corona. But the poem had touched her somehow, and she kept repeating snatches of it to herself as she rambled off in search of more birds' nests. Left to himself, Brother Copas pulled out book and pencil again, and began botching at the last lines of the Pervigilium Veneris—

"Her favour it was filled the sail of the Trojan
for Latium bound;
Her favour that won her Æneas a bride on
Laurentian ground;
And anon from the cloister inveigled the
Vestal, the Virgin, to Mars,
As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated
her Rome for its wars
With the Ramnes, Quirites, together
ancestrally proud as they drew
From Romulus down to our Ceesar—last,
best of that bone and that thew.—
Now learn ye to love who loved never—now ye
who have loved, love anew!"

"Her favour it was filled the sail of the Trojan
for Latium bound;
Her favour that won her Æneas a bride on
Laurentian ground;
And anon from the cloister inveigled the
Vestal, the Virgin, to Mars,
As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated
her Rome for its wars
With the Ramnes, Quirites, together
ancestrally proud as they drew
From Romulus down to our Ceesar—last,
best of that bone and that thew.—
Now learn ye to love who loved never—now ye
who have loved, love anew!"

Brother Copas paused to trim his pencil, which was blunt. His gaze wandered across the water-meadows and overtook Corona, who was wading deep in buttercups.

"Proserpine on the fields of Enna!" he muttered, and resumed—

"Love planteth a field; it conceives to the
passion, the pang, of his joy.
In a field was Dione in labour delivered of
Cupid the Boy:
And the field in its fostering lap from her
travail receiv'd him: he drew
Mother's milk from the delicate kisses of
flowers; and he prospered and grew.—
Now learn ye to love who loved never—now ye
who have loved, love anew!"

"Love planteth a field; it conceives to the
passion, the pang, of his joy.
In a field was Dione in labour delivered of
Cupid the Boy:
And the field in its fostering lap from her
travail receiv'd him: he drew
Mother's milk from the delicate kisses of
flowers; and he prospered and grew.—
Now learn ye to love who loved never—now ye
who have loved, love anew!"