War’s hell of lust and fire, the village-woe,
The tinsel chivalry veiling shame below,—
Not his to draw,—to see, perhaps:—Our eyes
Hold bias with our humour:—His, to paint
With Nature’s freshness, what before him lies:
The knave, the fool; the frolicsome, the quaint:
His the broad jest, the laugh without restraint,
The ready tears, the spirit lightly moved;
Loving the world, and by the world beloved.
So forth fared Chaucer on his pilgrimage
Through England’s humours; in immortal song
Bodying the form and pressure of his age,
Tints gay as pure, and delicate as strong;
Still to the Tabard the blithe travellers throng,
Seen in his mind so vividly, that we
Know them more clearly than the men we see.
Fair France, bright Italy, those numbers train’d;
First in his pages Nature wedding Art
Of all our sons of song; yet he remain’d
True English of the English at his heart:—
He stood between two worlds, yet had no part
In that new order of the dawning day
Which swept the masque of chivalry away.
O Poet of romance and courtly glee
And downcast eager glance that shuns the sky,
Above, about, are signs thou canst not see,
Portents in heaven and earth!—And one goes by
With other than thy prosperous, laughing eye,
Framing the rough web of his rueful lays,
The sorrow and the sin—with bitter gaze
As down the Strand he stalks, a sable shade
Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train,
In silver samite knight and dame and maid
Ride to the tourney on the barrier’d plain;
And he must bow in humble mute disdain,
And that worst woe of baffled souls endure,
To see the evil that they may not cure.
For on sweet Malvern Hill one morn he lay,
Drowsed by the music of the constant stream:—
Loud sang the cuckoo, cuckoo!—for the May
Breathed summer: summer floating like a dream
From the far fields of childhood, with a gleam
Of alien freshness on her forehead fair,
And Heaven itself within the common air.
Then on the mead in vision Langland saw
A pilgrim-throng; not missal-bright as those
Whom Chaucer’s hand surpass’d itself to draw,
Gay as the lark, and brilliant as the rose;—
But such as dungeon foul or spital shows,
Or the serf’s fever-den, or field of fight,
When festering sunbeams on the wounded smite.
No sainted shrine the motley wanderers seek,
Pilgrims of life upon the field of scorn,
Mocking and mock’d; with plague and hunger weak,
And haggard faces bleach’d as those who mourn,
And footsteps redden’d with the trodden thorn;
Blind stretching hands that grope for truth in vain,
Across a twilight demon-haunted plain.