And wind out, laughing, Ho, ho, ho!
[329]. "Mariana."
It is difficult to read this poem slowly and intently enough if one is to experience to the full the living things and sights and sounds that by its words are charmed into the mind—the hushed solitude, the desolation. Take even, of all there is, but the "peering mouse" in the sixth stanza—his sharp nose sniffing the air beneath the small wooden arch of his dark-glimmering mousery, where miche and shriek and gambol his fellows behind the mouldering wainscot. Or stay for a moment looking down on the "marsh mosses" in the third stanza—of a green as lively as a fairy's mantle in the sunlight, gilding the waters of the blackened sluice. So piece by piece the words of the poem build up in the imagination this solitary house with its forsaken Mariana, whom Tennyson himself had seen in the dream conferred on him by another poet, Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure:
Isabella.Can this be so? did Angelo so leave her?
Duke.Left her in her teares, and dried not one of them with his comfort: swallowed his vowes whole, pretending in her discoveries of dishonour: in few, bestowed on her her owne lamentation, which she yet weares for his sake: and he, a marble to her teares, is washed with them, but relents not.
Isabella.What a merit were it in death to take this poore maid from the world....
[332]. "Yes Tor."
Turn your back on Okehampton and break out due South into the wilds of Dartmoor, and there, "summering" together "beneath the empty skies," lie titanic Yes Tor and High Willes, rearing their bare vast shapes 700 yards into the air.
[333]. "To heare the Mandrake grone." (stanza 2)
Of the dangerous plant Mandrake ("its root in something the shape and appearance of a man") is concocted Mandragora, one of the "drowsy syrups." "The leaves and fruit be also dangerous, for they cause deadly sleep, and peevish drowsiness." The fruit is "of the bigness of a reasonable pippin, and as yellow as gold when it is thoroughly ripe": fair without, ashes within. It is said that the mandrake's screams, when it is dragged out of the ground, will send the hearer mad. So the gatherer should first seal his ears, then tie the plant to a dog's tail and hike him on to haul it out of its haunt! "Avicenna the Arabian physician asserts that a Jew at Metz had a mandragore with a human head, and the legs and body of a cock, which lived five weeks, and was fed on lavender and earthworms, and, when dead, was preserved in spirits." Even up to the nineteenth century dreaders or wishers of witchcraft were wont to carry these monstrous little Erdmannikens in bosom or pocket for an amulet or charm.