I draw the gliding fog-bank as a snake is drawn from the hole, They bellow one to the other, the frighted ship-bells toll: For day is a drifting terror till I raise the shroud with my breath, And they see strange bows above them and the two go locked to death.
But whether in calm or wrack-wreath, whether by dark or day I heave them whole to the conger or rip their plates away, First of the scattered legions, under a shrieking sky, Dipping between the rollers, the English Flag goes by.
The dead dumb fog hath wrapped it—the frozen dews have kissed— The morning stars have hailed it, a fellow-star in the mist. What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare, Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!’
Kipling.
NOTES
[I]
This descant upon one of the most glorious feats of arms that even England has achieved is selected and pieced together from the magnificent verse assigned to the Chorus—‘Enter Rumour painted full of tongues’—to King Henry V., the noble piece of pageantry produced in 1598, and a famous number from the Poems Lyrick and Pastorall (circ. 1605) of Michael Drayton. ‘Look,’ says Ben Jonson, in his Vision on the Muses of his Friend, Michael Drayton:—
Look how we read the Spartans were inflamed With bold Tyrtæus' verse; when thou art named So shall our English youths urge on, and cry An Agincourt! an Agincourt! or die.
This, it is true, was in respect of another Agincourt, but we need not hesitate to appropriate it to our own: in respect of which—‘To the Cambro-Britons and their Harp, His Ballad of Agincourt,’ is the poet's own description—it is to note that Drayton had no model for it; that it remains wellnigh unique in English letters for over two hundred years; and that, despite such lapses into doggerel as the third stanza, and some curious infelicities of diction which need not here be specified, it remains, with a certain Sonnet, its author's chief title to fame. Compare the ballads of The Brave Lord Willoughby and The Honour of Bristol in the seventeenth century, the song of The Arethusa in the eighteenth, and in the nineteenth a choice of such Tyrtæan music as The Battle of the Baltic, Lord Tennyson's Ballad of the Fleet, and The Red Thread of Honour of the late Sir Francis Doyle.