The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost, No wing of wind the region swept, But over all things brooding slept The quiet sense of something lost. As in the winters left behind, Again our ancient games had place, The mimic picture's breathing grace, And dance and song and hoodman-blind. Who show'd a token of distress? No single tear, no mark of pain : O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? O grief, can grief be changed to less? O last regret, regret can die! No-mixt with all this mystic frame, Her deep relations are the same, But with long use her tears are dry. CXI RING out, wild bells, to the wild sky, Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow : The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be. CXII O LIVING will that shalt endure When all that seems shall suffer shock, Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure, That we may lift from out of dust A voice as unto him that hears, A cry above the conquer'd years To one that with us works, and trust, With faith that comes of self-control, The truths that never can be proved Until we close with all we loved, And all we flow from, soul in soul. THE END NOTES PAGE 3 St. 1 The Legend of Good Women: One of Chaucer's unfinished pieces. Of the seventeen heroines named in the Prologue, only nine are dealt with, and among these several bear strong traces of hasty treatment, as if the task, (possibly laid upon him by the Queen Anne), had not been wholly congenial to the Poet. Chaucer, in fact, often displays that Mediaeval bias against Woman, which is in such singular contrast with the contemporaneous attitude of romantic adoration: he lacks the finer chivalrous tone of Dante, Petrarch, or Spenser: "Shakespeare's women," or such as the Dream before us presents, are beings hardly known to him. Cleopatra is the single heroine common to the two poems, and it is the Cleopatra of the Play which has been here before Tennyson, not the pale sketch of Chaucer's half-hearted Legend. St. 2 Dan: ancient for Dominus, and used thus of Chaucer by Spenser, who looked up to him as his poetical Master.-P. 4, St. I the tortoise: name in ancient warfare for a body of shieldcovered soldiers, or for a strong shed, moving against the wall of a besieged place to pierce or storm it. 4 St. 8 an old wood: image of the Past.-P. 5, St. These lines set forth such a picture as would have suited the style of the great Turner PAGE 4 in his maturity. St. 7 The first "fair woman' is Helen of Troy: The one that stood beside, (P. 6, St. 1), Iphigeneia, sacrificed to Artemis that the Grecian fleet might sail from Aulis to Troy at the beginning of the iron years of war. Next (St. 7) follows Cleopatra, described as by Shakespeare (Act 1, Sc. 5) -Me That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black—, although the polish'd argent of her breast (P. 7, St. 7) shows that a lady of Hellenic blood is here intended. -Jeptha's daughter and Fair Rosamond succeed and as the dream ends, (P. 10, St. 7, 8), Margaret Roper, daughter to Sir Thomas More murdered by Henry VIII, Joan of Arc, and Eleanor Queen of Edward I, pass before us and are gone. 7 St. 4 Canopus: a large star in Argo, not visible above the southern part of the Mediterranean. P. 10, St. 5 Fulvia: Antony's first wife, widow to Clodius, an imperious lady ;—named here by Cleopatra as a parallel to Eleanor :-St. 6 The captain of my dreams: the Morning Star. The Palace of Art: A Prologue in blank verse precedes this lyric : II I send you here a sort of allegory, (For you will understand it) of a soul, A spacious garden full of flowering weeds, And Knowledge for its beauty; or if Good, That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge, are three sisters That doat upon each other, friends to man, |
