Dried Marjoram
Over the moor the wind blew chill,
And cold it blew on the rounded hill
With a gibbet starting up from its crest,
The great arm pointing into the West
——Where something hung
——And clanked and swung.
Churchyard carrion, caged four-square
To every wind that furrows the air,
A poor unburied, unquiet thing,
The weighted end of a constant swing.
——It clanged and jangled
——But always dangled.
Lonely travellers riding by
Would check their horses suddenly
As out of the wind arose a cry
Hoarse as a horn in the weather-eye
——Of sleet at sea
——Blown desperately.
It would rise and fall, and the dissonance
As it struck the shrill of the wind would lance
The cold of ice-drops down the spine
And turn the blood to a clotted brine.
——Then only the hum
——Of the wind would come.
Never a sound but rasping heather
For minute after minute together.
Till once again a wail, long-drawn,
Would slice the night as though it were sawn,
——Cleaving through
——The mist and dew.
Such were the tales the riders told,
Sitting snugly out of the cold
In a wayside inn, with just a nip
Of cherry-brandy from which to sip,
——While rafters rattled
——And gossips prattled.
Rotted and blackened in its cage,
Anchored in permanent harborage,
Breeding its worms, with no decent clod
To weave it an apron of grassy sod.
——But this is no grief,
——The man was a thief.
He stole a sheep from a farmer's fold.
He was hungry, he said, and very cold.
His mother was ill and needed food.
The judge took snuff, his attitude
——Was gently resigned.
——He had not yet dined.
“To be hanged by the neck until you are dead.”
That was the verdict, the judge had said.
A sheep had died so why not a man.
The sheep had an owner, but no one can
——Claim to own
——A man full-grown.
Nobody's property, no one to care,
But some one is sobbing over there.
“Most distressing, I declare,”
Says the judge, “take the woman out on the stair,
——And give her a crown
——To buy a new gown.”
A gown for a son, such a simple exchange!
But the clerk of the court finds it hard to arrange
This matter of sobbing, the fact is the sheep
Was stolen for her, and the woman will weep.
——It is most unreasonable.
——Indeed, well-nigh treasonable.
Slowly, slowly, his hands tied with rope,
The cart winds up the market slope.
Slowly, slowly, the knot is adjusted.
The tackle-pulleys whine, they are rusted,
——But free at a kick—
——Run—and hold with a click.
A mother's son, swung like a ham,
Bobbing over the heads of the jam.
A woman has fainted, give her air,
Drag her away for the people stare.
——The hanging is done.
——No more fun.
Nothing more but a jolting ride.
An ox-cart with a corpse inside,
Creaking through the shiny sheen
Of heather-stalks melted and bathed in green
——From a high-set moon.
——The heather-bells croon.
Heather below, and moon overhead,
And iron bars clasping a man who is dead.
Shadows of gorse-bushes under him bite
The shimmering moor like a spotted blight.
——The low wind chirrs
——Over the furze.
Slowly, slowly, panting and weak,
Some one wanders and seems to seek,
Bursting her eyes in the green, vague glare,
For an object she does not know quite where.
——Ah, what is that?
——A wild moor cat?
It scratches and cries above her head,
But here is no tree, and overspread
With clouds and moon the waste recedes,
And the heather flows like bent sea-weeds
——Pushed by an ebb
——To an arching web.
Black and uncertain, it rises before
Her dim old eyes, and the glossy floor
At its feet is undulant and specked
With a rhythmic wavering, and flecked
——By a reddish smudge
——Which does not budge.
Woman, that bundle is your son,
This is the goal your steps have won.
Over the length of the jewelled moor
You have travelled at last to the high-hung door
——Of his airy grave,
——Which does nothing but wave.
Dripping and dropping, his caged limbs drain,
And the spangled ground has a sticky stain.
She gave him this blood from her own dull veins,
And hers still runs, but her body's pains
——Turn back on her now,
——And each is a blow.
Iron-shrouded, flapping the air,
Sepulchred without a prayer,
Denied the comfort of bell and book.
Her tortured eyes do nothing but look.
——And from flower to flower
——The moon sinks lower.
Silver-grey, lavender, lilac-blue,
East of the moor the sun breaks through;
Cracking a bank of orange mist,
It shoulders up with a ruddy twist,
——And spears the spires
——Of heath with its fires.
Then a lark shoots up like a popgun ball
And turns to a spark and a song, and all
The thrushes and sparrows twitter and fly,
And the dew on the heather and gorse is dry.
——But brutal and clear
——The gibbet is here.
Slowly, slowly, worn and flagging,
With the grasshoppers jumping in front of her dragging
Feet, the old woman returns to the town.
But the seed of a thought has been deeply sown
——In her aching mind,
——Where she holds it enshrined.
Nights of moon and nights of dark,
Over the moor-path footsteps. Hark!
It is the old woman whose son is rotting
Above, on the gallows. That shadow blotting
——The Western sky
——Will be hers by-and-by.
Morning, and evening, and sun, and snow,
Months of weather come and go.
The flesh falls away from the withering bones,
The bones grow loose and scatter like stones.
——For the gallows-tree
——Shakes windily.
Every night along the path
Which her steps have beaten to a swath
Where heather and bracken dare not spring,
To the clack and grind of the gallows swing,
——The woman stumbles.
——The skeleton crumbles.
Bit by bit, on the ferns and furze,
Drop the bones which now are hers.
Bit by bit, she gathers them up
And carries them home in an old cracked cup.
——But the head remains
——Although its brains
Nourish the harebells and mullein-stalks.
Blow the wind high, the head still balks;
It rolls like an ivory billiard-ball,
But the bars are too close to let it fall.
——Still, God is just,
——And iron may rust.
November comes, this one after ten,
And the stiff bush-branches grate on the fen,
The gibbet jars to the sharp wind-strokes,
And the frazzled iron snarls and croaks.
——It blows a gale
——With snow and hail.
Two days, three nights, the storm goes on,
And the cage is tossed like a gonfalon
Above a castle, crumpled and slit,
And the frail joints are shattered apart and split.
——The fissure gapes,
——And the skull escapes.
An ostrich-egg on a bed of fern,
Restlessly rolled by the streams which churn
The leaves, thrust under and forced into
The roots and the mud which oozes through
——The empty pockets
——Of wide eye-sockets.
Two days, three nights, and the ferns are torn
And scattered in heaps, and the bushes shorn,
And the heather docked of its seeded bells.
But the glittering skull heaves high and swells
——Above the dank square
——Where the ferns once were.
Hers at last, all, all of hers,
And past her tears the red sun blurs,
Bursting out of the sleeve of the storm.
She brushes a busy, wriggling worm
——Away from the head
——Of her dearest dead.
The uprooted gibbet, all awry,
Crooks behind her against the sky.
Startled rabbits flee from her feet;
The stems of the bracken smell ripe and sweet.
——She pays no heed,
——But quickens her speed.
In the quiet evening, the church-bell tolls;
Fishermen wind up their fishing-poles;
Sheep-bells clink in farmstead closes;
A cat in a kitchen window dozes;
——And doors are white
——With candlelight.
In the old woman's house there is much to do.
Her windows are shuttered, no gleam comes through,
But inside, the lamp-shine strikes on a tub;
She washes, it seems, and her old hands rub
——And polish with care
——The thing that is there.
Gently, gently, sorting and sifting,
With a little psalm-tune shakily drifting
Across her lips, she works and watches,
Stealing moments in sundry snatches
——To note the tick-tock
——Of the hanging clock.
Decently, reverently, all displayed
Upon a cloth, the bones are laid.
Oh, the loving, lingering touch
Tenderly pausing on such and such!
——A cuckoo flings
——From the clock, and sings.
“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” Eight times over.
Wrap them up in a linen cover.
Take the spade and snuff the lamp.
Put on a cloak for the night is damp.
——The door creaks wide,
——She steps outside.
All tottering, solemn, eager, slow,
She crawls along. The moon is low
And creeps beside her through the hedge,
Rising at last to peer over the edge
——Of the churchyard wall
——And brighten her shawl.
The flagstone path taps back to her tread.
She stops to listen, and whispers spread
All round her, hissing from trees and graves.
Before her is movement; something waves.
——But she passes on,
——The movement is gone.
Blind in the moon the windows shine,
Colourless, glinting, line and line,
The leaded panes are facets and squares
Of dazzle, arched in carven pairs.
——Ivy rustles.
——A yew-tree justles.
The corner last on the farthest side
Where the church, foreshortened, is heavy-eyed,
For only the chancel lancets pierce
The lichened mullions, designed in tierce,
——Whence the sun comes through
——Ruby and blue.
This corner is strangled in overgrowth;
Dock-leaves waver like elephants, loath
To move, but willing to flap their ears,
And huge stone blocks like unshaped biers
——Are sprawled among
——Clumps of adder's-tongue.
A bat swoops down and flitters away;
An owl whimpers like a child astray;
The slanting grave-stones, all askew,
Cock themselves obscenely, two and two.
——She stoops and pushes
——Between the bushes.
She lays her bundle on a stone.
Her bleeding hands are cut to the bone
And torn by the spines of thorn and brier.
Her shoulders ache. Her spade in the mire
——Sucks and slimes
——These many times.
Slowly she clears an open space,
Screened behind hollies, where wild vines lace
Their tendrils in angles and fractured turns.
But water is flooding the stems of the ferns.
——Alas for the dead
——Who lie in this bed!
But hanged men have no business where
The ground has been hallowed by chant and prayer.
Even to lie in the putrid seeping
Of consecrate mud is to be in God's keeping,
——And He will forget
——His judgment debt.
Poor lone soul, all palsied and dim,
As she lifts the bones, she quavers a hymn.
Then, as for years she laid him to sleep
In his crib, she sets the bundle deep
——In the watery hole,
——And prays for his soul.
“Rest, lad, now, surely God hears,
He has granted me this for my many tears.
Sleep, my Darling, for you are come
Home at last to stay at home.”
——But the old voice stops,
——And something drops.
They found her dead on a sunny noon,
Clasping the ground, and overstrewn
With decent leaves which had dropped a shroud
All about her. The parson allowed
——Custom to waive
——In making her grave.
Even the sexton said no word
When something under his shovel stirred,
And the parson read the burial prayer.
He seemed rather husky, but then the air
——Was bitter cold.
——There was frost on the mold.
And cold it blew on the rounded hill
With a gibbet starting up from its crest,
The great arm pointing into the West
——Where something hung
——And clanked and swung.
Churchyard carrion, caged four-square
To every wind that furrows the air,
A poor unburied, unquiet thing,
The weighted end of a constant swing.
——It clanged and jangled
——But always dangled.
Lonely travellers riding by
Would check their horses suddenly
As out of the wind arose a cry
Hoarse as a horn in the weather-eye
——Of sleet at sea
——Blown desperately.
It would rise and fall, and the dissonance
As it struck the shrill of the wind would lance
The cold of ice-drops down the spine
And turn the blood to a clotted brine.
——Then only the hum
——Of the wind would come.
Never a sound but rasping heather
For minute after minute together.
Till once again a wail, long-drawn,
Would slice the night as though it were sawn,
——Cleaving through
——The mist and dew.
Such were the tales the riders told,
Sitting snugly out of the cold
In a wayside inn, with just a nip
Of cherry-brandy from which to sip,
——While rafters rattled
——And gossips prattled.
Rotted and blackened in its cage,
Anchored in permanent harborage,
Breeding its worms, with no decent clod
To weave it an apron of grassy sod.
——But this is no grief,
——The man was a thief.
He stole a sheep from a farmer's fold.
He was hungry, he said, and very cold.
His mother was ill and needed food.
The judge took snuff, his attitude
——Was gently resigned.
——He had not yet dined.
“To be hanged by the neck until you are dead.”
That was the verdict, the judge had said.
A sheep had died so why not a man.
The sheep had an owner, but no one can
——Claim to own
——A man full-grown.
Nobody's property, no one to care,
But some one is sobbing over there.
“Most distressing, I declare,”
Says the judge, “take the woman out on the stair,
——And give her a crown
——To buy a new gown.”
A gown for a son, such a simple exchange!
But the clerk of the court finds it hard to arrange
This matter of sobbing, the fact is the sheep
Was stolen for her, and the woman will weep.
——It is most unreasonable.
——Indeed, well-nigh treasonable.
Slowly, slowly, his hands tied with rope,
The cart winds up the market slope.
Slowly, slowly, the knot is adjusted.
The tackle-pulleys whine, they are rusted,
——But free at a kick—
——Run—and hold with a click.
A mother's son, swung like a ham,
Bobbing over the heads of the jam.
A woman has fainted, give her air,
Drag her away for the people stare.
——The hanging is done.
——No more fun.
Nothing more but a jolting ride.
An ox-cart with a corpse inside,
Creaking through the shiny sheen
Of heather-stalks melted and bathed in green
——From a high-set moon.
——The heather-bells croon.
Heather below, and moon overhead,
And iron bars clasping a man who is dead.
Shadows of gorse-bushes under him bite
The shimmering moor like a spotted blight.
——The low wind chirrs
——Over the furze.
Slowly, slowly, panting and weak,
Some one wanders and seems to seek,
Bursting her eyes in the green, vague glare,
For an object she does not know quite where.
——Ah, what is that?
——A wild moor cat?
It scratches and cries above her head,
But here is no tree, and overspread
With clouds and moon the waste recedes,
And the heather flows like bent sea-weeds
——Pushed by an ebb
——To an arching web.
Black and uncertain, it rises before
Her dim old eyes, and the glossy floor
At its feet is undulant and specked
With a rhythmic wavering, and flecked
——By a reddish smudge
——Which does not budge.
Woman, that bundle is your son,
This is the goal your steps have won.
Over the length of the jewelled moor
You have travelled at last to the high-hung door
——Of his airy grave,
——Which does nothing but wave.
Dripping and dropping, his caged limbs drain,
And the spangled ground has a sticky stain.
She gave him this blood from her own dull veins,
And hers still runs, but her body's pains
——Turn back on her now,
——And each is a blow.
Iron-shrouded, flapping the air,
Sepulchred without a prayer,
Denied the comfort of bell and book.
Her tortured eyes do nothing but look.
——And from flower to flower
——The moon sinks lower.
Silver-grey, lavender, lilac-blue,
East of the moor the sun breaks through;
Cracking a bank of orange mist,
It shoulders up with a ruddy twist,
——And spears the spires
——Of heath with its fires.
Then a lark shoots up like a popgun ball
And turns to a spark and a song, and all
The thrushes and sparrows twitter and fly,
And the dew on the heather and gorse is dry.
——But brutal and clear
——The gibbet is here.
Slowly, slowly, worn and flagging,
With the grasshoppers jumping in front of her dragging
Feet, the old woman returns to the town.
But the seed of a thought has been deeply sown
——In her aching mind,
——Where she holds it enshrined.
Nights of moon and nights of dark,
Over the moor-path footsteps. Hark!
It is the old woman whose son is rotting
Above, on the gallows. That shadow blotting
——The Western sky
——Will be hers by-and-by.
Morning, and evening, and sun, and snow,
Months of weather come and go.
The flesh falls away from the withering bones,
The bones grow loose and scatter like stones.
——For the gallows-tree
——Shakes windily.
Every night along the path
Which her steps have beaten to a swath
Where heather and bracken dare not spring,
To the clack and grind of the gallows swing,
——The woman stumbles.
——The skeleton crumbles.
Bit by bit, on the ferns and furze,
Drop the bones which now are hers.
Bit by bit, she gathers them up
And carries them home in an old cracked cup.
——But the head remains
——Although its brains
Nourish the harebells and mullein-stalks.
Blow the wind high, the head still balks;
It rolls like an ivory billiard-ball,
But the bars are too close to let it fall.
——Still, God is just,
——And iron may rust.
November comes, this one after ten,
And the stiff bush-branches grate on the fen,
The gibbet jars to the sharp wind-strokes,
And the frazzled iron snarls and croaks.
——It blows a gale
——With snow and hail.
Two days, three nights, the storm goes on,
And the cage is tossed like a gonfalon
Above a castle, crumpled and slit,
And the frail joints are shattered apart and split.
——The fissure gapes,
——And the skull escapes.
An ostrich-egg on a bed of fern,
Restlessly rolled by the streams which churn
The leaves, thrust under and forced into
The roots and the mud which oozes through
——The empty pockets
——Of wide eye-sockets.
Two days, three nights, and the ferns are torn
And scattered in heaps, and the bushes shorn,
And the heather docked of its seeded bells.
But the glittering skull heaves high and swells
——Above the dank square
——Where the ferns once were.
Hers at last, all, all of hers,
And past her tears the red sun blurs,
Bursting out of the sleeve of the storm.
She brushes a busy, wriggling worm
——Away from the head
——Of her dearest dead.
The uprooted gibbet, all awry,
Crooks behind her against the sky.
Startled rabbits flee from her feet;
The stems of the bracken smell ripe and sweet.
——She pays no heed,
——But quickens her speed.
In the quiet evening, the church-bell tolls;
Fishermen wind up their fishing-poles;
Sheep-bells clink in farmstead closes;
A cat in a kitchen window dozes;
——And doors are white
——With candlelight.
In the old woman's house there is much to do.
Her windows are shuttered, no gleam comes through,
But inside, the lamp-shine strikes on a tub;
She washes, it seems, and her old hands rub
——And polish with care
——The thing that is there.
Gently, gently, sorting and sifting,
With a little psalm-tune shakily drifting
Across her lips, she works and watches,
Stealing moments in sundry snatches
——To note the tick-tock
——Of the hanging clock.
Decently, reverently, all displayed
Upon a cloth, the bones are laid.
Oh, the loving, lingering touch
Tenderly pausing on such and such!
——A cuckoo flings
——From the clock, and sings.
“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” Eight times over.
Wrap them up in a linen cover.
Take the spade and snuff the lamp.
Put on a cloak for the night is damp.
——The door creaks wide,
——She steps outside.
All tottering, solemn, eager, slow,
She crawls along. The moon is low
And creeps beside her through the hedge,
Rising at last to peer over the edge
——Of the churchyard wall
——And brighten her shawl.
The flagstone path taps back to her tread.
She stops to listen, and whispers spread
All round her, hissing from trees and graves.
Before her is movement; something waves.
——But she passes on,
——The movement is gone.
Blind in the moon the windows shine,
Colourless, glinting, line and line,
The leaded panes are facets and squares
Of dazzle, arched in carven pairs.
——Ivy rustles.
——A yew-tree justles.
The corner last on the farthest side
Where the church, foreshortened, is heavy-eyed,
For only the chancel lancets pierce
The lichened mullions, designed in tierce,
——Whence the sun comes through
——Ruby and blue.
This corner is strangled in overgrowth;
Dock-leaves waver like elephants, loath
To move, but willing to flap their ears,
And huge stone blocks like unshaped biers
——Are sprawled among
——Clumps of adder's-tongue.
A bat swoops down and flitters away;
An owl whimpers like a child astray;
The slanting grave-stones, all askew,
Cock themselves obscenely, two and two.
——She stoops and pushes
——Between the bushes.
She lays her bundle on a stone.
Her bleeding hands are cut to the bone
And torn by the spines of thorn and brier.
Her shoulders ache. Her spade in the mire
——Sucks and slimes
——These many times.
Slowly she clears an open space,
Screened behind hollies, where wild vines lace
Their tendrils in angles and fractured turns.
But water is flooding the stems of the ferns.
——Alas for the dead
——Who lie in this bed!
But hanged men have no business where
The ground has been hallowed by chant and prayer.
Even to lie in the putrid seeping
Of consecrate mud is to be in God's keeping,
——And He will forget
——His judgment debt.
Poor lone soul, all palsied and dim,
As she lifts the bones, she quavers a hymn.
Then, as for years she laid him to sleep
In his crib, she sets the bundle deep
——In the watery hole,
——And prays for his soul.
“Rest, lad, now, surely God hears,
He has granted me this for my many tears.
Sleep, my Darling, for you are come
Home at last to stay at home.”
——But the old voice stops,
——And something drops.
They found her dead on a sunny noon,
Clasping the ground, and overstrewn
With decent leaves which had dropped a shroud
All about her. The parson allowed
——Custom to waive
——In making her grave.
Even the sexton said no word
When something under his shovel stirred,
And the parson read the burial prayer.
He seemed rather husky, but then the air
——Was bitter cold.
——There was frost on the mold.
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