Francis Brett Young

“Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque FuturusArthur is gone…Tristram in CareolSleeps, with a broken sword - and Yseult sleepsBeside him, where the Westering waters rollOver drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps.Lancelot is fallen . . . The ardent helms that shoneSo knightly and the splintered lances rustIn the anonymous mould of Avalon:Gawain and Gareth and Galahad - all are dust.Where do the vanes and towers of CamelotAnd tall Tintagel crumble? Where do those tragicLovers and their bright eyed ladies rot?We cannot tell, for lost is Merlin's magic.And Guinevere - Call her not back againLest she betray the loveliness time lentA name that blends the rapture and the painLinked in the lonely nightingale's lament.Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discoverThe bower of Astolat a smokey hutOf mud and wattle - find the knightliest loverA braggart, and his lilymaid a slut.And all that coloured tale a tapestryWoven by poets. As the spider's skeinsAre spun of its own substance, so have theyEmbroidered empty legend - What remains?This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oakThat age had sapped and cankered at the root,Resistant, from her topmost bough there brokeThe miracle of one unwithering shoot.Which was the spirit of Britain - that certain menUncouth, untutored, of our island broodLoved freedom better than their lives; and whenThe tempest crashed around them, rose and stoodAnd charged into the storm's black heart, with swordLifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmedWith a strange majesty that the heathen hordeRemembered when all were overwhelmed;And made of them a legend, to their chief,Arthur, Ambrosius - no man knows his name -Granting a gallantry beyond belief,And to his knights imperishable fame.They were so few . . . We know not in what mannerOr where they fell - whether they wentRiding into the dark under Christ's bannerOr died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.But this we know; that when the Saxon routSwept over them, the sun no longer shoneOn Britain, and the last lights flickered out;And men in darkness muttered: Arthur is gone…”

“An autumn garden has a sadness when the sun is not shining...”

“And as we stood there, a curious thing happened: a kind of window opened in the rain, just as if a cloud had been hitched aside like a curtain, and in the space between we saw a landscape that took our breath away. The high ground along which the road ran fell away through a black, woody belt, and beyond it, for more miles than you can imagine, lay the whole basin of the Black Country, clear, amazingly clear, with innumerable smokestacks rising out of it like the merchant shipping of the world laid up in an estuary at low tide, each chimney flying a great pennant of smoke that blew away eastward by the wind, and the whole scene bleared by the light of a sulphurous sunset. No one need ever tell me again that the Black Country isn't beautiful. In all Shrophire and Radnor we'd seen nothing to touch it for vastness and savagery. And then this apocalyptic light! It was like a landscape of the end of the world, and, curiously enough, though men had built the chimneys and fired the furnaces that fed the smoke, you felt that the magnificence of the scene owed nothing to them. Its beauty was singularly inhuman and its terror – for it was terrible, you know – elemental. It made me wonder why you people who were born and bred there ever write about anything else.”

“The longer one lives, the more mysterious life seems.”

“All primitive people are frightened of owls,' said Harley. 'The villagers here are scared to death of the gufo. Birds of ill omen. If they see one, they think they'll die. But they never do. See one, I mean, of course,' he added with a laugh.”