Poems, 1799

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Title: Poems, 1799
Author: Robert Southey
Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8639]
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS, 1799
***
Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Clytie Siddall, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
POEMS,
by
Robert Southey.
The better, please; the worse, displease; I ask no more.
SPENSER.
THE SECOND VOLUME.
CONTENTS.
THE VISION of THE MAID of ORLEANS.
Book 1
2
3
The Rose
The Complaints of the Poor
Metrical Letter
BALLADS.
The Cross Roads.

The Sailor who had served in the Slave Trade
Jaspar
Lord William
A Ballad shewing how an old woman rode double
and who rode
before her
The Surgeon's Warning
The Victory
Henry the Hermit
ENGLISH ECLOGUES.
The Old Mansion House
The Grandmother's Tale
The Funeral
The Sailor's Mother
The Witch
The Ruined Cottage
The Vision
of
The Maid of Orleans.
Divinity hath oftentimes descended
Upon our slumbers, and the
blessed troupes
Have, in the calme and quiet of the soule,

Conversed with us.

SHIRLEY. 'The Grateful Servant'
[Sidenote: The following Vision was originally printed as the ninth
book of 'JOAN of ARC'. It is now adapted to the improved edition of
that Poem.]
THE VISION OF THE MAID OF ORLEANS.
THE FIRST BOOK.
Orleans was hush'd in sleep. Stretch'd on her couch
The delegated
Maiden lay: with toil
Exhausted and sore anguish, soon she closed

Her heavy eye-lids; not reposing then,
For busy Phantasy, in other
scenes
Awakened. Whether that superior powers,
By wise
permission, prompt the midnight dream,
Instructing so the passive [1]
faculty;
Or that the soul, escaped its fleshly clog,
Flies free, and
soars amid the invisible world,
And all things 'are' that [2] 'seem'.
Along a moor,
Barren, and wide, and drear, and desolate,
She
roam'd a wanderer thro' the cheerless night.
Far thro' the silence of
the unbroken plain
The bittern's boom was heard, hoarse, heavy, deep,

It made most fitting music to the scene.
Black clouds, driven fast
before the stormy wind,
Swept shadowing; thro' their broken folds the
moon
Struggled sometimes with transitory ray,
And made the
moving darkness visible.
And now arrived beside a fenny lake
She
stands: amid its stagnate waters, hoarse
The long sedge rustled to the
gales of night.
An age-worn bark receives the Maid, impell'd
By
powers unseen; then did the moon display
Where thro' the crazy
vessel's yawning side
The muddy wave oozed in: a female guides,

And spreads the sail before the wind, that moan'd
As melancholy
mournful to her ear,
As ever by the dungeon'd wretch was heard

Howling at evening round the embattled towers
Of that hell-house [3]
of France, ere yet sublime
The almighty people from their tyrant's
hand
Dash'd down the iron rod.

Intent the Maid
Gazed on the pilot's form, and as she gazed
Shiver'd,
for wan her face was, and her eyes
Hollow, and her sunk cheeks were
furrowed deep,
Channell'd by tears; a few grey locks hung down

Beneath her hood: then thro' the Maiden's veins
Chill crept the blood,
for, as the night-breeze pass'd,
Lifting her tattcr'd mantle, coil'd
around
She saw a serpent gnawing at her heart.
The plumeless bat with short shrill note flits by,
And the night-raven's
scream came fitfully,
Borne on the hollow blast. Eager the Maid

Look'd to the shore, and now upon the bank
Leaps, joyful to escape,
yet trembling still
In recollection.
There, a mouldering pile
Stretch'd its wide ruins, o'er the plain below

Casting a gloomy shade, save where the moon
Shone thro' its
fretted windows: the dark Yew,
Withering with age, branched there
its naked roots,
And there the melancholy Cypress rear'd
Its head;
the earth was heav'd with many a mound,
And here and there a
half-demolish'd tomb.
And now, amid the ruin's darkest shade,
The Virgin's eye beheld
where pale blue flames
Rose wavering, now just gleaming from the
earth,
And now in darkness drown'd. An aged man
Sat near, seated
on what in long-past days
Had been some sculptur'd monument, now
fallen
And half-obscured by moss, and gathered