Wyndham Towers | Page 3

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*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, [email protected]
.
WYNDHAM TOWERS
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
TO EDWIN BOOTH.
MY DEAR BOOTH:
In offering these verses to you, I beg you to treat them (as you have
many a time advised a certain lord chamberlain to treat the players) not
according to their desert. "Use them after your own honor and dignity;
the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty."
These many years your friend and comrade,
T. B. ALDRICH.
NOTE
The motif of the story embodied in the following poem was crudely
outlined in a brief sketch printed in an early collection of the authors
verse, and subsequently cancelled for a purpose not until now
accomplished. Wyndham Towers is not to be confused with this
discarded sketch, the text of which has furnished only a phrase, or an
indirect suggestion, here and there. That the writer's method, when
recasting the poem, was more or less influenced by the poets he had
been studying--chiefly the dramatists of the Elizabethan era--will, he
hopes, be obvious. It was part of his design, however far he may have
fallen from it, to give his narrative something of the atmosphere and
color of the period in which the action takes place, though the story is
supposed to be told at a later date.
WYNDHAM TOWERS.

Before you reach the slender, high-arched bridge,
Like to a heron
with one foot in stream,
The hamlet breaks upon you through green
boughs--
A square stone church within a place of graves
Upon the
slope; gray houses oddly grouped,
With plastered gables set with
crossed oak-beams,
And roofs of yellow tile and purplish slate.

That is The Falcon, with the swinging sign
And rustic bench, an
ancient hostelry;
Those leaden lattices were hung on hinge
In good
Queen Bess's time, so old it is.
On ridge-piece, gable-end, or dove-cot
vane,
A gilded weathercock at intervals
Glimmers--an angel on the
wing, most like,
Of local workmanship; for since the reign
Of pious
Edward here have carvers thrived,
In saints'-heads skillful and
winged cherubim
Meet for rich abbeys. From yon crumbling tower,

Whose brickwork base the cunning Romans laid--
And now of no
use else except to train
The ivy of an idle legend on--
You see, such
lens is this thin Devon air,
If it so chance no fog comes rolling in,

The Torridge where its branching crystal spreads
To join the Taw.
Hard by from a chalk cliff
A torrent leaps: not lovelier Sappho was

Giving herself all silvery to the sea
From that Leucadian rock.
Beneath your feet
Lie sand and surf in curving parallels.
Off shore,
a buoy gleams like a dolphin's back
Dripping with brine, and guards a
sunken reef
Whose sharp incisors have gnawed many a keel;
There
frets the sea and turns white at the lip,
And in ill-weather lets the
ledge show fang.
A very pleasant nook in Devon, this,
Upon the height of old was Wyndham Towers,
Clinging to rock there,
like an eagle's nest,
With moat and drawbridge once, and good for
siege;
Four towers it had to front the diverse winds:
Built God
knows when, all record being lost,
Locked in the memories of
forgotten men.
In Caesar's day, a pagan temple; next
A monastery;
then a feudal hold;
Later a manor, and at last a ruin.
Such
knowledge have we of it, vaguely caught
Through whispers fallen
from tradition's lip.
This shattered tower, with crenellated top
And
loops for archers, alone marks the spot,
Looming forlornly--a gigantic

harp
Whereon the invisible fingers of the wind
Its fitful and
mysterious dirges play.
Here dwelt, in the last Tudor's virgin reign,
One Richard Wyndham,
Knight and Gentleman,
(The son of Rawdon, slain near Calais wall

When Bloody Mary lost her grip on France,)
A lonely wight that no
kith had nor kin
Save one, a brother--by ill-fortune's spite
A brother,
since 't were better to have none--
Of late not often seen at Wyndham
Towers,
Where he in sooth but lenten welcome got
When to that
gate his errant footstep strayed.
Yet held he dear those gray majestic
walls,
Time-stained and crusted with the sea's salt breath;
There
first his eyes took color of the sea,
There did his heart stay when fate
drove him thence,
And there at last--but that we tell anon.
Darrell
they named him, for an ancestor
Whose bones were whitening in
Holy Land,
The other Richard; a crusader name,
Yet it was Darrell
had the lion-heart.
No love and little liking served this pair,
In look
and word unpaired as white and black--
Of once rich bough the last
unlucky fruit.
The one, for straightness like a Norland pine
Set on
some precipice's perilous edge,
Intrepid, handsome, little past blown
youth,
Of all pure thought and brave deed amorous,
Moulded the
court's high atmosphere to breathe,
Yet liking well the camp's more
liberal air--
Poet, soldier, courtier, 't was the mode;
The other--as a
glow-worm to a