C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Shameful Death
By William Morris (1834–1896)
T
The mass-priest knelt at the side,
I and his mother stood at the head,
Over his feet lay the bride;
We were quite sure that he was dead,
Though his eyes were open wide.
He did not die in the day;
But in the morning twilight
His spirit passed away,
When neither sun nor moon was bright,
And the trees were merely gray.
Knight’s axe, or the knightly spear,
Yet spoke he never a word
After he came in here;
I cut away the cord
From the neck of my brother dear.
For the recreants came behind,
In a place where the hornbeams grow,—
A path right hard to find,
For the hornbeam boughs swing so
That the twilight makes it blind.
When his arms were pinioned fast,
Sir John, the Knight of the Fen,
Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,
With knights threescore and ten,
Hung brave Lord Hugh at last.
And my hair is all turned gray;
But I met Sir John of the Fen
Long ago on a summer day,—
And am glad to think of the moment when
I took his life away.
And my strength is mostly passed;
But long ago I and my men,
When the sky was overcast,
And the smoke rolled over the reeds of the fen,
Slew Guy of the Dolorous Blast.
I pray you, pray for Sir Hugh,
A good knight and a true;
And for Alice, his wife, pray too.