PREFACE: IN THE DAYS OF THE BLOG...
There was a time not so very long ago, before the depredations of Facebook and Instagram, when this blog, amongst many, had a wide following. Each post would draw at least as many comments as any trenchant, topical or comic status update on Facebook might provoke today. The difference was that whilst that Facebook status, however well-received, will plummet down the fast-moving escallator of contributions within minutes, overtaken, eclipsed and submerged by the sheer weight and variety of material rising in its wake, the blog post would sit four-square, maybe for days or a week at a time, marinading in the mixture of reflective, carefully-considered comments that would appear.
The days of the personal blog have passed. I remain in contact via Facebook and email with nearly all of my closest blogging friends from those days, but with a handful of noble exceptions, our blogs are now lonely houses along a largely deserted highway. We continue to live here because a house is a home and we love the view. And in my case the Patteran Pages (founded in 2003) now acts as a gallery for occasional poems posted to a couple of prompt sites so there is still welcome traffic from time to time.
So the mammoth post below is very unlikely to be seen by more than a handful of old pals and the occasional wanderer who has got lost along this neglected highway. And of those who stop by there may be few who will persevere all the way to the end! But after 12 years I'm going nowhere so I'll post away as if nothing had changed. And if through the windows the road in both directions remains empty, I'll slip over to Facebook for a little company!
And so to the post...
:::
In 2007 I completed the fourth draft of a long poem entitled 'The Famous Flower'.
The original intention had been to select a group of traditional songs from Scottish/Irish/English sources and expand them into fuller narratives, extrapolating from the main storyline and developing some of the more allusive aspects. They would then be presented as a sort of suite of poems, sharing some reflection of the style and idiom of the original ballads, but embodying elements of a more contemporary concern with character and motivation.
I wrote up a version of the Anglo-Irish song, The Dark-Eyed Sailor, but subsequently failed to find anything else that seemed to lend itself to similar treatment. Until I rediscovered Martin Carthy's version of a 17th century ballad, The Famous Flower of Serving Men originally written by one Laurence Price and subsequently augmented anonymously over the centuries by the good old folk process. A wonderfully dark and sinuous tale, it provided all sorts of possibilities for exploration and extension. What I didn't intend at the outset was to end up with a piece running to over 4,000 words!
Here it is in its mighty entirety with the narrative shared between Fair Eleanor, her King and the voice of the invisible Chorus. But first, listen to Martin Carthy's exquisite rendition of the song...
FAMOUS FLOWER OF SERVING MEN
THE FAMOUS FLOWER – 4th DRAFT
FAIR ELEANOR
This is how it was. So long a journey
from that place of blood to this whitethorn fire;
from the scattering of the may blossom to the blowing
of these hag-tree ashes amongst the bones.
This is how it was. It is a spring night.
A hunter’s moon is trimming back the clouds.
A vixen cries in the coppice. My baby suckles,
eyes closed against the pulse of milk.
My lover lifts an apple bough into the fire
and turns to reach for another.
And, noiseless from the steep stair,
unbidden, unheralded, five men
are in my chamber like wraiths
who find their form only in firelight.
One has drawn his sword; the others bear
knives. Unhindered by passion, free
of guilt, they work like men harvesting
in advance of a storm, brisk and thorough,
tight-lipped and breathing hard.
My lover barely rises to his knees
and they cut him down, his mouth
in a gargoyle grin, lipless and wrapped
around his jawline. Two more strokes
and his right hand goes spinning down
into the hearth like a shed glove.
And a silence thickens the air.
A light, green and glaucous,
like through deep water, traps us
between one moment and the next.
The men pause, breathing heavy still,
like cattle who have run the length
of a field. I am a dreamer, motionless,
looking beyond the instant. (I am
a child wrapped in white furs,
sleigh-bound across deep snow.
I am a lover bearing the blessed weight
of a lover on a bed of moss under pines).
But my baby moves in my arms;
he shifts his warm body
inside the plaid shawl that wraps him,
cranes his head to see our visitors
so as to smile his two small pearly teeth
at them, so as to fix his round
sea-blue eyes on them, so as
to welcome them to our hearth
with his precious early words.
And one cuts him down.
With skill. It must be said,
with skill for his black blade
passes my face in a whisper,
a thing half seen, half-imagined –
the swift parabola of a bird
glanced between two clouds,
or a leaf blown in a hard wind.
I feel its dangerous breath;
I feel its voice deep within
my cage of bones (as now
I hear it; as I shall hear it ever).
And my milky babe makes no sound
as he passes swiftly from this place.
Was present, is absent
with no sense of the journey made.
(And this small grain of mercy,
dropped from the store
whose bounty it is God’s
to grant or to withhold,
is what I have hoarded
through the long years).
They turn to go, their black cloaks
gathered like Dominican shrouds,
save for the sword-bearer, the
baby-slayer. He throws back
his cowl and bares his face to show
a lattice-work of scars, as if one
has some time seized his hair behind
and pushed his face against
a blacksmith’s grate
or a burning prison’s bars.
My stepmother’s man. Now all’s
as clear as a chain of falling water:
my mother’s man, her seneschal,
and this disfigurement her work,
her hand in his hair in sudden anger.
And yet still he does her will – this,
all this, to forestall the white dove’s
prophecy that, my father slain,
the bastard son shall rise and rule.
And now he casts the sullied sword
away from him, towards the hearth,
for man may not sheath a sword
that bears a baby’s blood and he fears
for his immortal soul. Hilt and blade
sing off the stone they fall upon.
He turns and follows his companions
down the winding stair, the scuff
of their falling feet the only
whispered valediction on that night.
::
The earth at the moat’s edge
is soft with the night’s rain.
It yields to the broken sword,
its hilt and tongue of blade.
The winding sheet must be
the plaid shawl that wound me
through the winter by the fire
as I gave breast and crooned
the songs he took with him into
his moonlit dreams. The sword,
its hilt and bloody blade
are the cross of Christ to raise
above my boy. The bell that tolls him
through Eden’s gate is the blade
struck hard against the mounting block
(that block from which I would ride,
laughing, to hunt the hind). His marker
is this hawthorn spray. And the psalm
is wound into the wordless sounds
that, like some beast, its tongue ripped
out by the root, I cry into the night.
And as dawn arises - curds and whey
in a heartless sky – I hack away
my sunset locks, the hue of brass and gold
that once my lord would comb and plait
so that I would slumber, weightless,
timeless and wave-borne. And
the bone-white face, bound in a corolla
of ragged flame, that shivers back at me
from the morning water weeps
for the last time. A man’s face now,
drawn and grim, with sea-grey eyes
that always must look back towards
where the hills encircle the birthing place,
the bower, the hearth, the fire that died.
Clad in his hauberk and helmet and
with his
surcoat stained to black,
I ride astride
my dead lord’s destrier.
I cross bridges numberless,
pass over
waters that roar like oblivion or slumber,
unseen, unheard,
until the marches
fall away and the long, sad, flat
reaches of the fens lift towards gentle
hills
and valleys and the questing loops
and curls of hearthside fires rising.
But pacing me like a woven skein I see
the forest edge, now close with elm
and larch and beech and oak, plaited
against the light, now rimming
the horizon
become as the faintest memory of trees.
:::
THE KING
Thus it is, as commonplace as such arrivals are:
a horseman comes alone out of the north, wearing
the threads and hide of a week’s desperate weather.
I watch him from above, the slow, unguided
pricking steps towards the gate that he senses
more than sees. Only a child or a woman should so
embrace a horse’s neck, I note, as I turn toward
the narrow stair and so descend to greet my fate.
It is said that all may know the road from its first
few stones. Yes, and so it is. The courser stands
at my bridgehead, blowing, his great head hanging.
His rider lifts a bone-white face. Two sea-grey eyes
look down. They neither ask, nor do they demand,
nor do they plead. And as I wave away my two gatemen
and step onto the bridge; and as I take up
in my right hand the hanging reins; and as I brace against
the heft of that slim body sliding down the horse’s
sweating flank, I know of my heart’s turning;
I know that now no moon will ever tug my tides again;
I know in this instance that I am a king in thrall.
::
‘My famous flower’, I dub him, my Sweet William,
and I bind him to me as my chamberlain,
as chatelain, the hoops of keys that chime
like muffled bells within the flowing robes he wears.
Moons come and go; leaves form and fall and ever
he moves down passages, through doorways, under arches
cowled like a fragrant, pastel-drawn Dominican,
his voice, so rarely heard, a grass-blown whisper.
Some deep and distant sorrow hoods his eyes.
He sees amongst the blazing logs and branches
late at night swift phantoms, shifting spectres.
From my chair I watch him, turning and turning
his empty flagon, fire blooding the marble
of his cheeks. And if I speak of this, my fingers
on his wrist as one might seek to still the pulse
of a sickly child, he leans away towards the dark
beyond the fire and I’m alone inside the light.
And yet come dawn he pours my water - lifts
the ewer like an offering, fills the bowl,
watching the water fall as if in benediction.
All is ceremony: the cloth across his arm,
the opening of the casement, the tipping
of the ewer, the turning with the heavy bowl.
And as at the heart of all such sacrament,
there is, I know, I know, across the reaches
of the passing days, the flame incarnadine
of love. Not worship, fear or fealty, but love.
And from the tail of an eye I can spy them
smirking like children, even those who wear
my favours in their caps, those who hold
demesnes at my good behest, those who have
my love as won in battle. Loyalty is mere duty.
To know the lineaments of my soul so as to read
my true intent – there’s no one here can see
beyond the radiance of my crown, behind
the lion’s golden face. No one save, perhaps,
my silver son, my close and bounden one, my
Sweet William, famous flower of serving men.
:::
FAIR ELEANOR
With the owl still calling from the oak
and only a rim of red above the hills,
my lord goes riding. Even before
I have risen and slipped into my robe
and tried the door between our chambers,
he is gone. Although he keeps his
unstrung bow and quivered arrows
in with his tack below, I know he’s off
to the hunt for his jerkin’s out
of its press and his water’s poured.
Whenever he rises as the stars fade,
he goes alone. His bright hair coiled
within his hood, the cloak that wraps him
fashioned from darkness itself,
he sets his saddle while the grooms
sleep on. By dawn he’s cleared
the brakes and dykes and he’s reining
in at the forest’s edge. He knows
where the hind drinks and where
the boar roots, but he would as soon
bring down with a single shaft
the one who follows with officious
sword and shield to guard his king
as chase his chosen prey
through copse and thicket.
::
The wind rolls gentle from the west
and as the sun’s wheel turns the day,
the boys run down to the river where
a ship with an azure sail docks and unloads
spices, bolts of cloth and three
caged falcons. And then, running from
the sudden shower, tossing between them
a painted leather ball, four-and-twenty
of my lady the mother queen’s maidens.
Now, joined by their lords and suitors,
they scatter like crying seaside birds about
the empty hall, chasing the arcing ball
through fading sunbeam and gathering
shade. Alone beneath the great mantle
beam, before the unlit grate, I watch
and yearn as the brace and girdle of
tyrant memory hold me fast. And here,
most alone, I close my eyes and cross
my arms across my breast as one
in the fastest sleep, a replica of death.
And through the whoop and halloo of
those scampering fools, I hear as a
deep enfolding echo the boom of doors
flung wide and the iron-shod clamour
of a horse’s hooves on flagstones. As
I drop my arms and open my eyes
to the dusty gloom, my lord is high
above me, wrenching his skittish
courser sideways so the better
to lean and gather me up before
his pommel, half across the horse’s
neck and half in his encircling arms.
And before the stilled and unbelieving
crowd, he kisses me cheek and chin
and eyes and hair and weeps as one
distracted. Holding me hard with one
tight shuddering arm as if I were
to drown, with his free arm he flails
the air and cries to the company within
to quit this hall on pain of slaughter.
And as they tumble in a moiling flight
of legs and turning heads through the
open doorway, we must tumble too, out
of the saddle and into the ashes of
the empty hearth. Face to face we kneel
like marble saints, his hands amongst
my cropped inglorious curls, his eyes
defying mine to spurn his gaze, begging
that I should read some diamond-hard
effulgent truth within and so believe
far beyond the call of simple hollow words.
But I am in retreat as all refracts
and shivers into a halo of tears and all
that’s true and palpable are his two
hands around my face and his breath
against my lips. Rising, he lifts me and
I’m guided gently pacing over rushes
to a settle flush against the wall.
We sit and with crooked finger,
knuckle raised, he draws my tear
back to its source and sighing deep
and long just once, he tells his tale.
:::
THE KING
In at the day’s birth as I strap the girth
beneath his belly. I hug his great head
to still the hooves treading the straw,
kicking the stable door. I want no bleary
grooms fresh out of their dunghill dreams
to reach down bridle and harness half asleep,
or a watchman, fresh on his rounds, eager
to jump step and dance attendance on his king.
I long for the dew to rise at my gallop;
for the black air to part against my speed.
I need, oh need, to bleach the livid phantoms
that visit me by night to tug intangible
at my sheets, that would have me cast off
my garments and cross those twenty paces
to your door and through to unleash havoc.
So as I rein in at the forest’s edge and stand
high in my stirrups, I rejoice in my solitude
and breathe in lime and leaf-mould. Here,
where the sudden trees crowd deep, I am one
and one alone. And now as I edge us in between
the mighty boles to find the ancient tracks
laid down before (so long before) our hubris
had us call each other king or commoner, I’m
in my peace. My eyes are honed on the dark:
I read the arcane script engrained in trunk
of oak and sycamore; I watch the ooze of silver
sap from the birch and golden from the maple.
My ears are sifting every tiny sound – the fall
of a single leaf through buttresses of branches
high above; the switch and turn of a weasel
deep inside the forest floor; the clap of the
pigeon’s wings in a clearing half a league away.
I urge my hunter forward. He picks and steps
across and around the twisted roots and down
the mossy banks. I stoop low in my saddle,
my face along the horse’s neck and branches
plucking at the bow across my back. One
clearing and another and the bramble and
the bracken yield to a pathway laid through
thickets fettle-deep. I crane down low, half
hanging, stirrup-free so as to seek for scats,
or broken stems, or the trace of cloven hoof.
I straighten and my yellow hair is laced
with the rust of ferns and tiny flames of gorse.
And I rise into stillness; all is still and clear,
as if the forest should slumber on the instant.
I sit, ear tilted to the breeze, like a rabbit
on a stump. And even as I sit the last breath
of air subsides and all there is to hear is
the blood-beat of man and beast, hunter
and steed, two hearts that cross and chime.
Light arrests and shadows freeze. I close
my eyes against the mass of silence, here
on the cusp of old familiar day and something
just beyond, something half-familiar from
the hinterland of dreams and the dawn of
just awakening. I open my eyes and there
in three long shafts of light shining through
the drooping canopy of a mighty beech,
a hart of purest white stands motionless on
a catafalque of woven fern and purest moss.
His perfect neck is yielded as an offering,
a steady pulse embossed like a silver cord
from jaw to scapula. As one in the honey weight
of sleep, I slide my yew bow from back
to hand and lift an arrow to the nocking point
and draw the bowstring back to where
my knuckle for a heartbeat touches the lobe
of my right ear and I let the arrow fly.
Even as I lower the bow and grasp the pommel
as my horse goes turning, turning in a gyre
of sudden fear, I twist to see the ash-wood
arrow run the fifty paces from this patch
of loam to where the milk-white hart awaits,
still as a patient lover. And that nave of air
between us turns into a chamber charged
with some strange humour, thick yet aqueous
and my arrow passes like a cautious fish that
noses forward, straight but circumspect.
I watch the fletching ripple in the current; see
the nock engraved like the cross of Christ; and
I note the kissing moment of the head against
that silver corded pulse to loose a plait of blood
go twisting, purest red against the ivory. Then
so lifts the caul, the draping veil and my horse,
my brave Bellerophon, his nostrils drinking in
the air like a swimmer risen, hacks back
a step or two. He staggers and his haunches drop
so that when I turn to spy the star-white hart,
he’s gone. There’s blood upon the leaf and branch
and fallen like ruby tears on the forest floor,
but never a broken twig nor trampled covert,
never a parted thicket nor spray upon the sand.
As if she flew thus trackless, the blood-trail
tugs me spellbound through that dappled day,
winds me into coiling nets of brambles, under
the grappling arms of beeches, down through
root-bound tunnels plunging, up the ferny sides
of valleys, scattering pebbles crossing runnels,
racing the long beams of the setting sun across
the sudden swards, chasing the bloody pearls
that shine like buboes in the dying light until
at last the trail ends in a sanguine cross laid
like a marker at the forest’s edge and we spin
and turn and sink, winded and blown, beneath
the tresses and against the bole of a mighty oak.
Great shadows cloak the spreading moss beneath.
Foxglove, heather, bluebell gleam within the gold
and copper pools. And before us, laid like a mighty
green and velvet cloth amongst the cautious trees
that dare not tap the sacred earth beyond, a smooth
and grassy glade. And in the centre, fixed like a boss,
a tomb aligned from east to west, a single basalt box,
the length of a man who would be blessed either head
or foot by the long walk of the sun. And even as we
catch our breath beneath the hanging branches,
all the forest stills once more like a great settling
of wings. Light withdraws; shadows blacken the turf
like water rising from beneath its roots. No bird
lifts or settles; no creature scatters the leaf-mould,
troubles the canopies of leaves. Horse and man
as one in battle, bold Bellerophon and I hold hard
to the shade. He snickers once and tilts a hoof.
I rise up in the saddle, shift a hand from pommel
to sword hilt, watch unblinking as for a glint
of dying light from a blade, or a thread of smoke.
Then, even as I gaze into the far treeline,
a spectral form like a grounded cloud bleeds
into the gap between two trees. In motion yet
somehow glacial, standing clear as if forever
fixed in place and time, the white hart, head
turned back, the arrow proud and a bright chain
of blood from neck to flank to earth that seems
to tether him for the taking. I draw my sword
(for arrows seem to pierce this beast in vain)
and blade before I heel my charger forward.
From the touch of frog on clover, a hoof parting
the paper bells, the song begins. Full-throated but
so far away, as if it were blown like vapour through
the crowded trees; so many voices pitched from
keening trebles out of the thinnest air down to
rich profundo rolling out of thunder, wordless,
or in some tongue unspoken since the first footers
made their mark on sand or parted grass. As if
these tussocks were spikes of mist that rose
from the skin of some enchanted lake, we glide,
unsailed and rudderless, onto the sward.
As the pagan introit melts back into the trees,
so fades like a fume the stilly hart, once chalk-
white pelt, now smoke, now dream. Again, I close
my eyes and shake the fancy out of seeing;
open them and in wonder watch a dove - fashioned
surely from the very salt and snow of my errant
hart – go soaring high from that self-same place,
into the dusky blue, now pocked with early stars.
Then, like one such star, the dove comes falling,
wheels and turns and alights upon the northern
head of the sable tomb. I sheath my sword
as we tread the carpet grass. Against the
flawless black, the dove is silver, tipped and
still like a crescent moon. And as we draw
beside the tomb, it seems that through some
silken valance, rippling like water, first a sleeping
face and then the couchant form, full and clear,
of an armoured knight reveals within, shield arm
across a naked sword, sword arm severed from
the wrist, his feet upon a serpent, coiled
and striking. And as I slip to earth and make
to kneel in some obeisance to this marvel,
a voice as deep as the fastest clay, yet as close
as two lips pursed in secret discourse at my ear
begins at once to speak.
And the tale is your tale
from the apple bough fire
to the murdered babe,
to the sword cast down
by the hoodless penitent,
your stepmother’s thrall.
I feel the slicing of the air
by silent blades; I hear
the breath in the throats
and mouths of labouring men;
I smell the blood that gouts
and eddies over the flags;
I see your grey eyes
in my own contorted face,
hanging over the moat-water.
And your grief, red-raw,
laid open to the briny air,
beats inside my own heart’s pulse
and stills my very breath.
:::
FAIR ELEANOR
Oh, the bee’s-wing brush of fingers
on my lips, the tender tug of fingers
in my hair, the dry leaves of a voice
falling to silence through dust and dark.
For a lifetime moment in the wake
of the tale, there is the sound only
of the wind in the chimney breast and
a pigeon’s wings as she passes from
one high window to the next. And then
he rises, rises as one so weary of
the darkest transports of this world,
and he stands half shadowed, half
illumined and all about us in that
empty hall the strands and tresses
of the two tales, his and mine, settle
amongst the leaves and dust and dark.
But he is a king and bred into the warp
and weft of pledges, oaths and fealties.
His sword is dinged and dented from
a hundred battles fought to break
or build within his realm of mountains,
meads and rivers and beyond. And now
as he slowly turns as one out of late
dreaming and into this time and place
of honour, debt and obligation, fire
rises behind his eyes, bone and sinew
realign and his sword hand strays
to the hilt. I am looking up at a man
who will reach for his bridle, who will
climb into his saddle and set his eyes
on one dark mark upon a long horizon.
And he will ride as straight and true
as a multitude of roads and passes
will allow, untroubled by reflection,
guided by the lodestar retribution
and the love entire and boundless
in whose radiance I am standing now.
:::
THE BLOOMING OF THE MAY
He takes a cohort of his finest –
each man strange to mercy in
the service of his king. And
beneath a new device – a dove
upon a sable field – in three days
they are clear of our gentle lands;
in four they cross the fens; and
in a further six they reach
the same hills that encircle
the birthing place, the bower,
the hearth where the fire died.
And on a lambent dawn fashioned
more for the properties of love,
they burn her gatehouse, breach
her mighty gates and sack her
citadel. In a corner of her hall,
she crouches like a shitting beast
behind her seneschal. He swings
his mace right-handed; in his
left he wields a sword. He knows
that he shall die and as he turns
and turns about, he sings out loud
a wordless song. My lord ensures
within the circling of his blade
that, with a stroke, he severs
the seneschal’s right hand and
with another he guts his man
and then steps back so both
may watch him die amongst
his liver and his lights, unsinging
and unsung. And she my stepmother,
her eyes crazed white and spittle
on her chin like some trapped and
fevered dog, attempts to rise, but
falls back into her own rank juices.
::
So then her taking from that place
and down through all the broad lands
to our hearth and home. For upwards
of a year she languishes in irons bound,
awaiting the blooming of the may again
so that she might be brought into
the spring fields for the reckoning.
And now the may is blooming and dressed
in a verdant gown and crowned with plaited
quickthorn, she is queen of the pyre.
Some dance at her foot, circling and
circling the maypole’s axis mundi,
singing the catches of the season.
Others grim with purpose lift and heave
and stack the thorny bundles high.
I sit upon a white mare. Now my hair
falls down my back, held at my nape
by a twisted silken cord. Mounted close,
my lord’s right hand covers my left.
His middle finger turns my ring.
We are still; we are silent. There is
no triumph in the directing of these
engines of redress. All must submit
to the greater will that binds us
in the dark. And so he tips his head
the once to his watching chamberlain
and the burning brands are thrust
deep into the bowels of the stack.
The fire cracks and spits. Inside
the flames, leaves curl and cat-haws
pop. Yet from our shading beech
a throstle sings, a silver chain of
falling notes as if to purify the air.
And then, like the sound of the tearing
of some mighty tree by hurricane
from the rocky bonds of earth,
my lady cries abroad from her eyrie,
swathed in smoke and licked by tongues
of fire: Alas the day that she became
the famous flower of serving men!
And in my belly like a dancer turns
the boy conceived in love alone, he
who as the dove foretold shall take
the orb, the sceptre and the sword
to rule the land in peace and plenitude.
My lord, he leans from his saddle low
and plucks a sprig of hokey green to tuck
into my hair. I pick a single leaf. I lift it
to my lips. This shall be a sacrament
to be held in a locket of gold against
the dark winds of the world and for
the love that might slumber through
the heart’s long winter but shall rise
exultant with the blooming of the may.
:::
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