Heroines
Winsome daughters of dreams,
women with long gold hair,
they stand in a circle on the shore,
their stance commanding, proud.
Queens of legend, queens of love,
noble their brows,
and noble the slope of their breasts,
they’ve come from the forest of Broceliande
(where Merlin is buried, where Vivien lived),
from many a vanished kingdom.
Blue robes worked with golden flowers
express their tall and slender forms,
and on their long fine fingers
rings flicker with gems.
Their plunging necklines show a splendor
more than mortal, defying time:
the centuries are forgotten, fade,
but these remain, divine.
Isolde, Melusine, Guinevere—
names with the melancholy ring
of a distant horn. On the lips of the poet
who yet remembers them, their names
are sweet as a kiss, unforgettable
as a broken heart.
Their names are an incantation
enchanting back to life
their world of wars, of treacherous loves,
the crash and flash of famous swords
which one reads of in the barbarous
Old French of our epics
The poet is still in love with their glories
which inspired once the harping bards
of ancient Gaul,
even now, the poet yet believes in them
(if only fitfully, for the length of a line),
in visions brief and brilliant
as a lightning flash
in the night of Time.
From their graves in the neglected centuries
these forgotten heroines rise,
shed their shrouds to live again.
Their ghosts,
with the interminable sweetness of a dream,
walk again below those cliffs,
on the beach of Brittany,
in the savage, lurid light of a sunset
insistently yellow and red as fanned embers.
Eerily, as in a lucid dream,
one sees distinctly every pearl in their hair,
the transparent pallor of their faces and hands.
Enid
This poem is based on “The Marriage of Geraint” in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. In that poem Geraint, a knight of Arthur’s court, falls in love with Enid, a girl of noble but impoverished family.
Highlighted by a slanting ray of sun,
seated by the hearth: pale Enid,
daughter of Yniol, the hoary-headed earl.
Enid, exquisite as a silvery blossom—
she pulled the wool between pinching fingers,
fed it to the wheel, smiling beside
the ancient dame, her dozing mother.
A rough gust plucked petals from lily and violet,
flew them through the window to strew the floor,
casting floral ornament
on the faded silk of Enid’s dress.
A few petals fell
on the neck of the girl bent over her work
like the weightless brilliant kisses
of invisible spirits.
In the abandoned town half-returned to forest,
in a crumbling castle, overgrown with ivy,
captured by branches, overpowered by flowers,
where blackberry bushes had invaded
the courtyard’s broken flagstones,
a girl of twenty, Enid sang as she spun,
sweetly melancholy, dreaming of love,
while a king’s son stood unseen at the open window.
Through its pointed arch her picture
had forever taken him.
Vivien
According to the legend which Tennyson memorably retells in “Merlin and Vivien,” the artful Vivien seduces Merlin to steal from him the secrets of sorcery, which she then uses to imprison him in an endless enchanted sleep.
Deep in the forest of Broceliande,
forever unseen by the stupid curious eyes
of normal folk, Merlin sleeps to this day,
dreaming as one dreams when drunk with love,
of Vivien, pale, lithe Vivien,
with her heavy tiara of braided gold.
She sings where the hornèd thistle blooms,
where the moss beneath the trees gleams blue-green,
where her delicate feet shine with dazzling pallor
in the green night of deep woods at noon.
Her hair, a fierce red-gold, is so long
it brushes the tops of her feet as she dances
in the shady cool of this private leafy grotto
which now feels lullingly warm
to the old man bemused
by the girl, her movement, her perfume—
she looks at him as she dances, looks long,
and he yields her all his secrets,
as she strokes his bald head
with a whore’s practiced hands.
Justin Brumby’s translation of Blood of the Gods is now available in our bookstore here.