Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 9/A modern idyll
A MODERN IDYLL.
No more upon our meads fond shepherds languish,
Piping unto their loves beside a brook,
Or telling of inconstancy and anguish
Unto some friendly brother of the crook.
The oaten reed is silenced now, the tabor
Is never heard within our shady groves,
And Colins find no solace from their labour
In weaving summer garlands for their loves.
But poetry abides with us for ever
And only takes new fashion from the time;
No change of ours hath strength enough to sever
Our outward labour from its inner chime.
Our Phillisses are dead, we have strewed flowers
Upon their graves, and they exist no more;
Their simple loves are past, their shady bowers
Are merely matters of a poet’s lore.
But we have maidens still with fair young faces
As loveable as were the shepherd maids,
And in these modern times we find the traces
Of those sweet beauties of the forest glades.
In summer by the fragrant roadside hedges
Where primrose and sweet honeysuckle grow,
Or by the silent streams, where, midst the sedges,
The white-leaved water-lilies sway and flow;
Or waist-high midst the purple foxgloves straying,
Through woodland pathways in the checkered shades,
As in the olden time they went a-Maying,
Now wander forth our fair-faced English maids.
And we have swains as loving and true hearted
As those Arcadian shepherds who are dead:
The earnestness of love had not departed
When those old days of sylvan wooing fled.
They were the outward clothing of the passion,
Which still hath life in spite of their decay,
And we have now, although in other fashion,
The old, old idyll in the present day.
The sloping down with patches of sweet clover,
The sullen surge upon the shore beneath,
The background formed of uplands, dotted over
With tangled masses of the flow’ry heath,
And hedgerows, decked in all their summer favours,
Binding the meadows where the white flocks stray,
Such is the scene, which of the old time savours,
Wherein we place the idyll of our day.
Upon the sloping downs the sun is shining
And lights upon a circle of fair girls,
Who, in a pleasant indolence reclining,
The while the sea-breeze plays upon their curls,
Are list’ning with a kind of lazy pleasure
Unto the swain who, stretched amidst the ring,
Is reading in a voice of idle leisure,
The laureate’s tuneful “Idylls of the King.”
One plucks a little tuft of daisies growing,
And pulls them as she listens to the tale,
Shredding them with her fingers and then throwing
The pink-tipped leaves to flutter in the gale.
Another, on her elbow leaning forward,
Is idly gazing at a little skiff,
And watching it as it comes sailing shoreward
Until it vanishes beneath the cliff.
Some dreamingly, some earnestly, all listen
Unto the story of the fair Elaine
And of her hopeless love, and bright eyes glisten
At such a tale of sweetness, yet of pain.
And still the voice rolls onward with its story
Of erring Lancelot and Guinevere,
And of the tourney with its knightly glory,
And of the deep wound with the broken spear.
The distant sheep-bells with their fitful jingle,
The solemn cawing of the rooks above,
The wind-borne shouting of the sailors, mingle
With that sweet tale of constancy and love;
Until the white light settles on the distance.
And hedgerow shadows lengthen on the lea.
And so it is that idylls have existence,
And so, while hearts are young, ’twill ever be.
For bygone times are still by us reflected,
We are as near to Arcadie as they;
’Tis but the outward sign we have rejected,
The shepherd’s trappings that are put away.
And, in our hearts, for all time there abideth
The spirit that in old times clothed the downs,
The woods, and valleys where the river glideth,
With simple loves of shepherd-maids and clowns.