Traitors and strike him dead, and meet

myself

6

Then she stretch'd out her arms and cried aloud

clung

Of Britain; so she did not see the face, Which then was as an angel's, but she saw,

I must not dwell on that defeat of fame. Let the world be; that is but of the world What else? what hope? I think there was a hope,

'Ye know me then, that wicked one, who broke

The vast design and purpose of the King. O shut me round with narrowing nunnerywalls,

Meek maidens, from the voices crying "shame."

I must not scorn myself: he loves me still. Let no one dream but that he loves me still.

So let me, if you do not shudder at me, Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;

Wear black and white, and be a nun like you,

Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;

Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys,

But not rejoicing; mingle with your rites; Pray and be pray'd for; lie before your shrines ;

Do each low office of your holy house; Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole To poor sick people, richer in His eyes Who ransom'd us, and haler too than I;

Then glancing up beheld the holy nuns All round her, weeping; and her heart

was loosed

lived

For three brief years, and there, an Abbess, past

THAT story which the bold Sir Bedivere, First made and latest left of all the knights,

Told, when the man was no more than a voice

In the white winter of his age, to those With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.

For on their march to westward,
Bedivere,

Who slowly paced among the slumbering

host,

Heard in his tent the moanings of the King:

"I found Him in the shining of the stars, I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields,

But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would,
Till the High God behold it from beyond,
And enter it, and make it beautiful?
Or else as if the world were wholly fair,
But that these eyes of men are dense and
dim,

And have not power to see it as it is:
Perchance, because we see not to the

close ;

Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and call'd, 'Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind,

Thine, Gawain, was the voice-are these dim cries

Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild

will,

And have but stricken with the sword in

vain ;

And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm Reels back into the beast, and is no more. My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death:

Nay-God my Christ-I pass but shall not die.'

Then, ere that last weird battle in the

west,

There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain kill'd

And with him many of thy people, and

knights

Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown

Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee.

Right well in heart they know thee for the King.

Arise, go forth and conquer as of old.'

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedi

vere :

'Far other is this battle in the west Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth,

And brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome,

Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall,

And shook him thro' the north. Ill doom is mine

To war against my people and my knights. The king who fights his people fights himself.

And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke

That strikes them dead is as my death to

me.

Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way Thro' this blind haze, which ever since I

saw

One lying in the dust at Almesbury, Hath folded in the passes of the world.'

Then rose the King and moved his host by night,

And ever push'd Sir Modred, league by

league,

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse—
A land of old upheaven from the abyss
By fire, to sink into the abyss again;
Where fragments of forgotten peoples
dwelt,

And the long mountains ended in a coast
Of ever-shifting sand, and far away
The phantom circle of a moaning sea.
There the pursuer could pursue no more,
And he that fled no further fly the King;
And there, that day when the great light
of heaven

Burn'd at his lowest in the rolling year, On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed.

Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west.

A deathwhite mist slept over sand and

sea:

Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew

Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold

With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell

Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.

For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,

And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew ;

And some had visions out of golden youth,

And some beheld the faces of old ghosts Look in upon the battle; and in the mist Was many a noble deed, many a base, And chance and craft and strength in

single fights,

And ever and anon with host to host Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,

Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash

Of battleaxes on shatter'd helms, and shrieks

After the Christ, of those who falling down Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the

mist;

And shouts of heathen and the traitor

knights,

Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,

Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs

In that close mist, and cryings for the light,

Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.

Last, as by some one deathbed after

wail Of suffering, silence follows, or thro' death

Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,

Save for some whisper of the seething seas, A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day

Grew drearier toward twilight falling,

came

A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew

The mist aside, and with that wind the tide Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field

Of battle but no man was moving there; Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon, Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave Brake in among dead faces, to and fro Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down

Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen,

And shiver'd brands that once had fought with Rome,

And rolling far along the gloomy shores The voice of days of old and days to be.

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedi

vere,

And whiter than the mist that all day long Had held the field of battle was the King:

'Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world,

And wastes the narrow realm whereon we

move,

And beats upon the faces of the dead, My dead, as tho' they had not died for me?—

O Bedivere, for on my heart hath fall'n Confusion, till I know not what I am, Nor whence I am, nor whether I be King. Behold, I seem but King among the dead.'

Then spake the bold Sir Bedivere : 'My King,

King everywhere! and so the dead have kings,

There also will I worship thee as King. Yet still thy life is whole, and still I live Who love thee; but who hates thee, he that brought

The heathen back among us, yonder stands,

Modred, unharm'd, the traitor of thine house.'

Then spake the King: 'My house hath been my doom.

But call not thou this traitor of my house Who hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me.

My house are rather they who sware my

Vows,

Yea, even while they brake them, own'd me King.

And well for thee, saying in my dark hour, When all the purport of my throne hath fail'd,

That quick or dead thou holdest me for King.

King am I, whatsoever be their cry ; And one last act of kinghood shalt thou

see

Yet, ere I pass.' And uttering this the King

Made at the man: then Modred smote his liege

Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword

Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow,

Striking the last stroke with Excalibur, Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.

So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea; Until King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fall'n in Lyonnesse about their lord, King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep,

The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land:
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedi

vere:

'The sequel of to-day unsolders all The goodliest fellowship of famous knights