Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus
Arthur is gone . . . Tristram in Careol
Sleeps, with a broken sword - and Yseult sleeps
Beside him, where the Westering waters roll
Over drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps.
Lancelot is fallen . . . The ardent helms that shone
So knightly and the splintered lances rust
In the anonymous mould of Avalon:
Gawain and Gareth and Galahad - all are dust.
Where do the vanes and towers of Camelot
And tall Tintagel crumble? Where do those tragic
Lovers and their bright eyed ladies rot?
We cannot tell, for lost is Merlin's magic.
And Guinevere - Call her not back again
Lest she betray the loveliness time lent
A name that blends the rapture and the pain
Linked in the lonely nightingale's lament.
Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discover
The bower of Astolat a smokey hut
Of mud and wattle - find the knightliest lover
A braggart, and his lilymaid a slut.
And all that coloured tale a tapestry
Woven by poets. As the spider's skeins
Are spun of its own substance, so have they
Embroidered empty legend - What remains?
This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak
That age had sapped and cankered at the root,
Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke
The miracle of one unwithering shoot.
Which was the spirit of Britain - that certain men
Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood
Loved freedom better than their lives; and when
The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood
And charged into the storm's black heart, with sword
Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed
With a strange majesty that the heathen horde
Remembered when all were overwhelmed;
And made of them a legend, to their chief,
Arthur, Ambrosius - no man knows his name -
Granting a gallantry beyond belief,
And to his knights imperishable fame.
They were so few . . . We know not in what manner
Or where they fell - whether they went
Riding into the dark under Christ's banner
Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.
But this we know; that when the Saxon rout
Swept over them, the sun no longer shone
On Britain, and the last lights flickered out;
And men in darkness muttered: Arthur is gone . . .
Commentary
Note: The Latin reads: “Here Lies Arthur, the Once and Future King”
This poem by Francis Brett Young makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end! It offers a different perspective on the King Arthur legend, showing us that even if the courtly stories of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur are merely romantic nonsense there may be sufficient importance in the underlying historical truth for the legend still to be worth knowing and remembering.
Francis Brett Young was born in 1884 and died in 1954. He was a novelist, short-story writer and poet, and was born in born in Halesowen, Worcestershire, England. His father was a doctor and his mother also came from a medical family so it was natural that Francis trained at Birmingham University to become a physician. He started a practice at Brixham, Devon, in 1907 and married the following year. His wife was a singer and he accompanied her as well as setting poems to music for her. During the First World War he saw service in Africa in the Medical Corps but was invalided out in 1918, no longer able to practise medicine. The couple went to live in Capri until 1929 but travelled widely, including trips to South Africa, the United States and summers in the Lake District of England. They returned to live in England from 1932 and settled at Craycombe House, Fladbury, Worcestershire. At the end of the Second World War he moved to South Africa, dying in Cape Town in 1954. His ashes were returned to England and are in Worcester Cathedral.
Further details to be found at:
and at:
http://www3.shropshire-cc.gov.uk/young.htm
Best wishes,
Mike Lynd
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Tamsin Bacchus · 19 May 2006
I was all set to send this in as a guest submission but then found you have beaten me to it! So have my comment anyway:
I’ve loved this poem from the moment I first came across it in my early teens - to the extent of actually writing it out into the personal anthology I was creating in an old exercise book. It is quoted in full at the beginning of Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Sword and Sunset (her writing of the Arthurian legend firmly in post Roman British history) - a book like Lord of the Flies, so good that everyone should read it but so laden with impending doom one cannot bear to read it more than once. Later on I found where the poem comes from - it was written in the face of another overwhelming defeat, being first published in 1944….
John Jarratt · 12 June 2006
A poem I have loved for l these many years having come across it in Wavell’s ‘Other Men’s Flowers’ just after WW2. You have it quite right in saying that it brings up the hairs on your neck. My only comment is that I am sure the word ‘muttered’ in the last line should be ‘murmured’. (much more poetic too!). J Jarratt