Among all the golden doors in the Great Palace of English Literature
about which we are coming to know something, and through some of which
we have already passed, there was one golden window on the stairway
of the palace. This window on the stairway of the palace looked out
upon a busy town and down upon the windings of the river Wye, and off
upon hills and upon the ruins of a wonderful old abbey called Tintern
Abbey, about which, some six hundred years later, an English poet
called William Wordsworth was to write a poem called "Tintern Abbey."
Wordsworth wrote "We Are Seven," and also this little poem about a
butterfly:
I've watched you now a full half-hour,
Self-poised upon that yellow flower;
And, little Butterfly! indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless! Not frozen seas
More motionless! and then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees
And calls you forth again.
This plot of orchard ground is ours;
My trees they are, my Sister's flowers;
Here rest your wings when they are weary;
Here lodge as in a sanctuary!
Come often to us, fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
We'll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days when we were young;
Sweet childish days that were as long
As twenty days are now.
But the golden window at which Geoffrey sat was in Monmouth, and he was
called Geoffrey of Monmouth. That was some seven hundred years ago. No
doubt the little town was very busy even in 1137 when Geoffrey sat at
his window and wrote his famous chronicle called _British History_.
Before Geoffrey began to write down his marvelous stories, other
stories and poems were written. In King Alfred's time, when the home of
English literature was shifted from the north to the south, two fine
battle songs were written. They were the "Song of Brunanburh" and the
"Song of the Fight at Maldon." These were written in the tenth century.
"The Charge of the Light Brigade," composed some eight hundred years
later by the poet Tennyson, is like these old songs in its short, rapid
lines and in its thought. Every one should learn these lines from the
poem Alfred Tennyson wrote:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismayed?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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