Maid Alice and maid Margaret In the fields have built them a bower Of reedmace and rushes fine, Fenced with sharp albespyne; Pretty maids hid in the nest; and yet Yours is one death, and one hour! Priest and peasant and lord By the swift, soft stroke of the air, By a silent invisible sword, In plough-field or banquet, fall: The watchers are flat on the wall:-- Through city and village and valley The sweet-voiced herald of prayer Is dumb in the towers; the throng To the shrine pace barefoot; and where Blazed out from the choir a glory of song, God's altar is lightless and bare. Is there no pity in earth or sky? The burden of England, who shall say? Half the giant oak is riven away, And the green leaves yearn for the leaves that die. Will the whole world drink of the dragon's breath? It is the cup, men cry, the cup of God's fury that cometh! 'Tis the Black Death, Lord help us! The black black Death. In England is heard a moan, A bitter lament and a sore, Rachel lamenting her dead, And will not be comforted For the little faces for ever gone, The feet from the silent floor. And a cry goes up from the land, Take from us in mercy, O God, Take from us the weight of Thy hand, The cup and the wormwood of woe! 'Neath the terrible barbs of Thy bow This England, this once Thy beloved, Is water'd with life-blood for rain; The bones of her children are white, As flints on the Golgotha plain; Not slain as warriors by warriors in fight, By the arrows of Heaven slain. We have sinn'd: we lift up our souls to Thee, O Lord God eternal on high: Thou who gavest Thyself to die, Saviour, save! to Thy feet we flee:-- Snatch from the hell and the Enemy's breath, From the Prince of the Air, from the terror by night that cometh:-- From the Black Death, Christ save us! The black black Death! _That foul monster_; The Lernaean Hydra of Greek legend. _From the marshes_; The drought which preceded the plague in England, and may have predisposed to its reception, was followed by mist, in which the people fancied they saw the disease palpably advancing. _From Cathaya_; The plague was heard of in Central Asia in 1333; it reached Constantinople in 1347. _The City of Flowers_; Florence, where the ravages of the plague were immortalized in the _Decamerone_ of Boccaccio. _The pest boil_; Seems to have been the enlarged and discharging gland by which the specific blood-poison of the plague relieved itself. A 'muddy glistening' of the eye is noticed as one of the symptoms. _The common bed_; More than 50,000 are said to have been buried on the site of the Charter House. _Albespyne_; Hawthorn.