Wyndham Towers

His frequent visitations have of late
Perplexed me; now the riddle reads itself.
A proper man, a very proper man!
A fellow that burns Trinidado leaf
And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue!
A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts—
A murrain on him!  Would Elizabeth
In some mad freak had clapped him in the Tower—
Ay, through the Traitor’s Gate.  Would he were dead.
Within the year what worthy men have died,
Persons of substance, civic ornaments,
And here ‘s this gilt court-butterfly on wing!
O thou most potent lightning in the cloud,
Prick me this fellow from the face of earth!
I would the Moors had got him in Algiers
What time he harried them on land and sea,
And done their will with scimitar or cord
Or flame of fagot, and so made an end;
Or that some shot from petronel or bow
Had winged him in the folly of his flight.
Well had it been if the Inquisitors,
With rack and screw, had laid black claw on him!”
In days whose chronicle is writ in blood
The richest ever flowed in English veins
Some foul mischance in this sort might have been;
For at dark Fortune’s feet had Darrell flung
In his youth’s flower a daring gauntlet down.

A beardless stripling, at that solemn hour
When, breaking its frail filaments of clay,
The mother’s spirit soared invisible,
The younger son, unhoused as well he knew,
Had taken horse by night to London town,
With right sore heart and nought else in his scrip
But boyish hope to footing find at Court—
A page’s place, belike, with some great lord,
Or some small lord, that other proving shy
Of merit that had not yet clipt its shell.
Day after day, in weather foul or fair,
With lackeys, hucksters, and the commoner sort,
At Whitehall and Westminster he stood guard,
Reading men’s faces with most anxious eye.
There the lords swarmed, some waspish and some bland,
But none would pause at plucking of the sleeve
To hearken to him, and the lad had died
On London stones for lack of crust to gnaw
But that he caught the age’s malady,
The something magical that was in air,
And made men poets, heroes, demi-gods—
Made Shakespeare, Rawleigh, Grenvile, Oxenham,
And set them stars in the fore-front of Time.
In fine, young Darrell drew of that same air
A valiant breath, and shipped with Francis Drake,
Of Tavistock, to sail the Spanish seas
And teach the heathen manners, with God’s aid;
And so, among lean Papists and black Moors,
He, with the din of battle in his ears,
Struck fortune.  Who would tamely bide at home
At beck and call of some proud swollen lord
Not worth his biscuit, or at Beauty’s feet
Sit making sonnets, when was work to do
Out yonder, sinking Philip’s caravels
At sea, and then by way of episode
Setting quick torch[1 - Sir Francis Drake called this “singeing the King of Spayne’s beard.”] to pirate-nests ashore?

Brave sport to singe the beard o’ the King of Spain!
Brave sport, but in the end dreamed he of home—
Of where the trout-brook lisped among the reeds,
Of great chalk cliffs and leagues of yellow gorse,
Of peaceful lanes, of London’s roaring streets,
The crowds, the shops, the pageants in Cheapside,
And heard the trumpets blaring for the Queen
When ‘t was the wind that whistled in the shrouds
Off Cadiz.  Ah, and softer dreams he had
Of an unnamed and sweetest mystery,
And from the marble of his soul’s desire
Hewed out the white ideal of his love—
A new Pygmalion!  All things drew him home,
This mainly.  Foot on English earth once more,
Dear earth of England his propitious fame
A thorn in none but crooked Envy’s side,
He went cross-gartered, with a silken rose
At golden lovelock, diamond brooch at hat
Looping one side up very gallantly,
And changed his doublet’s color twice a day.
Ill fare had given his softer senses edge;
Good fortune, later, bade him come to dine,
Mild Spenser’s scholar, Philip Sidney’s friend.
So took he now his ease; in Devonshire,
When Town was dull, or he had need at heart
For sight of Wyndham Towers against the sky;
But chiefly did he bask him by the Thames,
For there ‘t was that Young England froze and thawed
By turns in GLORIANA’S frown and smile.

As some wild animal that gets a wound,
And prescience hath of death, will drag itself
Back to its cavern sullenly to die,
And would not have heaven’s airs for witnesses,
So Wyndham, shrinking from the very stars