The Ballad O The King’s Daughter Poem by Bessie Rayner Parkes

[How the King's Daughter, having married me, a peasant, for love, heareth of the death of her only brother, and taketh her little son to the king.]
I.

SHE twisted up her royal lengths
Of fallen hair with a silver pin,
Her eyes were frowning, molten depths
Which stirred to flame when I looked within;

Dressed in a gown of velvet black,
With a diamond clasp, and a silver band,
Walked from the door with a stately step,
And our young son held by his mother's hand.

Walter ran by his mother's side,
More like in his eyes to her than me;
The queen would have bartered her ivory throne
For such a blossom of royalty.

Heavily over the far-hill tops
Booms the bell in the minster-tower,
From city to city between the hills
Echo the bells at the burial hour.

'Amen!' saith the bough in the ten-mile forest;
'Amen!' saith the sea from its cavernous bed;
'Amen!' saith the people when bowed at the sorest;
'Who is dead?' said the rooks, 'who is dead? who is dead?'

The young man is dead, in his strength, in his beauty,
His curls lie loose on his white-fringed pall;
Loud cry the people and priests at the altar,
Soft wails the requiem over them all.

Low in the midst of the Church of the Merciful
Lieth the young man, gone to his rest,
His sword is sheathed and his coronet broken,
Flowers of yesterday cover his breast.

'Babe, child, brave youth!' wept the Queen in her closet;
'Heir of my name!' sighed the King on his throne;
'Who leads us to battle?' cried they of the market;
'My lover!' looked one face as cold as a stone.

Slow tolled the bells from the north to the southern sea,
Winds caught them up with a desolate cry,
Solemn he lies under darkening arches,
The hand of eternity pressed on each eye.

II.

The market-cross, with its sculptured Christ,
'Mid the crush and the trample stood steady and strong;
The welded masses of voiceless folk
As a sea at midnight rolled along.

Booming bells, as they struck the ear,
Died away in the silent skies;
Gossiping women were dumb with fear,
And each gabled house was alive with eyes.

But lo! in the distance a shadowy file,
They move to the beat of a muffled drum;
The waves recede as for Israel's march,
And the thick crowd mutters, 'They come, they come.'

Where the bier was borne by the central fount,
She stood as still as the carven stone,
Saying, 'O King, behold my boy,
His smile is the dead's, and his eye is your own.

'From my broad domain in one true man's heart,
From the home I chose of mine own free will,
I give you my jewel to wear in your crown.'
Then snatching him back for one last long fill

Of his rippling smiles, they heard her say,
With a haughty glance at her marriage-ring,
'Well is my home by the forester's hearth,
But Walter, my son, is the heir of a king.'

When the shadows fell on our quiet pool,
And the birds were asleep in the firs overhead,
She returned alone, but her face was white,
And her step as the step of one waked from the dead.