Forgotten Ground Regained
EXCERPT FROM ARTORIUS
Take down, Calliope, your trumpet from its tack:Rested has it long, and rusted? Give us a rouse, girl;Your voice I invoke now, and your eight with violets crownedSisters to sing, to a star-dance I dispose them,through the zone of the Zodiac, where Zeus’s son,and Leto’s, Apollo, shall lead with his lyre.Urania in a dialogue shall discourse delightfully;Thalia come also, colloquial in a clown’s mask;Polyhymnia with pompous paean of encomiumis commanded to a solemn ceremony of crowning,and blithe Erato with ballads and with badinagepromises prothalamion for a bride and her paranymph;and Terpsichore, she too, with her castanets, shall testifywith a sexual dance, a saraband of death;Plain-suited Clio, in prose, though she plod;And grave Melpomene shall give us a goat-song;Lastly and lyrically Euterpe shall lamentOver the waves, at winter’s and world’s end.But principally you, Calliope, I presume to ask presideat equinox and at solstice, at the sun’s turnings to singof War and Justice, of Warlockry and a Wounding.Present then for man’s life a paradigm, his passage,like the sun, through symbols; his season’s progressfrom spring’s heyday to high summer and harvest,and lastly to the laggard lagoon of old agewhere his son supplants him and the cycle returns.Labour continued is his lot; Alcides learned this,in his twelve month of toils, under a hard taskmaster—battling against beasts, and against brigands also,monsters whose hollow dens are in the mind of Man:the heart of the human being is Heaven’s ruler,through baleful constellations its course it must keep. Let us learn something of Lucius Artoriusof cognomen CASTUS; come of the Venetic gens;From Illyria long since with the legionaries they camebut British land they bought with blood now here established.The first that was his forebear, in former times directedthe rearing and erecting of the rampart, which Hadrian set from the Solway to the Germanic seaagainst the blue-cheeked bandits of Scotland, and the bandsof the Picts beyond that pale, the peoplesof moss and of moorland, and of mournful forests.Afterward in Armorica this first Artorius alsocampaigned with his legion; but no legend is left.From that stock he stemmed then, the steadfast man,Artorius name his or Arthur: some said Uther’s son,and some gave him Gorlois, the good duke for a sire,and some that his battle-hardy blood he borrowedfrom Aurelius Ambrosius, that erstwhile enduredin Britain the brunt of the Saxon boar-crests.But none for a certainty could say sooth of such things:Comes was he by commission—and after to be King?
Charles Earnest Butler, King Arthur (1903)
Copyright © John Heath-Stubbs, 1977
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