English Narrative Poems

My hair is gray, but not with years,

Nor grew it white

In a single night,

As men's have grown from sudden fears.[107]

My limbs are bowed, though not with toil,5

But rusted with a vile repose,

For they have been a dungeon's spoil,

And mine has been the fate of those

To whom the goodly earth and air

Are banned, and barred-forbidden fare;10

But this was for my father's faith

I suffered chains and courted death;

That father perished at the stake

For tenets he would not forsake;

And for the same his lineal race15

In darkness found a dwelling-place;

We were seven-who now are one,

Six in youth, and one in age,

Finished as they had begun,

Proud of Persecution's rage;20

One in fire, and two in field,

Their belief with blood have sealed[108]:

Dying as their father died,

For the God their foes denied;-

Three were in a dungeon cast,25

Of whom this wreck is left the last.

There are seven[109] pillars of Gothic mould

In Chillon's dungeons deep and old,

There are seven columns massy and gray,

Dim with a dull imprisoned ray,30

A sunbeam which hath lost its way,

And through the crevice and the cleft

Of the thick wall is fallen and left:

Creeping o'er the floor so damp,

Like a marsh's meteor lamp[110]:35

And in each pillar there is a ring,

And in each ring there is a chain;

That iron is a cankering[111] thing,

For in these limbs its teeth remain,

With marks that will not wear away40

Till I have done with this new day,

Which now is painful to these eyes,

Which have not seen the sun so rise

For years-I cannot count them o'er,

I lost their long and heavy score45

When my last brother drooped and died,

And I lay living by his side.

They chained us each to a column stone,

And we were three-yet, each alone;

We could not move a single pace,50

We could not see each other's face,

But with that pale and livid light

That made us strangers in our sight:

And thus together-yet apart,

Fettered in hand, but joined in heart;55

'Twas still some solace, in the dearth

Of the pure elements[112] of earth,

To hearken to each other's speech,

And each turn comforter to each

With some new hope or legend old,60

Or song heroically bold;

But even these at length grew cold.

Our voices took a dreary tone,

An echo of the dungeon stone,

A grating sound-not full and free65

As they of yore were wont to be;

It might be fancy-but to me

They never sounded like our own.