Lord Dunsany
Reading edition
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany, was born July 24, 1878, and was educated at Eton and Sandhurst. He is best known as an author of fantastic fairy tales and even more fantastic plays. The Gods of the Mountain (1911) and The Golden Doom (1912) are highly dramatic and intensely poetic. A Night at an Inn (1916) is that peculiar novelty, an eerie and poetical melodrama.
Dunsany's prime quality is a romantic and highly colored imagination which is rich in symbolism. After the World War, in which the playwright served as captain in the Royal Innis-killing Fusiliers, Dunsany visited America and revised the reissue of his early tales and prose poems collected in his The Book of Wonder.
SONGS FROM AN EVIL WOOD
I
There is no wrath in the stars, They do not rage in the sky; I look from the evil wood And find myself wondering why. Why do they not scream out And grapple star against star, Seeking for blood in the wood As all things round me are? They do not glare like the sky Or flash like the deeps of the wood; But they shine softly on In their sacred solitude. To their high, happy haunts Silence from us has flown, She whom we loved of old And know it now she is gone. When will she come again, Though for one second only? She whom we loved is gone And the whole world is lonely. And the elder giants come Sometimes, tramping from far Through the weird and flickering light Made by an earthly star. And the giant with his club, And the dwarf with rage in his breath, And the elder giants from far, They are all the children of Death. They are all abroad to-night And are breaking the hills with their brood,— And the birds are all asleep Even in Plug Street Wood!
II
Somewhere lost in the haze The sun goes down in the cold, And birds in this evil wood Chirrup home as of old; Chirrup, stir and are still, On the high twigs frozen and thin. There is no more noise of them now, And the long night sets in. Of all the wonderful things That I have seen in the wood I marvel most at the birds And their wonderful quietude. For a giant smites with his club All day the tops of the hill, Sometimes he rests at night, Oftener he beats them still. And a dwarf with a grim black mane Raps with repeated rage All night in the valley below On the wooden walls of his cage.
III
I met with Death in his country, With his scythe and his hollow eye, Walking the roads of Belgium. I looked and he passed me by. Since he passed me by in Plug Street, In the wood of the evil name, I shall not now lie with the heroes, I shall not share their fame; I shall never be as they are, A name in the lands of the Free, Since I looked on Death in Flanders And he did not look at me.