POEMS By HUGH CHESTERMAN

MERCHANT ADVENTURERS

Merchant Adventurers off to the East,

What are you trading?

Leather and cheese and golden grain,

Some for Russia, and some for Spain.

A hundred hides for the Zuyder Zee,

Twice as many for Lombardy,

And tin for the ports of Flanders.

Sacks of sea coal ten times ten,

Wool to sell to the weaver men,

With a cask of cider now and then

To cheer the Merchant Adventurers.

And what will your ships bring home to port,

Merchant Adventurers?

Pepper and cinnamon, wine and wheat,

Spice from Egypt, cloves from Crete,

Syrian silks of purest white,

A freight of fur from the Muscovite,

And anything else you want, sir!

And plenty too, but you’ve forgot

Your ships may sink and your cargoes rot,

Peradventure they will—peradventure not—

Much venturing Merchant Adventurers!

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Merchant Adventurers.

44

BROTHER BLAISE

Here sits Brother Blaise

All his days

With paper, paint and pen.

So aged is he, so cramped with age,

He seldom stirs, and turns a page

But now and then.

His eyes are set

On massive book of brave design

Whereon his hand makes, line by line,

Its curious alphabet.

The years go by (so slow

Their come and go

Time scarcely moves at all);

Only the Sun through some high window peeps

To mark the stealing hours, and creeps

From wall to wall.

It’s strange to think

That scribe and script must soon forgotten be—

And all his industry

But faded ink!

Hugh Chesterman.

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Brother Blaise.

46

THE BOWMAN

It’s jolly to play at Make-Believe

And think what you might have been

An Anglo-Norman aristocrat

With his feudal this and his feudal that;

A stern Crusader, tough and tanned,

Jogging along to the Holy Land;

A Roundhead trooper, spick and span,

Yeoman, Knight or Javelin man.

But best of the bunch, as it seems to me,

The jolliest fellow of all was he

Who covered the whole of his six foot three

In a suit of Lincoln green.

Foemen knew the twang of his bow

And bowed them down at the patter

Of dropping arrows, designed to put

The fear of the Lord in Horse and Foot,

(You’ll hear them still, wherever you look,

Hissing about in the history book).

But only the laughing bowman knew

Just where they’d go and what they’d do.

For often enough a Knight would find

A hole in his front—and one behind—

And the mess that it made of his peace of mind

Was hardly a laughing matter.

Hugh Chesterman.

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The Bowman.

48

THE BAFFLED BARD

In the palmy old days when a King went to war

A Minstrel was paid to make songs by the score,

To rhyme and tell stories

Of War and its glories;

He chanted the praises

Of fighting like blazes,

The pleasure of sticking

Your spear in a Viking

(What rapture to tap a

Real Dane on the “napper”!).

He rhymed about rallies,

And sorties and sallies,

And parleys and truces,

And sang their excuses

If either side lost: he piped like a linnet

And rhymed all the time without stopping a minute.

But, between you and me, all this musical prattle

Was easy enough with a nice sounding battle

Like Beaugé or Bampton,

Dundalk or Northampton;

His tongue would go curling

Round Senlac or Stirling,

While “trodden” and “sodden”

Are fine rhymes for Flodden,

Though I’m bound to confess he

Had trouble with Crecy;

But that’s not as hard as

The job that this Bard has:

For Uffa the Angle,

Has just had a wrangle

With Sleddha the Saxon—Oh, didn’t they go it!

And Wiht-gara-burh was the Battle (poor Poet!).

Hugh Chesterman.

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The Baffled Bard.

51

He nearly forgot to pull in the tides.