’Twixt Faoüet and Llangolan
There lives a hard, a holy man –
His name is Father Rasian.
On Faoüet his best he laid :
“Let every month a mass be said,
And bells be rung, and prayers be read.”
In Elliant the plague is o’er,
But not till it had raged full sore :
It slew seven thousand and five score.
Death unto Elliant hath gone down,
No living soul is in the town –
No living soul but two alone.
A crone of sixty years is one,
The other is her only son.
“The Plague,” quoth she, “is on our door-sill ;
’Twill enter if it be God’s will ;
But till it enter bide we still.”
Through Elliant’s streets who wills to go,
Everywhere will find grass to mow —
Everywhere, save in two wheel-ruts bare,
Where the wheels of the dead-cart wont to fare.
His heart were flint that had not wept,
Through Elliant’s grass-grown streets who stept,
To see eighteen carts, each with its load —
Eighteen at the graveyard, eighteen on the road.
Nine children of one house there were
Whom one dead-cart to the grave did bear :
Their mother ’twixt the shafts did fare.
The father, whistling, walk’d behind,
With a careless step and a mazy mind.
The mother shriek’d and call’d on God,
Crush’d, soul and body, beneath her load.
“God, help me bury my children nine,
And I vow thee a cord of the wax so fine :
A cord of the wax so long and fine,
To go thrice round the church and thrice round the shrine.
Nine sons I had ; I bare them all ;
Now Death has ta’en them, great and small.
Hath ta’en them all from my own door-stone :
None left, e’en to give me to drink—not one !”
The churchyard to the walls brims o’er,
The church is full to the steps of the door :
They must bless fields, if they ’d bury more.
There grows an oak by the chmchynrd wall,
From the top-bough hangs a white grave pall
The Plague hath taken one and all !
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Tom Taylor