Dear Pilgrim, art thou for the East indeed?
Go!—saying ever as thou dost proceed,
That I, French Rudel, choose for my device
A sunflower outspread like a sacrifice
Before its idol. See! These inexpert
And hurried fingers could not fail to hurt
The woven picture; ’tis a woman’s skill
Indeed; but nothing baffled me, so, ill
Or well, the work is finished. Say, men feed
On songs I sing, and therefore bask the bees
On my flower’s breast as on a platform broad:
But, as the flower’s concern is not for these
But solely for the sun, so men applaud
In vain this Rudel, he not looking here
But to the East—the East! Go, say this, Pilgrim dear!
This poem was first published in “Bells and Pomegranates” under the head
of “Queen Worship.” How exquisite the plea of the unnoticed Flower, with
no pretence to vie with the Mountain in its claim upon the Sun’s
attention, except this, that the great unchanging Mountain is “vainly
favoured,” while the Flower yields itself up in ceaseless and
self-forgetting devotion to an imitation, however feeble and foolish, of
the great Sun Life.
The second stanza is very rich. There is no mention in it of Sun or
Mountain or Flower; but as the Flower looks up to the Sun from its nook
at the Mountain’s base, so Rudel yearns for “one gold look” from his
Sun, the “Angel of the East.”
The meaning of the third stanza will be apparent when it is remembered
that “French Rudel” was a troubadour of the 12th century—the days of the
Crusades, and of the romance of chivalry. In those days the best way to
communicate with the East would be through some pilgrim passing thither:
and nothing would be more natural than such a reference to the “device”
which he had patiently, and in spite of difficulty, worked so as to wear
it as her “favour:” and once more, it is eminently natural to represent
the troubadour, not as sending a written message, but as finding a
sympathetic pilgrim to burden his memory with it—charging him to keep it
fresh by repetition till it had been duly delivered.
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