[Sidenote: Having heard a mass the king takes leave of this world's
shore and the queen.]
Down at the river ford
Beside the ferry,
Dances a little wherry,
To every wave that blows in from the sea
It dances merrily;
To every wave it dips it
And to the wind it tips it.
This merry little boat the king will take,
The pale queen waits with outstretched hands,
And now he bends above the oars,
And now before the garden gates he stands--
It was an eery thing to see
Him leave so merrily--
The music played him to the shore
Where he will walk no more.
The king is mad to be so lonely glad,
And mad to throw the key into the sea.
[Sidenote: In the perfect harmony of his garden the king is married
by the power of art and nature to the beauty of the earth.]
And now he dwells within his hermitage of bells
Upon the cape shaped like a hunter's horn,
The five bells strike a unitone,
The wind comes fooling like an ape
And the strange boy-breasted sea things mourn.
The rock pools seep and creep,
Laugh like a mad child in a moonstruck sleep,
And then flow onward like an easy dream,
Talking among the rocks,
Into one valley stream,
That ticks and drips and strikes like distant clocks
Till with a snaky motion
It curves three times
And glides into the ocean.
Marry! The king now is a lover!
The bridegroom of his mother earth, no other,
It goes unholily that he should be
Enamored of the earth that gave him birth
And of the sea,
But now he has his will
And he is husband to the sea and hill
And to the wind a brother.
[Sidenote: But the world still thinks the king mad.]
At sunset all the garden swoons with bells,
Rolling across the sea and fells.
The demon sound stumbles along the ground.
Withering for miles around
And then is still--
All but one bell that dins on from the hill,
That strikes to ten,
While all the peasants pray
And cross themselves and say,
"Christ pity us!
It is the mad king's angelus,
Amen."