ARTHUR

Too far from my beginning to begin again;
The truth disclosed not preventing action yet;
What powers I had harder and harder to call upon,
Still unable to abandon those gifts of youth
With which I once adored and would again
My faithless queen. The one hope I have
Impossible—to bring that bright world back;
My kingdom and my kingship all in question;
Isolated from the energies of happier men –
Whom at times I still invent within myself
Mistaking their ideas for powers my own—
Dreaming of the good Gawain and others dead,
In this wasted fastness of my middle years
I must sit down alone
And make a closing audit of what I am.
Then king or not, I am but one of all my race.
And bereft of power, our petitions received
As letters from the dead, still we keep watch
Southward over the grey deserted waves
Wanting to recall the borrowed legions
Who another time and long ago
Brought us within the compass of the world,
Forming our thought from their language
Fitting our freedom to their laws
Cherishing whatever of our youthful hopes
Might contribute to the immortality of Rome;
And Romans they called us, conferring upon us
The freedom of a city few ever saw,
Forgetting, as we forgot, that our past
Was not their past, our will enthralled,
While the nation slept for centuries
Entombed in the gorgeous mausoleum of the empire.
     The young and reckless then rejoiced
To hear the tramp of legions leaving
To watch our temporal lords departing,
Believing that soon we would be free
To break the sleep of long subjection
And become a people of our own possession.
     But because they wrote the record of our being
Whom we were before the Romans came
We can only guess at, and what we now discover
Is that we are not whom we thought we were—
The ancient shadows moving in our minds,
Sacred names we would have called upon
To guide us through this difficult freedom,
Glide away as traitors we approach,
Ghosts in the light of our Roman mind,
A light that has pierced our heart
Riven our history, driven us from ourselves
And given us only a living, not life,
The present no more than time to learn
That we are an untimely people, fostered
To a false life, deserted now, and so
Brutally woken from a wonderful dream—
The glorious table, my goodly queen—
Our death advancing from the Saxon shore,
One last defeat, a grievous wound,
The black hills, and asleep again
Wanting to wake to another world.

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