The Lady of Beare, Grown Old
Ebbing I am, like the tide.
Ageing has yellowed me.
Though I may rage at the pain,
age comes on greedily.
I am the Lady of Beare, grown
old. Once I wore a new gown
daily. Today I hardly own
more than one reach-me-down.
It’s gold
you love now, not folk!
In our day, back then,
what we loved was men.
The men whose lands we roved
we loved the most.
They were fine hosts to us,
and afterwards made no boasts.
Now, bragging is what they do best.
What they don’t do is provide.
They give little, keep the rest,
and put on a lot of side.
Chariots, speed,
and the very fastest steeds –
there were plenty of them then.
And glory for the king’s deeds!
My body – it’s all bitterness today –
can’t wait to reach that well-known place.
When the Son of God decrees,
let Him come and lead me away.
My arms! Look at them now –
scrawny, bony things!
Once they were better used,
embracing great kings.
Scrawny, bony arms –
look at them now. I’m sure
they’ll never clasp
a young man any more.
Young girls are full of joy
when Spring comes and the sun’s gold.
I’m not just sad.
Worse: I’m a woman, and I’m old.
Too late for speeches,
no fatted calf for my wedding fare.
My hair is thin and grey,
and I cover it, and I don’t care.
I wear a thick veil now,
but it makes no difference anyhow.
My head-dresses were bright and fine
back when we drank the best wine.
I envy no-one, just the fields
of corn at Feimen, and their yield.
Years have finished me. But that plain
will be gold with corn again.
The Standing Stone of the Kings,
the great Stone House – these things
are lashed for years by storms,
and yet they’re not age-worn.
The waves crash noisily
on Winter’s high sea.
No king’s son, not even a slave
will visit me across those waves.
I know what they are doing,
where they are today;
the ones that might have come
sleep in the cold clay.
Sad for me
that I no longer sail youth’s sea.
My years of beauty are all gone
and my days of lust done.
Bad for me
that however fine the day be,
I must wrap up well, even in the heat.
Cold age is the great threat.
Summer of youth is for us all.
I had it, and then fall.
Winter of age gets everyone.
I have it. Its first months have come.
Well, youth’s summer was well-spent.
I enjoyed it where I could.
There’s not much more to go now,
but no regrets. It was good.
The fields are rich and green:
God’s cloak lies over Drummain,
spread by the one great king –
rough earth made smooth again.
Yes, yes, I am cold.
All things are born to decay.
I used to feast in bright halls.
Now I kneel in the dark to pray.
Once I had my day with kings,
drinking wine and feasting,
now I drink watered milk
beside withered old women.
Well, let me drink watered milk,
that’s no sin.
But let the living God
calm the rage that burns within.
The cloak of life is frayed today,
my rambling mind leads me astray,
the grey hairs which grow on me
are like the bark of a rotting tree.
My right eye has lost its light
by God’s law; but heaven is in sight.
The left eye dims too.
My inner sight is heaven’s view.
Three floods
engulf Ard Ruide:
flood of horses, flood of men
flood of hounds swift as the wind.
Flood-wave,
and the ebb comes then.
What the flood-wave brings,
the ebb carries off again.
Flood-wave,
and the ebb comes to the shore.
I’ve known them all. I have
seen what will come no more.
Flood-wave,
but my cell’s like the silent grave.
All my many folk are in the dark,
a cold hand on them laid.
I suppose Holy Christ knew
I’d need the help of Mary’s son.
How generous was I in my time?
Well, I never said ‘no’ to any one!
It’s grave
that man is so depraved,
that we can’t see the ebb
when we ride the high flood-wave.
My flood-wave
kept its secrets thoroughly.
What Jesus, Mary’s son reveals
at ebb, that doesn’t trouble me.
An island standing in the ocean wide,
after each ebb gets another flood-tide.
I’m no island. There cannot be
a fresh flood-tide of youth for me.
When I look at places,
there’s nowhere I recognise today.
What was flood-tide once
is ebbing away.
A Note on Sources
The originals of most of the earlier theological and historical selections may be found in the massive (and heavy) compilations of the nineteenth century. Migne’s Patrologia Latina (Paris, 1844–64) has Gregory the Great; the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Weimar, 1832–) has Waltharius, Gregory of Tours, the Cambridge Songs (including the Snow-Baby), Einhard, Nithard; the Rolls Series (London) has Matthew Paris, the Annales Paulini, Thomas de la Moore, William of Newburgh and Ranulph Higden. Much of the vernacular literature is also found in the text-series begun around the end of the last century: the Early English Text Society has the books of manners (under the title of The Babees Book) and Andrew Boorde; the Altdeutsche Textbibliothek (published in Halle and then Tübingen) has Helmbrecht; the Leipzig Deutsche Literatur in Entwicklungsreihen has the works of Thomas Murner; the Classiques français du moyen age (Paris) include Rutebeuf. Ruf’s play is in an older series, the Bibliothek der deutschen Nationalliteratur (Leipzig). The play of Meriasek was edited and translated by Whitley Stokes (London, 1872). H. J. Schmitz, Die Bußbücher und die Bußdisziplin der Kirche (Mainz, 1883) has the Corrector, H. F. Massmann published the Forms of Confession in 1839, and the mock-mass is in Paul Lehmann’s Die Parodie in Mittelalter (repr. Stuttgart, 1963). The full horrors of Gilles de Rais are in Latin in Eugène Bossard, Gilles de Rais (Paris, 2. ed. 1886) and there is a French version of it all by Georges Battaille, Le procès de Gilles de Rais (Montreuil, 1965). There are many editions of Froissart (and the Bourchier translation) and of Boccaccio (older versions of the Everyman edition have our story in Italian). A full edition of the various versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is in progress, but there are several nineteenth century Clarendon editions. Lassberg’s Liedersaal, from which the German impotence-poem was taken, appeared in the early nineteenth century, but has been reprinted, and the Sidgwick anthology, one of the many places in which the ‘gentle cock’ has crowed, first appeared in 1907. The originals of Ce
cco’s poems can be found in anthologies such as the Penguin Book of Italian Verse; there is a diplomatic version of the whole Codex Karlsruhe (which has the ‘Monk and Goose’ story as well as the Adam and Eve sermon) edited by U. Schmid (Berne and Munich, 1974), and the standard edition of the Carmina Burana is that by A. Hilka, O. Schumann and B. Bischoff published in Heidelberg between 1930 and 1970. There is a truncated edition of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poem in the edition of Peniarth 49 by T. Parry (Cardiff, 1929), but for a fuller text see David Johnston’s in Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 9 (1985), pp. 71–89. The poems of Duncan Campbell are edited with a prose version by William Gillies (Scottish Gaelic Studies 13, 1978–81, pp. 18–45 and 263–88 and 14, 1983, 59–82). For The Old Woman of Beare see my paper in the Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 44 (1991), pp. 80–127.
COPYRIGHT
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Publishing History
First published by Dedalus in 1995
First ebook edition in 2013
Compilation, Introduction & Notes copyright © Brian Murdoch
Translations copyright © Dedalus 1995
Printed in Finland by W. S. Bookwell
Typeset by RefineCatch
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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