Poems

by Robert Southey

1799

 The better, please; the worse, displease; I ask no more. Spenser 

Table of Contents

 

 The Vision of the Maid of Orléans

 Divinity hath oftentimes descended Upon our slumbers, and the blessed troupes Have, in the calme and quiet of the soule, Conversed with us. Shirley. The Grateful Servant 

 Sidenote: The following Vision was originally printed as the ninth book of Joan of Arc. It is now adapted to the improved edition of that Poem. 

 

The First Book

 Orleans was hush’d in sleep. Stretch’d on her couch The delegated Maiden lay: with toil Exhausted and sore anguish, soon she closed Her heavy eye-lids; not reposing then, For busy Phantasy, in other scenes Awakened. Whether that superior powers, By wise permission, prompt the midnight dream, Instructing so the passive faculty;[1] Or that the soul, escaped its fleshly clog, Flies free, and soars amid the invisible world, And all things are that seem.[2] Along a moor, Barren, and wide, and drear, and desolate, She roam’d a wanderer thro’ the cheerless night. Far thro’ the silence of the unbroken plain The bittern’s boom was heard, hoarse, heavy, deep, It made most fitting music to the scene. Black clouds, driven fast before the stormy wind, Swept shadowing; thro’ their broken folds the moon Struggled sometimes with transitory ray, And made the moving darkness visible. And now arrived beside a fenny lake She stands: amid its stagnate waters, hoarse The long sedge rustled to the gales of night. An age-worn bark receives the Maid, impell’d By powers unseen; then did the moon display Where thro’ the crazy vessel’s yawning side The muddy wave oozed in: a female guides, And spreads the sail before the wind, that moan’d As melancholy mournful to her ear, As ever by the dungeon’d wretch was heard Howling at evening round the 

  P 1/51 next