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                              THE VIGIL OF
                                BRUNHILD

                            A NARRATIVE POEM

                           BY FREDERIC MANNING

                                 LONDON
                    JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
                                  1907

                               PRINTED BY
                     HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
                          LONDON AND AYLESBURY.




INTRODUCTION

BRUNHILD, died A.D. 613


The intervention of women in the course of the world’s history has
nearly always been attended by those events upon which poets delight to
meditate: events of sinister and tragic significance, the chief value
of which is to show in rude collision the ideals and the realities of
life; the common humanity of the central figures in direct conflict
with the inhuman march of circumstance; and the processes through which
these central figures, like Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra, are made to
transcend all conventional morality, and, though completely evil in the
ordinary sense, to redeem themselves and win our sympathy by a moment
of heroic fortitude, or of supreme and consuming anguish. Such events
and processes, however, belong properly to dramatic art; narrative
poetry, being of a smoother and easier texture allowing more scope to the
subjective play of ideas: in short, it is more spiritual than real. The
Queen of Austrasia and Burgundy, whom I have made the subject of my poem,
is essentially a figure of tragedy. Perhaps it might have been better to
treat her as a subject of dramatic action; but in order to do so it would
have been necessary to limit her personality, to define her character, to
treat only a part of her various and complex psychology. I preferred to
show her at the moment of complete renunciation, a prisoner in her own
castle of Orbe on the banks of the lake of Neuchâtel, after she had been
betrayed by her own army, and had become the prey of her own rebellious
nobles; and the poem is but a series of visions that come to her in
the stress of her final degradation, while she is awaiting the brutal
death which the victors reserved for her. Indeed, so entirely spiritual
was my intention, I have scarcely thought it worth while to enumerate
the ironies of her situation. The squalor of her cell, the triumph
of her foes, the prospect of her own immediate death become entirely
insignificant beside the pageantry, the splendour, the romance of a past
which her memories evoke and clothe with faint, reflected glories. She
hears, in the charming phrase of Renan, “les cloches d’une ville d’Is.”

In a note at the end of the volume I have given some extracts from
the _Histoire de France_, edited by M. Ernest Lavisse, which show the
principal events of her life.

                                                                  F. M.




THE VIGIL OF BRUNHILD


    Brunhild, with worn face framed in withered hands,
    Sate in her wounded royalty; and seemed
    Like an old eagle, taken in the toils,
    And fallen from the wide extended sway
    Of her dominion, whence the eye looks down
    On mountains shrunk to nothing, and the sea
    Fretting in vain against its boundaries.
      She sate, with chin thrust forward, listening
    To the loud shouting and the ring of swords
    On shields, that sounded from the crowded hall;
    Where all her ancient bards were emulous
    In praise, now, of her foes who feasted there.
    Her humid cell was strown with rotten straw,
    A roost of owls, and haunt of bats; the wind
    Blew the cold rain in, and made tremulous
    The smoking flame, on which her eyes were set;
    Her raiment was all torn, and stained with blood;
    Her hair had fallen, and she heeded not:
    She was alone and friendless, but her eyes
    Held something kingly that could outfrown Fate.
    Gray, haggard, wan, and yet with dignity,
    Which had been beauty once, and now was age,
    She sate in that foul cellar, as one sits
    To whom life owes no further injury,
    Whom no hopes cheat, and no despairs make pale;
    Though in her heart, and on her rigid face,
    Despair was throned in gaunt magnificence.
      A sound disturbed her thought; she turned her head,
    Waiting, while a strong hand unbarred the door,
    With hatred burning in her tearless eyes,
    Ready to front her foes. The huge door gave
    Creaking, unwillingly, to close again
    Behind a priest, whose melancholy eyes
    Were dropped before the anger of her own.
      “A priest!” she cried; “they send to me a priest!
    Mocking me, that my hand first helped these priests
    Till a priest’s hand was strong to strike me down.”
      He bent before her, swayed by grief and shame;
    Then spoke: “Brunhild, they sent me not to thee;
    But I came willingly, nor feared their wrath.
    Arnulf and Pippin feast their warriors
    In the high-raftered hall, and cheer the bards,
    Who sing of how they smote thee: so I crept
    Forth from the tumult. At the height of noon
    To-morrow they will tie thee to a horse
    That never has known bridle, to be dragged
    Over the stony ways till thou art dead;
    And I am come to shrive thee”: and he stayed
    His tongue; but sorrow filled his frightened eyes.
      “Go from me,” then she said; “thou knowest how
    My life has been as angry as a flame,
    Consumed with its own passions. Go from me:
    Thou couldst not bear the weight of all my sins.
    Yea, go. I will not call upon thy God;
    He is too far from me: could I again
    Have my old strength and beauty, I should waste
    Again the earth with my delight in war,
    And vex my body with the restless loves
    That my youth knew. A life of war and love;
    Passions that shake the soul; bright, ruddy flames
    Devouring speedily this fretful flesh:
    A life of clamour, shouting, dust and heat,
    The tumult of the battle, ringing shields,
    The hiss of sudden arrows through the air,
    And drumming hoofs of horses in the mad
    Thunderous fury of the charge, that breaks
    Baffled, like waves upon a wall of steel:
    Give me again that life of ecstasy
    And I shall leave your heaven to its sleep.”
      She wrapped her cloak about her, close; and frowned
    Once more upon the flame. He spoke again:
      “When I was long-haired, too, the windy joys
    Of battle wrought a madness in my blood;
    Yet never night came but mine eyes would close
    On sleep, that seemed a mother to my soul,
    In trustfulness as quiet as a child’s.
    Hast thou no need of quiet, of a sleep
    That stretches out its wings and shrouds thee close,
    Healing thee of all wounds, and wards the day
    Off from thine eyelids? There is peace in God,
    If we might find him; but the way is far
    And difficult of travel for our feet,
    Leading through all the sounding ways of life
    And silent ways of death, through whose domain
    Each blind soul voyages in loneliness:
    Nor ever has a man with undimmed eyes,
    Save he whom ravens fed, and he whose voice
    Sounded the note of triumph, even in Hell,
    While the dead flocked unto him, and the gates
    Were lifted up for gladness, travelled it.
    Wide regions filled with spirits numberless——”
      But Brunhild turned on him: “I see them now,
    Though Death has not yet claimed me, in that flame;
    And wouldst thou have me go to them in fear,
    With loosened knees and face untaught to frown?
    Would they for all my weeping pity me?
    Yea, there is Fredegonde with mocking eyes:
    I seem to see my life through smoking blood
    That she and I have spilt in quarrelling.
    Shall we too fill, with greater clamour, Hell;
    Battling like eagles through the gloomy air,
    That trembles at the passion of our wings?
    Go from me: I repent not anything.”
      “Nay, yet I shall not go; but rest and hear
    Thy story in the form it leaves thy lips;
    Nor question thee, but bless thee and depart.
    For surely all thy soul yearns backward now
    To half remembered days, that fill the flame,
    Even as you say, with floating memories,
    Purged of the dross, that was a part of them,
    Nought now but soft gold of thy plastic dreams,
    Wrought to what shape you will: so have I heard
    That we judge others and judge not ourselves
    By a stern measure; and therefore we fail
    Of perfect justice, which is charity.”
      “Ye, who are sheltered from the world, O priest,”
    Spake Brunhild, mocking him, “have time to pause
    Ere your minds fix the measure of pure truth
    And perfect justice; but our windy life
    Loses no time on niceties: for me,
    I gave such justice as I look for now;
    I swung a hammer on mine enemies,
    To forge the world anew unto my mind;
    My cause was justice in mine eyes, and those
    Who stood against me, enemies of God.
    Lo! I have failed of all my purposes,
    And age has come upon me like a cloud;
    And these old shoulders groan beneath the shame,
    The bitterness, the burden of defeat:
    Yet I have seen the star, where others saw
    Only the froth and spume of angry storms.”
      He gazed on her with patient, gentle eyes;
    Bowed, sate she, with her hands clasped round her knees,
    Incarnate sorrow: then her lion’s head
    She lifted; and spake once again to him:

      “When I came out of Spain to Sigebert
    The rude Franks wondered at my company,
    My Moorish falconers and deep-voiced hounds,
    My swift light-horsemen, harpers, lutanists;
    And prophesied my days would fly, like gold
    Out of the loose hands of a prodigal,
    With the delight of hunting and the glad
    Singing of minstrels in the crowded hall,
    Where the red torches mirror on the shields
    And burnished helmets their tempestuous lights:
    Ominous fires of slaughter, flickering,
    To flash out suddenly in angry flame.
      “But, for a while, my house was filled with smiles;
    And Love sate as a guest beside my hearth.
    Each morning heard the horns call to the chase
    The loud, glad music of the eager hounds,
    While huntsmen cheered them onward, and the rides
    Through woodlands, down the shadow-dappled ways,
    Woke, in the answering April of my youth,
    A pleasure that was one thing with the dawn.
      “So passed my days, in courtly wise, until
    Some whisper promised me another Spring
    Thrilling within my body, and I felt
    The first strange wakenings of motherhood,
    The pledge, and prophecy, of future Kings.
    And I went roaming through the woods no more;
    Intent on quiet business with my maids,
    Spinning new wool, or standing by the loom,
    Or broidering toy baldricks, with gold thread,
    Bright, to please baby eyes, that love bright things;
    Dreaming on all the promise, that I held,
    And all the storm and stress life held for him.
      “Then first I saw the doom that Nature laid
    On women, to be careful harvesters;
    To plan, and toil, and build for unborn sons,
    To shape the future out of their own time.
    These turbulent loud nobles with their feuds
    Carousing nightly, or in companies
    Changing their hunting-grounds from place to place,
    Vexed me with their unthrift and wantonness:
    I saw them as a hindrance to my son,
    And