12 “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”
First publ. B & P vii (DR & L), 6 Nov. 1845, the opening poem of the pamphlet; repr. 1849, 1863, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1845. B. was often asked for details of the composition and background; the following is a conflation of his replies (see esp. LH 215–16; NL 300; BSP i 49; Pall Mall Gazette, 31 Dec. 1889). He drafted the poem in Aug. 1844, while ‘on board ship off Tangiers’ in transit ‘from Sicily to Naples’, ‘after I had been at sea long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on a certain good horse “York,” then in my stable at home’. ‘The poem was written … in a gay moment on the inside of the cover of the one book I had with me,—Bartoli’s “Simboli” ’: i.e. his teacher Angelo Cerutti’s 1830 ed. of Daniello Bartoli’s De’ Simboli Trasportati al Morale (Rome 1677). B. later carefully erased the text (the book is in the library of Balliol College, Oxford; see also headnote to Home-Thoughts, from the Sea, II 246). A fair copy MS of the poem, signed and dated Paris 4 Feb. 1856, is in the Morgan Library (no significant variants from 1849–88), and several autographs of passages from the poem are extant; in one, of ll. 1–6, dated 1 June 1882 (now in the Huntington Library), l. 5 is incomplete and B. wrote in the margin ‘(forgotten!)’; see also l. 53n. In 1889 B. recorded from memory the opening lines on an Edison wax cylinder, substituting ‘saddle’ for ‘stirrup’ in l. 1, missing out l. 3 and faltering at l. 4:
I sprang to the saddle, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through;
The gate shuts behind us, the lights sink to rest …
At this point B. stops, saying: ‘I’m incredibly sorry that I can’t remember me own verses’ (see M. Hancher and J. Moore, ‘The Sound of a Voice that is Still’, BNL iv and v [1970]; we give our own version of B.’s words). Note that the phrase ‘The gate shuts’ is closer to B.’s MS, as quoted by EBB., than to the published text (see ll. 2–6n.).
There is no historical foundation for the poem, ‘merely [a] general impression of the characteristic warfare and besieging which abounds in the Annals of Flanders’. Aix is besieged and about to surrender, and the ‘good news’ that unexpected help is on its way is brought from Ghent by a route ‘hitherto impracticable’ but ‘discovered to be open for once’. In one place, B. claims that he ‘had no map, and wrote swiftly … the places mentioned were remembered or guessed at loosely enough’; but elsewhere he states that the story of the siege and the ‘impracticable’ route could account ‘for some difficulties in the time and space occupied by the ride in one night’. B. passed through Flanders in 1834 on his way to Russia, and in 1838 and 1844 on his return from Italy. J. Platt (N & Q 8th series, xii [1897] 345) points out the ‘medley of languages’ in the place-names; but his conclusion that B. ‘had never personally explored the route’ is not necessarily correct; some of the forms may have been adopted for metrical reasons, and, like many Victorians, B. was cavalier about linguistic consistency. In a letter to the Rev. V. D. Davis of Dec. 1881, B. expressed vexation at the repeated inquiries. He commented that ‘attention was meant to be concentrated’ on the ride itself and, after giving his usual summary, concluded: ‘A film or two, even so slight as the above, may sufficiently support a tolerably big spider-web of a story—where there is ability and good will enough to look most at the main fabric in the middle’ (TLS, 8 Feb. 1952, p. 109). When she saw the poem in manuscript, EBB. wrote: ‘You have finely distanced the rider in Rookwood here—not that I shd think of saying so, if we had not talked of him before’ (Wellesley MS: all her comments recorded in the notes derive from this text, unless otherwise stated). The ref. is to Harrison Ainsworth’s account of Dick Turpin’s ride to York, in his novel Rookwood (1834; iii 253–355), a famous set piece in the popular genre of the ‘ride’. Rookwood also contains an inset lyric, ‘Black Bess’, Turpin’s tribute to his horse, in the same metre as How They Brought the Good News, and with some shared details. See ll. 17n., 22–30n., 47–8n., and 58n. (we are grateful to Mr Michael Meredith for drawing our attention to the importance of this source). Cp. also Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib and Scott’s ballad Lochinvar: both are in couplets, again in the same metre as B.’s poem, and Scott uses a six-line stanza. Other ‘rides’ in B. include My Wife Gertrude (Cavalier Tunes iii, I 348), Through the Metidja (II 155), Last Ride Together (III 285), and Muléykeh (DI2, 1880); the messenger bearing news of deliverance reappears in Saul 313–18 (III 520) and Pheidippides (DI, 1879). EBB. further commented: ‘You hear the very trampling & breathing of the horses all through—& the sentiment is left in its right place through all the physical force-display. Then the difficult management of the three horses, of the three individualities, . . & Roland carrying the interest with him triumphantly! I know you must be fond of this poem: & nobody can forget it who has looked at it once’.
I.
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and He;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all Three;
“Good speed!” cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;
“Speed!” echoed the wall to us galloping through;
5 Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
II.
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride for stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girth tight,
10 Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit.
III.
’Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near
Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear;
15 At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see;
At Düffeld, ’twas morning as plain as could be;
And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half-chime,
So Joris broke silence with, “Yet there is time!”
At Aerschot, up leaped of a sudden the sun,
20 And against him the cattle stood black every one,
To stare thro’ the mist at us galloping past,
And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last,
With resolute shoulders, each butting away
The haze as some bluff river headland its spray.
V.
25 And his low head and crest, just one sharp car bent back
For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track;
And one eye’s black intelligence,—ever that glance
O’er its white edge at me, his own master, askance!
And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon
30 His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on.
VI.
By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris, “Stay spur!
“Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault’s not in her,
“We’ll remember at Aix”—for one heard the quick wheeze
Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees,
35 And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank,
As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank.
VII.
So left were we galloping, Joris and I,
Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky;
The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh,
40 ’Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff;
Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white,
And “Gallop,” gasped Joris, “for Aix is in sight!
VIII.
“How they’ll greet us”—and all in a moment his roan
Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone;
45 And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight
Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate,
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,
And with circles of red for his eye-sockets’ rim.
IX.
Then I cast loose my buffcoat, each holster let fall,
50 Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all,
Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear,
Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without peer;
Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or good,
Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood.
55 And all I remember is, friends flocking round
As I sate with his head ’twixt my knees on the ground,
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine,
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent)
60 Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent.
Title. The only title in B. in the form of a quotation not of literary or proverbial origin. Ghent: the English form; Flemish Gent, French Gand, capital of East Flanders province in what is now Belgium. Aix: short for French Aix-la-Chapelle, Flemish Aken, now Aachen in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany. All intervening places are in Belgium.
1. Cp. Scott, Lochinvar 40: ‘So light to the saddle before her he sprung’. Joris: B. may have taken the name from David Joris, the 16th-century Flemish Anabaptist leader. He] he (1849–88). Referring to Dirck, l. 2.
2–6. EBB. quoted:
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three—
Good speed cried the watch as the eastgate undrew—
Good speed from the wall, to us galloping through …
The gate, shut the porter, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
The italics are her own; she commented: ‘By the way, how the word “galloping” is a good galloping word! & how you felt it & took the effect up & dilated it by repeating it over & over in your first stanza, . . doubling, folding one upon another, the hoof-treads’. The changes in the published version were presumably not suggested by her.
2. Three] three (1849–88).
5. postern: a back- or side-gate (i.e. the riders are not leaving by the main gate); cp. Flight of the Duchess 800 (II 330).
8. for] by (1849–88).
10. set the pique right: in a letter of 1884, B. wrote: ‘I certainly had and have the impression that the old-fashioned projection in front of the military saddle on the Continent was called the “pique”—and, when of a smaller size, the “demi-pique”: I might as well have styled it simply the “peak”. In a large loose-sitting saddle, the “pique” might, by shifting it to one side, show that the trim wanted adjustment—“setting right,” opposite the withers of the horse. Such was my impression,—how far justified I cannot immediately say, the question never before having occurred to me’ (to Messrs Blackie & Son, 20 Feb. 1884, ABL MS).
14. EBB. quoted ‘Lokeren, the cocks crew & twilight seemed clear’, and commented: ‘I doubt about “twilight seeming clear”. Is it a happy expression? But I only doubt, you know’. Twilight can refer to either morning or evening.
Lokeren: a town 18 km east-north-east of Ghent; Platt (see headnote) points out that it is wrongly accented on the second syllable instead of the first.
15. Boom: a town 25 km east of Lokeren.
16. Düffeld: now Duffel, a town 10 km east of Boom.
17. Mecheln: Flemish Mechelen, French Malines; Platt (see headnote) queries the use of the German form. A town 7 km south-south-west of Duffel. church-steeple: the cathedral of St Rumboldus at Mechelen has a tall steeple and a 49-bell carillon. Cp. Rookwood iii 292: ‘as Turpin rode through the deserted streets of Huntingdon, he heard the eleventh hour given from the iron tongue of Saint Mary’s spire’.
19–30. EBB. admired this passage: ‘The leaping up of the sun … & the cattle standing black against him, & staring through the mist at the riders, . . all that, . . I do not call it picture, because it is so much better . . it is the very sun & mist & cattle themselves. And I like the description of Roland, . . I like him . . seeing him, . . with one sharp ear bent back & the other pricked out! it is so livingly the horse—even to me who know nothing of horses in the ordinary way of sitting down & trying to remember what I know, but who recognize this for a real horse galloping’.
19. Aerschot: properly Aarschot, the second syllable pronounced ‘scot’ (Platt; see headnote); a town 25 km south-east of Duffel.
20. him: the sun; cp. Morning [Parting at Morning] 3–4n. (II 359).
22–30. This passage was clearly influenced by sts. iii-iv of Ainsworth’s ‘Black Bess’: ‘Look! look! how that eyeball glows bright as a brand! / That neck proudly arches, those nostrils expand! / Mark! that wide-flowing mane! of which each silky tress / Might adorn prouder beauties—though none like Black Bess. // Mark! that skin sleek as velvet, and dusky as night, / With its jet undisfigured by one lock of white; / That throat branched with veins, prompt to charge or caress, / Now is she not beautiful—bonny Black Bess?’ (iii 241).
22. stout: of a horse: characterized by endurance or staying power, contrasted with ‘speedy’.
29–30. Cp. (noting l. 24) Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib 15–16: ‘And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, / And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf ’.
29. spume-flakes: cp. Childe Roland 114 (p. 360): ‘bespate with flakes and spumes’.
31. Hasselt: a town 35 km east-south-east of Aarschot.
37. left were we] we were left (1849–88).
38. Looz: the French form; Flemish Loon, now Borgloon, 15 km south of Hasselt.
Tongres: again the French form; Flemish Tongeren, 7 km south-east of Borgloon.
41. Dalhem: a village so called lies 20 km south-east of Tongeren, but it is another 30 km east-north-east of Aachen, which is meant to be ‘in sight’. dome-spire: Charlemagne’s famous Palace Chapel at Aachen has a high dome.
42. sight!] emended in agreement with 1872, 1884 from ‘sight!” ’, all other eds. (since Joris clearly speaks the next sentence).
44. neck and croup: cp. the expression ‘neck and crop’, ‘bodily, completely’. The ‘croup’ is a horse’s rump or hindquarters: cp. Scott, Lochinvar 39: ‘So light to the croup the fair lady he swung’. B. has ‘neck by croup’ in Muléykeh (DI2) 94. 47–8. Cp. Rookwood iii 318: ‘her eyeballs were dilated, and glowed like flaming carbuncles; while her widely distended nostril seemed … to snort forth smoke’.
49. buffcoat: a stout coat of buff leather; used again, with ‘jackboots’ (see next line), in Flight of the Duchess 253 (II 307).
53. In an undated autograph of the last two stanzas of the poem, now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, ‘any’ is replaced by ‘every’.
55–60. EBB. had ‘One query at the last stanza’. She quoted the line ‘That they saved to have drunk our Duke’s health in, but grieved’, and commented: ‘You mean to say . . “would have grieved” . . do you not? The construction seems a little imperfect’. It is possible, though not certain, that this line came in the place of l. 59; in any case the rhyme-word for ‘grieved’ has been lost. In a letter to B. of 12–14 Nov. 1845 (after publication), EBB. praised ‘that touch of natural feeling at the end, to prove that it was not in brutal carelessness that the poor horse was driven through all that suffering . . Yes, & how that one touch of softness acts back upon the energy & resolution & exalts both, instead of weakening anything, as might have been expected by the vulgar of writers or critics’ (Correspondence xi 167).
58. Conflating two incidents from Rookwood, one the report of a publican: ‘ “I know he gave his mare more ale than he took for himself ”’ (iii 276), the other describing how Turpin gave his horse a restorative potion: ‘Raising her head upon his shoulder, Dick poured the contents of the bottle down the throat of his mare’ (iii 333).