by Vernon Watkins
June 27 1906 – October 8 1967 (61 years)
Medium: Online Text
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=95&issue=1&page=21
Summary: A ballad describing the landscape of Zennor, the grey granite, bleak fields and legend carved in teak. On the horizon appears foam with the waves and the ascending seabirds. The mermaid implores the young boy to come down from the church stones to be with her.
Transcript:
Where grey Land’s End repels the sky
The granite boulders stand
Reared in a column, there they lie
Laid by a giant’s hand,
And there the ascending seabirds fly
Beyond the last of land
The shadow hills reflect that grey
The walled in fields are bleak.
The road from Zennor winds its way
West, in a barren streak,
Shunning the softer forms of day
Forgetting what men speak.
Who stands upon that farthest ledge
And sees the Atlantic break,
Back through the fields with stones for hedge
His Eastward way will take
To Zennor’s valley and its pledge a legend cut in teak.
The tale in teak has worn away
These last five hundred years
But still the church of granite grey
It’s haunting music hears
While fields are singing or obey
The silence winter wears.
The black teak near the chancel stands
And shines there like a shell.
The boy above her dripping hands
Had sung too well, too well.
The mermaid dragged him to her sands
And bound him with her spell.
‘Why break, why break unending waves?
O take me, lead me home!
The stones I long for are you naves
Where Cornish folk would come,
But here, black wood, in secret caves
The darkness of the foam!’
‘Come down, come down from that high chair,
That hook with hassock hung;
Climb from the sailors’ swinging stair,
Leap from the bottom rung.
Now throw your life into my care
And be forever young.
For you and I as one must be,
A mermaid and a boy,
Joined in the always moving sea
Where dolphins leap for joy.
Forget the stones, the starry tree;
The thought of graves put by.
This music hovered round your soul
Before you first drew breath,
And those its caul has covered whole,
Shall never come to death,
Long though the murderous sea waves roll
With many and many a wreath.’
A thousand tides, a thousand tides,
And bridals on the hill.
The sunken ships with broken sides lean over and are still.
A granite church the seaweed hides;
Its aisles the fishes fill.
‘Bend down, bend down and hear my wood:
None was more sweetly strung.
The tenor boy who fell was good.
I heard his golden tongue.
He raised my spirit from the flood
And on his voice I hung.
His music pierced my heart, and then
I called him from the sea.
He left the Church, he left the men,
He stood upon the guay.
The long rope ladder held him then,
And then the rope went free.’
But was it he who heard her sing
Or did she first hear him?
Black as bright teak the cormorants fling
Up from the waves they skim
The silver fish, and mussels cling
And close above the hymn
The mermaid knows what no man knows
The secrets of a shell,
The pearl on fire, the breaking rose,
The murmuring foundered bell
Whose sound through singing chambers goes
Crossed by the tingling swell.
And every adolescent knows
How searching is that song
And how mysteriously it flows
Plucked from a death so young
When unborn years with passion close
The casket of the strong.
‘However long the waters roll
Longer my love shall be,
Nor shall you leave my burning soul
Torn by the moving sea,
Though all the bells of Zennor toll,
And say you died for me.’