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Title: Blind Moone Of London
Author: Alfred Noyes [
More Titles by Noyes]
Blind Moone of London
He fiddled up and down,
Thrice for an angel,
And twice for a crown.
He fiddled at the _Green Man_,
He fiddled at the _Rose_;
And where they have buried him
Not a soul knows.
All his tunes are dead and gone, dead as yesterday.
And his lanthorn flits no more
Round the _Devil Tavern_ door,
Waiting till the gallants come, singing from the play;
Waiting in the wet and cold!
All his Whitsun tales are told.
He is dead and gone, sirs, very far away.
He would not give a silver groat
For good or evil weather.
He carried in his white cap
A long red feather.
He wore a long coat
Of the Reading-tawny kind,
And darned white hosen
With a blue patch behind.
So--one night--he shuffled past, in his buckled shoon.
We shall never see his face,
Twisted to that queer grimace,
Waiting in the wind and rain, till we called his tune;
Very whimsical and white,
Waiting on a blue Twelfth Night!
He is grown too proud at last--old blind Moone.
Yet, when May was at the door,
And Moone was wont to sing,
Many a maid and bachelor
Whirled into the ring:
Standing on a tilted wain
He played so sweet and loud
The Mayor forgot his golden chain
And jigged it with the crowd.
Old blind Moone, his fiddle scattered flowers along the street;
Into the dust of Brookfield Fair
Carried a shining primrose air,
Crooning like a poor mad maid, O, very low and sweet,
Drew us close, and held us bound,
Then--to the tune of _Pedlar's Pound_,
Caught us up, and whirled us round, a thousand frolic feet.
Master Shakespeare was his host.
The tribe of Benjamin
Used to call him Merlin's Ghost
At the _Mermaid Inn_.
He was only a crowder,
Fiddling at the door.
Death has made him prouder.
We shall not see him more.
Only--if you listen, please--through the master's themes,
You shall hear a wizard strain,
Blind and bright as wind and rain
Shaken out of willow-trees, and shot with elfin gleams.
_How should I your true love know?_
Scraps and snatches--even so!
That is old blind Moone again, fiddling in your dreams.
Once, when Will had called for sack
And bidden him up and play,
Old blind Moone, he turned his back,
Growled, and walked away,
Sailed into a thunder-cloud,
Snapped his fiddle-string,
And hobbled from _The Mermaid_
Sulky as a king.
Only from the darkness now, steals the strain we knew:
No one even knows his grave!
Only here and there a stave,
Out of all his hedge-row flock, be-drips the may with dew.
And I know not what wild bird
Carried us his parting word:--
_Master Shakespeare needn't take the crowder's fiddle, too._
Will has wealth and wealth to spare.
Give him back his own.
_At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone._
See his little lanthorn-spark.
Hear his ghostly tune,
Glimmering past you, in the dark,
Old blind Moone!
All the little crazy brooks, where love and sorrow run
Crowned with sedge and singing wild,
Like a sky-lark--or a child!--
Old blind Moone, he knew their springs, and played 'em every one;
Stood there, in the darkness, blind,
And sang them into Shakespeare's mind....
Old blind Moone of London, O now his songs are done,
The light upon his lost white face, they say it was the sun!
The light upon his poor old face, they say it was the sun!
[The end]
Alfred Noyes's poem: Blind Moone Of London
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