________________________________________________
Title: Bjorn's Banquet
Author: Theophile Gautier [
More Titles by Gautier]
Bjorn, odd and lonely cenobite,
High on a barren rock's plateau,
Far out of time's and the world's sight,
Dwells in a castle none may know.
No modern thought may violate
His darkened and secluded hall.
Bjorn bolts with care his postern-gate,
And barricades his castle wall.
When others wait the rising sun,
He from his mouldering parapet
Still contemplates the valley dun,
Where he beheld the red sun set.
Securely doth the past enlock
His retrospective spirit lone.
The pendulum within his clock
Was broken centuries agone.
Waking the echoes wanders he
Beneath his feudal arches drear,
His ringing footsteps seemingly
Followed by other footsteps clear.
Nor priests nor friends with him make bold,
Nor burghers plain nor gentlemen;
But his ancestral portraits hold
A parley with him now and then.
And of a midnight, sparing him
The ennui of a lonely cup,
Bjorn, harbouring a gloomy whim,
Invites his ancestors to sup.
Forth stepping at the hour's grim stroke,
Come phantoms armed from foot to head.
Bjorn, quaking, to the solemn folk
Proffers with state the goblet red.
To seat itself each panoply
With joints that grumble in revolt
Maketh an angle with its knee,
That creaketh like a rusty bolt;
Till all at once the suit of mail,
Rude coffin of an absent bulk,
Cleaving the silence with a wail,
Falls in its chair, a clanking hulk.
Landgraves and burgraves, spare and stout,
Come down from heaven or up from hell,
The iron guests of many a bout,
Arc bound within the midnight spell.
Their blow-indented helmets bear
Heraldic beasts that bay and grin,
Athwart the shades the red lights glare
On crest and ancient lambrequin.
Each empty, open casque now seems
Like to the helms of heraldries,
Save for two strange and livid gleams
That issue forth in threatening wise.
Seated is each old combatant
In the vast hall, at Bjorn's behest,
And the uncertain shadows grant
A swarthy page to every guest.
The liquors in the candle-shine
Take on suspicious purples. All
The viands in their gravy's wine
Grow lurid and fantastical.
Sometimes a breastplate glitters bright,
A morion speeds its flashes wroth,
A rondelle from a hand of might
Drops heavily upon the cloth.
Heard are the softly flapping wings
Of unseen bats. The shimmer flicks
Upon the carven panellings
The banners of the heretics.
The stiffly bended gauntlets play
In the dull glow incarnadine,
And, creaking, to the helmets gray
Pour bumpers full of Rhenish wine;
Or with their daggers keen of blade
Carve boars upon the plates of gold.
The corridor's uncanny shade
Hath clamours vague and manifold.
The orgy waxes riotsome--
One could not hear God's voice for it--
For when a phantom sups from home,
What wrong if he carouse a bit?
Now every ghostly care they drown
With jokes and jeers and loud guffaws.
A wine-cascade is running down
Each rusty helmet's iron jaws.
The full and rounded hauberks bulge,
And to the neck the river mounts.
Their eyes with liquid fire effulge.
They're howling drunk, these valiant counts!
One through the salad idly wields
A foot; another scolds the sick.
Some like the lions on their shields
With gaping mouths the fancy trick.
In voice still hoarse from silence long
In the tomb's dampness and restraint,
Max playfully intones a song
Of thirteen hundred, crude and quaint.
Albrecht, of quarrelsome repute,
Stirs right and left a war intense,
And drubs about with fist and foot,
As once he drubbed the Saracens.
And heated Fritz his helmet doffs,
Not deeming he's a headless trunk.
Then down pell-mell mid roars and scoffs
Together roll the phantoms drunk.
Ah! 'T is a hideous battle-ground,
Where pots and weapons bang and scud,
Where every dead man through some wound
Doth vomit victuals up for blood.
And Bjorn observes them, sad of eye,
And haggard, while athwart the panes
The dawn comes creeping stealthily,
With blue, thin lights, and darkness wanes.
The prostrate mass of rusty brown
Pales like a torch in daylight's room,
Until the drunkest pours him down
At last the stirrup-cup of doom.
The cock crows loud. And with the day
Once more with haughty mien and bold,
Their revel-weary heads they lay
Upon their marble pillows cold.
[The end]
Theophile Gautier's poem: Bjorn's Banquet
________________________________________________
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
