Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
England: Vols. I–IV. 1876–79.
The Cell
By Robert Stephen Hawker (18031875)H
The thrilling voice of prayer;
A seraph, from his cloudy bower,
Might lean to listen there.
To that gray fane have given
Hues that might win an angel’s gaze,
Mid scenery of heaven.
With footsteps firm and free;
Around, the mountains guard the deep;
Beneath, the wide, wide sea.
Like vessels on the shore,
Inverted, when the fisher-band
Might tread their planks no more.
Lest faithless hearts forget
The men that braved the ancient storm
And hauled the early net.
Still weaves the chancel screen;
And tombs, with many a broken rhyme,
Suit well this simple scene.
The womb of mystic birth;
An altar where, in angels’ sight,
Their Lord descends to earth.
Here breathes the soul of prayer;
The awful church, so hushed, so calm,—
Ah! surely God is there.
No theme of former men?
A shape to rise at fancy’s call,
And sink in graves again?
With whispered words they tell,
How once the monk with name unknown
Prepared that silent cell.
With vows long breathed in vain:
Those arches heard, at dead of night,
The lash, the shriek, the pain,
The sob, the bursting sigh:
Till woke with agony of years
The exceeding bitter cry.
E’en though in anguish nursed,—
Few think what human hearts can bear,
Before their sinews burst.
The hour of freedom came:
In that dim niche the stranger lay,
A cold and silent frame.
What guilt was rankling there,
We know not,—time may not unroll
The page of his despair.
A cross hath marked the stone:
Pray ye, his soul in death hath found
The peace to life unknown.
Take heed lest ye too fall;
A day may mar the rest, that years
Shall seek but not recall.
Or shame in cells is screened;
For Thought, the demon, will be there,
And Memory, the fiend.
Breathe it in hall and bower,
Till reckless hearts grow hushed to hear
The Monk of Hartland Tower.