Audley Court

Published 1842; among ‘English Idyls’. It was written autumn 1838 at Torquay (Mem. i 165), ‘partially suggested by Abbey Park at Torquay in the old time’ ( T.). In T.Nbk 26, it opens with a description of Francis’s arrival by boat; see below. There are two early drafts in the FitzGerald MS at Trinity (MS below). J. S. Hagen discusses T.’s revisions of ll. 73–88, using and reproducing 1842proofs with T.’s changes (Costerus n.s. iv, 1975, 39–49). In form and mood, the poem is based on Theocritus’s 7th Idyll, where Simichidas’s song (ll. 96–127) resembles Francis’s. Cp. the setting of The Princess with its picnic and songs, especially the swallow-song (iv). On T.s modernizing and anglicizing of Theocritus, see Turner (p. 82). Culler (p. 264) ‘wonders whether the title of the poem was not suggested by the well-known country house of Lord Braybrooke, Audley End, at Saffron Walden near Cambridge. In 1836, just two years before the poem was published [read written], Richard Lord Braybrooke published The History of Audley End … in which William Whewell and J. S. Henslow of Cambridge assisted.’ ‘The Bull, the Fleece are crammed, and not a room For love or money. Let us picnic there At Audley Court.’ I spoke, while Audley feast Hummed like a hive all round the narrow quay, To Francis, with a basket on his arm, To Francis just alighted from the boat, And breathing of the sea. ‘With all my heart,’ Said Francis. Then we shouldered through the swarm, And rounded by the stillness of the beach To where the bay runs up its latest horn. We left the dying ebb that faintly lipped The flat red granite; so by many a sweep The plashing paddlewheels and overhead The snoring funnel whizzed her silver steam. The plank was laid and breathing of the sea Came Francis with a basket in his hand — A dash of colour on his cheeks and nose Won from the wind: and up the hill we went Across the wake but all the causeway swarmed; The showman ranted: thrice as large as truth The black-barred tiger glared upon the poles, The quack was roaring nostrums: all the street Buzzed like a hive and over hollowed tubes Purselipt the swarthy piper moved his beard. ‘O come’ said Francis ‘I am dinned to death. The Bull, the Fleece are crammed and not a room For love of money. Come ’tis not so far. We two will picnic there at Oxley hall; See here’, and lifting up the basket lid He showed me lapt in cloth two pullets trusst With liver-wings and stowed with these a flask Of cyder from his father’s vats at home, Prime, which I knew: and even while he spoke We came on John the storyteller, John The talker, steering downward with a thumb In either armhole Of meadow smooth from aftermath we reached The griffin-guarded gates, and passed through all The pillared dusk of sounding sycamores, And crossed the garden to the gardener’s lodge, With all its casements bedded, and its walls And chimneys muffled in the leafy vine. There, on a slope of orchard, Francis laid A damask napkin wrought with horse and hound, Brought out a dusky loaf that smelt of home, And, half-cut-down, a pasty costly-made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied; last, with these, A flask of cider from his father’s vats, Prime, which I knew; and so we sat and eat And talked old matters over; who was dead, Who married, who was like to be, and how The races went, and who would rent the hall: Then touched upon the game, how scarce it was This season; glancing thence, discussed the farm, The four-field system, and the price of grain; And struck upon the corn-laws, where we split, And came again together on the king With heated faces; till he laughed aloud; And, while the blackbird on the pippin hung To hear him, clapt his hand in mine and sang — ‘Oh! who would fight and march and countermarch, Be shot for sixpence in a battle-field, And shovelled up into some bloody trench Where no one knows? but let me live my life. ‘Oh! who would cast and balance at a desk, Perched like a crow upon a three-legged stool, Till all his juice is dried, and all his joints Are full of chalk? but let me live my life. ‘Who’d serve the state? for if I carved my name Upon the cliffs that guard my native land, I might as well have traced it in the sands; The sea wastes all: but let me live my life. ‘Oh! who would love? I wooed a woman once, But she was sharper than an eastern wind, And all my heart turned from her, as a thorn Turns from the sea; but let me live my life.’ He sang his song, and I replied with mine: I found it in a volume, all of songs, Knocked down to me, when old Sir Robert’s pride, His books— the more the pity, so I said— Came to the hammer here in March— and this— I set the words, and added names I knew. ‘Sleep, Ellen Aubrey, sleep, and dream of me: Sleep, Ellen, folded in thy sister’s arm, And sleeping, haply dream her arm is mine. ‘Sleep, Ellen, folded in Emilia’s arm; Emilia, fairer than all else but thou, For thou art fairer than all else that is. ‘Sleep, breathing health and peace upon her breast: Sleep, breathing love and trust against her lip: I go tonight: I come tomorrow morn. ‘I go, but I return: I would I were The pilot of the darkness and the dream. Sleep, Ellen Aubrey, love, and dream of me.’ So sang we each to either, Francis Hale, The farmer’s son, who lived across the bay, My friend; and I, that having wherewithal, And in the fallow leisure of my life A rolling stone of here and everywhere, Did what I would; but ere the night we rose And sauntered home beneath a moon, that, just In crescent, dimly rained about the leaf Twilights of airy silver, till we reached The limit of the hills; and as we sank From rock to rock upon the glooming quay, The town was hushed beneath us: lower down The bay was oily calm; the harbour-buoy, Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm, With one green sparkle ever and anon Dipt by itself, and we were glad at heart.