Dover Road

Tonight I feel an aching melancholy. It is almost as if the elves are going back into the uttermost west and I shall not see them again. I sat in a wood-panelled room on the High Hill, with my kinsfolk. The red wine was deep with spiced oak, and so was the light. We ate, we talked, and I was homesick for the isles and the cold and the damp.

And behind it all, I realised that here too was part of the Family. In the things they said and the secret knowledge that they shared, the Family traits and the family traits shone clear. I felt at home, and yet I knew that I was not, and unlikely ever to go home. Part of me wanted to follow them across the seas, but they wanted me to stay and keep the flame burning.

And that great old masterful poem came to mind, that anchor and touchstone of the long, melancholy, faithless 19th century. You can see for yourself what significance has been attributed to it.

That poem has always filled me with wanderlust and discontent. I remember one evening, having just thrown the garbage out for the night, it came to mind. Before I could stop, I had walked to the boundary of the north and was looking at the narrow causeway to another land.

Why should I stay? I stayed in this country to the loss of my citizenship in the Far Place. I worked, I strove, I used my mind and wasted my body for the cause. I fought under the banner of the Wyvern, I wore the blue and red and gold, I was both hero and champion, and eventually, ronin. I watched as things lost their meaning and their shape.

And so, I leave you with Matthew Arnold, as he watches one form of thought take the meaning out of another.

=====

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.