“When high the sun in noonday glory–rides, / Where willows keep the lake’s green margin cool, / The speckled trout amid their shadow–hides, / And dragonflies haunt every shaded pool.”–Thomas S. Collier
This writing tonight features excerpts from a very long poem by William Morris who lived between 1834 and 1896. John Matthews Manly in his notes concerning the poetry of Morris, from his collection English Prose and Poetry published by Ginn and Company, New York, back at the turn of the last century, tells us that his “…whole interest as a young man lay apparently in medieval romance.” Nowhere is that more apparent than in his work The Lady of The Land, which is his own take on the Sir John Mandeville story, The Voyage and Travaile Of Sir John Maundeville. A brief summary of the original story is necessary to appreciate the poetic scenes that I will feature in my blog tonight.
A group of seafarers land on a seemingly uninhabited island called Lango. It is while there that one of them wanders away from the rest and discovers the true nature of this strange place. He enters the grounds of a castle hidden deep in the forest. The courtyard of the castle is overgrown with plant life, choked with weeds and statues lay on their sides destroyed. He finds access through a long corridor into an underground chamber…
“He moved not for awhile, but looking round / He wondered much to see the place so fair, / Because, unlike the castle above ground, / No pillagers or wrecker had been there; / It seemed that time had passed on other-where, / Nor laid a finger on this hidden place, / Rich with the wealth of some forgotten race.”
He is soon to discover that time really hasn’t forgotten the place. He also discovers that he is not alone in this vast room. He discovers a beautiful maiden who is something more than what she seems…
“In one quick glance these things his eyes did see, / But speedily they turned round to behold / Another sight, for throned on ivory / There sat a woman, whose wet tresses rolled / On to the floor in waves of gleaming gold,…”
“In her right hand, upon her bosom laid, / She held a golden comb, a mirror weighed / Her left hand down, aback her fair head lay / Dreaming awake of some long vanished day.”
He first sees her combing her hair in front of a mirror in a room filled with magnificent riches. The scene, in a sense, reminds me of the dragon Smaug in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, for dragons were supposed to have their lairs in a place where they could guard their treasure. But this creature was not a dragon.. She was a beautiful woman…
“Her eyes were shut, but she seemed not to sleep, / Her lips were murmuring things unheard and low, / Or sometimes twitched as though she needs must weep / Though from her eyes the tears refused to flow, / And oft with heavenly red her cheek did glow, / As if remembrance of some half-sweet shame / Across the web of many memories came.
“There stood the man, scarce daring to draw breath / For fear the lovely sight should fade away; / Forgetting heaven, forgetting life and death, / Trembling for fear lest something he should say / Unwitting, lest some sob should yet betray / His presence there, for his eager eyes / Already did the tears begin to rise.
“But as he gazed, she moved, and with a sigh / Bent forward, dropping down her golden head; / ‘Alas, alas! Another day gone by, / Another day and no soul come,’ she said; / ‘Another year, and still I am not dead!’ / And with that word once more her head she raised. / And on the trembling man with great eyes gazed.”
He tells her about his journey and also says that, if given the chance, he would be her suitor. She asks if he is a knight, to which he responds that he is not. She tells him to go back to his fellow travelers, make himself a knight, and then return to her the next day. She would then meet him in front of the chamber. He is to approach her, and bestow a kiss upon her, even though she would appear to him in the guise of a dragon…
The maiden in the chamber tells the seafarer why she has been condemned to this lonely place. She was left there by the goddess Diana who cast a spell over her. She was only twenty years of age when her father, a greedy landowner, made a pact with the goddess, a pact-in hindsight-that seems more a deal with the devil. She was to remain in this temple as its guardian. But in time, a rescuer arrived. She felt great affection for this man, and begins to remember…
“Ah! well do I remember all that night, / When through the window shone the orb of June, / And by the bed flickered the taper’s light, / Whereby I trembled, gazing at the moon: / Ah me! the meeting that we had, when soon / Into his strong, well-trusted arms I fell, / And many a sorrow we began to tell…”
Their reverie is interrupted by a shadow. They turn to find the goddess in the room with them.
“And on the high white brow, a deadly frown / Bent upon us, who stood scarce drawing breath, …”
Her anger is such that she casts a spell on her guardian and deals a harsh blow to her would-be suitor.
“‘No word at all the dreadful goddess said, / But soon across my feet my lover lay, / And well indeed I knew that he was dead; / For in a while the image turned away, / And without words my doom I understood, / And felt horror change my human blood.
“‘And there I fell, and on the floor I lay / By the dead man, till daylight came on me, / And not a word thenceforward could I say / For three years; till grief and misery, / The lingering pest, [plague] the cruel enemy, / My father and his folk were dead and gone, / And in this castle I was left alone:
“‘And then the doom foreseen upon me fell, / For Queen Diana did my body change / Into a fork-tongued dragon, flesh and fell, / And through the island nightly do I range, /… When in the middle of the moonlit night / The sleepy mariner I do affright.
“‘But all day long upon this gold I lie / Within this place, where never a mason’s hand / Smote trowel on the marble noisily; / Drowsy I lie, no folk at my command, / Who once was called the Lady of the Land; / Who might have bought a kingdom with a kiss, / Yea, half the world with such a sight as this.’”
She was transformed into a hideous dragon. That’s why the castle grounds have been ransacked. A statue of the goddess Diana was all but destroyed in one of her rages. She will do no harm to anyone who should happen to come upon this place, unless he tries to steal the riches she guards. But, as is the case in many legends of old, a kiss from a knight can forever banish the spell once and for all. But he must kiss her only when she assumes the form of the hideous creature. After the transformation, she will once again be mortal, but her time on earth may be painfully short.
The next day, he returns a knight, and as he approaches the chamber, he sees her in the shape of a dragon, the vile creature that the goddess Diana had changed her into. He is so frightened by the sight that he immediately casts aside any courage he may have mustered to break the spell.
“Shutting his eyes, and turned and from the place / Ran swiftly, with a white and ghastly face.
“But little things rough stones and tree-trunks seemed, / And if he fell, he rose and ran on still; / No more he felt his hurts than if he dreamed, / He made no stay for the valley or steep hill, / Heedless he dashed through many a foaming rill, / Until he came unto the ship at last / And with no word into the deep hold passed.
“Meanwhile, the dragon, seeing him clean gone, / Followed him not, but crying horribly, / Caught up within her jaws a block of stone / And ground it into powder, then turned she, / With cries that folk could hear far out at sea, / And reached the treasure set apart of old, / To brood above the hidden heaps of gold.”
No man who entered her lair, with intentions to break the wicked spell with a kiss, ever survived her hideousness. Such was the case with this seafarer, for he died after three days of lunacy and wild ravings.
She was seen over the ensuing years by passing sailors in the ripples of the bay, or heard terrorizing the beasts who lived in the forests around her castle, a temple to the goddess Diana.
If you’ve been watching the hit ABC series, Lost, then you know that the plane-crash survivors occasionally come upon a column of black smoke that has the voice of a dragon. It seems to be a guard of some sort to keep them crossing certain boundaries. I imagine the look of fear on their faces bears little resemblance to the fear described by those who happened upon the lonely guardian on the lost isle of Lango.
There can be no happy ending to a tale like The Lady of The Land. By the end of the poem we are led to believe that she is still haunting the isle of Lango to this day, still waiting for the kiss of one brave knight.
One of the pewter figurines in the Myth And Magic collection is called The Dragon’s Kiss. For a time I collected these incredible creations that feature a dragon in most settings. There is also an Austrian crystal incorporated into each setting. In The Dragon’s Kiss, a maiden is being kissed by a dragon. She is holding one of these Austrian crystals in her left hand, while the dragon’s long tail is loosely coiled around her on the ground. I’ve often wondered if the idea for that aspect of the collection came from this old story and poem.
April 23rd is St. George’s Day, the patron saint of England, and dragon-slayer.
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Don Jackson
