The Lay of The Last Minstrel E-Book

Walter Scott

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 109

Beschreibung

One of Sir Walter Scott's most celebrated and accessible works, The Lay of the Last Minstrel was a huge publishing phenomenon when it first appeared in 1802, with six editions appearing in three years years and sales of 27,000 in a decade. Its impact on Border tourism was vast, as countless people, moved by Scott's evocative description of the moonlit Melrose Abbey, flocked to the area. Painters too were inspired by the scene, and such was its fame that even prime minister William Pit recited sections from it in front of dinner guests. Told by an ageing minstrel to Ann, Duchess of Buccleuch in return for hospitality at Newark Castle, The Lay of the Last Minstrel is a powerful and dramatic tale concerning love, murder and kidnapping. A strong supernatural element lies at its heart, making it one of the most significant gothic tales ever written. This edition features an introduction by the Duke of Buccleuch.

Leseprobe

THE

LAY

OF

THE LAST MINSTREL

A POEM IN SIX CANTOS

This eBook edition published in 2013 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

This edition taken from the eighth edition (1808) printed for

Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, London and

A. Constable and Co., Edinburgh

Introduction copyright © the Duke of Buccleuch 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-78027-185-9

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-722-6

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION TO THE BOWHILL EDITION

THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL CANTO FIRST

Introduction

The Lay of The Last Minstrel Canto First

The Lay of The Last Minstrel Canto Second

The Lay of The Last Minstrel Canto Third

The Lay of The Last Minstrel Canto Fourth

The Lay of The Last Minstrel Canto Fifth

The Lay of The Last Minstrel Canto Sixth

INTRODUCTION

TO THE

BOWHILL EDITION

BY

THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH

The much loved Dame Jean Maxwell Scott, the last of Sir Walter Scott's direct descendants to live at Abbotsford, was my wife's godmother. Shortly after we were married some thirty years ago she gave her a special copy of The Lay of the Last Minstrel which came, as she wrote, from the author's great-great-great-granddaughter to the new Countess of Dalkeith, successor to the title once held by Scott's friend and enthusiastic muse, Harriet. Already on its eighth print run in 1808, it is this copy which Birlinn has faithfully transcribed as the basis for the new Bowhill edition of The Lay of the Last Minstrel.

That the first edition had appeared just three years before in January 1805 was testament to the phenomenal success of Scott's first long narrative poem. His Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, the compendium of the mainly oral verse of the region, had earned him wide respect. The Lay paved the path to his financial fortune. Sales exceeded 18,000 in five years, an astonishing figure at the time and although the bargain he struck with his publishers was so unbalanced that they embarrassedly made it up to him with the purchase of a fine horse, he was able to command an advance of 1,000 guineas (£1,050) for his next work, Marmion.

The Minstrel's tale is set in the sixteenth century but Scott has him tell it at the end of the seventeenth century on a stormy night in gaunt Newark tower in the Yarrow valley to the widowed Anna, Duchess of Buccleuch, who ‘though born in such a high degree . . . had wept o'er Monmouth's bloody tomb’. Place and family names of the Scottish and English borders abound. Centred on Branxholme, the old Scott family fortress near Hawick, it is a complex tale of romance and revenge, of noble motives and base methods including sorcery, petty feuding and high politics. Presiding over events is an earlier Buccleuch widow, in the poem just called the Ladye, whose husband, Sir Walter, had fallen in a bitter feud with, amongst others, a Lord Cranstoun, who unfortunately has become the great love of her daughter, Lady Margaret. In her determination to thwart the romance, the old lady deploys the loyal and chivalrous Sir William of Deloraine, whose despatch to retrieve the magic book of wizard Michael Scott from his tomb in Melrose Abbey at dead of night provides some of the poem's most vivid images. A series of disasters, including loss of the book and kidnapping of the young Buccleuch heir, follows, mainly due to the intervention of the Goblin Page, a magically endowed and malicious dwarf figure attached to Cranstoun. Even Scott acknowledged later that he might be ‘an excrescence’, but the character had been urged on him by Harriet, Countess of Dalkeith – his ‘lovely chieftainess . . . who has more of the angel in face and temper than anyone alive’ – who was a powerful influence in encouraging him to write the poem. Eventually after great forces have been deployed, an English army led by Lords Dacre and Howard, and all the Border clans aroused, it climaxes in mortal combat between Cranstoun disguised as Deloraine and the English champion, Sir Richard Musgrave, who, to general lamenting, ends up as the only real casualty of all six cantos.

Yet for all the often fantastical complexities the poem is a galloping tale. Completed, Scott later claimed, ‘about the rate of a canto a week’, he described it to a friend as ‘a light horseman sort of stanza’. Its irregular metre was strikingly original to contemporary readers as well as providing room for manoeuvre for the writer. Even at the time there was some controversy in literary circles as to the extent Scott had been inspired by having heard a recitation of Coleridge's ‘Christabel’, but Coleridge himself was generous and it was as much the scope of the narrative tale that enthralled readers as the verse. That was notwithstanding the prominence given to Scott's (and this writer's) own family and its historic glory amongst the Border clans in what John Sutherland vividly describes as ‘less a poem than a totem pole in verse’.

The Lay's popularity rested not just on the number of copies shifted but also on a spread of critical enthusiasm, starting with Wordsworth who wrote that ‘the novelty of the manners, the clear picturesque descriptions, and the easy glowing energy of much of the verse, greatly delight me’. Its appeal spanned the political divide, admired as much by Charles James Fox as by William Pitt, the Prime Minister, who described it as the sort of thing ‘which I might have expected in painting but could never have fancied capable of being given in poetry’.

I hope that with this publication its appeal might once again span the centuries. There are sections, as happens with Scott, which even the most devoted reader will skip by. There are lines – ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead’ or ‘O Caledonia! stern and wild’ – that are almost too familiar. But overall it is a tale of wonderful drama, vividly told, full of great descriptive poetry – ‘the gay beams of lightsome day/Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey’ of Melrose Abbey – and above all passages of beauty, true love is ‘the secret sympathy, The silver link, the silken tie/Which heart to heart, and mind to mind, In body and in soul can bind’. Beneath all the hurly burly and fun Scott's humanity, the foundation of all his writing, is there, and it is timeless.

Richard Buccleuch

THE

LAY

OF

THE LAST MINSTREL

A POEM;

THE EIGHTH EDITION.

WITH

BALLADS AND LYRICAL PIECES.

BY

WALTER SCOTT, ESQ.

Dum relego, scripsisse pudet, quia plurima cerno,Me quoque, qui feci judice, digna Uni.

LONDON :

PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, HURST, REES, AND ORME,PATERNOSTER-ROW, AND A. CONSTABLE AND CO. EDINBURG;

BY JAMES BALLANTYNE AND CO. EDINBURGH.

1808.

THE

LAY

OF

THE LAST MINSTREL

CANTO FIRST

INTRODUCTION

THE way was long, the wind was cold,

The Minstrel was infirm and old;

His withered cheek, and tresses gray,

Seemed to have known a better day;

The harp, his sole remaining joy,

Was carried by an orphan boy;

The last of all the bards was he,

Who sung of Border chivalry.

For, well-a-day! their date was fled,

His tuneful brethren all were dead;

And he, neglected and oppressed,

Wished to be with them, and at rest.

No more, on prancing palfrey borne,

He carolled, light as lark at morn;

No longer courted and caressed,

High placed in hall, a welcome guest,

He poured to lord and lady gay,

The unpremeditated lay:

Old times were changed, old manners gone;

A stranger filled the Stuart's throne;

The bigots of the iron time

Had called his harmless art a crime.

A wandering Harper, scorned and poor,

He begged his bread from door to door;

And tuned, to please a peasant's ear,

The harp, a king had loved to hear.

He passed where Newark's stately tower

Looks out from Yarrow's birchen bower:

The Minstrel gazed with wishful eye—

No humbler resting-place was nigh.

With hesitating step, at last,

The embattled portal-arch he passed,

Whose ponderous grate and massy bar

Had oft rolled back the tide of war,

But never closed the iron door

Against the desolate and poor.

The Duchess * marked his weary pace,

His timid mien, and reverend face,

And bade her page the menials tell,

That they should tend the old man well:

For she had known adversity,

Though born in such a high degree;

In pride of power, in beauty's bloom,

Had wept o'er Monmouth's bloody tomb!

When kindness had his wants supplied,

And the old man was gratified,

Began to rise his minstrel pride:

And he began to talk anon,

Of good Earl Francis, * dead and gone,

And of Earl Walter, † rest him God;

A braver ne'er to battle rode:

And how full many a tale he knew,

Of the old warriors of Buccleuch;

And, would the noble Duchess deign

To listen to an old man's strain,

Though stiff his hand, his voice though weak,

He thought even yet, the sooth to speak,

That, if she loved the harp to hear,

He could make music to her ear.

The humble boon was soon obtained;

The Aged Minstrel audience gained.

But, when he reached the room of state,

Where she, with all her ladies, sate,

Perchance he wished his boon denied;

For, when to tune his harp he tried,

His trembling hand had lost the ease,

Which marks security to please;

And scenes, long past, of joy and pain,

Came wildering o'er his aged brain—

He tried to tune his harp in vain.

The pitying Duchess praised its chime,

And gave him heart, and gave him time,

Till every string's according glee

Was blended into harmony.

And then, he said, he would full fain

He could recal an ancient strain,

He never thought to sing again.

It was not framed for village churles,

But for high dames and mighty earls:

He had played it to King Charles the Good,

When he kept court in Holyrood;

And much he wished, yet feared, to try

The long-forgotten melody.

Amid the strings his fingers strayed,

And an uncertain warbling made,

And oft he shook his hoary head.

But when he caught the measure wild,

The old man raised his face, and smiled;

And lightened up his faded eye

With all a poet's extacy!

In varying cadence, soft or strong,

He swept the sounding chords along:

The present scene, the future lot,

His toils, his wants, were all forgot;

Cold diffidence, and age's frost,

In the full tide of song were lost;

Each blank, in faithless memory void,

The poet's glowing thought supplied;

And, while his harp responsive rung,

’Twas thus the LATEST MINSTREL sung.

* Anne, Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth, representative of the ancient Lords of Buccleuch, and widow of the unfortunate James, Duke of Monmouth, who was beheaded in 1685.

* Francis Scot, Earl of Buccleuch, father of the Duchess.

† Walter, Earl of Buccleuch, grandfather of the Duchess, and a celebrated warrior.

THE

LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL

CANTO FIRST

I

THE feast was over in Branksome tower,

And the Ladye had gone to her secret bower;

Her bower, that was guarded by word and by spell,

Deadly to hear, and deadly to tell—

Jesu Maria, shield us well!

No living wight, save the Ladye alone,

Had dared to cross the threshold stone.

II

The tables were drawn, it was idlesse all;

Knight, and page, and household squire,

Loitered through the lofty hall,

Or crowded round the ample fire:

The stag-hounds, weary with the chace,

Lay stretched upon the rushy floor,

And urged, in dreams, the forest race,

From Teviot-stone to Eskdale-moor.

III

Nine-and-twenty knights of fame

Hung their shields in Branksome Hall;

Nine-and-twenty squires of name

Brought them their steeds from bower to stall;

Nine-and-twenty yeomen tall

Waited, duteous, on them all:

They were all knights of mettle true,

Kinsmen to the bold Buccleuch.

IV

Ten of them were sheathed in steel,

With belted sword, and spur on heel:

They quitted not their harness bright,

Neither by day, nor yet by night:

They lay down to rest

With corslet laced,

Pillowed on buckler cold and hard;

They carved at the meal

With gloves of steel,

And they drank the red wine through the helmet barred.

V

Ten squires, ten yeomen, mail-clad men,

Waited the beck of the warders ten;

Thirty steeds, both fleet and wight,

Stood saddled in stable day and night,

Barbed with frontlet of steel, I trow,

And with Jedwood-axe at saddle-bow;

A hundred more fed free in stall:—

Such was the custom of Branksome Hall.

VI

Why do these steeds stand ready dight?

Why watch these warriors, armed, by night?—

They watch, to hear the blood-hound baying;