II.1 (Strophe)

Weave the warp, and weave the woof,
The winding-sheet of Edward’s race.
Give ample room, and verge enough
The characters of hell to trace.
Mark the year, and mark the night,
When Severn shall re-eccho with affright
The shrieks of death, thro’ Berkley’s roofs that ring,
Shrieks of an agonizing King!
She-Wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,
That tear’st the bowels of thy mangled Mate,
From thee be born, who o’er thy country hangs
The scourge of Heav’n. What Terrors round him wait!
Amazement in his van, with Flight combined,
And Sorrow’s faded form, and Solitude behind.

II.2 (Antistrophe)

Mighty Victor, mighty Lord,
Low on his funeral couch he lies!
No pitying heart, no eye, afford
A tear to grace his obsequies.
Is the sable Warriour fled?
Thy son is gone. He rests among the Dead.
The Swarm, that in thy noon-tide beam were born?
Gone to salute the rising Morn.
Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows,
While proudly riding o’er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded Vessel goes;
Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind’s sway,
That, hush’d in grim repose, expects his evening-prey.

II.3 (Epode)

Fill high the sparkling bowl,
The rich repast prepare,
Reft of a crown, he yet may share the feast:
Close by the regal chair
Fell Thirst and Famine scowl
A baleful smile upon their baffled Guest.
Heard ye the din of battle bray,
Lance to lance, and horse to horse?
Long Years of havock urge their destined course,
And thro’ the kindred squadrons mow their way.
Ye Towers of Julius, London’s lasting shame,
With many a foul and midnight murther fed,
Revere his Consort’s faith, his Father’s fame,
And spare the meek Usurper’s holy head.
Above, below, the rose of snow,
Twined with her blushing foe, we spread:
The bristled Boar in infant-gore
Wallows beneath the thorny shade.
Now, Brothers, bending o’er th’accursed loom
Stamp we our vengeance deep, and ratify his doom.

III.1 (Strophe)

Edward, lo! to sudden fate
(Weave we the woof. The thread is spun)
Half of thy heart we consecrate.
(The web is wove. The work is done.)

This week’s poem is Thomas Gray’s The Bard. A Pindaric Ode, represented by the extract sometimes informally dubbed “the chorus of bards”. The chorus occupies the second section (strophe, antistrophe and epode) of the three-part ode, and continues for four lines into the first strophe of the third and last section. In the original, all the lines delivered by the fate-predicting trio of bards are prefaced by double inverted commas. Single commas elsewhere denote the speech of the solitary Bard (unnamed) whose magnificent curse from the heights of Mount Snowdon begins the poem: “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!” The whole Ode must be read to experience Gray’s grandly detailed imitation of the Pindaric design, his bold and economical narrative organisation, and wonderful variety of pace and rhythm. For help with the large cast of historical characters, the Thomas Gray Archive provides a host of textual notes and explanations, beside the poet’s own reluctantly added, but extremely useful, set of footnotes. If you want to know the identity of the “bristled boar” or the name of the woman who was half of Edward’s heart, this is where to click.

Gray was a formidable classical scholar whose restless intellect was increasingly drawn, during the 1750s, towards researching the histories and poetries of northern Europe. He didn’t learn Welsh, but his biographer, RW Ketton-Cremer, observes that several pages of his second Commonplace Book (there were three, still extant) “are headed Cambri and devoted to Welsh prosody and notes on kindred subjects.” Listen for the clustered chimes of Cynghannedd, particularly audible in the rhyme-groups “swarm/ born/ morn/ morn,” and “below/ rose, snow/ foe”. A further ingredient should be added to the melting pot of Gray’s imagination: his researches into Old Norse poetry. The fate-weaving bards are clearly related to the Valkyries who would appear in his 1761 translation, The Fatal Sisters.

Gray’s publishers set the scene for The Bard: “The following Ode is founded on a Tradition current in Wales, that EDWARD the First, when he compleated the conquest of that country, ordered all the Bards, that fell into his hands, to be put to death.” The execution, by hanging, occurred in 1284 according to Gray’s source , Carte’s History of England. The story is not authenticated: neither, incidentally, is the murder of Edward II in Berkeley Castle, recounted by Gray so sparingly but piercingly in the opening strophe above. But, while The Bard unfurls British history as a highly coloured and stylised banner of tragedy and travesty, excoriation and celebration, Gray strove for historical and even literary-critical accuracy. An attack of writer’s block, in the autumn of 1755, which almost prevented his finishing the poem at all, probably originated from this scrupulousness. He had envisaged a triumphant final epode in which the Bard prophesied redemption through the virtue and valour celebrated by his (English) poetic descendants. Unfortunately, on deeper pondering, Gray found that even Shakespeare fell short of such an ideal (he’d given us the character of Falstaff, after all!).

TS Eliot, in connection with the Metaphysical poets, noted that the difference between the poet and the ordinary mortal was that, for the former, activities as diverse as reading Spinoza and falling in love could connect imaginatively. In a wider sense than Eliot intended, this seems to point to an important source of creative originality. It clearly applies to Gray’s thought processes. He wasn’t the first English poet to imitate Pindar’s Odes, of course, but he wove them into a new fabric of materials never before combined in English verse.

The scene-setting (and, more fancifully, the rugged stanza-shape) might also remind us of Gray’s first awed experience of a mountain landscape (not Welsh but Alpine) recorded on his youthful Grand Tour. And, of course, we must add music to the mix. Gray had more or less given up on The Bard when the blind harper, John Parry, chanced to visit Cambridge. His performance so thrilled Gray that, as he declared in a letter to his friend the Rev William Mason, it had “set all this learned body a’dancing” and “put Odicle in motion again”. Through Parry’s harp, Gray had heard Pindar’s lyre, and recovered his sense of the Ode not as a static and page-bound heirloom, but as the all-singing and often-dancing live theatre piece it had been in antiquity. So, early in 1757, he returned to and completed the poem, envisaging the triumphal restoration of Arthur’s lineage via the Tudor throne, but evoking his poetic heirs, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, with perhaps a little less of the grandiloquence originally planned.

Gray had fancied himself “quite the Bard” in composing this, the second of his two great Pindaric Odes. Whatever self-doubts and low moods he endured after their mixed reception, he must have known that he had earned his laurels, and was securely “among the English poets”. Although the Odes never achieved the popularity of the Elegy, he was subsequently offered the poetry laureateship: he turned it down, declaring he would rather be employed “as pin-maker to the Palace”.

In retrospect, Gray’s poetry may have marked a beginning – that of the Romantic movement. But he would have been justified, in 1757, in noting, with quiet regret and, one hopes, a modicum of satisfaction, “The web is wove, the work is done.”