Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE CHANGELING, by MARGARET LOUISA WOODS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE CHANGELING, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: When did the changeling enter in?
Last Line: Came back, and I did not remember.
Alternate Author Name(s): Woods, Mrs. Margaret Louisa Bradley
Subject(s): Babies; Birth; Child Custody; Mothers; Infants; Child Birth; Midwifery


WHEN did the Changeling enter in?
How did the Devil set him a gin
Where the little soul lay like a rabbit,
Faint and still for a fiend to grab it?
I know not.

Where was the fount of our dishonour?
Was it a father's buried sin?
Brought his mother a curse upon her?
I trow not.

So pretty,
Body and soul, the child began.
He carolled and kissed and laughed and ran,
A glad creature of Earth and Heaven,
And the knowledge of love and the secret of pity,
That need our learning,
God to him at his birth had given.

One remembers
Trifles indeed—the backward-turning
Way he would smile from the field at play.
Sometimes the Thing that sits by the embers
Smiles at me—devil!—the selfsame way.
If only early enough one had guessed,
Known, suspected, watched him at rest,
Noted the Master's sign and fashion,
And unbefooled by the heart's compassion,
Undeterred by form and feature,
Caught the creature,
Tried by the test of water and fire,
Pierced and pinioned with silver wire,
Circled with signs that could control,
Battered with spells that tame and torture
The demon nature,
Till he writhed in his shape, a fiend confest,
And vanished—
Then had come back the poor soul banished,
Then had come back the little soul.

But now there is nothing to do or to say.
Will no one grip him and tear him away,
The Thing of Blood that gnaws at my breast?

Perhaps he called me and I was dumb.
Unconcerned I sat and heard
Little things,
Ivy tendrils, a bird's wings,
A frightened bird—
Or faint hands at the window-pane?
And now he will never come again,
The little soul. He is quite lost.

I have summoned him back with incantations
Of heart-deep sobs and whispering cries
Of anguished love and travail of prayer.
Nothing has answered my despair
But long sighs
Of pitiful wind in the fir-plantations.
Poor little soul! He cannot come.

Perchance on a night when trees were tost
The Changeling rode with his cavalcade
Among the clouds, that were tossing too,
And made the little soul afraid.
They hunted him madly, the howling crew,
Into the Limbo of the lost,
Into the Limbo of the others
Who wander crying and calling their mothers.

Now I know
The creatures that come to harry and raid,
How they ride in the airy regions,
Dance their rounds on meadow and moor,
Gallop under the earth in legions,
Hunt and holloa and run their races
Over tombs in burial-places.

In the common roads where people go,
Masked and mingled with human traces,
I have marked, I who know,
In the common dust a devil's spoor.

To somebody's gate
A Thing is footing it, cares not much
Whether he creep through an Emperor's portal

And steal the fate
Of a Prince, or into a poor man's hutch—
For the grief will be everywhere as great
And he'll everywhere spread the smirch of sin—
So long as a taste of our blood he may win,
So long as he may become a mortal.

I beseech you,
Prince and poor man, to watch the gate.
The heart is poisoned where he has fed,
The house is ruined that lets him in.
Yet I know I shall never teach you.
With the voice of the dear and the eyes of the dead
He will come to the door and you'll let him in.

If I could forget
Only that ever I had a child,
If only upon some mirk midnight,
When he stands at the door, all wet and wild,
With his owl's feather and dripping hair,
I could lie warm and not care,
I should rid myself of this Changeling yet.

I carried my woe to the Wise Man yonder.
"You sell forgetfulness, they say.
How much to pay
To forget a son who is my sorrow?"

The Wise Man began to ponder.
"Charms have I, many a one,
To make a woman forget her lover,
A man his wife or a fortune fled,
To make the day forget the morrow,
The doer forget the deed he has done,
But a mighty spell must I borrow
To make a woman forget her son.

For this I will take a royal fee.
Your house," said he,
"The storied hangings richly cover,
On your banquet table there were six
Golden branched candlesticks,
And of noble dishes you had a score.
The crown you wore
I remember, the sparkling crown.
All of these,
Madam, you shall pay me down.
Also the day I give you ease
Of golden guineas you pay a hundred."

Laughing I left the Wise Man's door.
Has he found such things where a Changeling sits?
The home is darkened from roof to floor,
The house is naked and ravaged and plundered
Where a Changeling sits
On the hearthstone, warming his shivering fits.

He sits at his ease, for he knows well
He can keep his post.
He has left me nothing to pay the cost
Of snatching my heart from his private Hell.

Yet when all is done and told,
I am glad the Wise Man in the city
Had no pity
For me, and for him I had no gold.

Because if I did not remember him,
My little child—Ah! what should we have,
He and I? Not even a grave
With a name of his own by the river's brim.
Because if among the poppies gay
On the hill-side, now my eyes are dim,
I could not fancy a child at play,
And if I should pass by the pool in the quarry
And never see him, a darling ghost,
Sailing a boat there, I should be sorry—
If in the firelit, lone December
I never heard him come scampering post
Haste down the stair—if the soul that is lost
Came back, and I did not remember.





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