Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE DEER IN GREENWICH PARK, by VICTOR GUSTAVE PLARR


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE DEER IN GREENWICH PARK, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Pathetic in their rags, from far and near
Last Line: Bondman, or brute that dies?
Subject(s): Deer; London; Parks


Pathetic in their rags, from far and near,
The children of the slums o'erswarm the grass:
Pathetic in their grace the kinglike deer
Leap up to let them pass.

Where riot scares the gloom and fevers burn
These wizened babes were pent till morning light:
Slim shadows moving 'mong the moonlit fern
These shy deer strayed all night.

In the hot hours London's poor wastrels find
Their paradise in this brown London Park:
The lordlier brutes, in the scant shade reclin'd,
Pant for the hours of dark

When some dim instinct of primeval years
Thrills on a sudden through each dappled breast,
And with untamable mysterious fears
The herd is repossessed!

Then the branch'd horns are tossed: the nostrils fine
Respire the sleepy breath from London's heart,
And bucks, and does, and fawns, in spectral line,
Forth from their bracken start.

An antlered watchman stamps a shapely hoof—
Is that a tartaned Gael within the brake?
Did Luath bay below the heath-clad roof—
Doth Fingal's son awake?

Hath a harp wailed in Tara? Did a bough
Snap in Broceliande, where Merlin keeps
His drowsy magic vigil even now
In the oak-woods' sunlit deeps?

Was it a cry, borne from Caerluda town—
A spell the Stag of Ages understands?
Or voices of old rivers raving down
Through heathery Cymric lands?

Or—since the red stag by wild mountain streams
Is he whom such weird terrors most appal;
Since these be fallow deer, and yonder dreams
The dom'd Stuart Hospital,—

Was it the bugle, echoing as of yore
In some vast chase, enwrapt in lake-side mists?
Swept Herne the Hunter by, or score on score
Of silken Royalists?

Hunts captured Charles? Or hath Cromwellian shot
Laid some escaping war-spent gallant low
In the far ride where last year's leaf doth rot,
And, save the deer, none go?

Who knows what stirs them? Nay, can any guess
That which their beautiful clear eyes import
When, at high noon, about your hand they press,
Begging in timid sort,

Save haply the exile's doom, which is the same
Whether 'tis buried in the tragic eyes
Of king discrowned, or wanderer without name,
Bondman, or brute that dies?





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