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PUCK OF POOK'S HILL
RUDYARD KIPLING
CONTENTS
Weland's Sword
Puck's Song
A Tree Song
Young Men at the Manor
Sir Richard's Song
The Knights of the Joyous Venture
Harp Song of the Dane Women
Thorkild's Song
Old Men at Pevensey
The Runes on Weland's Sword
A Centurion of the Thirtieth
'Cities and Thrones and Powers'
A British-Roman Song
On the Great Wall
A Song to Mithras
The Winged Hats
A Pict Song
Hal o' the Draft
'Prophets have honour all over the Earth'
A Smugglers' Song
'Dymchurch Flit'
The Bee Boy's Song
A Three-Part Song
The Treasure and the Law
Song of the Fifth River
The Children's Song
WELAND'S SWORD
Puck's Song
See you the dimpled track that runs,
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip's fleet!
See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book.
See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was where the Saxons broke,
On the day that Harold died!
See you the windy levels spread
About the gates of Rye?
O that was where the Northmen fled,
When Alfred's ships came by!
See you our pastures wide and lone,
Where the red oxen browse?
O there was a City thronged and known,
Ere London boasted a house!
And see you, after rain, the trace
Of mound and ditch and wall?
O that was a Legion's camping-place,
When Caesar sailed from Gaul!
And see you marks that show and fade,
Like shadows on the Downs?
O they are the lines the Flint Men made,
To guard their wondrous towns!
Trackway and Camp and City lost,
Salt Marsh where now is corn;
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
And so was England born!
She is not any common Earth,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare.
The children were at the Theatre, acting to Three Cows as
much as they could remember of Midsummer Night's
Dream. Their father had made them a small play out of the
big Shakespeare one, and they had rehearsed it with him
and with their mother till they could say it by heart. They
began when Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the
bushes with a donkey's head on his shoulders, and finds
Titania, Queen of the Fairies, asleep. Then they skipped
to the part where Bottom asks three little fairies to scratch
his head and bring him honey, and they ended where he
falls asleep in Titania's arms. Dan was Puck and Nick
Bottom, as well as all three Fairies. He wore a pointy-
cloth cap for Puck, and a paper donkey's head out
of a Christmas cracker - but it tore if you were not careful
- for Bottom. Una was Titania, with a wreath of
columbines and a foxglove wand.
The Theatre lay in a meadow called the Long Slip. A
little mill-stream, carrying water to a mill two or three
fields away, bent round one corner of it, and in the
middle of the bend lay a large old Fairy Ring of darkened
grass, which was the stage. The millstream banks, overgrown
with willow, hazel, and guelder-rose, made convenient
places to wait in till your turn came; and a
grown-up who had seen it said that Shakespeare himself
could not have imagined a more suitable setting for his
play. They were not, of course, allowed to act on
Midsummer Night itself, but they went down after tea on
Midsummer Eve, when the shadows were growing, and
they took their supper - hard-boiled eggs, Bath Oliver
biscuits, and salt in an envelope - with them. Three Cows
had been milked and were grazing steadily with a tearing
noise that one could hear all down the meadow; and the
noise of the Mill at work sounded like bare feet running
on hard ground. A cuckoo sat on a gate-post singing his
broken June tune, 'cuckoo-cuck', while a busy kingfisher
crossed from the mill-stream, to the brook which ran on
the other side of the meadow. Everything else was a sort
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