THE LAMENT OF THE DEAD KNIGHT.

    I hear my dear Love
    Crying in the North,
While all the ice-floes lay ’twixt me and her,
And frozen by her tears I could not stir
    Nor reach my dear Love
Crying in the North.
    I hear my dear Love
    Crying in the East,
Around her lay long leagues of desert land,
And I lay buried underneath the sand,
    And could not touch her
    Crying in the East.
    I heard my dear Love
    Crying in the South,
The flowers grew so thick about her feet,
Blinding me with their perfume sickly sweet.
    I could not find her
    Crying in the South.
    I hear my dear Love
    Crying in the West,
Where the green grass is waving over me,
But, Oh, her dear, dear face I cannot see,
    Nor kiss my dear Love
    Crying in the West.

Alix Egerton.

The hand-coloured tailpiece is centered on the page, below the text of the poem. The image is framed with a rectangular black border, horizontally oriented. The image depicts two figures separated by tangled black brambles. On the left, a pale woman kneels, holding her hands to her ears, her eyes closed. She wears a long, white medieval dress with a brown belt, and her hair is long and brown. On the right, a knight kneels forward on a green hill toward the brambles, his hands outstretched in prayer. His legs, stretched behind him, are shackled in red chains and manacles. He wears black armour and has a red sword at his hip. A line of green grass stretches across the bottom border of the frame. The register is slightly off, and the green bleeds a bit outside the frame along the bottom of the image. The artist’s monogram is at the mid right edge of the image.

MLA citation:

Egerton, Alix. “The Lament of the Dead Knight,” illustrated by Cecil French. The Green Sheaf, No. 3, 1903, p. 4. Green Sheaf Digital Edition, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Yellow Nineties 2.0, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2022. https://1890s.ca/GSV3-egerton-lament/

magazine_texts The Green Sheaf 3 The Lament of the Dead Knight Alix Egerton 1903 Poetry