Talk:Knight

Surplus

• In his last binn Sir Peter lies,
    Who knew not what it was to frown:
  Death took him mellow, by surprise,
    And in his cellar stopped him down.
  Through all our land we could not boast
    A knight more gay, more prompt than he,
  To rise and fill a bumper toast,
    And pass it round with THREE TIMES THREE.
  None better knew the feast to sway,
    Or keep Mirth’s boat in better trim:
  For Nature had but little clay
    Like that of which she moulded him.
  The meanest guest that graced his board
    Was there the freest of the free,
  His bumper toast when Peter poured,
    And passed it round with THREE TIMES THREE.
  He kept at true good humour’s mark,
    The social flow of pleasure’s tide:
  He never made a brow look dark,
    Nor caused a tear, but when he died.
  No sorrow round his tomb should dwell:
    More pleased his gay old ghost would be,
  For funeral song, and passing bell,
    To hear no sound but THREE TIMES THREE.
  • Thomas Love Peacock, "Song", from Headlong Hall (1816)

• There were four of us about that bed;
    The mass-priest knelt at the side,
  I and his mother stood at the head,
    Over his feet lay the bride;
  We were quite sure that he was dead,
    Though his eyes were open wide.
  He did not die in the night,
    He did not die in the day,
  But in the morning twilight
    His spirit pass’d away,
  When neither sun nor moon was bright,
    And the trees were merely grey.
  He was not slain with the sword,
    Knight’s axe, or the knightly spear,
  Yet spoke he never a word
    After he came in here;
  I cut away the cord
    From the neck of my brother dear.
  He did not strike one blow,
    For the recreants came behind,
  In the place where the hornbeams grow,
    A path right hard to find,
  For the hornbeam boughs swing so,
    That the twilight makes it blind.
  They lighted a great torch then,
    When his arms were pinion’d fast,
  Sir John the Knight of the Fen,
    Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,
  With knights threescore and ten,
    Hung brave Lord Hugh at last.
  I am threescore and ten,
    And my hair is all turn’d grey,
  But I met Sir John of the Fen,
    Long ago on a summer day,
  And am glad to think of the moment when
    I took his life away.
  I am threescore and ten,
    And my strength is mostly pass’d,
  But long ago I and my men,
    When the sky was overcast,
  And the smoke roll’d over the reeds of the fen,
    Slew Guy of the Dolorous Blast.
  And now, knights all of you,
    I pray you pray for Sir Hugh,
  A good knight and a true,
    And for Alice, his wife, pray too.
  • William Morris, "Shameful Death", in The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858)