Poulain the Prisoner
I
BEYOND his silent vault green springs went by,
The river flashed along its open way,
Blithe swallows flitted in their billowy play,
And the sweet lark went quivering up the sky.
With him was stillness and his heart’s dumb cry
And darkness of the tomb through hopeless day,
Save that along the wall one single ray
Shifted, through jealous loop-holes, westerly.
One single ray: and where its light could fall
His rusty nail carved saints and angels there,
And warriors, and slim girls with braided hair,
And blossomy boughs, and birds athwart the air.
Rude work, but yet a world. And light for all
Was one slant ray upon a prison wall.
II
One ray, and in its track he lived and wrought,
And in free wideness of the world, I know,
One said, “Fair sunshine, yet it serves not so,
It needs a tenderer when I shape my thought;”
And, “’Tis too brown and molten in the drought,”
And, “’Tis too wan a greyness in this snow,”
And would have toiled, but wearied and was woe,
While days stole past and had bequeathed him nought.
Maybe in Gisors, round the fortress mead –
Gisors where now, when fair-time brings its press,
They seek the prisoner’s tower to gaze and guess
And love the work he made in loneliness –
One cursed the gloom, and died without a deed,
The while he carved where his one ray could lead.
III
“Oh loneliness! oh darkness!” so we wail,
Crying to life to give we know not what,
The hope not come, the ecstasy forgot,
The things we should have had and, needing, fail,
Nor know what thing it was for which we ail,
And, like tired travellers to an unknown spot,
Pass listless, noting only “Yet ’tis not,”
And count the ended day an empty tale.
Ah me! to linger on in dim repose
And feel the numbness over hand and thought,
And feel the silence in the heart, that grows.
Ah me! to have forgot the hope we sought.
One ray of light, and a soul lived and wrought,
And on the prison walls a message rose.
One of my favourite Victorian poets, Augusta Webster, returns to Poem of the week with her sonnet triptych, Polain the Prisoner. It’s from her 1881 collection A Book of Rhyme.
The identity of the artist-prisoner incarcerated in the tower of the medieval castle in Gisors, Haute-Normandie, is still disputed. A Latin inscription encouraged some scholars to identify him with the German chevalier Wolfgang de Polham, a servant of Marie of Burgundy imprisoned for treason in 1479 by Louis XI. But “Nicolas Poulain” was probably a pseudonym, and in any case more than one artist may have contributed to the graffiti mural.
The engraver(s) apparently had no tool but a nail. Webster dramatises and amplifies this slenderness of resource with her image of Poulain at work by “one ray of light”. It’s the image of the single ray, rather than the humble nail, which expands to become the moral tissue of the poem. Today’s readers might find the notion a shade picturesque, even melodramatic, in the pre-Raphaelite manner, but at the same time it’s not absurdly unrealistic, given medieval prison conditions. Poulain could hardly have worked without any light: the natural light available must have been scant. Still, the idea could have teetered into metaphorical cliche. Because Webster bothers with the background details, from the lively, bird-filled pastoral outside Poulain’s “silent vault” to the “jealous loopholes” along its wall, the single ray is a credible and affecting symbol.
Each of the three sonnets is neatly, musically made, and the music has a faintly folksy touch. Webster simplifies the form, allowing only four rhyme-sounds per 14 lines. All sonnets follow the pattern of the Italian octave (ABBAABBA). The sestets of the first two rhyme CDDDCC. The use of the triple D-rhyme (the folksy bit) and the omission of the usual E rhyme may well be Webster’s own innovations. In the third sonnet, she abandons the triple-chime of D rhymes for a couplet, and adds in a C rhyme, creating a tighter sense of closure. It’s tempting to interpret both the tripling of the D rhyme earlier, and the eschewal of the E rhyme altogether, as a mimesis – a mirror of the constraints under which Polain worked and completed his project (or his part of the project).
This poem, I feel, might have successfully taken the form of one of Webster’s characteristic dramatic monologues. Signed “Gisors, 1881”, it’s clearly the response to a visit, perhaps enjoyed during the bustle of a local “fair-time”. Yet the self is kept at bay. Any first-person reference is limited to the “ah me” exclamations in the final sonnet’s sestet. Webster’s stroke of narrative brilliance, it seems, is to invite a new character on stage in the second sonnet. In contrast with Poulain, busy in the light of his single ray, the anonymous “one”, despite his “free wideness of the world”, is hopeless and complaining. Even the sun’s light is unusable without “a tenderer” – an unexpected noun, here, denoting a mediator of the practical kind, but perhaps including hints of the adjectival “tender”.
I particularly like the physicality of the colour references in the next lines, a reminder that Augusta Webster completed her education at the Cambridge School of Art. The kind of spoilt ingrate who complains of the sunlight that “‘’Tis too brown and molten in the drought,’ / And, ‘’Tis too wan a greyness in this snow,’” would certainly have been known to her; in fact, I can’t help wondering if Webster is pointing to a particular artistic acquaintance – not necessarily male, of course, but certainly a prima donna. The humour and common sense of this section add greatly to the quality of the poem, and show one of its author’s particular strength in action: a healthy but unshowy push against the limitations of its period.
Webster’s speaker earns her right to the concluding sermon. She makes us taste the quality of true despair, which is not necessarily fake or ridiculous because it comes with a certain fin de siècle aesthetic dimension. I can’t help feeling that the poet is also offering encouragement to herself at a time when she might have felt a waning of her own resources and powers of regeneration. The final sestet moves with tremendous ease and grace from the rhetoric of lamentation to the simple insistence on Poulain’s achievement – not an artistic achievement, finally, but one of simple human courage: “One ray of light, and a soul lived and wrought, / And on the prison walls a message rose.”