A Prologue

While to the clarion blown by Marlowes breath     Tall Tragedy tramped by in hues of death,     And Shakespeare yet was tuning string by string,     With English hawthorn crowned, in that glad spring     When bright clouds melted in a sky serene,     Romance moved lightly to the pipe of Greene.     As fresh as buds half-open, pure as dew,     Two damsels came in forefront of her crew,     One native to the hedgerows and the meads,     The keepers lass, in simple country weeds,     Her firm white arms, as delicate as silk,     Below her smock-sleeve shining wet with milk;     No marvel the young noble learnt to woo     A maid so merry and frank and homely true.     The other with sad mien, though yet a bride,     Clad in mans raiment softly stole aside     And grieved that he who should have been her stay     Would privily have done her life away,     For still his crime with bloodshot eyeballs grim     And dripping fangs turned back and hunted him.     Cast off, contemned and hated, stabbed, discrowned,     Still in her heart wide realm for him she found,     When earth and love and joy seemed to his hand,     Gripped madly, a waning measure of slipping sand.     Though lust and murder made of him a slave,     Her love set free, her purity forgave.     Humbled and hopeless, all his sins confessed,     By miracle his contrite soul was blessed,     And heavy tolling of those haunted days     Was turned to golden peals of joyous praise.     Ah, but this woeful lady, lily-pale,     Is no mere vision drifting through a tale;     The sad sweet picture of the patient Queen     Betrays the rebel heart of Robert Greene.