written_leaves (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
written_leaves) wrote2009-12-19 10:30 pm
written_leaves) wrote2009-12-19 10:30 pm
Glittering Caves, Huorns & Theoden
Three for Helms Deep and just after
For the Battle of Helms Deep I really have very little, but this first one notes Gimli's astonishment at the unacknowledged treasure that the Rohirrim were using as wartime storerooms. The second is a short verse for the uprising of the trees when they set the leftover orcs to better work as fertilizer. Not top quality works, but still worth a quick read.
With them I'm tucking a favorite piece for Theoden and Merry, which happened at Dunharrow rather than Helms Deep but followed shortly after. Their relationship always touched me. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Yeats will recognize it began as an adaptation from "When You are Old and Grey".
Glittering Caves
How can they call them storerooms,
Mere caves beneath the ground?
My heart whelms! Such beauty,
A gem beyond reknown.
How darkness flees before the torch,
The flames run round the room!
A thousand suns are shining bright
And they see not a one.
Wand'ring blind through paradise
Like the horses that they tend
They give no thought for crystal vein,
Sultry eye of veiled gem.
Ah, give me time and give me tools!
I'll show you where they've been,
And palaces of king or prince
Would be as beggar's tin.
How can they call them storerooms?
Such shame assigning worth,
For treating as a common clod
The gem of Middle-earth.
-
Huorns
As a rushing tide they came,
Roaring and silent.
The earth beneath them
Torn and tilled.
How could we dream of this,
A forest violent?
Stands that warm and feed now
Pursue and kill.
-
Theoden
(inspired by William Butler Yeats)
Though you were old and grey and full of sleep,
In a Hall lit only with fire, you still held a strength
Only slowly fading, and a dream of the proud sight
Your eyes once had, and of their memories deep;
How many had loved your years of noble grace,
And loved your glory with love false or true;
But Merry loved the caring soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down before your aged knees
Murmured, a little sadly, how like a father
You were to him, among many strangers:
And you took his hand in friendship free.
Though you, counted amid the great, then rarely smiled,
And he only a lonely halfling, between you there was a love;
You in your Winter years warmed by his honest Spring.
Like a father you were, to him, - for a little while.
-
For the Battle of Helms Deep I really have very little, but this first one notes Gimli's astonishment at the unacknowledged treasure that the Rohirrim were using as wartime storerooms. The second is a short verse for the uprising of the trees when they set the leftover orcs to better work as fertilizer. Not top quality works, but still worth a quick read.
With them I'm tucking a favorite piece for Theoden and Merry, which happened at Dunharrow rather than Helms Deep but followed shortly after. Their relationship always touched me. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Yeats will recognize it began as an adaptation from "When You are Old and Grey".
Glittering Caves
How can they call them storerooms,
Mere caves beneath the ground?
My heart whelms! Such beauty,
A gem beyond reknown.
How darkness flees before the torch,
The flames run round the room!
A thousand suns are shining bright
And they see not a one.
Wand'ring blind through paradise
Like the horses that they tend
They give no thought for crystal vein,
Sultry eye of veiled gem.
Ah, give me time and give me tools!
I'll show you where they've been,
And palaces of king or prince
Would be as beggar's tin.
How can they call them storerooms?
Such shame assigning worth,
For treating as a common clod
The gem of Middle-earth.
-
Huorns
As a rushing tide they came,
Roaring and silent.
The earth beneath them
Torn and tilled.
How could we dream of this,
A forest violent?
Stands that warm and feed now
Pursue and kill.
-
Theoden
(inspired by William Butler Yeats)
Though you were old and grey and full of sleep,
In a Hall lit only with fire, you still held a strength
Only slowly fading, and a dream of the proud sight
Your eyes once had, and of their memories deep;
How many had loved your years of noble grace,
And loved your glory with love false or true;
But Merry loved the caring soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down before your aged knees
Murmured, a little sadly, how like a father
You were to him, among many strangers:
And you took his hand in friendship free.
Though you, counted amid the great, then rarely smiled,
And he only a lonely halfling, between you there was a love;
You in your Winter years warmed by his honest Spring.
Like a father you were, to him, - for a little while.
-