Poem by Edward Hovell-Thurlow

Hastings

O MOON, that shinest on this heathy wild
And light’st the hill of Hastings with thy ray,
How am I with thy sad delight beguiled,
How hold with fond imagination play!
By thy broad taper I call up the time
When Harold on the bleeding verdure lay,
Though great in glory, overstained with crime,
And fallen by his fate from kingly sway!
On bleeding knights, and on war-broken arms,
Torn banners, and the dying steeds you shone,
When this fair England and her peerless charms,
And all but honor, to the foe were gone!
Here died the king, whom his brave subjects chose,
But, dying, lay amid his Norman foes.

1. On Beholding Bodiham Castle
2. To a Bird that Haunted the Waters of Laken in the Winter

Francis Palgrave Hastings ("Gyrth, is it dawn in the sky that I see? or is all the sky blood?")

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