My Lady at the Hall
Is grander than they all:  60
Hers is the oldest name
In all the neighbourhood;
But the race must die with her
Though she’s a lofty dame,
For she’s unmarried still. 
Poor people say she’s good
And has an open hand
As any in the land,
And she’s the comforter
Of many sick and sad; 70
My nurse once said to me
That everything she had
Came of my Lady’s bounty: 
’Though she’s greatest in the county
She’s humble to the poor,
No beggar seeks her door
But finds help presently. 
I pray both night and day
For her, and you must pray: 
But she’ll never feel distress 80
If needy folk can bless.’

I was a little maid
When here we came to live
From somewhere by the sea. 
Men spoke a foreign tongue
There where we used to be
When I was merry and young,
Too young to feel afraid;
The fisher folk would give
A kind strange word to me, 90
There by the foreign sea: 
I don’t know where it was,
But I remember still
Our cottage on a hill,
And fields of flowering grass
On that fair foreign shore.

I liked my old home best,
But this was pleasant too: 
So here we made our nest
And here I grew. 100
And now and then my Lady
In riding past our door
Would nod to Nurse and speak,
Or stoop and pat my cheek;
And I was always ready
To hold the field-gate wide
For my Lady to go through;
My Lady in her veil
So seldom put aside,
My Lady grave and pale. 110

I often sat to wonder
Who might my parents be,
For I knew of something under
My simple-seeming state. 
Nurse never talked to me
Of mother or of father,
But watched me early and late
With kind suspicious cares: 
Or not suspicious, rather
Anxious, as if she knew 120
Some secret I might gather
And smart for unawares. 
Thus I grew.

But Nurse waxed old and grey,
Bent and weak with years. 
There came a certain day
That she lay upon her bed
Shaking her palsied head,
With words she gasped to say
Which had to stay unsaid. 130
Then with a jerking hand
Held out so piteously
She gave a ring to me
Of gold wrought curiously,
A ring which she had worn
Since the day I was born,
She once had said to me: 
I slipped it on my finger;
Her eyes were keen to linger
On my hand that slipped it on; 140
Then she sighed one rattling sigh
And stared on with sightless eye:—­
The one who loved me was gone.