The Poetry Corner

Ecclesiastical Sonnets - Part II. - XXI - Dissolution Of The Monasteries

By William Wordsworth

Threats come which no submission may assuage, No sacrifice avert, no power dispute; The tapers shall be quenched, the belfries mute, And, 'mid their choirs unroofed by selfish rage, The warbling wren shall find a leafy cage; The gadding bramble hang her purple fruit; And the green lizard and the gilded newt Lead unmolested lives, and die of age. The owl of evening and the woodland fox For their abode the shrines of Waltham choose: Proud Glastonbury can no more refuse To stoop her head before these desperate shocks She whose high pomp displaced, as story tells, Arimathean Joseph's wattled cells.