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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=341834" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Ballad of Dick Turpin</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The daylight moon looked quietly down<br>Through the gathering dusk on London town</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A smock-frocked yokel hobbled along<br>By Newgate, humming a country song.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Chewing a straw, he stood to stare<br>At the proclamation posted there:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">“Three hundred guineas on Turpins head,<br>Trap him alive or shoot him dead;<br>And a hundred more for his mate, Tom King.”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He crouched like a tiger about to spring.<br>Then he looked up, and he looked down;<br>And chuckling low, like a country clown,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Dick Turpin painfully hobbled away<br>In quest of his inn – “The Load of Hay”...</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Alone in her stall, his mare, Black Bess,<br>Lifted her head in mute distress;<br>For five strange men had entered the yard<br>And looked at her long, and looked at her hard.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They went out, muttering under their breath;<br>And then – the dusk grew still as death.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But the velvet ears of the listening mare<br>Lifted and twitched. They were there – still there;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Hidden and waiting; for whom? And why?<br>The clock struck four, a set drew nigh.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It was King! Dick Turpins’ mate.<br>The black mare whinnied. Too late! Too late!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They rose like shadows out of the ground<br>And grappled him there, without a sound.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">“Throttle him – quietly – choke him dead!<br>Or we lose this hawk for a jay, they said.”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They wrestled and heaved, five men to one;<br>And a yokel entered the yard, alone;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A smock-frocked yokel, hobbling slow;<br>But a fight is physic as all men know.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">His age dropped off, he stood upright.<br>He leapt like a tiger into the fight.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Hand to hand, they fought in the dark;<br>For none could fire at a twisting mark.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Where he that shot at a foe might send<br>His pistol ball through the skull of a friend.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But “Shoot Dick, Shoot” gasped out Tom King<br>“Shoot! Or damn it we both shall swing!<br>Shoot and chance it!” Dick leapt back.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He drew. He fired. At the pistols crack<br>The wrestlers whirled. They scattered apart<br>And the bullet drilled through Tom Kings heart...</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Dick Turpin dropped his smoking gun.<br>They had trapped him five men to one.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A gun in the hand of the crouching five.<br>They could take Dick Turpin now alive;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Take him and bind him and tell their tale<br>As a pot house boast, when they drank their ale.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He whistled, soft as a bird might call<br>And a head rope snapped in his birds dark stall.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He whistled, soft as a nightingale<br>He heard the swish of her swinging tail.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">There was no way out that the five could see<br>To heaven or hell, but the Tyburn tree;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">No door but death; and yet once more<br>He whistled, as though at a sweethearts door.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The five men laughed at him, trapped alive;<br>And – the door crashed open behind the five!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Out of the stable, a wave of thunder,<br>Swept Black Bess, and the five went under.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He leapt to the saddle, a hoof turned stone,<br>Flashed blue fire, and their prize was gone.....</div><div style="margin:10px 0">**</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He rode for one impossible thing; that in the <br>morning light<br>The towers of York might waken him- <br>from London and last night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He rode to prove himself another, <br>and leave himself behind.<br>And the hunted self was like a cloud; <br>but the hunter like the wind.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Neck and neck they rode together; <br>that, in the day’s first gleam,<br>each might prove that the other self<br>was but a mocking dream.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And the little sleeping villages, and the <br>breathless country side <br>Woke to the drum of the ghostly hooves, <br>but missed that ghostly ride.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The did not see, they did not hear as the ghostly <br>hooves drew nigh,<br>The dark magnificent thief in the night <br>that rode so subtly by.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They woke, they rushed to the way-side door,<br>They saw what the midnight showed,-<br>A mare that came like a crested wave,<br>Along the Great North Road.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A flying spark in the formless dark, <br>a flash from the hoof-spurned stone,<br>And the lifted face of a man – <br>that took the starlight and was gone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The heard the sound of a pounding chase <br>three hundred yards away<br>There were fourteen men in a stream of sweat <br>and a plaster of Midland clay.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The starlight struck their pistol-butts as they <br>passed in the clattering crowd<br>But the hunting wraith was away like the wind <br>at the heels of the hunted cloud.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He rode by the walls of Nottingham, <br>and over him as he went<br>Like ghosts across the Great North Road, <br>the boughs of Sherwood bent.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">By Bawtry, all the chase but one has dropped <br>a league behind,<br>Yet, one rider haunted him, invisibly, as the wind.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And northward, like a blacker night, he saw the moors up-loom<br>And Don and Derwent sang to him, like memory in the gloom.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And northward, northward as he rode, and sweeter than a prayer<br>The voices of those hidden streams, <br>the Trent, the Ouse and the Aire;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Streams that could never slake his thirst. <br>He heard them as he flowed<br>But one dumb shadow haunted him along the <br>Great North Road.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Till now, at dawn, the towers of York rose on <br>the reddening sky.<br>And Bess went down between his knees, <br>like a breaking wave to die.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He lay beside her in the ditch, he kissed her lovely head,<br>And a shadow passed him like the wind and left him with his dead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He saw, but not that one as wakes, the city that he sought,<br>He had escaped from London town, but not from his own thought.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He strode up to the Mickle-gate, with none to say him nay.<br>And there he met his Other Self in the stranger light of day.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He strode up to the dreadful thing that in the gateway stood<br>And it stretched out a ghostly hand that the dawn had stained with blood.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It stood as in the gates of hell, with none to hear or see,<br>“Welcome,” it said, “Thou’st ridden well, and outstript all but me”.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Alfred+Noyes">Alfred Noyes</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=341834" data-title="The Ballad of Dick Turpin de Alfred Noyes" data-description="The daylight moon looked quietly down
Through the gathering dusk on London town

A smock-frocked yokel hobbled along
By Newgate, humming a country song.

Chewing a straw, he stood to stare
At the proclamation posted there:

“Three hundred guinea..."></div>
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