The Matin song of Friar Tuck by Alfred Noyes

The Matin song  – Alfred Noyes was an poet of English descent of some renown, publishing well-loved poems such as The Barrel Organ and The Highwayman.  The latter is a particular favourite, as illustrated in 1995 by a BBC nationwide poll to find Britain’s Favourite Poem and The Highwayman came in at Number 15.

Born in 1880 in the west midlands town of Wolverhampton, the family soon moved to the Welsh coast where Alfred’s father was a teacher of Greek as well as Latin.

The Matin-song of Friar Tuck

If souls could sing to heaven’s high King
As blackbirds pipe on earth,
How those delicious courts would ring
With gusts of lovely mirth!
What white-robed throng could lift a song
So mellow with righteous glee
As this brown bird that all day long

Delights my hawthorn tree.
Hark! That’s the thrush
With speckled breast
From yon white bush
Chaunting his best,
Te Deum! Te Deum laudamus!II.
If earthly dreams be touched with gleams
Of Paradisal air,

Some wings, perchance, of earth may glance
Around our slumbers there;
Some breaths of may might drift our way
With scents of leaf and loam,
Some whistling bird at dawn be heard
From those old woods of home.
Hark! That’s the thrush
With speckled breast
From yon white bush
Chaunting his best,

Te Deum! Te Deum laudamus!III.
No King or priest shall mar my feast
Where’er my soul may range.
I have no fear of heaven’s good cheer
Unless our Master change.
But when death’s night is dying away,
If I might choose my bliss,
My love should say, at break of day,
With her first waking kiss:–
Hark! That’s the thrush
With speckled breast,
From yon white bush
Chaunting his best,
Te Deum! Te Deum laudamus!