The Siege of Manor Castle
The siege had been proceeding for
_a year, a month, a day;
the drawbridge had stayed up—to get
_inside there was delay.
Therefore, to reach the outer wall
_and get across the moat,
because we couldn’t swim, we found
_ourselves a rowing boat.
We reached the curtain wall around
_the castle, but to foil
our first attack, our foes poured down
some pots of boiling oil.
And also from the battlements,
_up high some rocks and spears
were dropped down by our enemies
_to rain about our ears.
And from the loopholes in the walls
_came arrows shot by bow;
they pierced our knights and infantry,
_they laid our soldiers low.
But then, inside the barbican,
_our spy who served the Crown,
raised up the iron portcullis and
_he let the drawbridge down.
We swarmed inside the castle where
_a second gatehouse stood,
then on, across the bailey,
_smiting everyone we could.
Into the keep we fought our way,
_the Black Prince had to die,
and from the tallest tower he
_was taught he could not fly.
Poet’s Note
I wrote this poem for groups of foreign students I was teaching during the summer, in England, the day before they visited a castle (Arundel Castle, or Lewes Castle). Through a previous exercise they had learned the parts of the castle underlined in the text. Those underlined words were therefore presented as gaps in the text that the students had to fill in, inferring from the words around them.
We then went into the basics of poetry (stanzas, rhyme, meter, etc.), I modelled the first stanza, and in pairs the students practised reciting the poem before presenting it aloud. Of course, there were other aspects to the lesson—medieval vocabulary and discussion about Medieval sieges in cinema, for instance.
Paul A. Freeman is the author of Rumours of Ophir, a crime novel which was taught in Zimbabwean high schools and has been translated into German. In addition to having two novels, a children’s book and an 18,000-word narrative poem (Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers!) commercially published, Paul is the author of hundreds of published short stories, poems and articles.
I love this descriptive poem of the storming of a medieval castle with all the accouterments. The “barbican” was the only word I did not know, although I had heard it before. The ending was perfect. I used to watch a Robin Hood series on tv a long time ago and have seen Robin Hood movies back to Errol Flynn on classic movies on tv.