- The Project Gutenberg EBook of Selections from Modern Poets, by Various
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- Title: Selections from Modern Poets
- Made by J. C. Squire - Sassoon, Joyce, Graves...
- Author: Various
- Release Date: October 4, 2016 [EBook #53206]
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- SELECTIONS FROM MODERN POETS
- MADE BY J. C. SQUIRE
- LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
- 1921
- PREFATORY NOTE
- No Poet represented in this book was over fifty when, in 1919, I began
- to compile it. The eldest of them all was born in 1870.
- Many good and some great living poets are therefore missing from its
- pages. Nothing is here by Mr Hardy or Mr Bridges, by Mr A. E. Housman,
- Mr Yeats, _Æ,_ Mr Binyon, Mr Hewlett, Mr Herbert Trench, Mr Gosse, Mr
- Austin Dobson, Mr Doughty, Mr Kipling, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mrs Meynell,
- Mrs Woods, Mr Wilfrid Blunt, and others whose names must appear in
- any comprehensive anthology from living poets. The date, 1870, was
- arbitrarily chosen: so would any other date have been. But some date I
- had to fix, for my object was to illustrate what many of us think an
- exceptional recent flowering.
- I do not propose to analyse the tendencies, in idea and in method,
- exhibited in the poems here collected. These things are always
- better seen at a distance; and anyhow the materials are here for
- the production of an analysis by the reader himself, if he is eager
- for one. But I will express one opinion, and call attention to one
- phenomenon. The opinion is that the majority of the poems in this book
- have merit and that many more could have been printed without lowering
- the standard. And the phenomenon is the simultaneous appearance--the
- result of underlying currents of thought and feeling--of a very large
- number of poets who write only or mainly in lyrical forms. Several
- living poets of the highest repute have won their reputation solely on
- short poems, and there are, and have been, a very large number indeed
- who have written one or two good poems.
- The better production of our generation has been mainly lyrical and
- it has been widely diffused. Where is the ambitious work on a large
- scale? Where is the twentieth century poet who is fulfilling the usual
- functions of the greatest poets: to display human life in all its range
- and variety, or to exercise a clear and powerful influence on the
- thought of mankind with regard to the main problems of our existence?
- These questions are asked; possibly Echo may give its traditional and
- ironic answer.
- There are several observations, however, which should be made. One is
- that the great doctrinal poets have not always become widely recognised
- as such in their own prime, their general vogue being posthumous.
- Another is that we cannot possibly tell what a poet now living and
- young may or may not do before he dies. But though I have my own views
- on this subject I do not think that the age, even if admitted to be
- purely lyrical, stands in need of defence. It is of no use asking a
- poetical renascence to conform to type, for there isn't any type.
- There are marked differences in the features of all those English
- poetical movements which have chiefly contributed to the body of our
- "immortal" poetry. In the Elizabethan age we had the greatest diversity
- of production: a multitude of great and small men, with much genius,
- or but a spark of it blown to life by the favourable wind, produced
- works in every form and on every scale. The age of Herbert and Vaughan,
- of Crashaw, Herrick, Marvell, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Corbet,
- Habington, is memorable almost solely for its lyrical work. The era
- of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats was an age during
- which a vast amount of great poetry was written by a few great poets;
- there was very little healthy undergrowth. Should our literary age be
- remembered by posterity solely as an age during which fifty men had
- written lyrics of some durability for their truth and beauty, it would
- not be remembered with contempt. It is in that conviction that I have
- compiled this anthology.
- It is irritating to feel that even within its own limits it does
- not appear to myself--not to mention others--as good or as nearly
- representative as it might have been. Permission could not be obtained
- to print Mr Masefield's _Biography_ and his _August 1914,_ which I
- personally happen to prefer to any of his shorter works. Since the time
- in 1919-20 when I was compiling the book two volumes have come out from
- which I should like to have made large seleetions: Edmund Blunden's
- _The Waggoner_ and the late Wilfrid Owen's _Poems._ Each of these poets
- is inadequately represented here; and a few things by others, who do
- not appear here at all, came to my notice when it was too late to put
- them in.
- I have to thank the living poets from whose works I have drawn for
- permitting me to use everything I wanted. I am grateful to Mrs
- Brooke and Rupert Brooke's literary executor, Mr Edward Marsh (whose
- "Georgian" collections have been a great stimulus and help to me) for
- permission to use a selection from Brooke; to Mrs J. E. Flecker for
- poems by her husband; to Lady Desborough for the poems by her son,
- Julian Grenfell; to Lord Dunsany for the poems by Francis Ledwidge; to
- Mrs Thomas Macdonagh and Mrs Joseph Plunkett for the poems by their
- husbands; to Mrs Owen for her son Wilfrid Owen's _Strange Meeting;_
- to Professor W. R. Sorley for the poems by his son, Charles Sorley;
- to Lady Glenconner for those by her son, Edward Wyndham Tennant; to
- Mrs Edward Thomas for the poems (published too late for him ever to
- know-how people would admire them) by Edward Thomas.
- Finally, almost every publisher in the kingdom has assisted the book
- with permission to reprint copyright poems. The full list of publishers
- and works is as follows: Messrs Bell (Edward L. Davison, _Poems_);
- Blackwell (E. Wyndham Tennant, _Worple Flit_); Burns' Oates and
- Washbourne (G. K. Chesterton, _Poems_); Cambridge University Press (C.
- H. Sorley, _Marlborough and other Poems_); Chatto and Windus (Robert
- Nichols, _Ardours and Endurances, Aurelia,_ Wilfred Owen, _Poems_);
- Collins (F. Brett Young, _Poems_); Constable (Gordon Bottomley,
- _Annual of New Poetry,_ 1917, W. de la Mare, _Collected Poems_);
- Dent (G. K. Chesterton, _The Wild Knight_); Duckworth (H. Belloc,
- _Poems,_ D. H. Lawrence, _Love Poems,_ Sturge Moore, _Collected Poems_);
- Fifield (W. H. Davies, _Collected Poems_); Heffer (A. Y. Campbell,
- _Poems_); Heinemann (Robert Graves, _Fairies and Fusiliers,_ John
- Masefield, _Lollingdon Downs,_ Siegfried Sassoon, _The Old Huntsman,
- Counter-Attack, War Poems_); Herbert Jenkins (Francis Ledwidge,
- _Poems_); Lane (Lascelles Abercrombie, _Emblems of Love_); Macmillan
- (Ralph Hodgson, _Poems,_ James Stephens, _Songs from the Clay_);
- Elkin Mathews (Gordon Bottomley, _Chambers of Imagery,_ James Joyce,
- _Chamber Music,_ Sturge Moore, _The Vinedresser_); Maunsel and Roberts
- (Padraic Colum, _Poems,_ Seumas O'Sullivan, _The Twilight People,_
- Joseph Plunkett, _Poems_); Methuen (G. K. Chesterton, _The Ballad of
- the White Horse,_ W. H. Davies, _The Bird of Paradise,_ I. A. Williams,
- _Poems_); Palmer (Francis Burrows, _The Green Knight_); Poetry Bookshop
- (Frances Cornford, _Poems,_ Harold Monro, _Children of Love, Strange
- Meetings_); Seeker (Martin Armstrong, _The Buzzards,_ Maurice Baring,
- _Poems_ 1914-1919, J. E. Flecker, _Collected Poems,_ Robert Graves,
- _Country Sentiment,_ Edward Shanks, _The Queen of China_); Selwyn and
- Blount (Robin Flower, _Hymensea,_ John Freeman, _Poems New and Old,_
- Edward Thomas, _Collected Poems_); Sidgwick & Jackson (Edmund Blunden,
- _The Waggoner,_ Rupert Brooke, _Collected Poems,_ John Drinkwater,
- _Olton Pools,_ R. C. K. Ensor, _Odes,_ Ivor Gurney, _Severn and Somme,_
- R. Macaulay, _The Two Blind Countries,_ W. J. Turner, _The Hunter, The
- Dark Fire_); Talbot Press and Fisher Unwin (T. Macdonagh, _Poems_).
- J. C. SQUIRE.
- LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE
- MARRIAGE SONG
- Come up, dear chosen morning, come,
- Blessing the air with light,
- And bid the sky repent of being dark:
- Let all the spaces round the world be white,
- And give the earth her green again.
- Into new hours of beautiful delight,
- Out of the shadow where she has lain,
- Bring the earth awake for glee,
- Shining with dews as fresh and clear
- As my beloved's voice upon the air.
- For now, O morning chosen of all days, on thee
- A wondrous duty lies:
- There was an evening that did loveliness foretell;
- Thence upon thee, O chosen morn, it fell
- To fashion into perfect destiny
- The radiant prophecy.
- For in an evening of young moon, that went
- Filling the moist air with a rosy fire,
- I and my beloved knew our love;
- And knew that thou, O morning, wouldst arise
- To give us knowledge of achieved desire.
- For, standing stricken with astonishment,
- Half terrified in the delight,
- Even as the moon did into clear air move
- And made a golden light,
- Lo there, croucht up against it, a dark hill,
- A monstrous back of earth, a spine
- Of hunchèd rock, furred with great growth of pine,
- Lay like a beast, snout in its paws, asleep;
- Yet in its sleeping seemed it miserable,
- As though strong fear must always keep
- Hold of its heart, and drive its blood in dream.
- Yea, for to our new love, did it not seem,
- That dark and quiet length of hill,
- The sleeping grief of the world?--Out of it we
- Had like imaginations stept to be
- Beauty and golden wonder; and for the lovely fear
- Of coming perfect joy, had changed
- The terror that dreamt there I
- And now the golden moon had turned
- To shining white, white as our souls that burned
- With vision of our prophecy assured:
- Suddenly white was the moon; but she
- At once did on a woven modesty
- Of cloud, and soon went in obscured:
- And we were dark, and vanisht that strange hill.
- But yet it was not long before
- There opened in the sky a narrow door,
- Made with pearl lintel and pearl sill;
- And the earth's night seem'd pressing there,--
- All as a beggar on some festival would peer,--
- To gaze into a room of light beyond,
- The hidden silver splendour of the moon.
- Yea, and we also, we
- Long gazed wistfully
- Towards thee, O morning, come at last,
- And towards the light that thou wilt pour upon us soon!
- II
- O soul who still art strange to sense,
- Who often against beauty wouldst complain,
- Doubting between joy and pain
- If like the startling touch of something keen
- Against thee, it hath been
- To follow from an upland height
- The swift sun hunting rain
- Across the April meadows of a plain,
- Until the fields would flash into the air
- Their joyous green, like emeralds alight
- Or when in the blue of night's mid-noon
- The burning naked moon
- Draws to a brink of cloudy weather near,
- A breadth of snow, firm and soft as a wing,
- Stretcht out over a wind that gently goes,--
- Through the white sleep of snowy cloud there grows
- An azure-border'd shining ring,
- The gleaming dream of the approaching joy of her;--
- What now wilt thou do, Soul? What now,
- If with such things as these troubled thou wert?
- How wilt thou now endure, or how
- Not now be strangely hurt?--When
- utter beauty must come closer to thee
- Than even anger or fear could be;
- When thou, like metal in a kiln, must lie
- Seized by beauty's mightily able flame;
- Enjoyed by beauty as by the ruthless glee
- Of an unescapable power;
- Obeying beauty as air obeys a cry;
- Yea, one thing made of beauty and thee,
- As steel and a white heat are made the same!
- --Ah, but I know how this infirmity
- Will fail and be not, no, not memory,
- When I begin the marvellous hour.
- This only is my heart's strain'd eagerness,
- Long waiting for its bliss.--
- But from those other fears, from those
- That keep to Love so close,
- From fears that are the shadow of delight,
- Hide me, O joys; make them unknown to-night!
- III
- Thou bright God that in dream earnest to me last night,
- Thou with the flesh made of a golden light,
- Knew I not thee, thee and thy heart,
- Knew I not well, God, who thou wert?
- Yea, and my soul divinely understood
- The light that was beneath thee a ground,
- The golden light that cover'd thee round,
- Turning my sleep to a fiery morn,
- Was as a heavenly oath there sworn
- Promising me an immortal good:
- Well I knew thee, God of Marriages, thee and thy flame!
- Ah, but wherefore beside thee came
- That fearful sight of another mood?
- Why in thy light, to thy hand chained,
- Towards me its bondage terribly strained,
- Why came with thee that dreadful hound,
- The wild hound Fear, black, ravenous, and gaunt?
- Why him with thee should thy dear light surround?
- Why broughtest thou that beast to haunt
- The blissful footsteps of my golden dream?--
- All shadowy black the body dread,
- All frenzied fire the head,--
- The hunger of its mouth a hollow crimson flame,
- The hatred in its eyes a blaze
- Fierce and green, stabbing the ruddy glaze,
- And sharp white jetting fire the teeth snarl'd at me,
- And white the dribbling rage of froth,--
- A throat that gaped to bay and paws working violently,
- Yet soundless all as a winging moth;
- Tugging towards me, famishing for my heart;--
- Even while thou, O golden god, wert still
- Looking the beautiful kindness of thy will
- Into my soul, even then must I be,
- With thy bright promise looking at me,
- Then bitterly of that hound afraid?--
- Darkness, I know, attendeth bright,
- And light comes not but shadow comes:
- And heart must know, if it know thy light,
- Thy wild hound Fear, the shadow of love's delight.
- Yea, is it thus? Are we so made
- Of death and darkness, that even thou,
- O golden God of the joys of love,
- Thy mind to us canst only prove,
- The glorious devices of thy mind,
- By so revealing how thy journeying here
- Through this mortality, doth closely bind
- Thy brightness to the shadow of dreadful Fear?--
- Ah no, it shall not be! Thy joyous light
- Shall hide me from the hunger of fear to-night.
- IV
- For wonderfully to live I now begin.
- So that the darkness which accompanies
- Our being here, is fasten'd up within
- The power of light that holdeth me;
- And from these shining chains, to see
- My joy with bold misliking eyes,
- The shrouded figure will not dare arise.
- For henceforth, from to-night,
- I am wholly gone into the bright
- Safety of the beauty of love:
- Not only all my waking vigours plied
- Under the searching glory of love,
- But knowing myself with love all satisfied
- Even when my life is hidden in sleep;
- As high clouds, to themselves that keep
- The moon's white company, are all possest
- Silverly with the presence of their guest;
- Or as a darken'd room
- That hath within it roses, whence the air
- And quietness are taken everywhere
- Deliciously by sweet perfume.
- EPILOGUE
- What shall we do for Love these days?
- How shall we make an altar-blaze
- To smite the horny eyes of men
- With the renown of our Heaven,
- And to the unbelievers prove
- Our service to our dear god, Love?
- What torches shall we lift above
- The crowd that pushes through the mire,
- To amaze the dark heads with strange fire?
- I should think I were much to blame,
- If never I held some fragrant flame
- Above the noises of the world,
- And openly 'mid men's hurrying stares,
- Worshipt before the sacred fears
- That are like flashing curtains furl'd
- Across the presence of our lord Love.
- Nay, would that I could fill the gaze
- Of the whole earth with some great praise
- Made in a marvel for men's eyes,
- Some tower of glittering masonries,
- Therein such a spirit flourishing
- Men should see what my heart can sing:
- All that Love hath done to me
- Built into stone, a visible glee;
- Marble carried to gleaming height
- As moved aloft by inward delight;
- Not as with toil of chisels hewn,
- But seeming poised in a mighty tune.
- For of all those who have been known
- To lodge with our kind host, the sun,
- I envy one for just one thing:
- In Cordova of the Moors
- There dwelt a passion-minded King,
- Who set great bands of marble-hewers
- To fashion his heart's thanksgiving
- In a tall palace, shapen so
- All the wondering world might know
- The joy he had of his Moorish lass.
- His love, that brighter and larger was
- Than the starry places, into firm stone
- He sent, as if the stone were glass
- Fired and into beauty blown.
- Solemn and invented gravely
- In its bulk the fabric stood,
- Even as Love, that trusteth bravely
- In its own exceeding good
- To be better than the waste
- Of time's devices; grandly spaced,
- Seriously the fabric stood.
- But over it all a pleasure went
- Of carven delicate ornament,
- Wreathing up like ravishment,
- Mentioning in sculptures twined
- The blitheness Love hath in his mind;
- And like delighted senses were
- The windows, and the columns there
- Made the following sight to ache
- As the heart that did them make.
- Well I can see that shining song
- Flowering there, the upward throng
- Of porches, pillars and windowed walls,
- Spires like piercing panpipe calls,
- Up to the roof's snow-cloud flight;
- All glancing in the Spanish light
- White as water of arctic tides,
- Save an amber dazzle on sunny sides.
- You had said, the radiant sheen
- Of that palace might have been
- A young god's fantasy, ere he came
- His serious worlds and suns to frame;
- Such an immortal passion
- Quiver'd among the slim hewn stone.
- And in the nights it seemed a jar
- Cut in the substance of a star,
- Wherein a wine, that will be poured
- Some time for feasting Heaven, was stored.
- But within this fretted shell,
- The wonder of Love made visible,
- The King a private gentle mood
- There placed, of pleasant quietude.
- For right amidst there was a court,
- Where always musked silences
- Listened to water and to trees;
- And herbage of all fragrant sort,--Lavender,
- lad's-love, rosemary,
- Basil, tansy, centaury,--
- Was the grass of that orchard, hid
- Love's amazements all amid.
- Jarring the air with rumour cool,
- Small fountains played into a pool
- With sound as soft as the barley's hiss
- When its beard just sprouting is;
- Whence a young stream, that trod on moss,
- Prettily rimpled the court across.
- And in the pool's clear idleness,
- Moving like dreams through happiness,
- Shoals of small bright fishes were;
- In and out weed-thickets bent
- Perch and carp, and sauntering went
- With mounching jaws and eyes a-stare;
- Or on a lotus leaf would crawl,
- A brinded loach to bask and sprawl,
- Tasting the warm sun ere it dipt
- Into the water; but quick as fear
- Back his shining brown head slipt
- To crouch on the gravel of his lair,
- Where the cooled sunbeams broke in wrack,
- Spilt shatter'd gold about his back.
- So within that green-veiled air,
- Within that white-walled quiet, where
- Innocent water thought aloud,--
- Childish prattle that must make
- The wise sunlight with laughter shake
- On the leafage overbowed,--
- Often the King and his love-lass
- Let the delicious hours pass.
- All the outer world could see
- Graved and sawn amazingly
- Their love's delighted riotise,
- Fixt in marble for all men's eyes;
- But only these twain could abide
- In the cool peace that withinside
- Thrilling desire and passion dwelt;
- They only knew the still meaning spelt
- By Love's flaming script, which is
- God's word written in ecstasies.
- And where is now that palace gone,
- All the magical skill'd stone,
- All the dreaming towers wrought
- By Love as if no more than thought
- The unresisting marble was?
- How could such a wonder pass?
- Ah, it was but built in vain
- Against the stupid horns of Rome,
- That pusht down into the common loam
- The loveliness that shone in Spain.
- But we have raised it up again!
- A loftier palace, fairer far,
- Is ours, and one that fears no war.
- Safe in marvellous walls we are;
- Wondering sense like builded fires,
- High amazement of desires,
- Delight and certainty of love,
- Closing around, roofing above
- Our unapproacht and perfect hour
- Within the splendours of love's power.
- MARTIN ARMSTRONG
- THE BUZZARDS
- When evening came and the warm glow grew deeper,
- And every tree that bordered the green meadows
- And in the yellow cornfields every reaper
- And every corn-shock stood above their shadows
- Flung eastward from their feet in longer measure,
- Serenely far there swam in the sunny height
- A buzzard and his mate who took their pleasure
- Swirling and poising idly in golden light.
- On great pied motionless moth-wings borne along,
- So effortless and so strong,
- Cutting each other's paths together they glided,
- Then wheeled asunder till they soared divided
- Two valleys' width (as though it were delight
- To part like this, being sure they could unite
- So swiftly in their empty, free dominion),
- Curved headlong downward, towered up the sunny steep,
- Then, with a sudden lift of the one great pinion,
- Swung proudly to a curve, and from its height
- Took half a mile of sunlight in one long sweep.
- And we, so small on the swift immense hillside,
- Stood tranced, until our souls arose uplifted
- On those far-sweeping, wide,
- Strong curves of flight--swayed up and hugely drifted,
- Were washed, made strong and beautiful in the tide
- Of sun-bathed air. But far beneath, beholden
- Through shining deeps of air, the fields were golden
- And rosy burned the heather where cornfields ended.
- And still those buzzards whirled, while light withdrew
- Out of the vales and to surging slopes ascended,
- Till the loftiest flaming summit died to blue.
- MAURICE BARING
- DIFFUGERE NIVES, 1917
- _To_ J. C. S.
- The snows have fled, the hail, the lashing rain,
- Before the Spring.
- The grass is starred with buttercups again,
- The blackbirds sing.
- Now spreads the month that feast of lovely things
- We loved of old.
- Once more the swallow glides with darkling wings
- Against the gold.
- Now the brown bees about the peach trees boom
- Upon the walls;
- And far away beyond the orchard's bloom
- The cuckoo calls.
- The season holds a festival of light
- For you, for me;
- But shadows are abroad, there falls a blight
- On each green tree.
- And every leaf unfolding, every flower
- Brings bitter meed;
- Beauty of the morning and the evening hour
- Quickens our need.
- All is reborn, but never any Spring
- Can bring back this;
- Nor any fullness of midsummer bring
- The voice we miss.
- The smiling eyes shall smile on us no more;
- The laughter clear,
- Too far away on the forbidden shore,
- We shall not hear.
- Bereft of these until the day we die,
- We both must dwell;
- Alone, alone, and haunted by the cry:
- "Hail and farewell!
- Yet when the scythe of Death shall near us hiss,
- Through the cold air,
- Then on the shuddering marge of the abyss
- They will be there.
- They will be there to lift us from sheer space
- And empty night;
- And we shall turn and see them face to face
- In the new light.
- So shall we pay the unabated price
- Of their release,
- And found on our consenting sacrifice
- Their lasting peace.
- The hopes that fall like leaves before the wind,
- The baffling waste,
- And every earthly joy that leaves behind
- A mortal taste.
- The uncompleted end of all things dear,
- The clanging door
- Of Death, forever loud with the last fear,
- Haunt them no more.
- Without them the awakening world is dark
- With dust and mire;
- Yet as they went they flung to us a spark,
- A thread of fire.
- To guide us while beneath the sombre skies
- Faltering we tread,
- Until for us like morning stars shall rise
- The deathless dead.
- JULIAN GRENFELL
- Because of you we will be glad and gay,
- Remembering you, we will be brave and strong;
- And hail the advent of each dangerous day,
- And meet the last adventure with a song.
- And, as you proudly gave your jewelled gift,
- We'll give our lesser offering with a smile,
- Nor falter on that path where, all too swift,
- You led the way and leapt the golden stile.
- Whether new paths, new heights to climb you find,
- Or gallop through the unfooted asphodel,
- We know you know we shall not lag behind,
- Nor halt to waste a moment on a fear;
- And you will speed us onward with a cheer,
- And wave beyond the stars that all is well.
- PIERRE
- I saw you starting for another war,
- The emblem of adventure and of youth,
- So that men trembled, saying: He forsooth
- Has gone, has gone, and shall return no more.
- And then out there, they told me you were dead
- Taken and killed; how was it that I knew,
- Whatever else was true, that was not true?
- And then I saw you pale upon your bed,
- Scarcely a year ago, when you were sent
- Back from the margin of the dim abyss;
- For Death had sealed you with a warning kiss,
- And let you go to meet a nobler fate:
- To serve in fellowship, O fortunate:
- To die in battle with your regiment.
- HILAIRE BELLOC
- THE SOUTH COUNTRY
- When I am living in the Midlands
- That are sodden and unkind,
- I light my lamp in the evening:
- My work is left behind;
- And the great hills of the South Country
- Come back into my mind.
- The great hills of the South Country
- They stand along the sea;
- And it's there walking in the high woods
- That I could wish to be,
- And the men that were boys when I was a boy
- Walking along with me.
- The men that live in North England
- I saw them for a day;
- Their hearts are set upon the waste fells,
- Their skies are fast and grey;
- From their castle-walls a man may see
- The mountains far away.
- The men that live in West England
- They see the Severn strong,
- A-rolling on rough water brown
- Light aspen leaves along.
- They have the secret of the Rocks,
- And the oldest kind of song.
- But the men that live in the South Country
- Are the kindest and most wise,
- They get their laughter from the loud surf,
- And the faith in their happy eyes
- Comes surely from our Sister the Spring
- When over the sea she flies;
- The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,
- She blesses us with surprise.
- I never get between the pines
- But I smell the Sussex air;
- Nor I never come on a belt of sand
- But my home is there.
- And along the sky the line of the Downs
- So noble and so bare.
- A lost thing could I never find,
- Nor a broken thing mend:
- And I fear I shall be all alone
- When I get towards the end.
- Who will there be to comfort me
- Or who will be my friend?
- I will gather and carefully make my friends
- Of the men of the Sussex Weald,
- They watch the stars from silent folds,
- They stiffly plough the field,
- By them and the God of the South Country
- My poor soul shall be healed.
- If I ever become a rich man,
- Of if ever I grow to be old,
- I will build a house with deep thatch
- To shelter me from the cold,
- And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
- And the story of Sussex told.
- I will hold my house in the high wood
- Within a walk of the sea,
- And the men that were boys when I was a boy
- Shall sit and drink with me.
- THE NIGHT
- Most holy Night, that still dost keep
- The keys of all the doors of sleep,
- To me when my tired eyelids close
- Give thou repose.
- And let the far lament of them
- That chant the dead day's requiem
- Make in my ears, who wakeful lie,
- Soft lullaby.
- Let them that knaw the horned moth
- By my bedside their memories clothe.
- So shall I have new dreams and blest
- In my brief rest.
- Fold your great wings about my face,
- Hide dawning from my resting-place,
- And cheat me with your false delight,
- Most Holy Night.
- SONG
- INVITING THE INFLUENCE OF A YOUNG
- LADY UPON THE OPENING YEAR.
- I
- You wear the morning like your dress
- And all with mastery crowned;
- When as you walk your loveliness.
- Goes shining all around.
- Upon your secret, smiling way
- Such new contents were found,
- The Dancing Loves made holiday
- On that delightful ground.
- II
- Then summon April forth, and send
- Commandment through the flowers;
- About our woods your grace extend
- A queen of careless hours.
- For oh, not Vera veiled in vain,
- Nor Dian's sacred Ring,
- With all her royal nymphs in train
- Could so lead on the Spring.
- THE FALSE HEART
- I said to Heart, "How goes it?"
- Heart replied:
- "Right as a Ribstone Pippin!"
- But it lied.
- HANNAKER MILL (1913)
- Sally is gone that was so kindly;
- Sally is gone from Hannaker Hill,
- And the briar grows ever since then so blindly;
- And ever since then the clapper is still...
- And the sweeps have fallen from Hannaker Mill.
- Hannaker Hill is in desolation;
- Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
- And Spirits that call on a falling nation,
- Spirits that loved her calling aloud,
- Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.
- Spirits that call and no one answers--
- Hannaker's down and England's done.
- Wind and thistle for pipe and dancers,
- And never a ploughman under the sun:
- Never a ploughman, never a one.
- TARANTELLA
- Do you remember an Inn,
- Miranda?
- Do you remember an Inn?
- And the tedding and the spreading
- Of the straw for a bedding,
- And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
- And the wine that tasted of the tar?
- And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
- (Under the dark of the vine verandah)?
- Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
- Do you remember an Inn?
- And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
- Who hadn't got a penny,
- And who weren't paying any,
- And the hammer at the doors and the Din?
- And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
- Of the clap
- Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
- Of the girl gone chancing,
- Glancing,
- Dancing,
- Backing and advancing,
- Snapping of the clapper to the spin
- Out and in--
- And the Ting, Tong, Tang of the guitar!
- Do you remember an Inn,
- Miranda?
- Do you remember an Inn?
- Never more;
- Miranda,
- Never more.
- Only the high peaks hoar:
- And Aragon a torrent at the door.
- No sound
- In the walls of the Halls where falls
- The tread
- Of the feet of the dead to the ground.
- No sound:
- Only the boom
- Of the far Waterfall like Doom.
- ON A DEAD HOSTESS
- Of this bad world the loveliest and the best
- Has smiled, and said good-night, and gone to rest.
- EDMUND BLUNDEN
- ALMSWOMEN
- At Quincey's moat the squandering village ends,
- And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends
- Of all the village, two old dames that cling
- As close as any trueloves in the spring.
- Long, long ago they passed three-score-and-ten,
- And in this doll's house lived together then;
- All things they have in common being so poor,
- And their one fear, Death's shadow at the door.
- Each sundown makes them mournful, each sunrise
- Brings back the brightness in their failing eyes.
- How happy go the rich fair-weather days
- When on the roadside folk stare in amaze
- At such a honeycomb of fruit and flowers
- As mellows round their threshold; what long hours
- They gloat upon their steepling hollyhocks,
- Bee's balsams, feathery southernwood and stocks,
- Fiery dragons'-mouths, great mallow leaves
- For salves, and lemon plants in bushy sheaves,
- Shagged Esau's Hands with five green finger-tips!
- Such old sweet names are ever on their lips.
- As pleased as little children where these grow
- In cobbled pattens and worn gowns they go,
- Proud of their wisdom when on gooseberry shoots
- They stuck egg-shells to fright from coming fruits
- The brisk-billed rascals; waiting still to see
- Their neighbour owls saunter from tree to tree
- Or in the hushing half-light mouse the lane
- Long-winged and lordly.
- But when those hours wane
- Indoors they ponder, scared by the harsh storm
- Whose pelting saracens on the window swarm,
- And listen for the mail to clatter past
- And church clock's deep bay withering on the blast;
- They feed the fire that flings a freakish light
- On pictured kings and queens grotesquely bright,
- Platters and pitchers, faded calendars,
- And graceful hour-glass trim with lavenders.
- Many a time they kiss and cry, and pray
- Both may be summoned in the self-same day,
- And wiseman linnet tinkling in his cage
- End too with them the friendship of old age,
- And all together leave their treasured room
- Some bell-like evening when the May's in bloom.
- GLEANING
- Along the baulk the grasses drenched in dews
- Soak through the morning gleaners' clumsy shoes,
- And cloying cobwebs trammel their brown cheeks
- While from the shouldering sun the dewfog reeks.
- Then soon begun, on ground where yesterday
- The rakers' warning-sheaf forbade their way,
- Hard clucking dames in great white hoods make haste
- To cram their lap-bags with the barley waste,
- Scrambling as if a thousand were but one,
- Careless of stabbing thistles. Now the sun
- Gulps up the dew and dries the stubs, and scores
- Of tiny people trundle out of doors
- Among the stiff stalks, where the scratched hands
- Red ants and blackamoors and such as fly;
- Tunbellied, too, with legs a finger long,
- The spider harvestman; the churlish, strong
- Black scorpion, prickled earwig, and that mite
- Who shuts up like a leaden shot in fright
- And lies for dead. And still before the rout
- The young rats and the field mice whisk about
- And from the trod whisp out the leveret darts
- Bawled at by boys that pass with blundering carts
- Top-heavy to the red-tiled barns. And still
- The children feed their cornsacks with goodwill,
- And farm wives ever faster stoop and flounce.
- The hawk drops down a plummet's speed to pounce
- The nibbling mouse or resting lark away,
- The lost mole tries to pierce the mattocked clay
- In agony and terror of the sun.
- The dinner hour and its grudged leisure won,
- All sit below the pollards on the dykes,
- Rasped with the twinge of creeping barley spikes:
- Sweet beyond telling now the small beer goes
- From the hooped hardwood bottles, the wasp knows,
- And even hornets whizz from the eaten ash--
- Then crusts are dropt and switches snatched to slash,
- While, safe in shadow of the apron thrown
- Aside the bush which years before was grown
- To snap the poacher's nets, the baby sleeps.
- Now toil returns, in red-hot fluttering light,
- And far afield the weary rabble creeps,
- Oft clutching blind wheat black among the white,
- That smutches where it touches quick as soot--Oft
- gaping where the landrail seems afoot,
- Who with such magic throws his baffling speech,
- Far off he sounds when scarce beyond arm's reach.
- Mongrels are left to mind the morning's gain,
- But squinting knaves can slouch to steal the grain;
- Now close the farm the fields are gleaned agen,
- Where the boy droves the turkey and white hen
- To pick the shelled sweet corn; their hue and cry
- Answers the gleaners' gabble, and sows trudge
- With little pigs to play and rootle there
- And all the fields are full of din and blare.
- So steals the time past, so they glean and gloat;
- The hobby-horses whir, the moth's dust coat
- Blends with the stubble, scarlet soldiers fly
- In airy pleasure; but the gleaners' eye
- Sees little but their spoil, or robin flower
- Ever on tenterhooks to shun the shower,
- Their weather-prophet never known astray;
- When he folds up, then toward the hedge glean they.
- But now the dragon of the sky droops, pales,
- And wandering in the wet grey western vales,
- Stumbles, and passes, and the gleaning's done.
- The farmer, with fat hares slung on his gun,
- Gives folk goodnight as down the ruts they pull
- The creaking two-wheeled hand carts bursting full,
- And whimpering children cease their teasing squalls,
- While left alone the supping partridge calls--
- Till all at home is stacked from mischief's way
- To thrash and dress the first wild, windy day,
- And each good wife crowns weariness with pride,
- With such small riches more than satisfied.
- GORDON BOTTOMLEY
- THE PLOUGHMAN
- Under the long fell's stony eaves
- The ploughman, going up and down,
- Ridge after ridge man's tide-mark leaves,
- And turns the hard grey soil to brown.
- Striding, he measures out the earth
- In lines of life, to rain and sun;
- And every year that comes to birth
- Sees him still striding on and on.
- The seasons change, and then return;
- Yet still, in blind, unsparing ways,
- However I may shrink or yearn,
- The ploughman measures out my days.
- His acre brought forth roots last year;
- This year it bears the gloomy grain;
- Next Spring shall seedling grass appear;
- Then roots and corn and grass again.
- Five times the young corn's pallid green
- I have seen spread and change and thrill;
- Five times the reapers I have seen
- Go creeping up the far-off hill:
- And, as the unknowing ploughman climbs
- Slowly and inveterately,
- I wonder long how many times
- The corn will spring again for me.
- BABEL: THE GATE OF THE GOD
- Lost towers impend, copeless primeval props
- Of the new threatening sky, and first rude digits
- Of awe remonstrance and uneasy power
- Thrust out by man when speech sank back in his throat:
- Then had the last rocks ended bubbling up
- And rhythms of change within the heart begun
- By a blind need that would make Springs and Winters;
- Pylons and monoliths went on by ages,
- Mycenae and Great Zimbabwe came about;
- Cowed hearts in This conceived a pyramid
- That leaned to hold itself upright, a thing
- Foredoomed to limits, death and an easy apex;
- Then postulants for the stars' previous wisdom
- Standing on Carthage must get nearer still;
- While in Chaldea an altitude of God
- Being mooted, and a Saurian unearthed
- Upon a mountain stirring a surmise
- Of floods and alterations of the sea,
- A round-walled tower must rise upon Senaai
- Temple and escape to God the ascertained.
- These are decayed like Time's teeth in his mouth,
- Black cavities and gaps, yet earth is darkened
- By their deep-sunken and unfounded shadows
- And memories of man's earliest theme of towers.
- Space--the old source of time--should be undone,
- Eternity defined, by men who trusted
- Another tier would equal them with God.
- A city of grimed brick-kilns, squat truncations,
- Hunched like spread toads yet high beneath their circles
- Of low packed smoke, assemblages of thunder
- That glowed upon their under sides by night
- And lit like storm small shadowless workmen's toil.
- Meaningless stumps, unturned bare roots, remained
- In fields of mashy mud and trampled leaves,
- While, if a horse died hauling, plasterers
- Knelt on a plank to clip its sweaty coat.
- A builder leans across the last wide courses;
- His unadjustable unreaching eyes
- Fail under him before his glances sink
- On the clouds' upper layers of sooty curls
- Where some long lightening goes like swallow downward,
- But at the wider gallery next below
- Recognize master masons with pricked parchments:
- That builder then, as one who condescends
- Unto the sea and all that is beneath him,
- His hairy breast on the wet mortar calls
- "How many fathoms is it yet to heaven!"
- On the next eminence the orgulous King
- Nimrond stands up conceiving he shall live
- To conquer God, now that he knows where God is:
- His eager hands push up the tower in thought...
- Again, his shaggy inhuman height strides down
- Among the carpenters because he has seen
- One shape an eagle-woman on a door-post:
- He drives his spear-beam through him for wasted
- day.
- Little men hurrying, running here and there,
- Within the dark and stifling walls, dissent
- From every sound, and shoulder empty hods:
- "The God's great altar should stand in the crypt
- Among our earth's foundations"--"The God's great altar
- Must be the last far coping of our work"--
- "It should inaugurate the broad main stair"--
- "Or end it"--"It must stand toward the East!"
- But here a grave contemptuous youth cries out
- "Womanish babblers, how can we build God's altar
- Ere we divine its foreordained true shape?"
- Then one "It is a pedestal for deeds"--
- "'Tis more and should be hewn like the King's brow"--
- "It has the nature of a woman's bosom"--
- "The tortoise, first created, signifies it"--
- "A blind and rudimentary navel shows
- The source of worship better than horned moons."
- Then a lean giant "Is not a calyx needful?"--
- "Because round grapes on statues well expressed
- Become the nadir of incense, nodal lamps,
- Yet apes have hands that but and carved red crystals"--
- "Birds molten, touchly tale veins bronze buds crumble
- Ablid ublai ghan isz rad eighar ghaurl ..."
- Words said too often seemed such ancient sounds
- That men forget them or were lost in them;
- The guttural glottis-chasms of language reached
- A rhythm, a gasp, were curves of immortal thought.
- Man with his bricks was building, building yet,
- Where dawn and midnight mingled and woke no birds,
- In the last courses, building past his knowledge
- A wall that swung--for towers can have no tops,
- No chord can mete the universal segment,
- Earth has no basis. Yet the yielding sky,
- Invincible vacancy, was there discovered--
- Though piled-up bricks should pulp the sappy balks,
- Weight generate a secrecy of heat,
- Cankerous charring, crevices' fronds of flame.
- THE END OF THE WORLD
- The snow had fallen many nights and days;
- The sky was come upon the earth at last,
- Sifting thinly down as endlessly
- As though within the system of blind planets
- Something had been forgot or overdriven.
- The dawn now seemed neglected in the grey
- Where mountains were unbuilt and shadowless trees
- Rootlessly paused or hung upon the air.
- There was no wind, but now and then a sigh
- Crossed that dry falling dust and rifted it
- Through crevices of slate and door and casement.
- Perhaps the new moon's time was even past.
- Outside, the first white twilights were too void
- Until a sheep called once, as to a lamb,
- And tenderness crept everywhere from it;
- But now the flock must have strayed far away.
- The lights across the valley must be veiled,
- The smoke lost in the greyness or the dusk.
- For more than three days now the snow had thatched
- That cow-house roof where it had ever melted
- With yellow stains from the beasts' breath inside;
- But yet a dog howled there, though not quite lately.
- Someone passed down the valley swift and singing,
- Yes, with locks spreaded like a son of morning;
- But if he seemed too tall to be a man
- It was that men had been so long unseen,
- Or shapes loom larger through a moving snow.
- And he was gone and food had not been given him.
- When snow slid from an overweighted leaf
- Shaking the tree, it might have been a bird
- Slipping in sleep or shelter, whirring wings;
- Yet never bird fell out, save once a dead one--
- And in two days the snow had covered it.
- The dog had howled again--or thus it seemed
- Until a lean fox passed and cried no more.
- All was so safe indoors where life went on
- Glad of the close enfolding snow--O glad
- To be so safe and secret at its heart,
- Watching the strangeness of familiar things.
- They knew not what dim hours went on, went
- For while they slept the clock stopt newly wound
- As the cold hardened. Once they watched the road,
- Thinking to be remembered. Once they doubted
- If they had kept the sequence of the days,
- Because they heard not any sound of bells.
- A butterfly, that hid until the Spring
- Under a ceiling's shadow, dropt, was dead.
- The coldness seemed more nigh, the coldness deepened
- As a sound deepens into silences;
- It was of earth and came not by the air;
- The earth was cooling and drew down the sky.
- The air was crumbling. There was no more sky.
- Rails of a broken bed charred in the grate,
- And when he touched the bars he thought the sting
- Came from their heat--he could not feel such cold ...
- She said "O do not sleep,
- Heart, heart of mine, keep near me. No, no; sleep.
- I will not lift his fallen, quiet eyelids,
- Although I know he would awaken then--He
- closed them thus but now of his own will.
- He can stay with me while I do not lift them."
- ATLANTIS
- What poets sang in Atlantis? Who can tell
- The epics of Atlantis or their names?
- The sea hath its own murmurs, and sounds not
- The secrets of its silences beneath,
- And knows not any cadences enfolded
- When the last bubbles of Atlantis broke
- Among the quieting of its heaving floor.
- O, years and tides and leagues and all their billows
- Can alter not man's knowledge of men's hearts--
- While trees and rocks and clouds include our being
- We know the epics of Atlantis still:
- A hero gave himself to lesser men,
- Who first misunderstood and murdered him,
- And then misunderstood and worshipped him;
- A woman was lovely and men fought for her,
- Towns burnt for her, and men put men in bondage,
- But she put lengthier bondage on them all;
- A wanderer toiled among all the isles
- That fleck this turning star or shifting sea,
- Or lonely purgatories of the mind,
- In longing for his home or his lost love.
- Poetry is founded on the hearts of men:
- Though in Nirvana or the Heavenly courts
- The principle of beauty shall persist,
- Its body of poetry, as the body of man,
- Is but a terrene form, a terrene use,
- That swifter being will not loiter with;
- And, when mankind is dead and the world cold,
- Poetry's immortality will pass.
- NEW YEAR'S EVE, 1913
- O, Cartmel bells ring soft to-night,
- And Cartmel bells ring clear
- But I lie far away to-night,
- Listening with my dear;
- Listening in a frosty land
- Where all the bells are still
- And the small-windowed bell-towers stand
- Dark under heath and hill.
- I thought that, with each dying year,
- As long as life should last
- The bells of Cartmel I should hear
- Ring out an aged past:
- The plunging, mingling sounds increase
- Darkness's depth and height,
- The hollow valley gains more peace
- And ancientness to-night:
- The loveliness, the fruitfulness,
- The power of life lived there
- Return, revive, more closely press
- Upon that midnight air.
- But many deaths have place in men
- Before they come to die;
- Joys must be used and spent, and then
- Abandoned and passed by.
- Earth is not ours; no cherished space
- Can hold us from life's flow,
- That bears us thither and thence by ways
- We knew not we should go.
- O, Cartmel bells ring loud, ring clear,
- Through midnight deep and hoar,
- A year new-born, and I shall hear
- The Cartmel bells no more.
- TO IRON-FOUNDERS AND OTHERS
- When you destroy a blade of grass
- You poison England at her roots:
- Remember no man's foot can pass
- Where evermore no green life shoots.
- You force the birds to wing too high
- Where your unnatural vapours creep:
- Surely the living rocks shall die
- When birds no rightful distance keep.
- You have brought down the firmament
- And yet no heaven is more near;
- You shape huge deeds without event,
- And half made men believe and fear.
- Your worship is your furnaces,
- Which, like old idols, lost obscenes,
- Have molten bowels; your vision is
- Machines for making more machines.
- O, you are buried in the night,
- Preparing destinies of rust;
- Iron misused must turn to blight
- And dwindle to a tettered crust.
- The grass, forerunner of life, has gone,
- But plants that spring in ruins and shards
- Attend until your dream is done:
- I have seen hemlock in your yards.
- The generations of the worm
- Know not your loads piled on their soil;
- Their knotted ganglions shall wax firm
- Till your strong flagstones heave and toil.
- When the old hollowed earth is cracked,
- And when, to grasp more power and feasts,
- Its ores are emptied, wasted, lacked,
- The middens of your burning beasts
- Shall be raked over till they yield
- Last priceless slags for fashionings high,
- Ploughs to make grass in every field,
- Chisels men's hands to magnify.
- RUPERT BROOKE
- _Born 1887_
- _Died at Lemnos 1915_
- SONNET
- Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire
- Of watching you; and swing me suddenly
- Into the shade and loneliness and mire
- Of the last land! There, waiting patiently,
- One day, I think, I'll feel a cool wind blowing,
- See a slow light across the Stygian tide,
- And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing,
- And tremble. And _I_ shall know that you have died.
- And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream,
- Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host,
- Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam--
- Most individual and bewildering ghost!--
- And turn, and toss your brown delightful head
- Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.
- THE SOLDIER
- If I should die, think only this of me:
- That there's some corner of a foreign field
- That is for ever England. There shall be
- In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
- A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
- Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
- A body of England's, breathing English air,
- Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
- And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
- A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
- Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
- Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
- And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
- In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
- THE TREASURE
- When colour goes home into the eyes,
- And lights that shine are shut again,
- With dancing girls and sweet birds' cries
- Behind the gateways of the brain;
- And that no-place which gave them birth, shall close
- The rainbow and the rose:--
- Still may Time hold some golden space.
- Where I'll unpack that scented store
- Of song and flower and sky and face,
- And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
- Musing upon them; as a mother, who
- Has watched her children all the rich day through,
- Sits, quiet-handed, in the fading light,
- When children sleep, ere night.
- _August,_ 1914.
- THE GREAT LOVER
- I have been so great a lover I filled my days
- So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise,
- The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
- Desire illimitable, and still content,
- And all dear names men use, to cheat despair
- For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
- Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
- Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife
- Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far,
- My night shall be remembered for a star
- That outshone all the suns of all men's days.
- Shall I not crown them with immortal praise
- Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me
- High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see
- The inenarrable godhead of delight?
- Love is a flame:--we have beaconed the world's night.
- A city:--and we have built it, these and I.
- An emperor:--we have taught the world to die.
- So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence,
- And the high cause of Love's magnificence,
- And to keep loyalties young, I'll write those names
- Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames,
- And set them as a banner, that men may know,
- To dare the generations, burn, and blow
- Out on the wind of Time, shining and streaming......
- These I have loved:
- White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
- Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
- Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong
- Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
- Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
- And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
- And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
- Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
- Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
- Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
- Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
- Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
- Impassioned beauty of a great machine;
- The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
- The good smell of old clothes; and other such--
- The comfortable smell of friendly ringers,
- Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
- About dead leaves and last year's ferns ...
- Dear names,
- And thousand other throng to me! Royal flames;
- Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
- Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
- Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain,
- Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
- Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
- That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
- And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
- Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
- Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
- And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
- And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;--
- All these have been my loves. And these shall pass,
- Whatever passes not, in the great hour,
- Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power
- To hold them with me through the gate of Death.
- They'll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath,
- Break the high bond we made, and sell Love's trust
- And sacramented covenant to the dust.
- --Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
- And give what's left of love again; and make
- New friends, now strangers....
- But the best I've known,
- Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
- About the winds of the world, and fades from
- brains Of living men, and dies.
- Nothing remains.
- O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
- This one last gift I give: that after men
- Shall know, and later lovers, far removed,
- Praise you, 'All these were lovely'; say, 'He loved.'
- CLOUDS
- Down the blue night the unending columns press
- In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,
- Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow
- Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness.
- Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,
- And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,
- As who would pray good for the world, but know
- Their benediction empty as they bless.
- They say that the Dead die not, but remain
- Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.
- I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,
- In wise majestic melancholy train,
- And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,
- And men, coming and going on the earth.
- _The Pacific_
- THE OLD VICARAGE, GRANTCHESTER
- _Cafe des Western, Berlin._
- Just now the lilac is in bloom,
- All before my little room;
- And in my flower-beds, I think,
- Smile the carnation and the pink;
- And down the borders, well I know,
- The poppy and the pansy blow ...
- Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
- Beside the river make for you
- A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
- Deeply above; and green and deep
- The stream mysterious glides beneath,
- Green as a dream and deep as death.--
- Oh, damn! I know it I and I know
- How the May fields all golden show,
- And when the day is young and sweet,
- Gild gloriously the bare feet
- That run to bathe ...
- _Du lieber Gott!_
- Here am I, sweating, sick and hot,
- And there the shadowed waters fresh
- Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
- _Temperamentvoll_ German Jews
- Drink beer around; and _there_ the dews
- Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
- Here tulips bloom as they are told;
- Unkempt about those hedges blows
- An English unofficial rose;
- And there the unregulated sun
- Slopes down to rest when day is done,
- And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
- A slippered Hesper; and there are
- Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
- Where _das Betreten's_ not _verboten_..
- _ἐίθε γενοιμην_ ... would I were
- In Grantchester, in Grantchester!--
- Some, it may be, can get in touch
- With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
- And clever modern men have seen
- A Faun a-peeping through the green,
- And felt the Classics were not dead,
- To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
- Or hear the Goat-foot piping low ...
- But these are things I do not know.
- I only know that you may lie
- Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
- And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
- Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
- Until the centuries blend and blur
- In Grantchester, in Grantchester ...
- Still in the dawnlit waters cool
- His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
- And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
- Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx;
- Dan Chaucer hears his river still
- Chatter beneath a phantom mill;
- Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
- How Cambridge waters hurry by ...
- And in that garden, black and white
- Creep whispers through the grass all night;
- And spectral dance, before the dawn,
- A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
- Curates, long dust, will come and go
- On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
- And oft between the boughs is seen
- The sly shade of a Rural Dean ...
- Till, at a shiver in the skies,
- Vanishing with Satanic cries,
- The prim ecclesiastic rout
- Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
- Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,
- The falling house that never falls.
- . . . . . . .
- God! I will pack, and take a train,
- And get me to England once again!
- For England's the one land, I know,
- Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
- And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
- The shire for Men who Understand;
- And of _that_ district I prefer
- The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
- For Cambridge people rarely smile,
- Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
- And Royston men in the far South
- Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
- At Over they fling oaths at one,
- And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
- And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
- And there's none in Harston under thirty,
- And folks in Shelford and those parts
- Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
- And Barton men make cockney rhymes,
- And Co ton's full of nameless crimes,
- And things are done you'd not believe
- At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
- Strong men have run for miles and miles
- When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
- Strong men have blanched and shot their wives
- Rather than send them to St. Ives;
- Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
- To hear what happened at Babraham.
- But Grantchester, ah, Grantchester!
- There's peace and holy quiet there,
- Great clouds along pacific skies,
- And men and women with straight eyes,
- Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
- A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
- And little kindly winds that creep
- Round twilight corners, half asleep.
- In Grantchester their skins are white,
- In Grantchester their skins are white,
- They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
- The women there do all they ought;
- The men observe the Rules of Thought.
- They love the Good; they worship Truth;
- They laugh uproariously in youth;
- (And when they get to feeling old,
- They up and shoot themselves, I'm told)
- Ah God! to see the branches stir
- Across the moon at Grantchester!
- To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
- Unforgettable, unforgotten
- River smell, and hear the breeze
- Sobbing in the little trees.
- Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand,
- Still guardians of that holy land?
- The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
- The yet unacademic stream?
- Is dawn a secret shy and cold
- Anadyomene, silver-gold?
- And sunset still a golden sea
- From Haslingfield to Madingley?
- And after, ere the night is born,
- Do hares come out about the corn?
- Oh, is the water sweet and cool
- Gentle and brown, above the pool?
- And laughs the immortal river still--
- Under the mill, under the mill?
- Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
- And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
- Deep-meadows yet, for to forget
- The lies, and truths, and pain?... oh! yet
- Stands the Church clock at ten to three
- And is there honey still for tea?
- THE BUSY HEART
- Now that we've clone our best and worst, and parted,
- I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend.
- (O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted)
- I'll think of Love in books, Love without end;
- Women with child, content; and old men sleeping;
- And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain;
- And babes that weep, and so forget their weeping;
- And the young heavens, forgetful after rain;
- And evening hush, broken by homing wings;
- And Song's nobility, and Wisdom holy,
- That live, we dead. I would think of a thousand things,
- Lovely and loveable, and taste them slowly,
- One after one, like tasting a sweet food.
- I have need to busy my heart with quietude.
- DINING-ROOM TEA
- When you were there, and you, and you,
- Happiness crowned the night; I too,
- Laughing and looking, one of all,
- I watched the quivering lamplight fall
- On plate and flowers and pouring tea
- And cup and cloth; and they and we
- Flung all the dancing moments by
- With jest and glitter. Lip and eye
- Flashed on the glory, shone and cried,
- Improvident, unmemoried;
- And fitfully and like a flame
- The light of laughter went and came.
- Proud in their careless transience moved
- The changing faces that I loved.
- Till suddenly, and otherwhence,
- I looked upon your innocence;
- For lifted clear and still and strange
- From the dark woven flow of change
- Under a vast and starless sky
- I saw the immortal moment lie.
- One instant I, an instant, knew
- As God knows all. And it and you
- I, above Time, oh, blind! could see
- In witless immortality.
- I saw the marble cup; the tea,
- Hung on the air, an amber stream;
- I saw the fire's unglittering gleam,
- The painted flame, the frozen smoke.
- No more the flooding lamplight broke
- On flying eyes and lips and hair;
- But lay, but slept unbroken there,
- On stiller flesh, and body breathless,
- And lips and laughter stayed and deathless,
- And words on which no silence grew.
- Light was more alive than you.
- For suddenly, and otherwhence,
- I looked on your magnificence.
- I saw the stillness and the light,
- And you, august, immortal, white,
- Holy and strange; and every glint
- Posture and jest and thought and tint
- Freed from the mask of transiency,
- Triumphant in eternity,
- Immote, immortal.
- Dazed at length
- Human eyes grew, mortal strength
- Wearied; and Time began to creep.
- Change closed about me like a sleep.
- Light glinted on the eyes I loved.
- The cup was filled. The bodies moved.
- The drifting petal came to ground.
- The laughter chimed its perfect round.
- The broken syllable was ended.
- And I, so certain and so friended,
- How could I cloud, or how distress
- The heaven of your unconsciousness?
- Or shake at Time's sufficient spell,
- Stammering of lights unutterable?
- The eternal holiness of you,
- The timeless end, you never knew,
- The peace that lay, the light that shone.
- You never knew that I had gone
- A million miles away, and stayed
- A million years. The laughter played
- Unbroken round me; and the jest
- Flashed on. And we that knew the best
- Down wonderful hours grew happier yet.
- I sang at heart, and talked, and eat,
- And lived from laugh to laugh, I too,
- When you were there, and you, and you.
- FRANCIS BURROWS
- THE PRAYER TO DEMETER
- Mother whose hair I grasp, whose bosom I tread,
- Thy son adopted. Thou who dost so charm me
- And in thy lappels of affection warm me,
- Heap all thine other misery on my head;
- Madness alone of evils do I dread,
- Against its imminent presence guard and arm me,
- Suffer its broad flung shadow not to harm me
- But plunge me rather with the naked dead.
- Yet if it must come, let it be entire;
- Cast then upon me unillumined night,
- One whole eclipse not knowing any fire
- To give it record of the former light.
- Complete destruction of the heart's desire,
- A ruin of thought and audience and sight.
- THE GIANT'S DIRGE
- Remember him who battled here,
- What was his living character?
- To friends an heart for ever filled
- With love and with compassion brave;
- To foes a power never stilled
- In pushing vengeance to the grave;
- Where is his spirit gone now, O where?
- What of his ten grand paces here
- Whose motion was a perfect sphere?
- To friends a making unafraid,
- A sure defence, a wall of glass.
- To foes a hidden trap well laid
- To catch them stalking through the grass;
- Where is he walking now, O where?
- What of his power who is here
- Enclosed within the sepulchre?
- To friends an eager sword of joy,
- A shield to nestle underneath.
- To foes whose love is to destroy,
- A stumbling block, a hidden death;
- Where is his power gone now, O where?
- What of his eye that floated here
- Like sky-born dewy gossamer?
- To friends the ever-sought desire,
- The hope achieved, the loving cup;
- To foes an unassaulted fire,
- A furnace withering them up.
- Where is he shining now, O where?
- What of the head that breathed so here
- And the hair beloved so, is it sere;
- To friends a shadow shedding stars,
- Like blessings, from the upper deep;
- To foes a poisoned tree that mars
- Men's lives thereunder laid asleep.
- Where does it blossom now, O where?
- He lives, is living everywhere,
- Where human hearts are, he is there.
- To friends a soul of certainty
- That love though lost is more than none.
- To foes an inability
- To say, "We slew him, we alone,
- His soul is here, we slew him here."
- THE UNFORGOTTEN
- There is a cave beneath the throne of grace
- Where these have honoured and remembered place;
- Strong hairy men, huge-jawed, with wiry limbs,
- Half hid in mist, the heroes of old times.
- They lie among the pots and flints and beads
- Their friends once buried with them as the needs
- Of the after-life, to hunt with and to slay with,
- And flay and cook, or in repose to play with.
- Here he who shaped the flint and bound to axe
- And arrow first; who made the thread of flax
- And hemp to weave; and he who to the plough
- Harnessed and tamed the bull and milked the cow;
- Who taught to bake and grind and till the seed
- Of corn sufficient for the future's need;
- And he who said: "These are my children, these;
- My blood between them and their enemies;
- For when I age and cannot win my meat,
- They shall become new head and hands and feet";
- And he who said: "Let none of our tribe die
- Slain by ourselves with violence. For why,
- Our foes are plentiful, our friends are few,
- Our living scarce. All may have work to do,
- As hunting, warring, digging for the strong,
- Or potting, cooking, weaving for the young,
- The old, the weak, yet for adornment skilled"--
- Too early born and by his brethren killed.
- Here he who dreamed a strange dream in the night,
- And from his rushes springing swat with fright,
- But thought and said with opened eyes, "'Tis beauty,"
- And terror left him. Those who spoke of duty,
- Mercy and truth, and taught the undying soul,
- And many more. And many a grunt and growl
- They give in friendly dreams; when haunches quiver
- And nostrils widen, and hands do twitch and shiver.
- And often one awakes, and blinks, half speaks,
- And yawns and licks and blows upon his cheeks:
- Pure spirits laugh, and with a kindly eye
- The father views their rough-haired majesty.
- THE WELL
- See this plashing fount enshrined,
- Some ancient people roofed and lined;
- Some memory here of a forlorn rime,
- A thought, a breath of a thought sublime
- A sobbing under the wings of time.
- See the ancient people's grave:
- No Andromache, no slave
- Water here for a master draws,
- No slaves longer laugh and pause.
- All's strange language and new laws.
- O words, be good to impart assurance
- Of hope, of memory, of endurance,
- O flourish grass upon our tomb,
- Grant us, sunk in a little room,
- Both a sepulchre and home.
- EGYPTIAN
- The pyramid is built, is built,
- And stone by stone the sphinx;
- Upon the ground the wine is spilt,
- And deep the builder drinks.
- _Deeply the wise man in the desert thinks.
- Hark to the lanterned gondolas!
- The stream is incense-calmed;
- We smoke, we draw the gods with praise,
- They walk amongst us charmed.
- Cries _"Never are the desert-sands disarmed."_
- Our building toil is done, is done,
- All strifes and quarrels cease;
- And slaves and masters are at one,
- And enemies at peace.
- Cries: _"Yet the sands are stirred and wars increase."_
- Riches and joy and thankfulness
- By our rich river are;
- To see our noble work and bless
- Shall travellers come afar.
- Cries: _"Yes, a jew, but many more for war."_
- LIFE
- When I consider this, that bare
- Water and earth and common air
- Combine together to compose
- A being who breathes and stands and goes
- With eyes to see the sun, with brain
- To contemplate his origin,
- I marvel not at death and pain
- But rather how he should have been.
- A. Y. CAMPBELL
- ANIMULA VAGULA
- Night stirs but wakens not, her breathings climb
- To one slow sigh; the strokes of many twelves
- From unseen spires mechanically chime,
- Mingling like echoes, to frustrate themselves;
- My soul, remember Time.
- The tones like smoke into the stillness curl,
- The slippered hours their placid business ply,
- And in thy hand there lies occasion's pearl;
- But thou art playing with it absently
- And dreaming, like a girl.
- A BIRD
- His haunts are by the brackish ways
- Where rivers and sea-currents meet;
- He is familiar with the sprays,
- Over the stones his flight is fleet.
- Low, low he flutters, like a rat
- That scampers up a river-bank;
- Swift, lizard-like, he scours the flat
- Where pools are wersh and weeds are dank,
- The fresh green smell of inland groves,
- The pureness of the upper air,
- Are poorer than his pungent coves
- That hold strange spices everywhere.
- Strong is the salt of open sea;
- Far out, the virgin brine is keen:
- No home is there for such as he,
- Out of the beach he is not seen.
- By shallows and capricious foams
- Are the queer corners he frequents,
- And in an idle humour roams
- The borderland of elements.
- THE DROMEDARY
- In dreams I see the Dromedary still,
- As once in a gay park, l saw him stand i
- A thousand eyes in vulgar wonder scanned
- His humps and hairy neck, and gazed their fill
- At his lank shanks and mocked with laughter shrill.
- He never moved: and if his Eastern land
- Flashed on his eye with stretches of hot sand,
- It wrung no mute appeal from his proud will.
- He blinked upon the rabble lazily;
- And still some trace of majesty forlorn
- And a coarse grace remained: his head was high,
- Though his gaunt flanks with a great mange were worn:
- There was not any yearning in his eye,
- But on his lips and nostril infinite scorn.
- THE PANIC
- Pale in her evening silks she sat
- That but a week had been my bride;
- Then, while the stars we wondered at,
- Without a word she left my side;
- Devious and silent as a bat,
- I watched her round the garden glide.
- Soon o'er the moonlit lawn she streamed,
- Then floated idly down the glade;
- Now like a forest nymph she seemed,
- Now like a light within a shade:
- She turned, and for a moment gleamed,
- And suddenly I saw her fade.
- I had been held in tranced stare
- Till she had vanished from my sight;
- Then did I start in wild despair,
- And followed fast in mad affright;
- What if herself a spirit were
- And had so soon rejoined the night?
- G. K. CHESTERTON
- WINE AND WATER
- Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,
- He ate his egg with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,
- And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was Whale,
- But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail,
- And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
- "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."
- The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the brink
- As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink,
- The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,
- And Noah he cocked his eye and said, "It looks like rain, I think,
- The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,
- But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."
- But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod,
- Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod,
- And you can't get wine at a P.S.A., or chapel, or Eisteddfod,
- But the Curse of Water has come again because of the wrath of God,
- And water is on the Bishop's board and the Higher Thinker's shrine,
- But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.
- THE ROLLING ENGLISH ROAD
- Before the Roman came to Rye or out of Severn strode,
- The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
- A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
- And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
- A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread,
- The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
- I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
- And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
- But I did bash their bagginets because they came arrayed
- To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
- When you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
- The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
- His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
- Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
- The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
- But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
- God pardon us, nor harden us: we did not see so clear
- The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.
- My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
- Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
- But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
- And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
- But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
- Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
- THE DONKEY
- When fishes flew and forests walked
- And figs grew upon thorn,
- Some moment when the moon was blood
- Then surely I was born;
- With monstrous head and sickening cry
- And ears like errant wings,
- The devil's walking parody
- On all four-footed things.
- The tattered outlaw of the earth,
- Of ancient crooked will;
- Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
- I keep my secret still.
- Fools! For I also had my hour;
- One far fierce hour and sweet _i_
- There was a shout about my ears,
- And palms before my feet.
- THE SECRET PEOPLE
- Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget,
- For we are the people of England, that never has spoken yet.
- There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
- There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.
- There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
- There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes;
- You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet:
- Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.
- The fine French kings came over in a nutter of flags and dames.
- We liked their smiles and battles, but we never could say their names.
- The blood ran red to Bosworth and the high French lords went down;
- There was naught but a naked people under a naked crown.
- And the eyes of the King's Servants turned terribly every way,
- And the gold of the King's Servants rose higher every day.
- They burnt the homes of the shaven men, that had been quaint and kind,
- Till there was no bed in a monk's house, nor food that man could find.
- The inns of God where no man paid, that were the wall of the weak,
- The King's Servants ate them all. And still we did not speak.
- And the face of the King's Servants grew greater than the King:
- He tricked them, and they trapped him, and stood round him in a ring.
- The new grave lords closed round him, that had eaten the abbey's fruits,
- And the men of the new religion, with their Bibles in their boots,
- We saw their shoulders moving, to menace or discuss,
- And some were pure and some were vile; but none took heed of us.
- We saw the King as they killed him, and his face was proud and pale;
- And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.
- A war that we understood not came over the world and woke
- Americans, Frenchmen, Irish; but we knew not the things they spoke.
- They talked about rights and nature and peace and the people's reign:
- And the squires, our masters, bade us fight; and never scorned us again.
- Weak if we be for ever, could none condemn us then;
- Men called us serfs and drudges; men knew that we were men.
- In foam and flame at Trafalgar, on Albuera plains,
- We did and died like lions, to keep ourselves in chains,
- We lay in living ruins; firing and fearing not
- The strange fierce face of the Frenchmen who knew for what they fought,
- And the man who seemed to be more than man we strained against and broke;
- And we broke our own rights with him. And still we never spoke.
- Our path of glory ended; we never heard guns again.
- But the squire seemed struck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain
- He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew,
- He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo.
- Or perhaps the shades of the shaven men, whose spoil is in his house,
- Come back in shining shapes at last to spoil his last carouse _i_
- We only know the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea,
- And a new people takes the land: and still it is not we.
- They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords,
- Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
- They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
- They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
- And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
- Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.
- We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
- Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
- It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
- Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst.
- It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
- God's scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
- But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
- Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.
- FROM THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE
- Far northward and far westward
- The distant tribes drew nigh,
- Plains beyond plains, fell beyond fell,
- That a man at sunset sees so well,
- And the tiny coloured towns that dwell
- In the comers of the sky.
- But dark and thick as thronged the host,
- With drum and torch and blade,
- The still-eyed King sat pondering,
- As one that watches a live thing,
- The scoured chalk; and he said,
- "Though I give this land to Our Lady,
- That helped me in Athelney,
- Though lordlier trees and lustier sod
- And happier hills hath no flesh trod
- Than the garden of the Mother of God
- Between Thames side and the sea,
- "I know that weeds shall grow in it
- Faster than men can burn;
- And though they scatter now and go,
- In some far century, sad and slow,
- I have a vision, and I know
- The heathen shall return.
- "They shall not come with warships,
- They shall not waste with brands,
- But books be all their eating,
- And ink be on their hands.
- "Not with the humour of hunters
- Or savage skill in war,
- But ordering all things with dead words,
- Strings shall they make of beasts and birds
- And wheels of wind and star.
- "They shall come mild as monkish clerks,
- With many a scroll and pen;
- And backward shall ye turn and gaze,
- Desiring one of Alfred's days,
- When pagans still were men.
- "The dear sun dwarfed of dreadful suns,
- Like fiercer flowers on stalk,
- Earth lost and little like a pea
- In high heaven's towering forestry,
- --These be the small weeds ye shall see
- Crawl, covering the chalk.
- "But though they bridge St. Mary's sea,
- Or steal St. Michael's wing--Though
- they rear marvels over us,
- Greater than great Vergilius
- Wrought for the Roman king;
- "By this sign you shall know them,
- The breaking of the sword,
- And Man no more a free knight,
- That loves or hates his lord.
- "Yea, this shall be the sign of them,
- The sign of the dying fire;
- And Man made like a half-wit,
- That knows not of his sire.
- "What though they come with scroll and pen,
- And grave as a shaven clerk,
- By this sign you shall know them,
- That they ruin and make dark;
- "By all men bond to Nothing,
- Being slaves without a lord,
- By one blind idiot world obeyed,
- Too blind to be abhorred;
- "By terror and the cruel tales
- Of curse in bone and kin,
- By weird and weakness winning,
- Accursed from the beginning,
- By detail of the sinning,
- And denial of the sin;
- "By thought a crawling ruin,
- By life a leaping mire,
- By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
- And the end of the world's desire;
- "By God and man dishonoured,
- By death and life made vain,
- Know ye the old barbarian,
- The barbarian come again again--
- "When is great talk of trend and tide,
- And wisdom and destiny,
- Hail that undying heathen
- That is sadder than the sea.
- "In what wise men shall smite him,
- Or the Cross stand up again,
- Or charity, or chivalry,
- My vision saith not; and I see
- No more; but now ride doubtfully
- To the battle of the plain."
- And the grass-edge of the great down
- Was clean cut as a lawn,
- While the levies thronged from near and far,
- From the warm woods of the western star,
- And the King went out to his last war
- On a tall grey horse at dawn.
- And news of his far-off fighting
- Came slowly and brokenly
- From the land of the East Saxons,
- From the sunrise and the sea,
- From the plains of the white sunrise,
- And sad St. Edmund's crown,
- Where the pools of Essex pale and gleam
- Out beyond London Town--
- In mighty and doubtful fragments,
- Like faint or fabled wars,
- Climbed the old hills of his renown,
- Where the bald brow of White Horse Down
- Is close to the cold stars.
- But away in the eastern places
- The wind of death walked high,
- And a raid was driven athwart the raid,
- The sky reddened and the smoke swayed,
- And the tall grey horse went by.
- The gates of the great river
- Were breached as with a barge,
- The walls sank crowded, say the scribes,
- And high towers populous with tribes
- Seemed leaning from the charge.
- Smoke like rebellious heavens rolled
- Curled over coloured flames,
- Billowed in monstrous purple dreams
- In the mighty pools of Thames.
- Loud was the war on London wall,
- And loud in London gates,
- And loud the sea-kings in the cloud
- Broke through their dreaming gods, and loud
- Cried on their dreadful fates.
- And all the while on White Horse Hill
- The horse lay long and wan,
- The turf crawled and the fungus crept,
- And the little sorrel, while all men slept,
- Unwrought the work of man.
- With velvet finger, velvet foot,
- The fierce soft mosses then
- Crept on the large white commonweal
- All folk had striven to strip and peel,
- And the grass, like a great green witch's wheel,
- Unwound the toils of men.
- And clover and silent thistle throve,
- And buds burst silently,
- With little care for the Thames Valley
- Or what things there might be--
- That away on the widening river,
- In the eastern plains for crown
- Stood up in the pale purple sky
- One turret of smoke like ivory;
- And the smoke changed and the wind went by,
- And the King took London Town.
- PADRAIC COLUM
- THE OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS
- O, to have a little house!
- To own the hearth and stool and all!
- The heaped up sods upon the fire
- The pile of turf again' the wall!
- To have a clock with weights and chains,
- And pendulum swinging up and down!
- A dresser filled with shining delph,
- Speckled with white and blue and brown!
- I could be busy all the day
- Cleaning and sweeping hearth and floor,
- And fixing on their shelf again
- My white and blue and speckled store!
- I could be quiet there at night
- Beside the fire and by myself,
- Sure of a bed, and loth to leave
- The ticking clock and shining delph!
- Och! but I'm weary of mist and dark,
- And roads where there's never a house or bush,
- And tired I am of bog and road,
- And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!
- And I am praying to God on high,
- And I am praying Him night and day,
- For a little house--a house of my own--Out
- of the wind's and rain's way.
- FRANCES CORNFORD
- AUTUMN EVENING
- The shadows flickering, the daylight dying,
- And I upon the old red sofa lying,
- The great brown shadows leaping up the wall,
- The sparrows twittering; and that is all.
- I thought to send my soul to far-off lands,
- Where fairies scamper on the windy sands,
- Or where the autumn rain comes drumming down
- On huddled roofs in an enchanted town.
- But O my sleepy soul, it will not roam,
- It is too happy and too warm at home:
- With just the shadows leaping up the wall,
- The sparrows twittering; and that is all.
- W. H. DAVIES
- DAYS TOO SHORT
- When Primroses are out in Spring,
- And small, blue violets come between;
- When merry birds sing on boughs green,
- And rills, as soon as born, must sing;
- When butterflies will make side-leaps,
- As though escaped from Nature's hand
- Ere perfect quite; and bees will stand
- Upon their heads in fragrant deeps;
- When small clouds are so silvery white
- Each seems a broken rimmed moon--When
- such things are, this world too soon,
- For me, doth wear the veil of Night.
- THE EXAMPLE
- Here's an example from
- A Butterfly;
- That on a rough, hard rock
- Happy can lie;
- Friendless and all alone
- On this unsweetened stone.
- Now let my bed be hard
- No care take I;
- I'll make my joy like this
- Small Butterfly;
- Whose happy heart has power
- To make a stone a flower.
- THE EAST IN GOLD
- Somehow this world is wonderful at times,
- As it has been from early morn in May;
- Since I first heard the cock-a-doodle-do,
- Timekeeper on green farms--at break of day.
- Soon after that I heard ten thousand birds,
- Which made me think an angel brought a bin
- Of golden grain, and none was scattered yet--
- To rouse those birds to make that merry din.
- I could not sleep again, for such wild cries,
- And went out early into their green world;
- And then I saw what set their little tongues
- To scream for joy--they saw the East in gold.
- THE HAPPY CHILD
- I saw this day sweet flowers grow thick--
- But not one like the child did pick.
- I heard the packhounds in green park--
- But no dog like the child heard bark.
- I heard this day bird after bird--But
- not one like the child has heard.
- A hundred butterflies saw I--But
- not one like the child saw fly.
- I saw the horses roll in grass--
- But no horse like the child saw pass.
- My world this day has lovely been--
- But not like what the child has seen.
- A GREAT TIME
- Sweet Chance, that led my steps abroad,
- Beyond the town, where wild flowers grow--
- A rainbow and a cuckoo, Lord,
- How rich and great the times are now!
- Know, all ye sheep
- And cows, that keep
- On staring that I stand so long
- In grass that's wet from heavy rain--
- A rainbow and a cuckoo's song
- May never come together again;
- May never come
- This side the tomb.
- THE WHITE CASCADE
- What happy mortal sees that mountain now,
- The white cascade that's shining on its brow;
- The white cascade that's both a bird and star,
- That has a ten-mile voice and shines as far?
- Though I may never leave this land again,
- Yet every spring my mind must cross the main
- To hear and see that water-bird and star
- That on the mountain sings, and shines so far.
- IN MAY
- Yes, I will spend the livelong day
- With Nature in this month of May;
- And sit beneath the trees, and share
- My bread with birds whose homes are there;
- While cows lie down to eat, and sheep
- Stand to their necks in grass so deep;
- While birds do sing with all their might,
- As though they felt the earth in flight.
- This is the hour I dreamed of, when
- I sat surrounded by poor men;
- And thought of how the Arab sat
- Alone at evening, gazing at
- The stars that bubbled in clear skies;
- And of young dreamers, when their eyes
- Enjoyed methought a precious boon
- In the adventures of the Moon
- Whose light, behind the Clouds' dark bars,
- Searched for her stolen flocks of stars.
- When I, hemmed in by wrecks of men,
- Thought of some lonely cottage then,
- Full of sweet books; and miles of sea,
- With passing ships, in front of me;
- And having, on the other hand,
- A flowery, green, bird-singing land.
- THUNDERSTORMS
- My mind has thunderstorms,
- That brood for heavy hours:
- Until they rain me words,
- My thoughts are drooping flowers
- And sulking, silent birds.
- Yet come, dark thunderstorms,
- And brood your heavy hours;
- For when you rain me words
- My thoughts are dancing flowers
- And joyful singing birds.
- SWEET STAY-AT-HOME
- Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Well-content,
- Thou knowest of no strange continent:
- Thou hast not felt thy bosom keep
- A gentle motion with the deep;
- Thou hast not sailed in Indian seas,
- Where scent comes forth in every breeze.
- Thou hast not seen the rich grape grow
- For miles, as far as eyes can go;
- Thou hast not seen a summer's night
- When maids could sew by a worm's light;
- Nor the North Sea in spring send out
- Bright trees that like birds flit about
- In solid cages of white ice--
- Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-place.
- Thou hast not seen black fingers pick
- White cotton when the bloom is thick,
- Nor heard black throats in harmony;
- Nor hast thou sat on stones that lie
- Flat on the earth, that once did rise
- To hide proud kings from common eyes.
- Thou hast not seen plains full of bloom
- Where green things had such little room
- They pleased the eye like fairer flowers--
- Sweet Stay-at-Home, all these long hours.
- Sweet Well-content, sweet Love-one-place,
- Sweet, simple maid, bless thy dear face;
- For thou hast made more homely stuff
- Nurture thy gentle self enough;
- I love thee for a heart that's kind--
- Not for the knowledge in thy mind.
- EDWARD L. DAVISON
- THE TREES
- I did not know your names and yet I saw
- The handiwork of Beauty in your boughs,
- I worshipped as the Druids did, in awe,
- Feeling at Spring my pagan soul arouse
- To see your leaf-buds open to the day,
- And dull green moss upon your ragged girth,
- The hoary sanctity of your decay,
- Life and Death glimmering upon the Earth.
- IN THIS DARK HOUSE
- I shall come back to die
- From a far place at last
- After my life's carouse
- In the old bed to lie,
- Remembering the past
- In this dark house.
- Because of a clock's chime
- In the long waste of night
- I shall awake and wait
- At that calm lonely time
- Each smell and sound and sight
- Mysterious and innate:
- Some shadow on the wall
- When curtains by the door
- Move in a draught of wind;
- Or else a light footfall
- In a near corridor;
- Even to feel the kind
- Caress of a cool hand
- Smoothing the draggled hair
- Back from my shrunken brow,
- And strive to understand
- The woman's presence there,
- And whence she came, and how.
- What gust of wind that night
- Shall mutter her lost name
- Through windows open wide,
- And twist the nickering light
- Of a sole candle's flame
- Smoking from side to side,
- Till the last spark it blows
- Sets a moth's wings aflare
- As the faint flame goes out?
- Some distant door may close;
- Perhaps a heavy chair
- On bare floors dragged about
- O'er the low ceiling sound,
- And the thin twig of a tree
- Knock on my window-pane
- Till all the night around
- Is listening with me,
- While like a noise of rain
- Leaves rustle in the wind.
- Then from the inner gloom
- The scratching of a mouse
- May echo down my mind
- And sound around the room
- In this dark house.
- The vague scent of a flower,
- Smelt then in that warm air
- From gardens drifting in,
- May slowly overpower
- The vapid lavender,
- Till feebly I begin
- To count the scents I knew
- And name them one by one,
- And search the names for this.
- Dreams will be swift and few
- Ere that last night be done,
- And gradual silences
- In each long interim
- Of halting time awake
- Confuse all conscious sense.
- Shadows will grow more dim,
- And sound and scent forsake
- The dark ere dawn commence,
- In the new morning then,
- So fixed the stare and fast,
- The calm unseeing eye
- Will never close again.
- . . . .
- I shall come back at last
- To this dark house to die.
- WALTER DE LA MARE
- THE LISTENERS
- "Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
- Knocking on the moonlit door;
- And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
- Of the forest's ferny floor:
- And a bird flew up out of the turret,
- Above the Traveller's head:
- And he smote upon the door again a second time;
- "Is there anybody there?" he said.
- But no one descended to the Traveller;
- No head from the leaf-fringed sill
- Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
- Where he stood perplexed and still.
- But only a host of phantom listeners
- That dwelt in the lone house then
- Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
- To that voice from the world of men:
- Stood thronging the faint moon beams on the dark stair,
- That goes down to the empty hall,
- Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
- By the lonely traveller's call.
- And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
- Their stillness answering his cry,
- While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
- 'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
- For he suddenly smote on the door, even
- Louder, and lifted his head:--
- "Tell them I came, and no one answered,
- That I kept my word," he said.
- Never the least stir made the listeners,
- Though every word he spake
- Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
- From the one man left awake:
- Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
- And the sound of iron on stone
- And how the silence surged softly backward
- When the plunging hoofs were gone.
- ARABIA
- Far are the shades of Arabia,
- Where the Princes ride at noon,
- 'Mid the verdurous vales and thickets,
- Under the ghost of the moon;
- And so dark is that vaulted purple
- Flowers in the forest rise
- And toss into blossom 'gainst the phantom stars
- Pale in the noonday skies.
- Sweet is the music of Arabia
- In my heart, when out of dreams
- I still in the thin clear mirk of dawn
- Descry her gliding streams;
- Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
- Ring loud with the grief and delight
- Of the dim-silked, dark-haired Musicians
- In the brooding silence of night.
- They haunt me--her lutes and her forests;
- No beauty on earth I see
- But shadowed with that dream recalls
- Her loveliness to me.
- Still eyes look coldly upon me,
- Cold voices whisper and say--
- "He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
- They have stolen his wits away."
- MUSIC
- When music sounds, gone is the earth I know,
- And all her lovely things even lovelier grow;
- Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees
- Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.
- When music sounds, out of the water rise
- Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes,
- Rapt in strange dream burns each enchanted face,
- With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place.
- When music sounds, all that I was I am
- Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came;
- And from Time's woods break into distant song
- The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.
- THE SCRIBE
- What lovely things
- hand hath made,
- The smooth-plumed bird
- In its emerald shade,
- The seed of the grass,
- The speck of stone
- Which the wayfaring ant
- Stirs, and hastes on.
- Though I should sit
- By some tarn in Thy hills,
- Using its ink
- As the spirit wills
- To write of Earth's wonders
- Its live willed things,
- Flit would the ages
- On soundless wings
- Ere unto Z
- My pen drew nigh,
- Leviathan told,
- And the honey-fly;
- And still would remain
- My wit to try--My
- worn reeds broken.
- The dark tarn dry,
- All words forgotten--
- Thou, Lord, and I.
- THE GHOST
- "Who knocks?" "I, who was beautiful
- Beyond all dreams to restore,
- I from the roots of the dark thorn am hither,
- And knock on the door."
- "Who speaks?" "I--once was my speech
- Sweet as the bird's on the air,
- When echo lurks by the waters to heed;
- 'Tis I speak thee fair."
- "Dark is the hour!" "Aye, and cold."
- "Lone is my house." "Ah, but mine?"
- "Sight, touch, lips, eyes gleamed in vain."
- "Long dead these to thine."
- Silence. Still faint on the porch
- Broke the flames of the stars.
- In gloom groped a hope-wearied hand
- Over keys, bolts, and bars.
- A face peered. All the grey night
- In chaos of vacancy shone;
- Nought but vast sorrow was there--
- The sweet cheat gone.
- CLEAR EYES
- Clear eyes so dim at last,
- And cheeks outlive their rose.
- Time, heedless of the past,
- No loving kindness knows;
- Chill unto mortal lip
- Still Lethe flows.
- Griefs, too, but brief while stay,
- And sorrow, being o'er,
- Its salt tears shed away,
- Woundeth the heart no more.
- Stealthily lave these waters
- That solemn shore.
- Ah, then, sweet face burn on,
- While yet quick memory lives!
- And Sorrow, ere thou art gone,
- Know that my heart forgives--
- Ere yet, grown cold in peace,
- It loves not, nor grieves.
- FARE WELL
- When I lie where shades of darkness
- Shall no more assail mine eyes,
- Nor the rain make lamentation
- When the wind sighs;
- How will fare the world whose wonder
- Was the very proof of me?
- Memory fades, must the remembered
- Perishing be?
- Oh, when this my dust surrenders
- Hand, foot, lip to dust again,
- May those loved and loving faces
- Please other men!
- May the rusting harvest hedgerow
- Still the Traveller's Joy entwine,
- And as happy children gather
- Posies once mine.
- Look thy last on all things lovely,
- Every hour. Let no night
- Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
- Till to delight
- Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
- Since that all things thou wouldst praise
- Beauty took from those who loved them
- In other days.
- ALL THAT'S PAST
- Very old are the woods;
- And the buds that break
- Out of the briar's boughs,
- When March winds wake,
- So old with their beauty are--
- Oh, no man knows
- Through what wild centuries
- Roves back the rose.
- Very old are the brooks;
- And the rills that rise
- When snow sleeps cold beneath
- The azure skies
- Sing such a history
- Of come and gone,
- Their every drop is as wise
- As Solomon.
- Very old are we men;
- Our dreams are tales
- Told in dim Eden
- By Eve's nightingales;
- We wake and whisper awhile,
- But, the day gone by,
- Silence and sleep like fields
- Of Amaranth lie.
- THE SONG OF THE MAD PRINCE
- Who said, "Peacock Pie"?
- The old King to the sparrow:
- Who said, "Crops are ripe"?
- Rust to the harrow:
- Who said, "Where sleeps she now?
- Where rests she now her head,
- Bathed in Eve's loveliness"?--
- That's what I said.
- Who said, "Ay, mum's the word"?
- Sexton to willow:
- Who said, "Green dust for dreams,
- Moss for a pillow"?
- Who said, "All Time's delight
- Hath she for narrow bed;
- Life's troubled bubble broken"?--
- That's what I said.
- JOHN DRINKWATER
- BIRTHRIGHT
- Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed
- Because a summer evening passed;
- And little Ariadne cried
- That summer fancy fell at last
- To dust; and young Verona died
- When beauty's hour was overcast.
- Theirs was the bitterness we know
- Because the clouds of hawthorn keep
- So short a state, and kisses go
- To tombs unfathomably deep,
- While Rameses and Romeo
- And little Ariadne sleep.
- MOONLIT APPLES
- At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
- And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
- Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes
- A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.
- A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then
- There is no sound at the top of the house of men
- Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again
- Dapples the apples with deep-sea light.
- They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams;
- On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams
- Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams,
- And quiet is the steep stair under.
- In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep,
- And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep
- Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep
- On moon-washed apples of wonder.
- R. C. K. ENSOR
- ODE TO REALITY
- O Real, O That Which Is,
- Beyond all earthly bliss
- My spirit prays to be at one with Thee;
- Away from that which seems,
- From unenduring dreams,
- From vain pursuits and vainer meeds set free.
- How rosy to our eyes
- The mists of error rise,
- The proud pavilions that we weave at will I
- How glittering the ray
- Of that illusive day,
- The hills how grand, the vales how green and still!
- And how inviting yet
- The service of deceit,
- Paid by the crowd that does not understand,
- Parents and friends and foes
- All bowing down to those
- Who against Thee have lifted up their hand!
- Ah, but on whomsoever
- Amid such glib endeavour
- Thy light has shined in sudden sovereignty,
- He who has fallen and heard
- Thy spirit-searching word:
- _Why kick against the pricks? Why outrage Me?
- He can no longer stay
- There in the easy way,
- No longer please himself with make-believe,
- No longer shape at will
- The forms of good and ill
- And what he shall reject and what receive.
- Nor may he dwell content
- In self-aggrandisement,
- To the deep wrong of modern Mammon blind;
- Nor can he drown his cares
- Among the doctrinaires,
- Who think by sowing hate to save mankind.
- For every scheme of vision
- He sees as the condition
- Not of the truest only but the best--
- The riches of all wealth,
- The beauty of Beauty's self--
- That on Thee and within Thee it should rest.
- By Thee our bounds are set;
- Thou madest us; and yet
- O Mother, when we strain to see Thy face,
- Still dost Thou tease our prying
- With masks and mystifying,
- Still hold us at arm's length from Thy embrace!
- Yet would I rather in act
- Plough with the iron Fact
- And earn at least some harvest that is bread,
- Than rich and popular
- In gay Imposture's car
- Dazzle mankind and leave them still unfed.
- Rather would I in thought
- Miss all that I had sought,
- Still pining on Negation's desert isle,
- Than with the current float
- In Pragmatism's boat
- Down to the fatal shore where sirens smile.
- Rather would I be thrown
- Against Thine altar-stone,
- Unsanctified, unpitied, unreprieved,
- Than in some other shrine
- Sup the priests' meat and wine,
- Taking the wages of a world deceived.
- JAMES ELROY FLECKER
- _Born 1884_
- _Died 1915_
- RIOUPEROUX
- High and solemn mountains guard Riouperoux,
- --Small untidy village where the river drives a mill:
- Frail as wood anemones, white, and frail were you,
- And drooping a little, like the slender daffodil.
- Oh I will go to France again, and tramp the valley through,
- And I will change these gentle clothes for clog and corduroy,
- And work with the mill-hands of black Rioupéroux,
- And walk with you, and talk with you, like any other boy.
- WAR SONG OF THE SARACENS
- We are they who come faster than fate: we are they who ride early
- or late:
- We storm at your ivory gate: Pale Kings of the Sunset, beware!
- Not on silk nor in samet we lie, not in curtained solemnity die
- Among women who chatter and cry, and children who mumble a prayer.
- But we sleep by the ropes of the camp, and we rise with a shout,
- and we tramp
- With the sun or the moon for a lamp, and the spray of the wind in
- our hair.
- From the lands, where the elephants are, to the forts of Merou
- and Balghar,
- Our steel we have brought and our star to shine on the ruins of Rum.
- We have marched from the Indus to Spain, and by God we will go
- there again;
- We have stood on the shore of the plain where the Waters of
- Destiny boom.
- A mart of destruction we made at Jalula where men were afraid,
- For death was a difficult trade, and the sword was a broker of doom;
- And the Spear was a Desert Physician who cured not a few of ambition,
- And drave not a few to perdition with medicine bitter and strong:
- And the shield was a grief to the fool and as bright as a desolate pool,
- And as straight as the rock of Stamboul when their cavalry thundered
- along:
- For the coward was drowned with the brave when our battle sheered up
- like a wave,
- And the dead to the desert we gave, and the glory to God in our song.
- THE OLD SHIPS
- I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep
- Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,
- With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep
- For Famagusta and the hidden sun
- That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;
- And all those ships were certainly so old
- Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,
- Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
- The pirate Genoese
- Hell-raked them till they rolled
- Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.
- But now through friendly seas they softly run,
- Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green,
- Still patterned with the vine and grapes in
- gold.
- But I have seen,
- Pointing her shapely shadows from the dawn
- And image tumbled on a rose-swept bay,
- A drowsy ship of some yet older day;
- And, wonder's breath indrawn,
- Thought I--who knows--who knows--but in that same
- (Fished up beyond _Ææa,_ patched up new
- --Stern painted brighter blue--)
- That talkative, bald-headed seaman came
- (Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar)
- From Troy's doom-crimson shore,
- And with great lies about his wooden horse
- Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course.
- It was so old a ship--who knows, who knows?
- --And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain
- To see the mast burst open with a rose,
- And the whole deck put on its leaves again.
- STILLNESS
- When the words rustle no more,
- And the last work's done,
- When the bolt lies deep in the door,
- And Fire, our Sun,
- Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor;
- When from the clock's last chime to the next chime
- Silence beats his drum,
- And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother Time
- Wheeling and whispering come,
- She with the mould of form and he with the loom of rhyme:
- Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee,
- I am emptied of all my dreams:
- I only hear Earth turning, only see
- Ether's long bankless streams,
- And only know I should drown if you laid not your hand on me.
- AREIYA
- This place was formed divine for love and us to dwell;
- This house of brown stone built for us to sleep therein;
- Those blossoms haunt the rocks that we should see and smell;
- Those old rocks break the hill that we the heights should win.
- Those heights survey the sea that there our thoughts should sail
- Up the steep wall of wave to touch the Syrian sky:
- For us that sky at eve fades out of purple pale,
- Pale as the mountain mists beneath our house that lie.
- In front of our small house are brown stone arches three;
- Behind it, the low porch where all the jasmine grows;
- Beyond it, red and green, the gay pomegranate tree;
- Around it, like love's arms, the summer and the rose.
- Within it sat and wrote in minutes soft and few
- This worst and best of songs, one who loves it, and you.
- THE QUEEN'S SONG
- Had I the power
- To Midas given of old
- To touch a flower
- And leave the petals gold
- I then might touch thy face,
- Delightful boy,
- And leave a metal grace,
- A graven joy.
- Thus would I slay,--
- Ah, desperate device!
- The vital day
- That trembles in thine eyes,
- And let the red lips close
- Which sang so well,
- And drive away the rose
- To leave a shell.
- Then I myself,
- Rising austere and dumb
- On the high shelf
- Of my half-lighted room,
- Would place the shining bust
- And wait alone,
- Until I was but dust,
- Buried unknown.
- Thus in my love
- For nations yet unborn,
- I would remove
- From our two lives the morn,
- And muse on loveliness
- In mine arm-chair,
- Content should Time confess
- How sweet you were.
- BRUMANA
- Oh shall I never never be home again?
- Meadows of England shining in the rain
- Spread wide your daisied lawns: your ramparts green
- With briar fortify, with blossom screen
- Till my far morning--and O streams that slow
- And pure and deep through plains and playlands go,
- For me your love and all your kingcups store,
- And--dark militia of the southern shore,
- Old fragrant friends--preserve me the last lines
- Of that long saga which you sung me, pines,
- When, lonely boy, beneath the chosen tree
- I listened, with my eyes upon the sea.
- O traitor pines, you sang what life has found
- The falsest of fair tales.
- Earth blew a far-horn prelude all around,
- That native music of her forest home,
- While from the sea's blue fields and syren dales
- Shadows and light noon-spectres of the foam
- Riding the summer gales
- On aery viols plucked an idle sound.
- Hearing you sing, O trees,
- Hearing you murmur, "There are older seas,
- That beat on vaster sands,
- Where the wise snailfish move their pearly towers
- To carven rocks and sculptured promont'ries,"
- Hearing you whisper, "Lands
- Where blaze the unimaginable flowers."
- Beneath me in the valley waves the palm,
- Beneath, beyond the valley, breaks the sea;
- Beneath me sleep in mist and light and calm
- Cities of Lebanon, dream-shadow-dim,
- Where Kings of Tyre and Kings of Tyre did rule
- In ancient days in endless dynasty,
- And all around the snowy mountains swim
- Like mighty swans afloat in heaven's pool.
- But I will walk upon the wooded hill
- Where stands a grove, O pines, of sister pines,
- And when the downy twilight droops her wing
- And no sea glimmers and no mountain shines
- My heart shall listen still.
- For pines are gossip pines the wide world through
- And full of runic tales to sigh or sing.
- 'Tis ever sweet through pine to see the sky
- Mantling a deeper gold or darker blue.
- 'Tis ever sweet to lie
- On the dry carpet of the needles brown,
- And though the fanciful green lizard stir
- And windy odours light as thistledown
- Breathe from the lavdanon and lavender,
- Half to forget the wandering and pain,
- Half to remember days that have gone by,
- And dream and dream that I am home again!
- HYALI
- Στὸ Γυαλὶ στὸ γαλἄζιο βρἄχο
- Island in blue of summer floating on,
- Little brave sister of the Sporades,
- Hail and farewell! I pass, and thou art gone,
- So fast in fire the great boat beats the seas.
- But slowly fade, soft Island! Ah to know
- Thy town and who the gossips of thy town,
- What flowers flash in thy meadows, what winds blow
- Across thy mountain when the sun goes down.
- There is thy market, where the fisher throws
- His gleaming fish that gasp in the death-bright dawn:
- And there thy Prince's house, painted old rose,
- Beyond the olives, crowns its slope of lawn.
- And is thy Prince so rich that he displays
- At festal board the flesh of sheep and kine?
- Or dare he--summer days are long hot days--
- Load up with Asian snow his Coan wine?
- Behind a rock, thy harbour, whence a noise
- Of tarry sponge-boats hammered lustily:
- And from that little rock thy naked boys
- Like burning arrows shower upon the sea.
- And there by the old Greek chapel--there beneath
- A thousand poppies that each sea-wind stirs
- And cyclamen, as honied and white as death,
- Dwell deep in earth the elder islanders.
- ***
- Thy name I know not, Island, but _his_ name
- I know, and why so proud thy mountain stands,
- And what thy happy secret, and Who came
- Drawing his painted galley up thy sands.
- For my Gods--Trident Gods who deep and pale
- Swim in the Latmian Sound, have murmured thus:
- "To such an island came with a pompous sail
- On his first voyage young Herodotus."
- Since then--tell me no tale how Romans built,
- Saracens plundered--or that bearded lords
- Rowed by to fight for Venice, and here spilt
- Their blood across the bay that keeps their swords.
- That old Greek day was all thy history:
- For that did Ocean poise thee as a flower.
- Farewell: this boat attends not such as thee:
- Farewell: I was thy lover for an hour!
- Farewell! But I who call upon thy caves
- Am far like thee,--like thee, unknown and poor.
- And yet my words are music as thy waves,
- And like thy rocks shall down through time endure.
- THE GOLDEN JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND
- PROLOGUE
- We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
- And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
- We Poets of the proud old lineage
- Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,--
- What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
- Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
- Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
- And winds and shadows fall toward the West:
- And there the world's first huge white-bearded kings
- In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
- And closer round their breasts the ivy clings,
- Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.
- And how beguile you? Death has no repose
- Warmer and deeper than that Orient sand
- Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
- Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
- And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
- Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair:
- They know time comes, not only you and I,
- But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;
- When those long caravans that cross the plain
- With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
- Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
- Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells,
- When the great markets by the sea shut fast
- All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
- When even lovers find their peace at last,
- And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.
- EPILOGUE
- _At the Gate of the Sun, Bagdad, in olden time_
- THE MERCHANTS (_together_)
- Away, for we are ready to a man!
- Our camels sniff the evening and are glad.
- Lead on, O Master of the Caravan:
- Lead on the Merchant-Princes of Bagdad.
- THE CHIEF DRAPER
- Have we not Indian carpets dark as wine,
- Turbans and sashes, gowns and bows and veils,
- And broideries of intricate design,
- And printed hangings in enormous bales?
- THE CHIEF GROCER
- We have rose-candy, we have spikenard,
- Mastic and terebinth and oil and spice,
- And such sweet jams meticulously jarred
- As God's own Prophet eats in Paradise.
- THE PRINCIPAL JEWS
- And we have manuscripts in peacock styles
- By Ali of Damascus; we have swords
- Engraved with storks and apes and crocodiles,
- And heavy beaten necklaces, for Lords.
- THE MASTER OF THE CARAVAN
- But you are nothing but a lot of Jews.
- THE PRINCIPAL JEWS
- Sir, even dogs have daylight, and we pay.
- THE MASTER OF THE CARAVAN
- But who are ye in rags and rotten shoes,
- You dirty-bearded, blocking up the way?
- THE PILGRIMS
- We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
- Always a little further: it may be
- Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,
- Across that angry or that glimmering sea,
- White on a throne or guarded in a cave
- There lives a prophet who can understand
- Why men were born: but surely we are brave,
- Who make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
- THE CHIEF MERCHANT
- We gnaw the nail of hurry. Master, away!
- ONE OF THE WOMEN
- O turn your eyes to where your children stand.
- Is not Bagdad the beautiful? O stay!
- THE MERCHANTS (_in chorus_)
- We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.
- AN OLD MAN
- Have you not girls and garlands in your homes,
- Eunuchs and Syrian boys at your command?
- Seek not excess: God hateth him who roams!
- THE MERCHANTS (_in chorus_)
- We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
- A PILGRIM WITH A BEAUTIFUL VOICE
- Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
- When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
- And softly through the silence beat the bells
- Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.
- A MERCHANT
- We travel not for trafficking alone:
- By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
- For lust of knowing what should not be known
- We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
- THE MASTER OF THE CARAVAN
- Open the gate, O watchman of the night!
- THE WATCHMAN
- Ho, travellers, I open. For what land
- Leave you the dim-moon city of delight?
- THE MERCHANTS (_with a shout_)
- We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
- [_The Caravan passes through the gate_]
- THE WATCHMAN (_consoling the women_)
- What would ye, ladies? It was ever thus.
- Men are unwise and curiously planned.
- A WOMAN
- They have their dreams, and do not think of us.
- VOICES OF THE CARAVAN (_in the distance, singing_)
- We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
- ROBIN FLOWER
- LA VIE CEREBRALE
- I am alone--alone;
- There is nothing--only I,
- And, when I will to die,
- All must be gone.
- Eternal thought in me
- Puts on the dress of time
- And builds a stage to mime
- Its listless tragedy.
- And in that dress of time
- And on that stage of space
- I place, change, and replace
- Life to a wilful rime.
- I summon at my whim
- All things that are, that were:
- The high incredible air,
- Where stars--my creatures--swim.
- I dream, and from my mind
- The dead, the living come;
- I build a marble Rome,
- I give it to the wind.
- Athens and Babylon
- I breathe upon the night,
- Troy towers for my delight
- And crumbles stone by stone.
- I change with white and green
- The seasons hour by hour;
- I think--it is a flower,
- Think--and the flower has been.
- Men, women, things, a stream
- That wavers and flows by,
- A lonely dreamer, I
- Build and cast down the dream.
- And one day weary grown
- Of all my brain has wrought,
- I shall destroy my thought
- And I and all be gone.
- THE PIPES
- With the spring awaken other springs,
- Those swallows' wings are shadowed by other wings
- And another thrush behind that glad bird sings.
- A multitude are the flowers, but multitudes
- Blossom and waver and breathe from forgotten woods,
- And in silent places an older silence broods.
- With the spring long-buried springs in my heart awaken,
- Time takes the years, but the springs he has not taken,
- My thoughts with a boy's wild thoughts are mixed and shaken.
- And here amid inland fields by the down's green shoulder
- I remember an ancient sea and mountains older,
- Older than all but time, skies sterner and colder.
- When the swift spring night on the sea and the mountains fell
- In the hush of the solemn hills I remember well
- The far pipes calling and the tale they had to tell.
- Sad was the tale, ah! sad beyond all saying
- The lament of the lonely pipes in the evening playing
- Lost in the glens, in the still, dark pines delaying.
- And now with returning spring I remember all,
- On southern fields those mountain shadows fall,
- Those wandering pipes in the downland evening call.
- SAY NOT THAT BEAUTY
- Say not that beauty is an idle thing
- And gathered lightly as a wayside flower
- That on the trembling verges of the spring
- Knows but the sweet survival of an hour.
- For 'tis not so. Through dedicated days
- And foiled adventure of deliberate nights
- We lose and find and stumble in the ways
- That lead to the far confluence of delights.
- Not with the earthly eye and fleshly ear,
- But lifted far above mortality,
- We see at last the eternal hills, and hear
- The sighing of the universal sea;
- And kneeling breathless in the holy place
- We know immortal Beauty face to face.
- JOHN FREEMAN
- THE WAKERS
- The joyous morning ran and kissed the grass
- And drew his fingers through her sleeping hair,
- And cried, "Before thy flowers are well awake
- Rise, and the lingering darkness from thee shake.
- "Before the daisy and the sorrel buy
- Their brightness back from that close-folding night,
- Come, and the shadows from thy bosom shake,
- Awake from thy thick sleep, awake, awake!"
- Then the grass of that mounded meadow stirred
- Above the Roman bones that may not stir
- Though joyous morning whispered, shouted, sang:
- The grass stirred as that happy music rang.
- O, what a wondrous rustling everywhere!
- The steady shadows shook and thinned and died,
- The shining grass flashed brightness back for brightness,
- And sleep was gone, and there was heavenly lightness.
- As if she had found wings, light as the wind,
- The grass flew, bent with the wind, from east to west,
- Chased by one wild grey cloud, and flashing all
- Her dews for happiness to hear morning call ...
- But even as I stepped out the brightness dimmed,
- I saw the fading edge of all delight.
- The sober morning waked the drowsy herds,
- And there was the old scolding of the birds.
- THE BODY
- When I had dreamed and dreamed what woman's beauty was,
- And how that beauty seen from unseen surely flowed,
- I turned and dreamed again, but sleeping now no more:
- My eyes shut and my mind with inward vision glowed.
- "I did not think!" I cried, seeing that wavering shape
- That steadied and then wavered, as a cherry bough in June
- Lifts and falls in the wind--each fruit a fruit of light;
- And then she stood as clear as an unclouded moon.
- As clear and still she stood, moonlike remotely near;
- I saw and heard her breathe, I years and years away.
- Her light streamed through the years, I saw her clear and still,
- Shape and spirit together mingling night with day.
- Water falling, falling with the curve of time
- Over green-hued rock, then plunging to its pool
- Far, far below, a falling spear of light;
- Water falling golden from the sun but moonlike cool:
- Water has the curve of her shoulder and breast,
- Water falls as straight as her body rose,
- Water her brightness has from neck to still feet,
- Water crystal-cold as her cold body flows.
- But not water has the colour I saw when I dreamed,
- Nor water such strength has. I joyed to behold
- How the blood lit her body with lamps of fire
- And made the flesh glow that like water gleamed cold.
- A flame in her arms and in each finger flame,
- And flame in her bosom, flame above, below,
- The curve of climbing flame in her waist and her thighs;µ
- From foot to head did flame into red flame flow.
- I knew how beauty seen from unseen must rise,
- How the body's joy for more than body's use was made.
- I knew then how the body is the body of the mind,
- And how the mind's own fire beneath the cool skin played.
- O shape that once to have seen is to see evermore,
- Falling stream that falls to the deeps of the mind,
- Fire that once lit burns while aught burns in the world,
- Foot to head a flame moving in the spirit's wind!
- If these eyes could see what these eyes have not seen--
- The inward vision clear--how should I look for
- Knowing that beauty's self rose visible in the world
- Over age that darkens, and griefs that destroy?
- STONE TREES
- Last night a sword-light in the sky
- Flashed a swift terror on the dark.
- In that sharp light the fields did lie
- Naked and stone-like; each tree stood
- Like a tranced woman, bound and stark.
- Far off the wood
- With darkness ridged the riven dark.
- The cows astonished stared with fear,
- And sheep crept to the knees of cows,
- And comes to their burrows slid,
- And rooks were still in rigid boughs,
- And all things else were still or hid.
- From all the wood
- Came but the owl's hoot, ghostly, clear.
- In that cold trance the earth was held
- It seemed an age, or time was nought.
- Sure never from that stone-like field
- Sprang golden corn, nor from those chill
- Gray granite trees was music wrought.
- In all the wood
- Even the tall poplar hung stone still.
- It seemed an age, or time was none ...
- Slowly the earth heaved out of sleep
- And shivered, and the trees of stone
- Bent and sighed in the gusty wind,
- And rain swept as birds nocking sweep.
- Far off the wood
- Rolled the slow thunders on the wind.
- From all the wood came no brave bird,
- No song broke through the close-fall'n night,
- Nor any sound from cowering herd:
- Only a dog's long lonely howl
- When from the window poured pale light.
- And from the wood
- The hoot came ghostly of the owl.
- MORE THAN SWEET
- The noisy fire,
- The drumming wind,
- The creaking trees,
- And all that hum
- Of summer air
- And all the long inquietude
- Of breaking seas--
- Sweet and delightful are
- In loneliness.
- But more than these
- The quiet light
- From the morn's sun
- And night's astonished moon,
- Falling gently upon breaking seas.
- Such quietness
- Another beauty is--
- Ah, and those stars
- So gravely still
- More than light, than beauty pour
- Upon the strangeness
- Of the heart's breaking seas.
- WAKING
- Lying beneath a hundred seas of sleep
- With all those heavy waves flowing over me,
- And I unconscious of the rolling night
- Until, slowly, from deep to lesser deep
- Risen, I felt the wandering seas no longer cover me
- But only air and light ...
- It was a sleep
- So dark and so bewilderingly deep
- That only death's were deeper or completer,
- And none when I awoke stranger or sweeter.
- Awake, the strangeness still hung over me
- As I with far-strayed senses stared at the light.
- I--and who was I?
- Saw--oh, with what unaccustomed eye!
- The room was strange and everything strange
- Like a strange room entered by wild moonlight;
- And yet familiar as the light swept over me
- And I rose from the night.
- Strange--yet stranger I.
- And as one climbs from water up to land
- Fumbling for weedy steps with foot and hand,
- So I for yesterdays whereon to climb
- To this remote and new-struck isle of time.
- But I found not myself nor yesterday--
- Until, slowly, from deep to lesser deep
- Risen, I felt the seas no longer over me
- But only air and light.
- Yes, like one clutching at a ring I heard
- The household noises as they stirred,
- And holding fast I wondered, What were they?
- I felt a strange hand lying at my side,
- Limp and cool. I touched it and knew it mine.
- A murmur, and I remembered how the wind died
- In the near aspens. Then
- Strange things were no more strange.
- I travelled among common thoughts again;
- And felt the new-forged links of that strong chain
- That binds me to myself, and this to-day
- To yesterday. I heard it rattling near
- With a no more astonished ear.
- And I had lost the strangeness of that sleep,
- No more the long night rolled its great seas over me.
- --O, too anxious I!
- For in this press of things familiar
- I have lost all that clung
- Round me awaking of strangeness and such sweetness.
- Nothing now is strange
- Except the man that woke and then was I.
- THE CHAIR
- The chair was made
- By hands long dead,
- Polished by many bodies sitting there,
- Until the wood-lines flowed as clean as waves.
- Mine sat restless there,
- Or propped to stare
- Hugged the low kitchen with fond eyes
- Or tired eyes that looked at nothing at all.
- Or watched from the smoke rise
- The flame's snake-eyes,
- Up the black-bearded chimney leap;
- Then on my shoulder my dull head would drop.
- And half asleep
- I heard her creep--Her
- never-singing lips shut fast,
- Fearing to wake me by a careless breath.
- Then, at last,
- My lids upcast,
- Our eyes met, I smiled and she smiled,
- And I shut mine again and truly slept.
- Was I that child
- Fretful, sick, wild?
- Was that you moving soft and soft
- Between the rooms if I but played at sleep?
- Or if I laughed,
- Talked, cried, or coughed,
- You smiled too, just perceptibly,
- Or your large kind brown eyes said, O poor boy!
- From the fireside I
- Could see the narrow sky
- Through the barred heavy window panes,
- Could hear the sparrows quarrelling round the
- lilac;
- And hear the heavy rains
- Choking in the roof-drains:--
- Else of the world I nothing heard
- Or nothing remember now. But most I loved
- To watch when you stirred
- Busily like a bird
- At household doings; with hands floured
- Mixing a magic with your cakes and tarts.
- O into me, sick, froward,
- Yourself you poured;
- In all those days and weeks when I
- Sat, slept, woke, whimpered, wondered and slept again.
- Now but a memory
- To bless and harry me
- Remains of you still swathed with care;
- Myself your chief care, sitting by the hearth
- Propped in the pillowed chair,
- Following you with tired stare,
- And my hand following the wood lines
- By dead hands smoothed and followed many years.
- THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES
- And now, while the dark vast earth shakes and rocks
- In this wild dream-like snare of mortal shocks,
- How look (I muse) those cold and solitary stars
- On these magnificent, cruel wars?--Venus,
- that brushes with her shining lips
- (Surely!) the wakeful edge of the world and mocks
- With hers its all ungentle wantonness?--Or
- the large moon (pricked by the spars of ships
- Creeping and creeping in their restlessness),
- The moon pouring strange light on things more strange,
- Looks she unheedfully on seas and lands
- Trembling with change and fear of counter-change?
- O, not earth trembles, but the stars, the stars!
- The sky is shaken and the cool air is quivering.
- I cannot look up to the crowded height
- And see the fair stars trembling in their light,
- For thinking of the starlike spirits of men
- Crowding the earth and with great passion quivering:--
- Stars quenched in anger and hate, stars sick with pity.
- I cannot look up to the naked skies
- Because a sorrow on dark midnight lies,
- Death, on the living world of sense;
- Because on my own land a shadow lies
- That may not rise;
- Because from bare grey hillside and rich city
- Streams of uncomprehending sadness pour,
- Thwarting the eager spirit's pure intelligence...
- How look (I muse) those cold and solitary stars
- On these magnificent, cruel wars?
- Stars trembled in broad heaven, faint with pity.
- An hour to dawn I looked. Beside the trees
- Wet mist shaped other trees that branching rose,
- Covering the woods and putting out the stars.
- There was no murmur on the seas,
- No wind blew--only the wandering air that grows
- With dawn, then murmurs, sighs,
- And dies.
- The mist climbed slowly, putting out the stars,
- And the earth trembled when the stars were gone;
- And moving strangely everywhere upon
- The trembling earth, thickened the watery mist.
- And for a time the holy things are veiled.
- England's wise thoughts are swords; her quiet hours
- Are trodden underfoot like wayside flowers,
- And every English heart is England's wholly.
- In starless night
- A serious passion streams the heaven with light.
- A common beating is in the air--
- The heart of England throbbing everywhere.
- And all her roads are nerves of noble thought,
- And all her people's brain is but her brain;
- And all her history, less her shame,
- Is part of her requickened consciousness.
- Her courage rises clean again.
- Even in victory there hides defeat;
- The spirit's murdered though the body survives,
- Except the cause for which a people strives
- Burn with no covetous, foul heat.
- Fights she against herself who infamously draws
- The sword against man's secret spiritual laws,
- But thou, England, because a bitter heel
- Hath sought to bruise the brain, the sensitive will,
- The conscience of the world,
- For this, England, art risen, and shalt fight
- Purely through long profoundest night,
- Making their quarrel thine who are grieved like thee;
- And (if to thee the stars yield victory)
- Tempering their hate of the great foe that hurled
- Vainly her strength against the conscience of the world.
- I looked again, or dreamed I looked, and saw
- The stars again and all their peace again.
- The moving mist had gone, and shining still
- The moon went high and pale above the hill.
- Not now those lights were trembling in the vast
- Ways of the nervy heaven, nor trembled earth:
- Profound and calm they gazed as the soft-shod hours passed.
- And with less fear (not with less awe,
- Remembering, England, all the blood and pain)
- How look, I cried, you stern and solitary stars
- On these disastrous wars!
- August, 1914.
- SHADOWS
- The shadow of the lantern on the wall,
- The lantern hanging from the twisted beam,
- The eye that sees the lantern, shadow and all.
- The crackle of the sinking fire in the grate,
- The far train, the slow echo in the coombe,
- The ear that hears fire, train and echo and all.
- The loveliness that is the secret shape
- Of once-seen, sweet and oft-dreamed loveliness,
- The brain that builds shape, memory, dream and all ...
- A white moon stares Time's thinning fabric through,
- And makes substantial insubstantial seem,
- And shapes immortal mortal as a dream;
- And eye and brain flicker as shadows do
- Restlessly dancing on a cloudy wall.
- ROBERT GRAVES
- STAR-TALK
- "Are you awake, Gemelli,
- This frosty night?"
- "We'll be awake till reveille,
- Which is Sunrise," say the Gemelli,
- "It's no good trying to go to sleep:
- If there's wine to be got we'll drink it deep,
- But rest is hopeless to-night,
- But rest is hopeless to-night."
- "Are you cold too, poor Pleiads,
- This frosty night?"
- "Yes, and so are the Hyads:
- See us cuddle and hug," say the Pleiads,
- "All six in a ring: it keeps us warm:
- We huddle together like birds in a storm:
- It's bitter weather to-night,
- It's bitter weather to-night."
- "What do you hunt, Orion,
- This starry night?"
- "The Ram, the Bull and the Lion
- And the Great Bear," says Orion,
- "With my starry quiver and beautiful belt
- I am trying to find a good thick pelt
- To warm my shoulders to-night,
- To warm my shoulders to-night."
- "Did you hear that, Great She-bear,
- This frosty night?"
- "Yes, he's talking of stripping _me_ bare
- Of my own big fur," says the She-bear.
- "I'm afraid of the man and his terrible arrow:
- The thought of it chills my bones to the marrow,
- And the frost so cruel to-night!
- And the frost so cruel to-night!"
- "How is your trade, Aquarius,
- This frosty night?"
- "Complaints is many and various
- And my feet are cold," says Aquarius,
- "There's Venus objects to Dolphin-scales,
- And Mars to Crab-spawn found in my pails,
- And the pump has frozen to-night,
- And the pump has frozen to-night."
- TO LUCASTA ON GOING TO THE WARS--
- FOR THE FOURTH TIME
- It doesn't matter what's the cause,
- What wrong they say we're righting,
- A curse for treaties, bonds and laws,
- When we're to do the fighting!
- And since we lads are proud and true,
- What else remains to do?
- Lucasta, when to France your man
- Returns his fourth time, hating war,
- Yet laughs as calmly as he can
- And flings an oath, but says no more,
- That is not courage, that's not fear--Lucasta
- he is Fusilier,
- And his pride sends him here.
- Let statesmen bluster, bark and bray
- And so decide who started
- This bloody war, and who's to pay
- But he must be stout-hearted,
- Must sit and stake with quiet breath,
- Playing at cards with Death.
- Don't plume yourself he fights for you;
- It is no courage, love or hate
- That lets us do the things we do;
- It's pride that makes the heart so great;
- It is not anger, no, nor fear--Lucasta
- he's a Fusilier,
- And his pride keeps him here.
- NOT DEAD
- Walking through trees to cool my heat and pain,
- I know that David's with me here again.
- All that is simple, happy, strong, he is.
- Caressingly I stroke
- Rough bark of the friendly oak.
- A brook goes bubbling by: the voice is his.
- Turf burns with pleasant smoke;
- I laugh at chaffinch and at primroses.
- All that is simple, happy, strong, he is.
- Over the whole wood in a little while
- Breaks his slow smile.
- IN THE WILDERNESS
- Christ of his gentleness
- Thirsting and hungering,
- Walked in the wilderness;
- Soft words of grace He spoke
- Unto lost desert-folk
- That listened wondering.
- He heard the bittern's call
- From ruined palace wall,
- Answered them brotherly.
- He held communion
- With the she-pelican
- Of lonely piety.
- Basilisk, cockatrice,
- Flocked to His homilies,
- With mail of dread device,
- With monstrous barbed stings,
- With eager dragon-eyes;
- Great rats on leather wings
- And poor blind broken things,
- Foul in their miseries.
- And ever with Him went,
- Of all His wanderings
- Comrade, with ragged coat,
- Gaunt ribs--poor innocent--
- Bleeding foot, burning throat,
- The guileless old scape-goat;
- For forty nights and days
- Followed in Jesus' ways,
- Sure guard behind Him kept,
- Tears like a lover wept.
- NEGLECTFUL EDWARD
- _Nancy_
- Edward back from the Indian Sea,
- "What have you brought for Nancy?"
- _Edward_
- "A rope of pearls and a gold earring,
- And a bird of the East that will not sing.
- A carven tooth, a box with a key--"
- _Nancy_
- "God be praised you are back," says she,
- "Have you nothing more for your Nancy?"
- _Edward_
- "Long as I sailed the Indian Sea
- I gathered all for your fancy:
- Toys and silk and jewels I bring,
- And a bird of the East that will not sing:
- What more can you want, dear girl, from me?"
- _Nancy_
- "God be praised you are back," said she,
- "Have you nothing better for Nancy?"
- _Edward_
- "Safe and home from the Indian Sea
- And nothing to take your fancy?"
- _Nancy_
- "You can keep your pearls and your gold earring,
- And your bird of the East that will not sing,
- But, Ned, have you _nothing_ more for me
- Than heathenish gew-gaw toys?" says she,
- "Have you nothing better for Nancy?"
- JULIAN GRENFELL
- _Born 1888_
- _Killed in Action 1915_
- TO A BLACK GREYHOUND
- Shining black in the shining light,
- Inky black in the golden sun,
- Graceful as the swallow's flight,
- Light as swallow, winged one,
- Swift as driven hurricane,
- Double-sinewed stretch and spring,
- Muffled thud of flying feet--
- See the black dog galloping,
- Hear his wild foot-beat.
- See him lie when the day is dead,
- Black curves curled on the boarded floor.
- Sleepy eyes, my sleepy-head--
- Eyes that were aflame before.
- Gentle now, they burn no more;
- Gentle now and softly warm,
- With the fire that made them bright
- Hidden--as when after storm
- Softly falls the night.
- INTO BATTLE
- The naked earth is warm with Spring,
- And with green grass and bursting trees
- Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
- And quivers in the sunny breeze;
- And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
- And a striving evermore for these;
- And he is dead who will not fight;
- And who dies fighting has increase.
- The fighting man shall from the sun
- Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;
- Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
- And with the trees to newer birth;
- And find, when fighting shall be done,
- Great rest, and fullness after dearth.
- All the bright company of Heaven
- Hold him in their high comradeship,
- The Dog-Star and the Sisters Seven,
- Orion's Belt and sworded hip.
- The woodland trees that stand together,
- They stand to him each one a friend,
- They gently speak in the windy weather;
- They guide to valley and ridges' end.
- The kestrel hovering by day,
- And the little owls that call by night,
- Bid him be swift and keen as they,
- As keen of ear, as swift of sight.
- The blackbird sings to him, "Brother, brother,
- If this be the last song you shall sing
- Sing well, for you may not sing another;
- Brother, sing."
- In dreary, doubtful, waiting hours,
- Before the brazen frenzy starts,
- The horses show him nobler powers;
- O patient eyes, courageous hearts
- And when the burning moment breaks,
- And all things else are out of mind,
- And only Joy of Battle takes
- Him by the throat, and makes him blind
- Through joy and blindness he shall know,
- Not caring much to know, that still,
- Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
- That it be not the Destined Will.
- The thundering line of battle stands,
- And in the air Death moans and sings;
- But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
- And Night shall fold him in soft wings.
- IVOR GURNEY
- TO THE POET BEFORE BATTLE
- Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion comes:
- Thy lovely things must all be laid away;
- And thou, as others, must face the riven day
- Unstirred by rattle of the rolling drums,
- Or bugles' strident cry. When mere noise numbs
- The sense of being, the fear-sick soul doth sway,
- Remember thy great craft's honour, that they may say
- Nothing in shame of poets. Then the crumbs
- Of praise the little versemen joyed to take
- Shall be forgotten: then they must know we are,
- For all our skill in words, equal in might
- And strong of mettle as those we honoured; make
- The name of poet terrible in just war,
- And like a crown of honour upon the fight.
- SONG OF PAIN AND BEAUTY
- To M. M. S.
- O may these days of pain,
- These wasted-seeming days,
- Somewhere reflower again
- With scent and savour of praise,
- Draw out of memory all bitterness
- Of night with Thy sun's rays.
- And strengthen Thou in me
- The love of men here found,
- And eager charity,
- That, out of difficult ground,
- Spring like flowers in barren deserts, or
- Like light, or a lovely sound.
- A simpler heart than mine
- Might have seen beauty clear
- When I could see no sign
- Of Thee, but only fear.
- Strengthen me, make me to see
- Thy beauty always
- In every happening here.
- _In Trenches, March_ 1917.
- RALPH HODGSON
- EVE
- Eve, with her basket, was
- Deep in the bells and grass,
- Wading in bells and grass
- Up to her knees,
- Picking a dish of sweet
- Berries and plums to eat,
- Down in the bells and grass
- Under the trees.
- Mute as a mouse in a
- Corner the cobra lay,
- Curled round a bough of the
- Cinnamon tall......
- Now to get even and
- Humble proud heaven and
- Now was the moment or
- Never at all.
- "Eva!" Each syllable
- Light as a flower fell,
- "Eva!" he whispered the
- Wondering maid,
- Soft as a bubble sung
- Out of a linnet's lung,
- Soft and most silverly
- "Eva!" he said.
- Picture that orchard sprite,
- Eve, with her body white,
- Supple and smooth to her
- Slim finger tips,
- Wondering, listening,
- Eve with a berry
- Half way to her lips.
- Oh had our simple Eve
- Seen through the make-believe!
- Had she but known the
- Pretender he was!
- Out of the boughs he came
- Whispering still her name
- Tumbling in twenty rings
- Into the grass.
- Here was the strangest pair
- In the world anywhere;
- Eve in the bells and grass
- Kneeling, and he
- Telling his story low....
- Singing birds saw them go
- Down the dark path to
- The Blasphemous Tree.
- Oh what a clatter when
- Titmouse and Jenny Wren
- Saw him successful and
- Taking his leave!
- How the birds rated him,
- How they all hated him!
- How they all pitied
- Poor motherless' Eve!
- Picture her crying
- Outside in the lane,
- Eve, with no dish of sweet
- Berries and plums to eat,
- Haunting the gate of the
- Orchard in vain......
- Picture the lewd delight
- Under the hill to-night--
- "Eva!" the toast goes round,
- "Eva!" again.
- THE BULL
- See an old unhappy bull,
- Sick in soul and body both,
- Slouching in the undergrowth
- Of the forest beautiful,
- Banished from the herd he led,
- Bulls and cows a thousand head.
- Cranes and gaudy parrots go
- Up and down the burning sky;
- Tree-top cats purr drowsily
- In the dim-day green below;
- And troops of monkeys, nutting, some,
- All disputing, go and come;
- And things abominable sit
- Picking offal buck or swine,
- On the mess and over it
- Burnished flies and beetles shine,
- And spiders big as bladders lie
- Under hemlocks ten foot high;
- And a dotted serpent curled
- Round and round and round a tree,
- Yellowing its greenery,
- Keeps a watch on all the world,
- All the world and this old bull
- In the forest beautiful.
- Bravely by his fall he came:
- One he led, a bull of blood
- Newly come to lustihood,
- Fought and put his prince to shame,
- Snuffed and pawed the prostrate head
- Tameless even while it bled.
- There they left him, every one,
- Left him there without a lick,
- Left him for the birds to pick,
- Left him there for carrion,
- Vilely from their bosom cast
- Wisdom, worth and love at last.
- When the lion left his lair
- And roared his beauty through the hills,
- And the vultures pecked their quills
- And flew into the middle air,
- Then this prince no more to reign
- Came to life and lived again,
- He snuffed the herd in far retreat,
- He saw the blood upon the ground,
- And snuffed the burning airs around
- Still with beevish odours sweet,
- While the blood ran down his head
- And his mouth ran slaver red.
- Pity him, this fallen chief,
- All his splendour, all his strength,
- All his body's breadth and length
- Dwindled down with shame and grief,
- Half the bull he was before,
- Bones and leather, nothing more.
- See him standing dewlap-deep
- In the rushes at the lake,
- Surly, stupid, half asleep,
- Waiting for his heart to break
- And the birds to join the flies
- Feasting at his bloodshot eyes,--
- Standing with his head hung down
- In a stupor, dreaming things:
- Green savannas, jungles brown,
- Battlefields and bellowings,
- Bulls undone and lions dead
- And vultures flapping overhead.
- Dreaming things: of days he spent
- With his mother gaunt and lean
- In the valley warm and green,
- Full of baby wonderment,
- Blinking out of silly eyes
- At a hundred mysteries;
- Dreaming over once again
- How he wandered with a throng
- Of bulls and cows a thousand strong,
- Wandered on from plain to plain,
- Up the hill and down the dale,
- Always at his mother's tail;
- How he lagged behind the herd,
- Lagged and tottered, weak of limb,
- And she turned and ran to him
- Blaring at the loathly bird
- Stationed always in the skies,
- Waiting for the flesh that dies.
- Dreaming maybe of a day
- When her drained and drying paps
- Turned him to the sweets and saps,
- Richer fountains by the way,
- And she left the bull she bore
- And he looked to her no more;
- And his little frame grew stout,
- And his little legs grew strong,
- And the way was not so long;
- And his little horns came out,
- And he played at butting trees
- And boulder-stones and tortoises,
- Joined a game of knobby skulls
- With the youngsters of his year,
- All the other little bulls,
- Learning both to bruise and bear,
- Learning how to stand a shock
- Like a little bull of rock.
- Dreaming of a day less dim,
- Dreaming of a time less far,
- When the faint but certain star
- Of destiny burned clear for him,
- And a fierce and wild unrest
- Broke the quiet of his breast.
- And the gristles of his youth
- Hardened in his comely pow,
- And he came to righting growth,
- Beat his bull and won his cow,
- And flew his tail and trampled off
- Past the tallest, vain enough,
- And curved about in splendour full
- And curved again and snuffed the airs
- As who should say Come out who dares I
- And all beheld a bull, a Bull,
- And knew that here was surely one
- That backed for no bull, fearing none.
- And the leader of the herd
- Looked and saw, and beat the ground,
- And shook the forest with his sound,
- Bellowed at the loathly bird
- Stationed always in the skies,
- Waiting for the flesh that dies.
- Dreaming, this old bull forlorn,
- Surely dreaming of the hour
- When he came to sultan power,
- And they owned him master-horn,
- Chiefest bull of all among
- Bulls and cows a thousand strong.
- And in all the tramping herd
- Not a bull that barred his way,
- Not a cow that said him nay,
- Not a bull or cow that erred
- In the furnace of his look
- Dared a second, worse rebuke;
- Not in all the forest wide,
- Jungle, thicket, pasture, fen,
- Not another dared him then,
- Dared him and again defied;
- Not a sovereign buck or boar
- Came a second time for more.
- Not a serpent that survived
- Once the terrors of his hoof
- Risked a second time reproof,
- Came a second time and lived,
- Not a serpent in its skin
- Came again for discipline;
- Not a leopard bright as flame,
- Flashing fingerhooks of steel,
- That a wooden tree might feel,
- Met his fury once and came
- For a second reprimand,
- Not a leopard in the land.
- Not a lion of them all
- Not a lion of the hills,
- Hero of a thousand kills,
- Dared a second fight and fall,
- Dared that ram terrific twice,
- Paid a second time the price....
- Pity him, this dupe of dream,
- Leader of the herd again
- Only in his daft old brain,
- Once again the bull supreme
- And bull enough to bear the part
- Only in his tameless heart.
- Pity him that he must wake;
- Even now the swarm of flies
- Blackening his bloodshot eyes
- Bursts and blusters round the lake,
- Scattered from the feast half-fed,
- By great shadows overhead.
- And the dreamer turns away
- From his visionary herds
- And his splendid yesterday,
- Turns to meet the loathly birds
- Flocking round him from the skies,
- Waiting for the flesh that dies.
- THE SONG OF HONOUR
- I climbed a hill as light fell short,
- And rooks came home in scramble sort,
- And filled the trees and flapped and fought
- And sang themselves to sleep;
- An owl from nowhere with no sound
- Swung by and soon was nowhere found,
- I heard him calling half-way round,
- Holloing loud and deep;
- A pair of stars, faint pins of light,
- Then many a star, sailed into sight,
- And all the stars, the flower of night,
- Were round me at a leap;
- To tell how still the valleys lay
- I heard a watchdog miles away......
- And bells of distant sheep.
- I heard no more of bird or bell,
- The mastiff in a slumber fell,
- I stared into the sky,
- As wondering men have always done,
- Since beauty and the stars were one,
- Though none so hard as I.
- It seemed, so still the valleys were,
- As if the whole world knelt at prayer,
- Save me and me alone;
- So pure and wide that silence was
- I feared to bend a blade of grass,
- And there I stood like stone.
- There, sharp and sudden, there I heard--
- _Ah! some wild lovesick singing bird_
- _Woke singing in the trees?_
- _The nightingale and babble-wren_
- _Were in the English greenwood then,_
- _And you heard one of these?_
- The babble-wren and nightingale
- Sang in the Abyssinian vale
- That season of the year!
- Yet, true enough, I heard them plain,
- I heard them both again, again,
- As sharp and sweet and clear
- As if the Abyssinian tree
- Had thrust a bough across the sea,
- Had thrust a bough across to me
- With music for my ear!
- I heard them both, and oh! I heard
- The song of every singing bird
- That sings beneath the sky,
- And with the song of lark and wren
- The song of mountains, moths and men
- And seas and rainbows vie!
- I heard the universal choir
- The Sons of Light exalt their Sire
- With universal song,
- Earth's lowliest and loudest notes,
- Her million times ten million throats
- Exalt Him loud and long,
- And lips and lungs and tongues of Grace
- From every part and every place
- Within the shining of His face
- The universal throng.
- I heard the hymn of being sound
- From every well of honour found
- In human sense and soul:
- The song of poets when they write
- The testament of Beautysprite
- Upon a flying scroll,
- The song of painters when they take
- A burning brush for Beauty's sake
- And limn her features whole--
- The song of men divinely wise
- Who look and see in starry skies
- Not stars so much as robins' eyes,
- And when these pale away
- Hear flocks of shiny pleiades
- Among the plums and apple trees
- Sing in the summer day--
- The song of all both high and low
- To some blest vision true,
- The song of beggars when they throw
- The crust of pity all men owe
- To hungry sparrows in the snow,
- Old beggars hungry too--
- The song of kings of kingdoms when
- They rise above their fortune men,
- And crown themselves anew,--
- The song of courage, heart and will
- And gladness in a fight,
- Of men who face a hopeless hill
- With sparking and delight,
- The bells and bells of song that ring
- Round banners of a cause or king
- From armies bleeding white--
- The songs of sailors every one
- When monstrous tide and tempest run
- At ships like bulls at red,
- When stately ships are twirled and spun
- Like whipping-tops and help there's none
- And mighty ships ten thousand ton
- Go down like lumps of lead--
- And songs of fighters stern as they
- At odds with fortune night and day,
- Crammed up in cities grim and grey
- As thick as bees in hives,
- Hosannas of a lowly throng
- Who sing unconscious of their song,
- Whose lips are in their lives--
- And song of some at holy war
- With spells and ghouls more dread by far
- Than deadly seas and cities are,
- Or hordes of quarrelling kings--
- The song of fighters great and small,
- The song of pretty fighters all,
- And high heroic things--
- The song of lovers--who knows how
- Twitched up from place and time
- Upon a sigh, a blush, a vow,
- A curve or hue of cheek or brow,
- Borne up and off from here and now
- Into the void sublime!
- And crying loves and passions still
- In every key from soft to shrill
- And numbers never done,
- Dog-loyalties to faith and friend,
- And loves like Ruth's of old no end,
- And intermission none--
- And burst on burst for beauty and
- For numbers not behind,
- From men whose love of motherland
- Is like a dog's for one dear hand,
- Sole, selfless, boundless, blind--
- And song of some with hearts beside
- For men and sorrows far and wide,
- Who watch the world with pity and pride
- And warm to all mankind--
- And endless joyous music rise
- From children at their play,
- And endless soaring lullabies
- From happy, happy mother's eyes,
- And answering crows and baby cries,
- How many who shall say!
- And many a song as wondrous well
- With pangs and sweets intolerable
- From lonely hearths too gray to tell,
- God knows how utter gray!
- And song from many a house of care
- When pain has forced a footing there
- And there's a Darkness on the stair
- Will not be turned away--
- And song--that song whose singers come
- With old kind tales of pity from
- The Great Compassion's lips,
- That makes the bells of Heaven to peal
- Round pillows frosty with the feel
- Of Death's cold finger tips--
- The song of men all sorts and kinds,
- As many tempers, moods and minds
- As leaves are on a tree,
- As many faiths and castes and creeds,
- As many human bloods and breeds
- As in the world may be;
- The song of each and all who gaze
- On Beauty in her naked blaze,
- Or see her dimly in a haze,
- Or get her light in fitful rays
- And tiniest needles even,
- The song of all not wholly dark,
- Not wholly sunk in stupor stark
- Too deep for groping Heaven--
- And alleluias sweet and clear
- And wild with beauty men mishear,
- From choirs of song as near and dear
- To Paradise as they,
- The everlasting pipe and flute
- Of wind and sea and bird and brute,
- And lips deaf men imagine mute
- In wood and stone and clay;
- The music of a lion strong
- That shakes a hill a whole night long,
- A hill as loud as he,
- The twitter of a mouse among
- Melodious greenery,
- The ruby's and the rainbow's song,
- The nightingale's--all three,
- The song of life that wells and flows
- From every leopard, lark and rose
- And everything that gleams or goes
- Lack-lustre in the sea.
- I heard it all, each, every note
- Of every lung and tongue and throat,
- Ay, every rhythm and rhyme
- Of everything that lives and loves
- And upward, ever upward moves
- From lowly to sublime!
- Earth's multitudinous Sons of Light,
- I heard them lift their lyric might
- With each and every chanting sprite
- That lit the sky that wondrous night
- As far as eye could climb!
- I heard it all, I heard the whole
- Harmonious hymn of being roll
- Up through the chapel of my soul
- And at the altar die,
- And in the awful quiet then
- Myself I heard Amen, Amen,
- Amen I heard me cry!
- I heard it all, and then although
- I caught my flying senses, oh,
- A dizzy man was I!
- I stood and stared; the sky was lit,
- The sky was stars all over it,
- I stood, I knew not why,
- Without a wish, without a will,
- I stood upon that silent hill
- And stared into the sky until
- My eyes were blind with stars and still
- I stared into the sky.
- REASON HAS MOONS
- Reason has moons, but moons not hers
- Lie mirror'd on her sea,
- Confounding her astronomers,
- But, O! delighting me.
- JAMES JOYCE
- STRINGS IN THE EARTH
- Strings in the earth and air
- Make music sweet;
- Strings by the river where
- The willows meet.
- There's music along the river
- For Love wanders there,
- Pale flowers on his mantle,
- Dark leaves on his hair.
- All softly playing,
- With head to the music bent,
- And fingers straying
- Upon an instrument.
- I HEAR AN ARMY
- I hear an army charging upon the land,
- And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
- Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
- Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
- They cry unto the night their battle-name:
- I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
- They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
- Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
- They come shaking in triumph their long green hair:
- They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
- My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
- My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
- D. H. LAWRENCE
- SERVICE OF ALL THE DEAD
- Between the avenues of cypresses,
- All in their scarlet cloaks, and surplices
- Of linen, go the chaunting choristers,
- The priests in gold and black, the villagers.
- And all along the path to the cemetery
- The round, dark heads of men crowd silently,
- And black-scarved faces of women-folk, wistfully
- Watch at the banner of death, and the mystery.
- And at the foot of a grave a father stands
- With sunken head, and forgotten, folded hands;
- And at the foot of a grave a woman kneels
- With pale shut face, and neither hears nor feels
- The coming of the chaunting choristers
- Between the avenues of cypresses,
- The silence of the many villagers,
- The candle-flames beside the surplices.
- FRANCIS LEDWIDGE
- _Killed in Action, 1917,_
- IN FRANCE
- The silence of maternal hills
- Is round me in my evening dreams;
- And round me music-making rills
- And mingling waves of pastoral streams.
- Whatever way I turn I find
- The path is old unto me still.
- The hills of home are in my mind,
- And there I wander as I will.
- _February 3rd, 1917.
- THOMAS MACDONAGH
- He shall not hear the bittern cry
- In the wild sky, where he is lain,
- Nor voices of the sweeter birds
- Above the wailing of the rain.
- Nor shall he know when loud March blows
- Thro' slanting snows her fanfare shrill,
- Blowing to flame the golden cup
- Of many an upset daffodil.
- But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor,
- And pastures poor with greedy weeds,
- Perhaps he'll hear her low at morn
- Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.
- IN SEPTEMBER
- Still are the meadowlands, and still
- Ripens the upland com,
- And over the brown gradual hill
- The moon has dipped a horn.
- The voices of the dear unknown
- With silent hearts now call,
- My rose of youth is overblown
- And trembles to the fall.
- My song forsakes me like the birds
- That leave the rain and grey,
- I hear the music of the words
- My lute can never say.
- ROSE MACAULAY
- TRINITY SUNDAY
- As I walked in Petty Cury on Trinity Day,
- While the cuckoos in the fields did shout,
- Right through the city stole the breath of the may,
- And the scarlet doctors all about
- Lifted up their heads to snuff at the breeze,
- And forgot they were bound for great St. Mary's
- To listen to a sermon from the Master of Caius,
- And "How balmy," they said, "the air is!"
- And balmy it was; and the sweet bells rocking
- Shook it till it rent in two
- And fell, a torn veil; and like maniacs mocking
- The wild things from without passed through.
- Wild wet things that swam in King's Parade
- The days it was a marshy fen,
- Through the rent veil they did sprawl and wade
- Blind bog-beasts and Ugrian men.
- And the city was not. (For cities are wrought
- Of the stuff of the world's live brain.
- Cities are thin veils, woven of thought,
- And thought, breaking, rends them in twain.)
- And the fens were not. (For fens are dreams
- Dreamt by a race long dead;
- And the earth is naught, and the sun but seems:
- And so those who know have said.)
- So veil beyond veil inimitably lifted:
- And I saw the world's naked face,
- Before, reeling and baffled and blind, I drifted
- Back within the bounds of space.
- ***
- I have forgot the unforgettable.
- All of honey and milk the air is.
- God send I do forget.... The merry winds swell
- In the scarlet gowns bound for St. Mary's.
- THOMAS MACDONAGH
- _Born 1878._
- _Executed after Easter Week Rising, 1916._
- INSCRIPTION ON A RUIN
- I stood beside the postern here,
- High up above the trampling sea,
- In shadow, shrinking from the spear
- Of light, not daring hence to flee.
- The moon beyond the western cliff
- Had passed, and let the shadow fall,
- Across the water to the skiff
- That came on to the castle wall.
- I heard below murmur of words
- Not loud, the splash upon the strand,
- And the long cry of darkling birds.
- The ivory horn fell from my hand.
- THE NIGHT HUNT
- In the morning, in the dark,
- When the stars begin to blunt,
- By the wall of Barn a Park
- Dogs I heard and saw them hunt;
- All the parish dogs were there,
- All the dogs for miles around,
- Teeming up behind a hare,
- In the dark, without a sound.
- How I heard I scarce can tell--
- 'Twas a patter in the grass--
- And I did not see them well
- Come across the dark and pass;
- Yet I saw them and I knew
- Spearman's dog and Spellman's dog
- And, beside my own dog too,
- Leamy's from the Island Bog.
- In the morning when the sun
- Burnished all the green to gorse,
- I went out to take a run
- Round the bog upon my horse;
- And my dog that had been sleeping
- In the heat beside the door
- Left his yawning and went leaping
- On a hundred yards before.
- Through the village street we passed--
- Not a dog there raised a snout--
- Through the street and out at last
- On the white bog road and out
- Over Barna Park full pace,
- Over to the silver stream,
- Horse and dog in happy race,
- Rider between thought and dream.
- By the stream, at Leamy's house,
- Lay a dog--my pace I curbed--
- But our coming did not rouse
- Him from drowsing undisturbed;
- And my dog, as unaware
- Of the other, dropped beside
- And went running by me there
- With my horse's slackened stride.
- Yet by something, by a twitch
- Of the sleeper's eye, a look
- From the runner, something which
- Little chords of feeling shook,
- I was conscious that a thought
- Shuddered through the silent deep
- Of a secret--I had caught
- Something I had known in sleep.
- JOHN MASEFIELD
- C. L. M.
- In the dark womb where I began
- My mother's life made me a man.
- Through all the months of human birth
- Her beauty fed my common earth.
- I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
- But through the death of some of her.
- Down in the darkness of the grave
- She cannot see the life she gave.
- For all her love, she cannot tell
- Whether I use it ill or well,
- Nor knock at dusty doors to find
- Her beauty dusty in the mind.
- If the grave's gates could be undone,
- She would not know her little son,
- I am so grown. If we should meet
- She would pass by me in the street,
- Unless my soul's face let her see
- My sense of what she did for me.
- What have I done to keep in mind
- My debt to her and womankind?
- What woman's happier life repays
- Her for those months of wretched days?
- For all my monthless body leeched
- Ere Birth's releasing hell was reached?
- What have I done, or tried, or said
- In thanks to that dear woman dead?
- Men triumph over women still,
- Men trample women's rights at will,
- And man's lust roves the world untamed.
- ***
- O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.
- WHAT AM I, LIFE?
- What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt
- Held in cohesion by unresting cells
- Which work they know not why, which never halt,
- Myself unwitting where their master dwells.
- I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin;
- A world which uses me as I use them,
- Nor do I know which end or which begin,
- Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.
- So, like a marvel in a marvel set,
- I answer to the vast, as wave by wave
- The sea of air goes over, dry or wet,
- Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave,
- Or the great sun comes north, this myriad I
- Tingles, not knowing how, yet wondering why.
- HAROLD MONRO
- JOURNEY
- I
- How many times I nearly miss the train
- By running up the staircase once again
- For some dear trifle almost left behind.
- At that last moment the unwary mind
- Forgets the solemn tick of station-time;
- That muddy lane the feet must climb--
- The bridge--the ticket--signal down--
- Train just emerging beyond the town:
- The great blue engine panting as it takes
- The final curve, and grinding on its brakes
- Up to the platform-edge... The little doors
- Swing open, while the burly porter roars.
- The tight compartment fills: our careful eyes
- Go to explore each other's destinies.
- A lull. The station-master waves. The train
- Gathers, and grips, and takes the rails again,
- Moves to the shining open land, and soon
- Begins to tittle-tattle a tame tattoon.
- II
- They ramble through the country-side,
- Dear gentle monsters, and we ride
- Pleasantly seated--so we sink
- Into a torpor on the brink
- Of thought, or read our books, and understand
- Half them and half the backward-gliding land:
- (Trees in a dance all twirling round;
- Large rivers flowing with no sound;
- The scattered images of town and field,
- Shining flowers half concealed.)
- And, having settled to an equal rate,
- They swing the curve and straighten to the straight,
- Curtail their stride and gather up their joints,
- Snort, dwindle their steam for the noisy points,
- Leap them in safety, and, the other side,
- Loop again to an even stride.
- The long train moves: we move in it along.
- Like an old ballad, or an endless song,
- It drones and wimbles its unwearied croon--
- Croons, drones, and mumbles all the afternoon.
- Towns with their fifty chimneys close and high,
- Wreathed in great smoke between the earth and sky,
- It hurtles through them, and you think it must
- Halt--but it shrieks and sputters them with dust,
- Cracks like a bullet through their big affairs,
- Rushes the station-bridge, and disappears
- Out to the suburb, laying bare
- Each garden trimmed with pitiful care;
- Children are caught at idle play,
- Held a moment, and thrown away.
- Nearly everyone looks round.
- Some dignified inhabitant is found
- Right in the middle of the commonplace--
- Buttoning his trousers, or washing his face.
- III
- Oh the wild engine! Every time I sit
- In any train I must remember it.
- The way it smashes through the air; its great
- Petulant majesty and terrible rate:
- Driving the ground before it, with those round
- Feet pounding, eating, covering the ground;
- The piston using up the white steam so
- You cannot watch it when it come or go;
- The cutting, the embankment; how it takes
- The tunnels, and the clatter that it makes;
- So careful of the train and of the track,
- Guiding us out, or helping us go back;
- Breasting its destination: at the close
- Yawning, and slowly dropping to a doze.
- IV
- We who have looked each other in the eyes
- This journey long, and trundled with the train,
- Now to our separate purposes must rise,
- Becoming decent strangers once again.
- The little chamber we have made our home
- In which we so conveniently abode,
- The complicated journey we have come,
- Must be an unremembered episode.
- Our common purpose made us all like friends.
- How suddenly it ends!
- A nod, a murmur, or a little smile,
- Or often nothing, and away we file.
- I hate to leave you, comrades. I will stay
- To watch you drift apart and pass away.
- It seems impossible to go and meet
- All those strange eyes of people in the street.
- But, like some proud unconscious god, the train
- Gathers us up and scatters us again.
- SOLITUDE
- When you have tidied all things for the night,
- And while your thoughts are fading to their sleep,
- You'll pause a moment in the late firelight,
- Too sorrowful to weep.
- The large and gentle furniture has stood
- In sympathetic silence all the day
- With that old kindness of domestic wood;
- Nevertheless the haunted room will say:
- "Some one must be away."
- The little dog rolls over half awake,
- Stretches his paws, yawns, looking up at you,
- Wags his tail very slightly for your sake,
- That you may feel he is unhappy too.
- A distant engine whistles, or the floor
- Creaks, or the wandering night-wind bangs a door.
- Silence is scattered like a broken glass.
- The minutes prick their ears and run about,
- Then one by one subside again and pass
- Sedately in, monotonously out.
- You bend your head and wipe away a tear.
- Solitude walks one heavy step more near.
- MILK FOR THE CAT
- When the tea is brought at five o'clock,
- And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
- The little black cat with bright green eyes
- Is suddenly purring there.
- At first she pretends, having nothing to do,
- She has come in merely to blink by the grate,
- But, though tea may be late or the milk may be sour
- She is never late.
- And presently her agate eyes
- Take a soft large milky haze,
- And her independent casual glance
- Becomes a stiff, hard gaze.
- Then she stamps her claws or lifts her ears,
- Or twists her tail and begins to stir,
- Till suddenly all her lithe body becomes
- One breathing, trembling purr.
- The children eat and wriggle and laugh;
- The two old ladies stroke their silk:
- But the cat is grown small and thin with desire,
- Transformed to a creeping lust for milk:
- The white saucer like some full moon descends
- At last from the clouds of the table above;
- She sighs and dreams and thrills and glows,
- Transfigured with love.
- She nestles over the shining rim,
- Buries her chin in the creamy sea;
- Her tail hangs loose; each drowsy paw
- Is doubled under each bending knee.
- A long dim ecstasy holds her life;
- Her world is an infinite shapeless white,
- Till her tongue has curled the last half drop,
- Then she sinks back into the night,
- Draws and dips her body to heap
- Her sleepy nerves in the great arm-chair,
- Lies defeated and buried deep
- Three or four hours unconscious there.
- T. STURGE MOORE
- SENT FROM EGYPT WITH A FAIR ROBE
- OF TISSUE TO A SICILIAN VINE-DRESSER.
- 276 B.C.
- Put out to sea, if wine thou wouldest make
- Such as is made in Cos: when open boat
- May safely launch, advice of pilots take;
- And find the deepest bottom, most remote
- From all encroachment of the crumbling shore,
- Where no fresh stream tempers the rich salt wave,
- Forcing rash sweetness on sage ocean's brine;
- As youthful shepherds pour
- Their first love forth to Battos gnarled and grave,
- Fooling shrewd age to bless some fond design.
- Not after storm! but when, for a long spell,
- No white-maned horse has raced across the blue,
- Put from the beach! lest troubled be the well--
- Less pure thy draught than from such depth were due.
- Fast close thy largest jars, prepared and clean!
- Next weigh each buoyant womb down through the flood,
- Far down! when, with a cord the lid remove,
- And it will fill unseen,
- Swift as a heart Love smites sucks back the blood:--
- This bubbles, deeper born than sighs, shall prove.
- If thy bowed shoulders ache, as thou dost haul--
- Those groan who climb with rich ore from the mine;
- Labour untold round Ilion girt a wall;
- A god toiled that Achilles' arms might shine;
- Think of these things and double knit thy will!
- Then, should the sun be hot on thy return,
- Cover thy jars with piles of bladder weed,
- Dripping, and fragrant still
- From sea-wolds where it grows like bracken-fern:
- A grapnel dragged will soon supply thy need.
- Home to a tun-convey thy precious freight!
- Wherein, for thirty days, it should abide,
- Closed, yet not quite closed from the air, and wait
- While, through dim stillness, slowly doth subside
- Thick sediment. The humour of a day,
- Which has defeated youth and health and joy,
- Down, through a dreamless sleep, will settle thus,
- Till riseth maiden gay
- Set free from all glooms past--or else a boy
- Once more a school-friend worthy Troilus.
- Yet to such cool wood tank some dream might dip:
- Vision of Aphrodite sunk to sleep,
- Or of some sailor let down from a ship,
- Young, dead, and lovely, while across the deep,
- Through the calm night, his hoarse-voiced comrades chaunt--
- So far at sea, they cannot reach the land
- To lay him perfect in the warm brown earth.
- Pray that such dreams there haunt!
- While, through damp darkness, where thy tun doth stand,
- Cold salamanders sidle round its girth.
- Gently draw off the clear and tomb it yet
- For other twenty days in cedarn casks!
- Where through trance, surely, prophecy will set;
- As, dedicated to light temple-tasks,
- The young priest dreams the unknown mystery.
- Through Ariadne, knelt disconsolate
- In the sea's marge, so welled back warmth which throbbed
- With nuptial promise: she
- Turned; and, half-choked through dewy glens, some great,
- Some magic drone of revel coming sobbed.
- Of glorious fruit, indeed, must be thy choice,
- Such as has fully ripened on the branch,
- Such as due rain, then sunshine, made rejoice,
- Which, pulped and coloured, now deep bloom doth blanch;
- Clusters like odes for victors in the games,
- Strophe on strophe globed, pure nectar all!
- Spread such to dry,--if Helios grant thee grace,
- Exposed unto his flames
- Two days, or, if not, three; or, should rain fall;
- Stretch them on hurdles in the house four days.
- Grapes are not sharded chestnuts, which the tree
- Lets fall to burst them on the ground, where red
- Rolls forth the fruit, from white-lined wards set free,
- And all undamaged glows 'mid husks it shed;
- Nay, they are soft and should be singly stripped
- From off the bunch, by maiden's dainty hand,
- Then dropped through the cool silent depth to sink
- (Coy, as herself hath slipped,
- Bathing, from shelves in caves along the strand)
- Till round each dark grape water barely wink;
- Since some nine measures of sea-water fill
- A butt of fifty, ere the plump fruit peep,
- --Like sombre dolphin shoals when nights are still,
- Which penned in Proteus' wizard circle sleep,
- And 'twixt them glinting curves of silver glance
- If Zephyr, dimpling dark calm, counts them o'er.--
- Let soak thy fruit for two days thus, then tread!
- While bare-legged bumpkins dance,
- Bright from thy bursting press arched spouts shall pour,
- And gurgling torrents towards thy vats run red.
- Meanwhile the maidens, each with wooden rake,
- Drag back the skins and laugh at aprons splashed;
- Or youths rest, boasting how their brown arms ache,
- So fast their shovels for so long have flashed,
- Baffling their comrades' legs with mounting heaps.
- Treble their labour! still the happier they,
- Who at this genial task wear out long hours,
- Till vast night round them creeps,
- When soon the torch-light dance whirls them away;
- For gods who love wine double all their powers.
- Iacchus is the always grateful god!
- His vineyards are more fair than gardens far;
- Hanging, like those of Babylon, they nod
- O'er each Ionian cliff and hill-side scar!
- While Cypris lends him saltness, depth, and peace;
- The brown earth yields him sap for richest green;
- And he has borrowed laughter from the sky;
- Wildness from winds; and bees
- Bring honey.--Then choose casks which thou hast seen
- Are leakless, very wholesome, and quite dry!
- That Coan wine the very finest is,
- I do assure thee, who have travelled much
- And learned to judge of diverse vintages.
- Faint not before the toil! this wine is such
- As tempteth princes launch long pirate barks;--From
- which may Zeus protect Sicilian bays,
- And, ere long, me safe home from Egypt bring,
- Letting no black-sailed sharks
- Scent this king's gifts, for whom I sweeten praise
- With those same songs thou didst to Chloe sing!
- I wrote them 'neath the vine-cloaked elm, for thee.
- Recall those nights! our couches were a load
- Of scented lentisk; upward, tree by tree,
- Thy father's orchard sloped, and past us flowed
- A stream sluiced for his vineyards; when, above,
- The apples fell, they on to us were rolled,
- But kept us not awake.--O Laco, own
- How thou didst rave of love!
- Now art thou staid, thy son is three years old;
- But I, who made thee love-songs, live alone.
- Muse thou at dawn o'er thy yet slumbering wife!--
- Not chary of her best was nature there,
- Who, though a third of her full gift of life
- Was spent, still added beauties still more rare;
- What calm slow days, what holy sleep at night,
- Evolved her for long twilight trystings fraught
- With panic blushes and tip-toe surmise:
- And then, what mystic might--
- All, with a crowning boon, through travail brought!
- Consider this and give thy best likewise!
- Ungrateful be not! Laco, ne'er be that!
- Well worth thy while to make such wine 'twould be;
- I see thy red face 'neath thy broad straw hat,
- I see thy house, thy vineyards, Sicily!--
- Thou dost demur, good but too easy friend!
- Come, put those doubts away! thou hast strong lads,
- Brave wenches; on the steep beach lolls thy ship
- Where vine-clad slopes descend,
- Sheltering our bay, that headlong rillet glads,
- Like a stripped child fain in the sea to dip.
- A SPANISH PICTURE
- Thy life is over now, Don Juan:
- Thy fingers are so shrunk
- That all their rings from off their cold tips crowd,
- Where limp thy hand hath sunk;
- On a trestle-table laid, Don Juan,
- A half-mask near thine ear,
- A visor black in which void gape two gaps
- Where through thou oft didst leer.
- Thou waitest for the priests, Don Juan,
- To bear thee to thy grave;
- Thou'rt theirs at length beyond all doubt, but ha!
- Hast now no soul to save.
- Thou wast brought home last night, Don Juan,
- Upon a stable door;
- Beneath a young nun's casement, found dropped dead,
- Where thou hadst wooed of yore:
- To pay their trouble then, Don Juan,
- Those base grooms took thy sword;
- A rapier to fetch gold, with shagreened sheath,
- Wrought hand-grip, and silk cord;
- Which, with thy fame enhanced, Don Juan,
- Were worth hidalgo's rent;
- Yet on which now, at most, some few moidore
- May by some fop be spent.
- Dull brown a cloak enwraps, Don Juan,
- Both thy lean shanks, one arm,
- That old bird-cage thy breast, where like magpie
- Thy heart hopped on alarm.
- Yet out beyond thy cloak, Don Juan,
- Thrust prim white-stocking'd feet--Silk-stocking'd
- feet that in quadrille pranced round--
- Slippers high-heeled and neat;
- Thy silver-buckled shoes, Don Juan,
- No more shall tread a floor,
- Beside their heels upon the board lies now
- A half-peeled onion's core:
- Munching, a crone, that knew, Don Juan,
- Thy best contrived plots,
- Hobbles about the room, whose gaunt stone walls
- Drear echo as she trots;
- She makes her bundle up, Don Juan;
- She'll not forget thy rings,
- Thy buckles, nor silk stockings; nay, not she!
- They'll go with her few things.
- Those lids she hath pulled down, Don Juan,
- That lowered ne'er for shame;
- No spark from beauty more in thy brain pan,
- Shall make its tinder flame:
- Thou hast enjoyed all that, Don Juan,
- Which good resolves doth daunt,
- Which hypocrites doth tempt to stake vile souls,
- Which cowards crave and want;
- Thou wast an envied man, Don Juan,
- Long shalt be envied still;
- Thou hadst thy beauty as the proud pard hath,
- And instinct trained to skill.
- A DUET
- "Flowers nodding gaily, scent in air,
- "Flowers posied, flowers for the hair,
- "Sleepy flowers, flowers bold to stare--
- "Oh, pick me some!"
- "Shells with lip, or tooth, or bleeding gum,
- "Tell-tale shells, and shells that whisper 'Come,'
- "Shells that stammer, blush, and yet are dumb--"
- "Oh, let me hear!"
- "Eyes so black they draw one trembling near,
- "Brown eyes, caverns flooded with a tear,
- "Cloudless eyes, blue eyes so windy clear--"
- "Oh, look at me!"
- "Kisses sadly blown across the sea,
- "Darkling kisses, kisses fair and free,
- "Bob-a-cherry kisses 'neath a tree--"
- "Oh, give me one!"
- Thus sang a king and queen in Babylon.
- THE GAZELLES
- When the sheen on tall summer grass is pale,
- Across blue skies white clouds float on
- In shoals, or disperse and singly sail,
- Till, the sun being set, they all are gone:
- Yet, as long as they may shine bright in the sun,
- They flock or stray through the daylight bland,
- While their stealthy shadows like foxes run
- Beneath where the grass is dry and tanned:
- And the waste, in hills that swell and fall,
- Goes heaving into yet dreamier haze;
- And a wonder of silence is over all
- Where the eye feeds long like a lover's gaze:
- Then, cleaving the grass, gazelles appear
- (The gentler dolphins of kindlier waves)
- With sensitive heads alert of ear;
- Frail crowds that a delicate hearing saves,
- That rely on the nostrils' keenest power,
- And are governed from trance-like distances
- By hopes and fears, and, hour by hour,
- Sagacious of safety, snuff the breeze.
- They keep together, the timid hearts;
- And each one's fear with a panic thrill
- Is passed to an hundred; and if one starts
- In three seconds all are over the hill.
- A Nimrod might watch, in his hall's wan space,
- After the feast, on the moonlit floor,
- The timorous mice that troop and race,
- As tranced o'er those herds the sun doth pour;
- Like a wearied tyrant sated with food
- Who envies each tiniest thief that steals
- Its hour from his abstracted mood,
- For it living zest and beauty reveals.
- He alone, save the quite dispassionate moon,
- Sees them; she stares at the prowling pard
- Who surprises their sleep and, ah! how soon
- Is riding the weakest or sleepiest hard!
- Let an agony's nightmare course begin,
- Four feet with five spurs a piece control,
- Like a horse thief reduced to save his skin
- Or a devil that rides a human soul!
- The race is as long as recorded time,
- Yet brief as the flash of assassin's knife;
- For 'tis crammed as history is with crime
- 'Twixt the throbs at taking and losing life;
- Then the warm wet clutch on the nape of the neck,
- Through which the keen incisors drive;
- Then the fleet knees give, down drops the wreck
- Of yesterday's pet that was so alive.
- Yet the moon is naught concerned, ah no!
- She shines as on a drifting plank
- Far in some northern sea-stream's flow
- From which two numbed hands loosened and sank.
- Such thinning their number must suffer; and worse
- When hither at times the Shah's children roam,
- Their infant listlessness to immerse
- In energy's ancient upland home:
- For here the shepherd in years of old
- Was taught by the stars, and bred a race
- That welling forth from these highlands rolled
- In tides of conquest o'er earth's face:
- On piebald ponies or else milk-white,
- Here, with green bridles in silver bound,
- A crescent moon on the violet night
- Of their saddle cloths, or a sun rayed round,--
- With tiny bells on their harness ringing,
- And voices that laugh and are shrill by starts,
- Prancing, curvetting, and with them bringing
- Swift chetahs cooped up in light-wheeled carts,
- They come, and their dainty pavilions pitch
- In some valley, beside a sinuous pool,
- Where a grove of cedars towers in which
- Herons have built, where the shade is cool;
- Where they tether their ponies to low hung boughs,
- Where long through the night their red fires gleam,
- Where the morning's stir doth them arouse
- To their bath in the lake, as from dreams to a dream.
- And thence in an hour their hunt rides forth,
- And the chetahs course the shy gazelle
- To the east or west or south or north,
- And every eve in a distant vale
- A hetacomb of the slaughtered beasts
- Is piled; tongues loll from breathless throats;
- Round large jet eyes the horsefly feasts--
- Jet eyes, which now a blue film coats:
- Dead there they bleed, and each prince there
- Is met by his sister, wife, or bride--
- Delicious ladies with long dark hair,
- And soft dark eyes, and brows arched wide,
- In quilted jacket, embroidered sash,
- And tent-like skirts of pleated lawn;
- While their silk-lined jewelled slippers flash
- Round bare feet bedded like pools at dawn:
- So choicefully prepared to please,
- Young, female, royal of race and mood,
- In indolent compassion these
- O'er those dead beauteous creatures brood:
- They lean some minutes against their friend,
- A lad not slow to praise himself,
- Who tells how this one met his end
- Out-raced, or trapped by leopard stealth,
- And boasts his chetahs fleetest are;
- Through his advice the chance occurred,
- That leeward vale by which the car
- Was well brought round to head the herd.
- Seeing him bronzed by sun and wind,
- She feels his power and owns him lord,
- Then, that his courage may please her mind,
- With a soft coy hand half draws his sword,
- Just shudders to see the cold steel gleam,
- And drops it back in the long curved sheath;
- She will make his evening meal a dream
- And surround his sleep like some rich wreath
- Of heavy-lidded flowers bewitched
- To speak soft words of ecstasy
- To wizard king old, wise, and enriched
- With all save youth's and love's sweet glee.
- But, while they sleep, the orphaned herd
- And wounded stragglers, through the night
- Wander in pain, and wail unheard
- To the moon and the stars so cruelly bright:
- Why are they born? ah! why beget
- They in the long November gloom
- Heirs of their beauty, their fleetness,--yet
- Heirs of their panics, their pangs, their doom?
- That to princely spouses children are born
- To be daintily bred and taught to please,
- Has a fitness like the return of morn:
- But why perpetuate lives like these?
- Why, with horns that jar and with fiery eyes,
- Should the male stags fight for the shuddering does
- Through the drear dark nights, with frequent cries
- From tyrant lust or outlawed woes?
- Doth the meaningless beauty of their lives
- Rave in the spring, when they course afar
- Like the shadows of birds, and the young fawn strives
- Till its parents no longer the fleetest are?
- Like the shadows of flames which the sun's rays throw
- On a kiln's blank wall, where glaziers dwell,
- Pale shadows as those from glasses they blow,
- Yet that lap at the blank wall and rebel,--
- Even so to my curious trance-like thought
- Those herds move over those pallid hills,
- With fever as of a frail life caught
- In circumstance o'er-charged with ills;
- More like the shadow of lives than life,
- Or most like the life that is never born
- From baffled purpose and foredoomed strife,
- That in each man's heart must be hidden from scorn
- Yet with something of beauty very rare
- Unseizable, fugitive, half discerned;
- The trace of intentions that might have been fair
- In action, left on a face that yearned
- But long has ceased to yearn, alas!
- So faint a trace do they leave on the slopes
- Of hills as sleek as their coats with grass;
- So faint may the trace be of noblest hopes.
- Yet why are they born to roam and die?
- Can their beauty answer thy query, O soul?
- Nay, nor that of hopes which were born to fly,
- But whose pinions the common and coarse day stole.
- Like that region of grassy hills outspread,
- A realm of our thoughts knows days and nights
- And summers and winters, and has fed
- Ineffectual herds of vanished delights.
- ROBERT NICHOLS
- TO ------
- Asleep within the deadest hour of night
- And turning with the earth, I was aware
- How suddenly the eastern curve was bright,
- As when the sun arises from his lair.
- But not the sun arose: it was thy hair
- Shaken up heaven in tossing leagues of light.
- Since then I know that neither night nor day
- May I escape thee, O my heavenly hell!
- Awake, in dreams, thou springest to waylay
- And should I dare to die, I know full well
- Whose voice would mock me in the mourning bell,
- Whose face would greet me in hell's fiery way.
- FAREWELL TO PLACE OF COMFORT
- For the last time, maybe, upon the knoll
- I stand. The eve is golden, languid, sad....
- Day like a tragic actor plays his role
- To the last whispered word, and falls gold-clad.
- I, too, take leave of all I ever had.
- They shall not say I went with heavy heart:
- Heavy I am, but soon I shall be free;
- I love them all, but O I now depart
- A little sadly, strangely, fearfully,
- As one who goes to try a Mystery.
- The bell is sounding down in Dedham Vale:
- Be still, O bell! too often standing here
- When all the air was tremulous, fine, and pale,
- Thy golden note so calm, so still, so clear,
- Out of my stony heart has struck a tear.
- And now tears are not mine. I have release
- From all the former and the later pain;
- Like the mid-sea I rock in boundless peace,
- Soothed by the charity of the deep sea rain....
- Calm rain! Calm sea! Calm found, long sought in vain.
- O bronzen pines, evening of gold and blue,
- Steep mellow slope, brimmed twilit pool below,
- Hushed trees, still vale dissolving in the dew,
- Farewell! Farewell! There is no more to do.
- We have been happy. Happy now I go.
- THE FULL HEART
- Alone on the shore in the pause of the night-time
- I stand and I hear the long wind blow light;
- I view the constellations quietly, quietly burning;
- I hear the wave fall in the hush of the night.
- Long after I am dead, ended this bitter journey,
- Many another whose heart holds no light
- Shall your solemn sweetness, hush, awe, and comfort,
- O my companions, Wind, Waters, Stars, and Night.
- _Near Gold Cap,_ 1916.
- THE TOWER
- It was deep night, and over Jerusalem's low roofs
- The moon floated, drifting through high vaporous woofs.
- The moonlight crept and glistened silent, solemn, sweet,
- Over dome and column, up empty, endless street;
- In the closed, scented gardens the rose loosed from the stem
- Her white showery petals; none regarded them;
- The starry thicket breathed odours to the sentinel palm;
- Silence possessed the city like a soul possessed by calm.
- Not a spark in the warren under the giant night,
- Save where in a turret's lantern beamed a grave, still light:
- There in the topmost chamber a gold-eyed lamp was lit--
- Marvellous lamp in darkness, informing, redeeming it!
- For, set in that tiny chamber, Jesus, the blessed and doomed,
- Spoke to the lone apostles as light to men entombed;
- And spreading His hands in blessing, as one soon to be dead,
- He put soft enchantment into spare wine and bread.
- The hearts of the disciples were broken and full of tears,
- Because their Lord, the spearless, was hedged about with spears;
- And in His face the sickness of departure had spread a gloom
- At leaving His young friends friendless.
- They could not forget the tomb.
- He smiled subduedly, telling, in tones soft as voice of the dove,
- The endlessness of sorrow, the eternal solace of love;
- And lifting the earthly tokens, wine and sorrowful bread,
- He bade them sup and remember One who lived and was dead.
- And they could not restrain their weeping.
- But one rose up to depart,
- Having weakness and hate of weakness raging within his heart,
- And bowed to the robed assembly whose eyes gleamed wet in the light.
- Judas arose and departed; night went out to the night.
- Then Jesus lifted His voice like a fountain in an ocean of tears,
- And comforted His disciples and calmed and allayed their fears.
- But Judas wound down the turret, creeping from floor to floor,
- And would fly; but one leaning, weeping, barred him beside the door.
- And he knew her by her ruddy garment and two yet-watching men:
- Mary of Seven Evils, Mary Magdalen.
- And he was frighted at her. She sighed: 'I dreamed Him dead.
- We sell the body for silver ...'
- Then Judas cried out and fled
- Forth into the night!... The moon had begun to set;
- A drear, deft wind went sifting, setting the dust afret,
- Into the heart of the city Judas ran on and prayed
- To stern Jehovah lest his deed make him afraid.
- But in the tiny lantern, hanging as if on air,
- The disciples sat unspeaking. Amaze and peace were there.
- For _His_ voice, more lovely than song of all earthly birds,
- In accents humble and happy spoke slow, consoling words.
- Thus Jesus discoursed, and was silent, sitting upright, and soon
- Past the casement behind Him slanted the sinking moon;
- And, rising for Olivet, all stared, between love and dread,
- Seeing the torrid moon a ruddy halo behind His head.
- FULFILMENT
- Was there love once? I have forgotten her.
- Was there grief once? grief yet is mine.
- Other loves I have, men rough, but men who stir
- More grief, more joy, than love of thee and thine.
- Faces cheerful, full of whimsical mirth,
- Lined by the wind, burned by the sun;
- Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth,
- As whose children we are brethren: one.
- And any moment may descend hot death
- To shatter limbs! pulp, tear, blast
- Beloved soldiers who love rough life and breath
- Not less for dying faithful to the last.
- O the fading eyes, the grimed face turned bony,
- Oped mouth gushing, fallen head,
- Lessening pressure of a hand shrunk, clammed, and stony!
- O sudden spasm, release of the dead!
- Was there love once? I have forgotten her.
- Was there grief once? grief yet is mine.
- O loved, living, dying, heroic soldier,
- All, all, my joy, my grief, my love, are thine!
- THE SPRIG OF LIME
- He lay, and those who watched him were amazed
- To see unheralded beneath the lids
- Twin tears, new gathered at the price of pain,
- Start and at once run crookedly athwart
- Cheeks channelled long by pain, never by tears.
- So desolate too the sigh next uttered
- They had wept also, but his great lips moved,
- And bending down one heard, '_A sprig of lime;
- Bring me a sprig of lime._' Whereat she stole
- With dumb signs forth to pluck the thing he craved.
- So lay he till a lime-twig had been snapped
- From some still branch that swept the outer grass
- Far from the silver pillar of the hole
- Which mounting past the house's crusted roof
- Split into massy limbs, crossed boughs, a maze
- Of close-compacted intercontorted staffs
- Bowered in foliage wherethrough the sun
- Shot sudden showers of light or crystal spars
- Or wavered in a green and vitreous flood.
- And all the while in faint and fainter tones
- Scarce audible on deepened evening's hush
- He framed his curious and last request,
- For '_lime, a sprig of lime._' Her trembling hand
- Closed his loose fingers on the awkward stem
- Covered above with gentle heart-shaped leaves
- And under dangling, pale as honey-wax,
- Square clusters of sweet-scented starry flowers.
- She laid his bent arm back upon his breast,
- Then watched above white knuckles clenched in prayer.
- He never moved. Only at last his eyes
- Opened, then brightened in such avid gaze
- She feared the coma mastered him again ...
- But no; strange sobs rose chuckling in his throat,
- A stranger ecstasy suffused the flesh
- Of that just mask so sun-dried, gouged and old
- Which few--too few!--had loved, too many feared.
- 'Father,' she cried; 'Father!'
- He did not hear.
- She knelt and kneeling drank the scent of limes,
- Blown round the slow blind by a vesperal gust,
- Till the room swam. So the lime incense blew
- Into her life as once it had in his,
- Though how and when and with what ageless charge
- Of sorrow and deep joy how could she know?
- Sweet lime that often at the height of noon
- Diffusing dizzy fragrance from your boughs,
- Tasselled with blossoms mere innumerable
- Than the black bees, the uproar of whose toil
- Filled your green vaults, winning such metheglyn
- As clouds their sappy cells, distil, as once
- Ye used, your sunniest emanations
- Toward the window where a woman kneels--She
- who within that room in childish hours
- Lay through the lasting murmur of blanch'd noon
- Behind the sultry blind, now full now flat,
- Drinking anew of every odorous breath,
- Supremely happy in her ignorance
- Of Time that hastens hourly and of Death
- Who need not haste. Scatter your fumes, O lime,
- Loose from each hispid star of citron bloom,
- Tangled beneath the labyrinthine boughs,
- Cloud on such stinging cloud of exhalations
- As reek of youth, fierce life and summer's prime,
- Though hardly now shall he in that dusk room
- Savour your sweetness, since the very sprig,
- Profuse of blossom and of essences,
- He smells not, who in a paltering hand
- Clasps it laid close his peaked and gleaming face
- Propped in the pillow. Breathe silent, lofty lime,
- Your curfew secrets out in fervid scent
- To the attendant shadows! Tinge the air
- Of the midsummer night that now begins,
- At an owl's oaring flight from dusk to dusk
- And downward caper of the giddy bat
- Hawking against the lustre of bare skies,
- With something of th' unfathomable bliss
- He, who lies dying there, knew once of old
- In the serene trance of a summer night
- When with th' abundance of his young bride's hair
- Loosed on his breast he lay and dared not sleep,
- Listening for the scarce motion of your boughs,
- Which sighed with bliss as she with blissful sleep,
- And drinking desperately each honied wave
- Of perfume wafted past the ghostly blind
- Knew first th' implacable and bitter sense
- Of Time that hastes and Death who need not haste.
- Shed your last sweetness, limes!
- But now no more.
- She, fruit of that night's love, she heeds you not,
- Who bent, compassionate, to the dim floor
- Takes up the sprig of lime and presses it
- In pain against the stumbling of her heart,
- Knowing, untold, he cannot need it now.
- SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN
- THE TWILIGHT PEOPLE
- It is a whisper among the hazel bushes;
- It is a long low whispering voice that fills
- With a sad music the bending and swaying rushes;
- It is a heart beat deep in the quiet hills.
- Twilight people, why will you still be crying,
- Crying and calling to me out of the trees?
- For under the quiet grass the wise are lying,
- And all the strong ones are gone over the seas.
- And I am old, and in my heart at your calling
- Only the old dead dreams a-fluttering go;
- As the wind, the forest wind, in its falling
- Sets the withered leaves fluttering to and fro.
- WILFRED OWEN
- _Born 1893,_
- _Killed in Action, 1918._
- STRANGE MEETING
- It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
- Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
- Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
- Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
- Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
- Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
- With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
- Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
- And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
- With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
- Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
- And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
- "Strange, friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."
- "None," said the other, "save the undone years."
- The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
- Was my life also; I went hunting wild
- After the wildest beauty in the world,
- Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
- But mocks the steady running of the hour,
- And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
- For by my glee might many men have laughed,
- And of my weeping something has been left,
- Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
- The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
- Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
- Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
- They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
- None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
- Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
- Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
- To miss the march of this retreating world
- Into vain citadels that are not walled.
- Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
- I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
- Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
- I would have poured my spirit without stint
- But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
- Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
- I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
- I knew you in this death: for so you frowned
- Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
- I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
- Let us sleep now......
- JOSEPH PLUNKETT
- _Born 1887._
- _Executed after the Easter Week Rising, 1916._
- I SEE HIS BLOOD UPON THE ROSE
- I see His blood upon the rose
- And in the stars the glory of His eyes,
- His body gleams amid eternal snows,
- His tears fall from the skies.
- I see His face in every flower;
- The thunder and the singing of the birds
- Are but His voice--and carven by His power
- Rocks are His written words.
- All pathways by His feet are worn,
- His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
- His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
- His cross is every tree.
- SIEGFRIED SASSOON
- 'IN THE PINK'
- So Davies wrote: 'This leaves me in the pink.
- Then scrawled his name: 'Your loving sweet-heart, Willie'
- With crosses for a hug. He'd had a drink
- Of rum and tea; and, though the barn was chilly,
- For once his blood ran warm; he had pay to spend.
- Winter was passing; soon the year would mend.
- He couldn't sleep that night. Stiff in the dark
- He groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm,
- When he'd go out as cheerful as a lark
- In his best suit to wander arm-in-arm
- With brown-eyed Gwen, and whisper in her ear
- The simple silly things she liked to hear.
- And then he thought: to-morrow night we trudge
- Up to the trenches, and my boots are rotten.
- Five miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge,
- And everything but wretchedness forgotten.
- To-night he's in the pink; but soon he'll die.
- And still the war goes on; _he_ don't know why.
- THE DEATH-BED
- He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped
- Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
- Aqueous-like floating rays of amber light,
- Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep,--
- Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
- Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.
- Some one was holding water to his mouth,
- He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped
- Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot
- The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.
- Water--calm, sliding green above the weir;
- Water--a sky-lit alley for his boat,
- Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers
- And shaken hues of summer: drifting down,
- He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.
- Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,
- Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.
- Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars
- Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;
- Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,
- Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.
- Rain; he could hear it rustling through the dark
- Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
- Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers
- That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps
- Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace
- Gently and slowly washing life away.
- . . . . .
- He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain
- Leaped like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore
- His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.
- But some one was beside him; soon he lay
- Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.
- And Death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared.
- Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
- Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
- Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
- He's young; he hated war; how should he die
- When cruel old campaigners win safe through?
- But Death replied: 'I choose him.' So he went,
- And there was silence in the summer night;
- Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
- Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.
- COUNTER-ATTACK
- We'd gained our first objective hours before
- While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
- Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
- Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
- With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
- And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.
- The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
- High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps;
- And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
- Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
- And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
- Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
- And then the rain began,--the jolly old rain!
- A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,
- Staring across the morning blear with fog;
- He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;
- And then, of course, they started with five-nines
- Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.
- Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst,
- Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,
- While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.
- He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,
- Sick for escape,--loathing the strangled horror
- And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.
- An officer came blundering down the trench:
- "Stand-to and man the fire-step!" On he went ...
- Gasping and bawling, "Fire-step... Counter-attack!"
- Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
- Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;
- And stumbling figures looming out in front.
- "O Christ, they're coming at us!" Bullets spat,
- And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ...
- And started blazing wildly ... Then a bang
- Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out
- To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked
- And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,
- Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ...
- Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,
- Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.
- DREAMERS
- Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
- Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
- In the great hour of destiny they stand,
- Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
- Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
- Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
- Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
- They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.
- I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
- And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
- Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
- And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
- Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
- And going to the office in the train.
- EVERYONE SANG
- Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
- And I was filled with such delight
- As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
- Winging wildly across the white
- Orchards and dark-green fields; on--on--and out of sight.
- Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
- And beauty came like the setting sun:
- My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
- Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
- Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
- EDWARD SHANKS
- A NIGHT-PIECE
- Come out and walk. The last few drops of light
- Drain silently out of the cloudy blue;
- The trees are full of the dark-stooping night,
- The fields are wet with dew.
- All's quiet in the wood but, far away,
- Down the hillside and out across the plain,
- Moves, with long trail of white that marks its way,
- The softly panting train.
- Come through the clearing. Hardly now we see
- The flowers, save dark or light against the grass,
- Or glimmering silver on a scented tree
- That trembles as we pass.
- Hark now! So far, so far ... that distant song ...
- Move not the rustling grasses with your feet.
- The dusk is full of sounds, that all along
- The muttering boughs repeat.
- So far, so faint, we lift our heads in doubt.
- Wind, or the blood that beats within our ears,
- Has feigned a dubious and delusive note,
- Such as a dreamer hears.
- Again ... again! The faint sounds rise and fail.
- So far the enchanted tree, the song so low ...
- A drowsy thrush? A waking nightingale?
- Silence. We do not know.
- THE GLOW-WORM
- The pale road winds faintly upward into the dark skies,
- And beside it on the rough grass that the wind invisibly stirs,
- Sheltered by sharp-speared gorse and the berried junipers,
- Shining steadily with a green light, the glow-worm lies.
- We regard it; and this hill and all the other hills
- That fall in folds to the river, very smooth and steep,
- And the hangers and brakes that the darkness thickly fills
- Fade like phantoms round the light and night is deep, so deep,--
- That all the world is emptiness about the still flame
- And we are small shadows standing lost in the huge night.
- We gather up the glow-worm, stooping with dazzled sight,
- And carry it to the little enclosed garden whence we came,
- And place it on the short grass. Then the shadowy flowers fade,
- The walls waver and melt and the houses dis-appear
- And the solid town trembles into insubstantial shade
- Round the light of the burning glow-worm, steady and clear.
- THE HALT
- _"Mark time in front! Rear fours cover! Company--halt!_
- _Order arms! Stand at--ease! Stand easy."_
- A sudden hush:
- And then the talk began with a mighty rush--
- "You weren't ever in step--The sergeant.--It wasn't my fault--
- Well, the Lord be praised at least for a ten minutes' halt."
- We sat on a gate and watched them easing and shifting;
- Out of the distance a faint, keen breath came drifting,
- From the sea behind the hills, and the hedges were salt.
- Where do you halt now? Under what hedge do you lie?
- Where the tall poplars are fringing the white French roads?
- And smoke I have not seen discolours the foreign sky?
- Is the company resting there as we rested together
- Stamping its feet and readjusting its loads
- And looking with wary eyes at the drooping weather?
- A HOLLOW ELM
- What hast thou not withstood;
- Tempest-despising tree,
- Whose bleak and riven wood
- Gapes now so hollowly,
- What rains have beaten thee through many years,
- What snows from off thy branches dripped like tears?
- Calmly thou standest now
- Upon thy sunny mound;
- The first spring breezes flow
- Past with sweet dizzy sound;
- Yet on thy pollard top the branches few
- Stand stiffly out, disdain to murmur too.
- The children at thy foot
- Open new-lighted eyes,
- Where, on gnarled bark and root,
- The soft, warm sunshine lies--
- Dost thou, upon thine ancient sides, resent
- The touch of youth, quick and impermanent?
- These, at the beck of spring,
- Live in the moment still;
- Thy boughs unquivering,
- Remembering winter's chill,
- And many other winters past and gone,
- Are mocked, not cheated, by the transient sun.
- Hast thou so much withstood,
- Tempest-despising tree,
- That now thy hollow wood
- Stiffens disdainfully
- Against the soft spring airs and soft spring rain,
- Knowing too well that winter comes again?
- THE RETURN
- I
- Now into hearts long empty of the sun
- The morning comes again with golden light
- And all the shades of the half-dusk are done
- And all the crevices are suddenly bright.
- So gradually had love lain down to sleep,
- We knew it not; but when we saw his head
- Pillowed and sunken in a trance so deep
- We whispered shuddering that he was dead.
- Then you like Psyche took the light and leant
- Over the monster lying in his place,
- Daring, despairing, trembling as you bent ...
- But love raised up his new-awakening face
- And into our hearts long empty of the sun
- We felt the sky-distilled bright liquor run.
- II
- When love comes back that went in mist and cloud
- He comes triumphant in his pomp and power;
- Voices that muttered long are glad and loud
- To mark the sweetness of the sudden hour.
- How could we live so long in that half-light?
- That opiate shadow, where the deadened nerves
- So soon forget how hills and winds are bright,
- That drugged and sleepy dusk, that only serves
- With false shades to conceal the emptiness
- Of hearts whence love has stolen unawares,
- Where creeping doubts and dumb, dull sorrows press
- And weariness with blind eyes gapes and stares.
- This was our state, but now a happy song
- Rings through our inner sunlight all day long.
- III
- When that I lay in a mute agony,
- I nothing saw nor heard nor felt nor thought,
- The inner self, the quintessential me,
- In that blind hour beyond all sense was brought
- Hard against pain. I had no body, no mind,
- Nought but the point that suffers joy or loss,
- No eyes in sudden blackness to be blind,
- No brain for swift regrets to run across.
- But when you touched me, when your hot tears fell,
- The point that had been nothing else but pain
- Changed into rapture by a miracle,
- In which all raptures known before were vain.
- Thus loss which bared the utmost shivering nerve
- For joy's precursor in the heart did serve.
- CLOUDS
- Over this hill the high clouds float all day
- And trail their long, soft shadows on the grass,
- And now above the meadows make delay
- And now with regular, swift motion pass.
- Now comes a threatening drift from the south-west,
- In smoky colours drest,
- That spills far out upon the chequered plain
- Its burden of dark rain;
- Then hard behind a stately galleon
- Sails onward with its piled and carven towers
- Stiff sculptured like a heap of marble flowers,
- Rigid, unaltering, a miracle
- Of moulded surfaces, whereon the light
- Shines steadily, intolerably bright;
- Now on a livelier wind a wandering bell
- Of delicate vapour comes, invisibly hung,
- Like feathers from the seeding thistle flung,
- And saunters wantonly far out of sight.
- O God, who fill'st with shifting imagery
- The blue page of the sky,
- Thus writ'st thou also, with as vague a pen,
- In the immenser hearts of dreaming men.
- THE ROCK POOL
- This is the Sea. In these uneven walls
- A wave lies prisoned. Far and far away,
- Outward to ocean, as the slow tide falls,
- Her sisters, through the capes that hold the bay,
- Dancing in lovely liberty recede.
- But lovely in captivity she lies,
- Filled with soft colours, where the waving weed
- Moves gently, and discloses to our eyes
- Blurred shining veins of rock and lucent shells
- Under the light-shot water, and here repose
- Small quiet fish, and dimly-glowing bells
- Of sleeping sea-anemones that close
- Their tender fronds and will not now awake
- Till on these rocks the waves returning break.
- THE SWIMMERS
- The cove's a shining plate of blue and green,
- With darker belts between
- The trough and crest of the slow-rising swell,
- And the great rocks throw purple shadows down,
- Where transient sun-sparks wink and burst and drown
- And glimmering pebbles lie too deep to tell,
- Hidden or shining as the shadow wavers.
- And everywhere the restless sun-steeped air
- Trembles and quavers,
- As though it were
- More saturate with light than it could bear.
- Now come the swimmers from slow-dripping caves,
- Where the shy fern creeps under the veined roof,
- And wading out meet with glad breast the waves.
- One holds aloof,
- Climbing alone the reef with shrinking feet,
- That scarce endure the jagged stones' dull beat
- Till on the edge he poises
- And flies to cleave the water, vanishing
- In wreaths of white, with echoing liquid noises,
- And swims beneath, a vague, distorted thing.
- Now all the other swimmers leave behind
- The crystal shallow and the foam-wet shore
- And sliding into deeper water find
- A living coolness in the lifting flood,
- And through their bodies leaps the sparkling blood,
- So that they feel the faint earth's drought no more.
- There now they float, heads raised above the green,
- White bodies cloudily seen,
- Farther and farther from the brazen rock,
- On which the hot air shakes, on which the tide
- Fruitlessly throws with gentle, soundless shock
- The cool and lagging wave. Out, out they go,
- And now upon a mirrored cloud they ride
- Or turning over, with soft strokes and slow,
- Slide on like shadows in a tranquil sky.
- Behind them, on the tall, parched cliff, the dry
- And dusty grasses grow
- In shallow ledges of the arid stone,
- Starving for coolness and the touch of rain.
- But, though to earth they must return again,
- Here come the soft sea-airs to meet them, blown
- Over the surface of the outer deep,
- Scarce moving, staying, falling, straying, gone,
- Light and delightful as the touch of sleep...
- One wakes and splashes round,
- And, as by magic, all the others wake
- From that sea-dream, and now with rippling sound
- Their rapid arms the enchanted silence break.
- And now again the crystal shallows take
- The gleaming bedies whose cool hour is done;
- They pause upon the beach, they pause and sigh
- Then vanish in the caverns one by one.
- Soon the wet foot-marks on the stones are dry:
- The cove sleeps on beneath the unwavering sun.
- THE STORM
- We wake to hear the storm come down,
- Sudden on roof and pane;
- The thunder's loud and the hasty wind
- Hurries the beating rain.
- The rain slackens, the wind blows gently,
- The gust grows gentle and stills,
- And the thunder, like a breaking stick,
- Stumbles about the hills.
- The drops still hang on leaf and thorn,
- The downs stand up more green;
- The sun comes out again in power
- And the sky is washed and clean.
- C. H. SORLEY
- _Born 1895,_
- _Killed in Action 1915._
- GERMAN RAIN
- The heat came down and sapped away my powers.
- The laden heat came down and drowned my brain,
- Till through the weight of overcoming hours
- felt the rain.
- Then suddenly I saw what more to see
- I never thought: old things renewed, retrieved,
- The rain that fell in England fell on me,
- And I believed.
- ALL THE HILLS AND VALES
- All the hills and vales along
- Earth is bursting into song,
- And the singers are the chaps
- Who are going to die perhaps.
- O sing, marching men,
- Till the valleys ring again.
- Give your gladness to earth's keeping,
- So be glad, when you are sleeping.
- Cast away regret and rue,
- Think what you are marching to.
- Little live, great pass.
- Jesus Christ and Barabbas
- Were found the same day.
- This died, that went his way.
- So sing with joyful breath.
- For why, you are going to death.
- Teeming earth will surely store
- All the gladness that you pour.
- Earth that never doubts nor fears,
- Earth that knows of death, not tears,
- Earth that bore with joyful ease
- Hemlock for Socrates,
- Earth that blossomed and was glad
- 'Neath the cross that Christ had,
- Shall rejoice and blossom too
- When the bullet reaches you.
- Wherefore, men marching
- On the road to death, sing!
- Pour your gladness on earth's head,
- So be merry, so be dead.
- From the hills and valleys earth
- Shouts back the sound of mirth,
- Tramp of feet and lilt of song
- Ringing all the road along.
- All the music of their going,
- Ringing swinging glad song-throwing,
- Earth will echo still, when foot
- Lies numb and voice mute.
- On, marching men, on
- To the gates of death with song.
- Sow your gladness for earth's reaping,
- So you may be glad, though sleeping.
- Strew your gladness on earth's bed,
- So be merry, so be dead.
- JAMES STEPHENS
- DEIRDRE
- Do not let any woman read this verse;
- It is for men, and after them their sons
- And their sons' sons.
- The time comes when our hearts sink utterly;
- When we remember Deirdre and her tale,
- And that her lips are dust.
- Once she did tread the earth: men took her hand;
- They looked into her eyes and said their say,
- And she replied to them.
- More than a thousand years it is since she
- Was beautiful: she trod the waving grass;
- She saw the clouds.
- A thousand years! The grass is still the same,
- The clouds as lovely as they were that time
- When Deirdre was alive.
- But there has never been a woman born
- Who was so beautiful, not one so beautiful
- Of all the women born.
- Let all men go apart and mourn together;
- No man can ever love her; not a man
- Can ever be her lover.
- No man can bend before her: no man say--
- What could one say to her? There are no words
- That one could say to her!
- Now she is but a story that is told
- Beside the fire! No man can ever be
- The friend of that poor queen.
- THE GOAT PATHS
- The crooked paths go every way
- Upon the hill--they wind about
- Through the heather in and out
- Of the quiet sunniness.
- And there the goats, day after day,
- Stray in sunny quietness,
- Cropping here and cropping there,
- As they pause and turn and pass,
- Now a bit of heather spray
- Now a mouthful of the grass.
- In the deeper sunniness,
- In the place where nothing stirs,
- Quietly in quietness,
- In the quiet of the furze,
- For a time they come and lie
- Staring on the roving sky.
- If you approach they run away,
- They leap and stare, away they bound,
- With a sudden angry sound,
- To the sunny quietude;
- Crouching down where nothing stirs
- In the silence of the furze,
- Crouching down again to brood
- In the sunny solitude.
- If I were as wise as they
- I would stray apart and brood,
- I would beat a hidden way
- Through the quiet heather spray
- To a sunny solitude;
- And should you come I'd run away,
- I would make an angry sound,
- I would stare and turn and bound
- To the deeper quietude,
- To the place where nothing stirs
- In the silence of the furze.
- In that airy quietness
- I would think as long as they;
- Through the quiet sunniness
- I would stray away to brood
- By a hidden beaten way
- In a sunny solitude.
- I would think until I found
- Something I can never find,
- Something lying on the ground,
- In the bottom of my mind.
- THE FIFTEEN ACRES
- I cling and swing
- On a branch, or sing
- Through the cool, clear hush of
- Morning, O:
- Or fling my wing
- On the air, and bring
- To sleepier birds a warning, O:
- That the night's in flight,
- And the sun's in sight,
- And the dew is the grass adorning, O:
- And the green leaves swing
- As I sing, sing, sing,
- Up by the river,
- Down the dell,
- To the little wee nest,
- Where the big tree fell,
- So early in the morning, O.
- I flit and twit
- In the sun for a bit
- When his light so bright is shining, O:
- Or sit and fit
- My plumes, or knit
- Straw plaits for the nest's nice lining, O
- And she with glee
- Shows unto me
- Underneath her wings reclining, O:
- And I sing that Peg
- Has an egg, egg, egg,
- Up by the oat-field,
- Round the mill
- Past the meadow
- Down the hill,
- So early in the morning, O.
- I stoop and swoop
- On the air, or loop
- Through the trees, and then go soaring, O:
- To group with a troop
- On the gusty poop
- While the wind behind is roaring, O:
- I skim and swim
- By a cloud's red rim
- And up to the azure flooring, O:
- And my wide wings drip
- As I slip, slip, slip
- Down through the rain-drops,
- Back where Peg
- Broods in the nest
- On the little white egg
- So early in the morning, O.
- EDWARD WYNDHAM TENNANT
- _Born 1895._
- _Killed in Action 1916._
- HOME THOUGHTS IN LAVENTIE
- Green gardens in Laventie!
- Soldiers only know the street
- Where the mud is churned and splashed about
- By battle-wending feet;
- And yet beside one stricken house there is a glimpse of grass,
- Look for it when you pass.
- Beyond the Church whose pitted spire
- Seems balanced on a strand
- Of swaying stone and tottering brick
- Two roofless ruins stand,
- And here behind the wreckage where the _back_ wall should have been
- We found a garden green.
- The grass was never trodden on,
- The little path of gravel
- Was overgrown with celandine,
- No other folk did travel
- Along its weedy surface, but the nimble-footed mouse
- Running from house to house.
- So all among the vivid blades
- Of soft and tender grass
- We lay, nor heard the limber wheels
- That pass and ever pass,
- In noisy continuity until their stony rattle
- Seems in itself a battle.
- At length we rose up from this ease
- Of tranquil happy mind,
- And searched the garden's little length
- A fresh pleasaunce to find;
- And there, some yellow daffodils and jasmine hanging high
- Did rest the tired eye.
- The fairest and most fragrant
- Of the many sweets we found,
- Was a little bush of Daphne flower
- Upon a grassy mound,
- And so thick were the blossoms set and so divine the scent
- That we were well content.
- Hungry for Spring I bent my head,
- The perfume fanned my face,
- And all my soul was dancing,
- In that lovely little place,
- Dancing with a measured step from wrecked and shattered towns
- Away......upon the Downs.
- I saw green banks of daffodil,
- Slim poplars in the breeze,
- Great tan-brown hares in gusty March
- A-couching on the leas;
- And meadows with their glittering streams, and silver scurrying dace,
- Home--what a perfect place.
- _Belgium, March,_ 1916.
- EDWARD THOMAS
- _Born 1877._
- _Killed in Action 1017._
- ASPENS
- All day and night, save winter, every weather,
- Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
- The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
- Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.
- Out of the blacksmith's cavern comes the ringing
- Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
- The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing--The
- sounds that for these fifty years have been.
- The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
- And over lightless pane and footless road,
- Empty as sky, with every other sound
- Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode.
- A silent smithy, a silent inn, not fails
- In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
- In tempest or the night of nightingales,
- To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.
- And it would be the same were no house near.
- Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
- A spens must shake their leaves and men may hear
- But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.
- Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
- We cannot other than an aspen be
- That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
- Or so men think who like a different tree.
- THE BROOK
- Seated once by a brook, watching a child
- Chiefly that paddled, I was thus beguiled.
- Mellow the blackbird sang and sharp the thrush
- Not far off in the oak and hazel brush,
- Unseen. There was a scent like honeycomb
- From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
- Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
- A butterfly alighted. From aloft
- He took the heat of the sun, and from below,
- On the hot stone he perched contented so,
- As if never a cart would pass again
- That way; as if I were the last of men
- And he the first of insects to have earth
- And sun together and to know their worth,
- I was divided between him and the gleam,
- The motion, and the voices, of the stream,
- The waters running frizzled over gravel,
- That never vanish and for ever travel.
- A grey flycatcher silent on a fence
- And I sat as if we had been there since
- The horseman and the horse lying beneath
- The fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath,
- The horseman and the horse with silver shoes,
- Galloped the downs last. All that I could lose
- I lost. And then the child's voice raised the dead.
- "No one's been here before" was what she said
- And what I felt, yet never should have found
- A word for, while I gathered sight and sound.
- THE BRIDGE
- I have come a long way to-day:
- On a strange bridge alone,
- Remembering friends, old friends,
- I rest, without smile or moan,
- As they remember me without smile or moan.
- All are behind, the kind
- And the unkind too, no more
- To-night than a dream. The stream
- Runs softly yet drowns the Past,
- The dark-lit stream has drowned the Future and the Past.
- No traveller has rest more blest
- Than this moment brief between
- Two lives, when the Night's first lights
- And shades hide what has never been,
- Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been.
- LIGHTS OUT
- I have come to the borders of sleep,
- The unfathomable deep
- Forest where all must lose
- Their way, however straight,
- Or winding, soon or late;
- They cannot choose.
- Many a road and track
- That, since the dawn's first crack,
- Up to the forest brink,
- Deceived the travellers
- Suddenly now blurs,
- And in they sink.
- Here love ends,
- Despair, ambition ends,
- All pleasure and all trouble,
- Although most sweet or bitter,
- Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
- Than tasks most noble.
- There is not any book
- Or face of dearest look
- That I would not turn from now
- To go into the unknown
- I must enter and leave alone
- I know not how.
- The tall forest towers;
- Its cloudy foliage lowers
- Ahead, shelf above shelf;
- Its silence I hear and obey
- That I may lose my way
- And myself.
- WORDS
- Out of us all
- That make rhymes,
- Will you choose
- Sometimes--
- As the winds use
- A crack in the wall
- Or a drain,
- Their joy or their pain
- To whistle through--
- Choose me,
- You English words?
- I know you:
- You are light as dreams,
- Tough as oak,
- Precious as gold,
- As poppies and corn,
- Or an old cloak:
- Sweet as our birds
- To the ear,
- As the linnet note
- In the heat
- Of Midsummer:
- Strange as the races
- Of dead and unborn:
- Strange and sweet
- Equally.
- And familiar,
- To the eye,
- As the dearest faces
- That a man knows,
- And as lost homes are:
- But though older far
- Than oldest yew,--
- As our hills are, old,--
- Worn new
- Again and again:
- Young as our streams
- After rain:
- And as dear
- As the earth which you prove
- That we love.
- Make me content
- With some sweetness
- From Wales
- Whose nightingales
- Have no wings,--
- From Wiltshire and Kent
- And Herefordshire,
- And the villages there,--
- From the names, and the things,
- No less.
- Let me sometimes dance
- With you,
- Or climb
- Or stand perchance
- In ecstasy,
- Fixed and free
- In a rhyme,
- As poets do.
- TALL NETTLES
- Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
- These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
- Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
- Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.
- This corner of the farmyard I like most:
- As well as any bloom upon a flower
- I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
- Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.
- THE PATH
- Running along a bank, a parapet
- That saves from the precipitous wood below
- The level road, there is a path. It serves
- Children for looking down the long smooth steep,
- Between the legs of beech and yew, to where
- A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women
- Content themselves with the road, and what they see
- Over the bank, and what the children tell.
- The path, winding like silver, trickles on,
- Bordered and ever invaded by thinnest moss
- That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk
- With gold, olive, and emerald, but in vain.
- The children wear it. They have flattened the bank
- On top, and silvered it between the moss
- With the current of their feet, year after year.
- But the road is houseless, and leads not to school.
- To see a child is rare there, and the eye
- Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
- And underyawns it, and the path that looks
- As if it led on to some legendary
- Or fancied place where men have wished to go
- And stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends.
- SWEDES
- They have taken the gable from the roof of clay
- On the long swede pile. They have let in the sun
- To the white and gold and purple of curled fronds
- Unsunned. It is a sight more tender-gorgeous
- At the wood-corner where Winter moans and drips
- Than when, in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings,
- A boy crawls down into a Pharaoh's tomb
- And, first of Christian men, beholds the mummy,
- God and monkey, chariot and throne and vase,
- Blue pottery, alabaster, and gold.
- But dreamless long-dead Amen-hotep lies.
- This is a dream of Winter, sweet as Spring.
- W. J. TURNER
- ROMANCE
- When I was but thirteen or so
- I went into a golden land,
- Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
- Took me by the hand.
- My father died, my brother too,
- They passed like fleeting dreams.
- I stood where Popocatapetl
- In the sunlight gleams.
- I dimly heard the Master's voice
- And boys far-off at play,
- Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
- Had stolen me away.
- I walked in a great golden dream
- To and fro from school--
- Shining Popocatapetl
- The dusty streets did rule.
- I walked home with a gold dark boy
- And never a word I'd say,
- Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
- Had taken my speech away:
- I gazed entranced upon his face
- Fairer than any flower--
- O shining Popocatapetl
- It was thy magic hour:
- The houses, people, traffic seemed
- Thin fading dreams by day,
- Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
- They had stolen my soul away!
- THE CAVES OF AUVERGNE
- He carved the red deer and the bull
- Upon the smooth cave rock,
- Returned from war with belly full,
- And scarred with many a knock,
- He carved the red deer and the bull
- Upon the smooth cave rock.
- The stars flew by the cave's wide door,
- The clouds wild trumpets blew,
- Trees rose in wild dreams from the floor,
- Flowers with dream faces grew
- Up to the sky, and softly hung
- Golden and white and blue.
- The woman ground her heap of corn,
- Her heart a guarded fire;
- The wind played in his trembling soul
- Like a hand upon a lyre,
- The wind drew faintly on the stone
- Symbols of his desire:
- The red deer of the forest dark,
- Whose antlers cut the sky,
- That vanishes into the mirk
- And like a dream flits by,
- And by an arrow slain at last
- Is but the wind's dark body.
- The bull that stands in marshy lakes
- As motionless and still
- As a dark rock jutting from a plain
- Without a tree or hill;
- The bull that is the sign of life,
- Its sombre, phallic will.
- And from the dead, white eyes of them
- The wind springs up anew,
- It blows upon the trembling heart,
- And bull and deer renew
- Their flitting life in the dim past
- When that dead Hunter drew.
- I sit beside him in the night,
- And, fingering his red stone,
- I chase through endless forests dark
- Seeking that thing unknown,
- That which is not red deer or bull,
- But which by them was shown:
- By those stiff shapes in which he drew
- His soul's exalted cry,
- When flying down the forest dark
- He slew and knew not why,
- When he was filled with song, and strength
- Flowed to him from the sky.
- The wind blows from red deer and bull,
- The clouds wild trumpets blare.
- Trees rise in wild dreams from the earth,
- Flowers with dream faces stare,
- _O Hunter, your own shadow stands_
- _Within your forest lair!_
- ECSTASY
- I saw a frieze on whitest marble drawn
- Of boys who sought for shells along the shore,
- Their white feet shedding pallor in the sea,
- The shallow sea, the spring-time sea of green
- That faintly creamed against the cold, smooth pebbles.
- The air was thin, their limbs were delicate,
- The wind had graven their small eager hands
- To feel the forests and the dark nights of Asia
- Behind the purple bloom of the horizon,
- Where sails would float and slowly melt away.
- Their naked, pure, and grave, unbroken silence
- Filled the soft air as gleaming, limpid water
- Fills a spring sky those days when rain is lying
- In shattered bright pools on the wind-dried roads,
- And their sweet bodies were wind-purified.
- One held a shell unto his shell-like ear
- And there was music carven in his face,
- His eyes half-closed, his lips just breaking open
- To catch the lulling, mazy, coralline roar
- Of numberless caverns filled with singing seas.
- And all of them were hearkening as to singing
- Of far off voices thin and delicate,
- Voices too fine for any mortal mind
- To blow into the whorls of mortal ears--
- And yet those sounds flowed from their grave, sweet faces.
- And as I looked I heard that delicate music,
- And I became as grave, as calm, as still
- As those carved boys. I stood upon that shore,
- I felt the cool sea dream around my feet,
- My eyes were staring at the far horizon:
- And the wind came and purified my limbs,
- And the stars came and set within my eyes,
- And snowy clouds rested upon my shoulders,
- And the blue sky shimmered deep within me,
- And I sang like a carven pipe of music.
- KENT IN WAR
- The pebbly brook is cold to-night,
- Its water soft as air,
- A clear, cold, crystal-bodied wind
- Shadowless and bare,
- Leaping and running in this world
- Where dark-horned cattle stare:
- Where dark-horned cattle stare, hoof-firm
- On the dark pavements of the sky,
- And trees are mummies swathed in sleep,
- And small dark hills crowd wearily:
- Soft multitudes of snow-grey clouds
- Without a sound march by.
- Down at the bottom of the road
- I smell the woody damp
- Of that cold spirit in the grass,
- And leave my hill-top camp--
- Its long gun pointing in the sky--And
- take the Moon for lamp.
- I stop beside the bright cold glint
- Of that thin spirit of the grass,
- So gay it is, so innocent!
- I watch its sparkling footsteps pass
- Lightly from smooth round stone to stone,
- Hid in the dew-hung grass.
- My lamp shines in the globes of dew,
- And leaps into that crystal wind
- Running along the shaken grass
- To each dark hole that it can find--
- The crystal wind, the Moon my lamp,
- Have vanished in a wood that's blind.
- High lies my small, my shadowy camp,
- Crowded about by small dark hills;
- With sudden small white flowers the sky
- Above the woods' dark greenness fills;
- And hosts of dark-browed, muttering trees
- In trance the white Moon stills.
- I move among their tall grey forms,
- A thin moon-glimmering, wandering Ghost,
- Who takes his lantern through the world
- In search of life that he has lost,
- While watching by that long lean gun
- Upon his small hill post.
- DEATH
- When I am dead a few poor souls shall grieve
- As I grieved for my brother long ago.
- Scarce did my eyes grow dim,
- I had forgotten him;
- I was far-off hearing the spring winds blow,
- And many summers burned
- When, though still reeling with my eyes aflame,
- I heard that faded name
- Whispered one Spring amid the hurrying world
- From which, years gone, he turned.
- I looked up at my windows and I saw
- The trees, thin spectres sucked forth by the moon.
- The air was very still
- Above a distant hill;
- It was the hour of night's full silver moon.
- "O art thou there my brother?" my soul cried;
- And all the pale stars down bright rivers wept,
- As my heart sadly crept
- About the empty hills, bathed in that light
- That lapped him when he died.
- Ah! it was cold, so cold; do I not know
- How dead my heart on that remembered day!
- Clear in a far-away place
- I see his delicate face
- Just as he called me from my solitary play,
- Giving into my hands a tiny tree.
- We planted it in the dark, blossomless ground
- Gravely, without a sound;
- Then back I went and left him standing by
- His birthday gift to me.
- In that far land perchance it quietly grows
- Drinking the rain, making a pleasant shade;
- Birds in its branches fly
- Out of the fathomless sky
- Where worlds of circling light arise and fade,
- Blindly it quivers in the bright flood of day,
- Or drowned in multitudinous shouts of rain
- Glooms o'er the dark-veiled plain--Buried
- below, the ghost that's in his bones
- Dreams in the sodden clay.
- And, while he faded, drunk with beauty's eyes
- I kissed bright girls and laughed deep in dumb trees,
- That stared fixt in the air
- Like madmen in despair
- Gaped up from earth with the escaping breeze.
- I saw earth's exaltation slowly creep
- Out of their myriad sky-embracing veins.
- I laughed along the lanes,
- Meeting Death riding in from the hollow seas
- Through black-wreathed woods asleep.
- I laughed, I swaggered on the cold, hard ground
- Through the grey air trembled a falling wave--
- "Thou'rt pale, O Death!" I cried,
- Mocking him in my pride;
- And passing I dreamed not of that lonely grave,
- But of leaf-maidens whose pale, moon-like hands
- Above the tree-foam waved in the icy air,
- Sweeping with shining hair
- Through the green-tinted sky, one moment fled
- Out of immortal lands.
- One windless Autumn night the Moon came out
- In a white sea of cloud, a field of snow;
- In darkness shaped of trees,
- I sank upon my knees
- And watched her shining, from the small wood below--
- Faintly Death flickered in an owl's far cry--
- We floated soundless in the great gulf of space,
- Her light upon my face--Immortal,
- shining in that dark wood I knelt
- And knew I could not die.
- And knew I could not die--O Death did'st thou
- Heed my vain glory, standing pale by thy dead?
- There is a spirit who grieves
- Amid earth's dying leaves;
- Was't thou that wept beside my brother's bed?
- For I did never mourn nor heed at all
- Him passing on his temporal elm-wood bier;
- I never shed a tear.
- The drooping sky spread grey-winged through my soul,
- While stones and earth did fall.
- That sound rings down the years--I hear it yet--
- All earthly life's a winding funeral--
- And though I never wept,
- But into the dark coach stept,
- Dreaming by night to answer the blood's sweet call,
- She who stood there, high breasted, with small wise lips,
- And gave me wine to drink and bread to eat,
- Has not more steadfast feet,
- But fades from my arms as fade from mariners' eyes
- The sea's most beauteous ships.
- The trees and hills of earth were once as close
- As my own brother, they are becoming dreams
- And shadows in my eyes;
- More dimly lies
- Guaya deep in my soul, the coastline gleams
- Faintly along the darkening crystalline seas.
- Glimmering and lovely still, 'twill one day go;
- The surging dark will flow
- Over my hopes and joys, and blot out all
- Earth's hills and skies and trees.
- I shall look up one night and see the Moon
- For the last time shining above the hills,
- And thou, silent, wilt ride
- Over the dark hillside.
- 'Twill be, perchance, the time of daffodils--
- _"How come those bright immortals in the woods?_
- _Their joy being young, did'st thou not drag them all_
- _Into dark graves ere Fall?"_
- Shall life thus haunt me, wondering, as I go
- To thy deep solitudes?
- There is a figure with a down-turned torch
- Carved on a pillar in an olden time,
- A calm and lovely boy
- Who comes not to destroy
- But to lead age back to its golden prime.
- Thus did an antique sculptor draw thee, Death,
- With smooth and beauteous brow and faint sweet smile,
- Nor haggard, gaunt and vile,
- And thou perhaps art Him to whom men may
- Unvexed, give up their breath.
- But in my soul thou sittest like a dream
- Among earth's mountains, by her dim-coloured seas;
- A wild unearthly Shape
- In thy dark-glimmering cape,
- Piping a tune of wavering melodies,
- Thou sittest, ay, thou sittest at the feast
- Of my brief life among earth's bright-wreathed flowers,
- Stemming the dancing hours
- With sombre gleams until abrupt, thou risest
- And all, at once, is ceased.
- SOLDIERS IN A SMALL CAMP
- There is a camp upon a rounded hill
- Where men do sleep more closely to the stars,
- And tree-like shapes stand at its entrances,
- Beside the small, dark, shadow-soldiery.
- Deep in the gloom of days of isolation,
- Withdrawn, high up from the low, murmuring town,
- Those shadows sit, drooping around their fires,
- Or move as winds dark-waving in a wood.
- Staring at cattle on a neighbouring hill
- They are oblivious as is stone or grass--The
- clouds passed voiceless over, and the sun
- Rose, and lit trees, and vanished utterly.
- Then in the awful beauty of the world,
- When stars are singing in dark ecstasy,
- Those ox-like soldiers sit collected round
- A thin, metallic echo of human song:
- And click their feet and clap their hands in time,
- And wag their heads, and make the white ghost owl
- Flit from its branch--but still those tree-like shapes
- Stand like archangels dark-winged in the sky.
- And presently the soldiers cease to stir;
- The thin voice sinks and all at once is dead;
- They lie down on their planks and hear the wind,
- And feel the darkness fumbling at their souls.
- They lie in rows as stiff as tombs or trees,
- Their eyeballs imageless, like marble still;
- And secretly they feel that roof and walls
- Are gone and that they stare into the sky.
- It is so black, so black, so black, so black,
- Those black-winged shapes have stretched across the world,
- Have swallowed up the stars, and if the sun
- Rises again, it will be black, black, black.
- A RITUAL DANCE
- I--THE DANCE
- In the black glitter of night the grey vapour forest
- Lies a dark Ghost in the water, motionless, dark,
- Like a corpse by the bank fallen, and hopelessly rotting
- Where the thin silver soul of the stars silently dances.
- The flowers are closed, the birds are carved on the trees,
- When out of the forest glide hundreds of spear-holding shadows,
- In smooth dark ivory bodies their eyeballs gleaming
- Forming a gesturing circle beneath the Moon.
- The bright-eyed shadows, the tribe in ritual gathered,
- Are dancing and howling, the embryo soul of a nation:
- In loud drum-beating monotonous the tightly stretched skins
- Of oxen that stared at the stars are singing wild paeans:
- Wild paeans for food that magically grew in the clearings
- When he that was slain was buried and is resurrected,
- And a green mist arose from the mud and shone in the Moon,
- A great delirium of faces, a new generation.
- The thin wafer Moon it is there, it is there in the sky,
- The hand-linked circle raise faces of mad exaltation--
- Dance, O you Hunters, leap madly upon the flung shields,
- Shoot arrows into the sky, thin moon-seeking needles:
- Now you shall have a harvest, a belly-full rapture,
- There shall be many fat women, full grown, and smoother than honey,
- Their limbs like ivory rounded, and firm as a berry,
- Their lips full of food and their eyes full of hunger for men!
- The heat of the earth arises, a faint love mist
- Wan with over-desiring, and in the marshes
- Blindly the mud stirs, clouding the dark shining water,
- And troubling the still soft swarms of fallen stars.
- There is bright sweat upon the bodies of cattle,
- Great vials of life motionless in the moonlight,
- Breathing faint mists over the warm, damp ground;
- And the cry of a dancer rings through the shadowy forest.
- The tiger is seeking his mate and his glassy eyes
- Are purple and shot with starlight in the grass shining,
- The fiery grass tortured out of the mud and writhing
- Under the sun, now shivering and pale in the Moon.
- The shadows are dancing, dancing, dancing, dancing:
- The grey vapour amis of the forest lie dreaming around them;
- The cold, shining moonlight falls from their bodies and faces,
- But caught in their eyes lies prisoned and faintly gleaming:
- And they return to their dwellings within the grey forest,
- Into their dark huts, burying the moonlight with them,
- Burying the trees and the stars and the flowing river,
- And the glittering spears, and their dark, evocative gestures.
- II--SLEEP
- Hollow the world in the moonlit hour when the birds are shadows small,
- Lost in the swarm of giant leaves and myriad branches tall;
- When vast thick boughs hang across the sky like solid limbs of night,
- Dug from still quarries of grey-black air by the pale transparent light,
- And the purple and golden blooms of the sun, each crimson and
- spotted flower,
- Are folded up or have faded away, as the still intangible power
- Floats out of the sky, falls shimmering down, a silver-shadowy bloom,
- On the spear-pointed forest a fragile crown, in the soul a soft,
- bright gloom;
- Hollow the world when the shadow of man lies prone and still on its floor,
- And the moonlight shut from his empty heart weeps softly against his door,
- And his terror and joy but a little dream in the corner of his house,
- And his voice dead in the darkness 'mid the twittering of a mouse.
- III.
- Hollow the world! hollow the world!
- And its dancers shadow-grey;
- And the Moon a silver-shadowy bloom
- Fading and fading away;
- And the forest's grey vapour, and all the trees
- Shadows against the sky;
- And the soul of man and his ecstasies
- A night-forgotten cry.
- Hollow the world! hollow the world!
- IOLO ANEURIN WILLIAMS
- FROM A FLEMISH GRAVEYARD
- JANUARY 1915
- A year hence may the grass that waves
- O'er English men in Flemish graves,
- Coating this clay with green of peace
- And softness of a year's increase,
- Be kind and lithe as English grass
- To bend and nod as the winds pass;
- It was for grass on English hills
- These bore too soon the last of ills.
- And may the wind be brisk and clean,
- And singing cheerfully between
- The bents a pleasant-burdened song
- To cheer these English dead along;
- For English songs and English winds
- Are they that bred these English minds.
- And may the circumstantial trees
- Dip, for these dead ones, in the breeze,
- And make for them their silver play
- Of spangled boughs each shiny day.
- Thus may these look above, and see
- And hear the wind in grass and tree,
- And watch a lark in heaven stand,
- And think themselves in their own land.
- A MONUMENT
- (AFTER AN ANCIENT FASHION)
- Traveller, turn a mournful eye
- Where my lady's ashes lie;
- If thou hast a sweet thine own
- Pity me, that am alone;--
- Yet, if thou no lover be,
- Nor hast been, I'll pity thee.
- FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
- SONG OF THE DARK AGES
- We digged our trenches on the down
- Beside old barrows, and the wet
- White chalk we shovelled from below;
- It lay like drifts of thawing snow
- On parados and parapet;
- Until a pick neither struck flint
- Nor split the yielding chalky soil,
- But only calcined human bone:
- Poor relic of that Age of Stone
- Whose ossuary was our spoil.
- Home we marched singing in the rain,
- And all the while, beneath our song,
- I mused how many springs should wane
- And still our trenches scar the plain:
- The monument of an old wrong.
- But then, I thought, the fair green sod
- Will wholly cover that white stain,
- And soften, as it clothes the face
- Of those old barrows, every trace
- Of violence to the patient plain.
- And careless people, passing by
- Will speak of both in casual tone:
- Saying: "You see the toil they made
- The age of iron, pick and spade,
- Here jostles with the Age of Stone."
- Yet either from that happier race
- Will merit but a passing glance;
- And they will leave us both alone:
- Poor savages who wrought in stone--Poor
- Poor savages who fought in France.
- BÊTE HUMAINE
- Riding through Ruwu swamp, about sunrise,
- I saw the world awake; and as the ray
- Touched the tall grasses where they sleeping lay,
- Lo, the bright air alive with dragonflies:
- With brittle wings aquiver, and great eyes
- Piloting crimson bodies, slender and gay.
- I aimed at one, and struck it, and it lay
- Broken and lifeless, with fast-fading dyes ...
- Then my soul sickened with a sudden pain
- And horror, at my own careless cruelty,
- That in an idle moment I had slain
- A creature whose sweet life it is to fly:
- Like beasts that prey with tooth and claw ...
- Nay, they
- Must slay to live, but what excuse had I?
- THE GIFT
- Marching on Tanga, marching the parch'd plain
- Of wavering spear-grass past Pangani river,
- England came to me--me who had always ta'en
- But never given before--England, the giver,
- In a vision of three poplar-trees that shiver
- On still evenings of summer, after rain,
- By Slapton Ley, where reed-beds start and quiver
- When scarce a ripple moves the upland grain.
- Then I thanked God that now I had suffered pain
- And, as the parch'd plain, thirst, and lain awake
- Shivering all night through till cold daybreak:
- In that I count these sufferings my gain
- And her acknowledgment. Nay, more, would fain
- Suffer as many more for her sweet sake.
- THE LEANING ELM
- Before my window, in days of winter hoar
- Huddled a mournful wood;
- Smooth pillars of beech, domed chestnut, sycamore,
- In stony sleep they stood:
- But you, unhappy elm, the angry west
- Had chosen from the rest,
- Flung broken on your brothers' branches bare,
- And left you leaning there
- So dead that when the breath of winter cast
- Wild snow upon the blast,
- The other living branches, downward bowed,
- Shook free their crystal shroud
- And shed upon your blackened trunk beneath
- Their livery of death......
- On windless nights between the beechen bars
- I watched cold stars
- Throb whitely in the sky, and dreamily
- Wondered if any life lay locked in thee:
- If still the hidden sap secretly moved
- As water in the icy winterbourne
- Floweth unheard:
- And half I pitied you your trance forlorn:
- You could not hear, I thought, the voice of any bird,
- The shadowy cries of bats in dim twilight
- Or cool voices of owls crying by night ...
- Hunting by night under the horned moon:
- Yet half I envied you your wintry swoon,
- Till, on this morning mild, the sun, new-risen
- Steals from his misty prison;
- The frozen fallows glow, the black trees shaken
- In a clear flood of sunlight vibrating awaken:
- And lo, your ravaged hole, beyond belief
- Slenderly fledged anew with tender leaf
- As pale as those twin vanes that break at last
- In a tiny fan above the black beech-mast
- Where no blade springeth green
- But pallid bells of the shy helleborine.
- What is this ecstasy that overwhelms
- The dreaming earth? See, the embrownèd elms
- Crowding purple distances warm the depths of the wood:
- A new-born wind tosses their tassels brown,
- His white clouds dapple the down:
- Into a green flame bursting the hedgerows stand.
- Soon, with banners flying, Spring will walk the land....
- There is no day for thee, my soul, like this,
- No spring of lovely words. Nay, even the kiss
- Of mortal love that maketh man divine
- This light cannot outshine:
- Nay, even poets, they whose frail hands catch
- The shadow of vanishing beauty, may not match
- This leafy ecstasy. Sweet words may cull
- Such magical beauty as time may not destroy;
- But we, alas, are not more beautiful:
- We cannot flower in beauty as in joy.
- We sing, our mused words are sped, and then
- Poets are only men
- Who age, and toil, and sicken ... This maim'd tree
- May stand in leaf when I have ceased to be.
- PROTHALAMION
- When the evening came my love said to me:
- Let us go into the garden now that the sky is cool;
- The garden of black hellebore and rosemary
- Where wild woodruff spills in a milky pool.
- Low we passed in the twilight, for the wavering heat
- Of day had waned; and round that shaded plot
- Of secret beauty the thickets clustered sweet:
- Here is heaven, our hearts whispered, but our lips spake not.
- Between that old garden and seas of lazy foam
- Gloomy and beautiful alleys of trees arise
- With spire of cypress and dreamy beechen dome,
- So dark that our enchanted sight knew nothing but the skies
- Veiled with a soft air, drench'd in the roses' musk
- Or the dusky, dark carnation's breath of clove:
- No stars burned in their deeps, but through the dusk
- I saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.
- No star their secret ravished, no wasting moon
- Mocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:
- Only the soft unseeing heaven of June,
- The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.
- For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday now
- Were silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,
- Nor even a mild sea-whisper moved a creaking bough--
- Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?
- Was ever a moment meeter made for love?
- Beautiful are your close lips beneath my kiss;
- And all your yielding sweetness beautiful--
- Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!
- INDEX
- LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE:
- Marriage Song
- Epilogue
- MARTIN ARMSTRONG:
- The Buzzards
- MAURICE BARING:
- Diffugere Nives, 1917
- Julian Grenfell
- Pierre
- HILAIRE BELLOC:
- The South Country
- The Night
- Song
- The False Heart
- Hannaker Mill (1913)
- Tarantella
- On a Dead Hostess
- EDMUND BLUNDEN:
- Almswomen
- Gleaning
- GORDON BOTTOMLEY:
- The Ploughman
- Babel: The Gate of the God
- The End of the World
- Atlantis
- New Year's Eve, 1913
- To Iron-founders and Others
- RUPERT BROOKE:
- Sonnet
- The Soldier
- The Treasure
- The Great Lover
- Clouds
- The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
- The Busy Heart
- Dining-Room Tea
- FRANCIS BURROWS:
- The Prayer to Demeter
- The Giant's Dirge
- The Unforgotten
- The Well
- Egyptian
- Life
- A. Y. CAMPBELL:
- Animula Vagula
- A Bird
- The Dromedary
- The Panic
- G. K. CHESTERTON:
- Wine and Water
- The Rolling English Road
- The Secret People
- From the Ballad of the White Horse
- PADRAIC COLUM:
- The Old Woman of the Roads
- FRANCES CORNFORD:
- Autumn Evening
- W. H. DAVIES:
- Days Too Short
- The Example
- The East in Gold
- The Happy Child
- A Great Time
- The White Cascade
- In May
- Thunderstorms
- Sweet Stay-at-Home
- EDWARD L. DAVISON:
- The Trees
- In this Dark House
- WALTER DE LA MARE:
- The Listeners
- Arabia
- Music
- The Scribe
- The Ghost
- Clear Eyes
- Fare Well
- All That's Past
- The Song of the Mad Prince
- JOHN DRINKWATER:
- Birthright
- Moonlit Apples
- R. C. K. ENSOR:
- Ode to Reality, 171
- JAMES ELROY FLECKER:
- Riouperoux
- War Song of the Saracens
- The Old Ships
- Stillness
- Areiya
- The Queen's Song
- Brumana
- Hyali
- The Golden Journey to Samarkand--Prologue
- Epilogue
- ROBIN FLOWER:
- La Vie Cérébrale
- The Pipes
- Say not that Beauty
- JOHN FREEMAN:
- The Wakers
- The Body
- Stone Trees
- More Than Sweet
- Waking
- The Chair
- The Stars in Their Courses
- Shadows
- ROBERT GRAVES:
- Star-Talk
- To Lucasta on going to the Wars
- Not Dead
- In the Wilderness
- Neglectful Edward
- JULIAN GRENFELL:
- To a Black Greyhound
- Into Battle
- IVOR GURNEY:
- To the Poet before Battle
- Song of Pain and Beauty
- RALPH HODGSON:
- Eve
- The Bull
- The Song of Honour
- Reason has Moons
- JAMES JOYCE:
- Strings in the Earth
- I Hear an Army
- D. H. LAWRENCE:
- Service of All the Dead
- FRANCIS LEDWIDGE:
- In France
- Thomas Macdonagh
- In September
- ROSE MACAULAY:
- Trinity Sunday
- THOMAS MACDONAGH:
- Inscription on a Ruin
- The Night Hunt
- JOHN MASEFIELD:
- C. L. M.
- What Am I, Life?
- HAROLD MONRO:
- Journey
- Solitude
- Milk for the Cat
- STURGE MOORE:
- Sent from Egypt
- A Spanish Picture
- A Duet
- The Gazelles
- ROBERT NICHOLS:
- To ----
- Farewell to place of comfort
- The Full Heart
- The Tower
- Fulfilment
- The Sprig of Lime
- SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN:
- The Twilight People
- WILFRED OWEN:
- Strange Meeting
- JOSEPH PLUNKETT:
- I See His Blood Upon the Rose
- SIEGFRIED SASSOON:
- "In the Pink"
- The Death-Bed
- Counter-Attack
- Dreamers
- Everyone Sang
- EDWARD SHANKS:
- A Night Piece
- The Glow-Worm
- The Halt
- A Hollow Elm
- The Return
- Clouds
- The Rock Pool
- The Swimmers
- The Storm
- C. H. SORLEY:
- German Rain
- All the Hills and Vales
- JAMES STEPHENS:
- Deirdre
- The Goat-Paths
- The Fifteen Acres
- EDWARD WYNDHAM TENNANT:
- Homo Thoughts in Laventie
- EDWARD THOMAS:
- Aspens
- The Brook
- The Bridge
- Lights Out
- Words
- Tall Nettles
- The Path
- Swedes
- W. J. TURNER:
- Romance
- The Caves of Auvergne
- Ecstasy
- Kent in War
- Death
- Soldiers in a Small Camp
- A Ritual Dance
- IOLO ANEURIN WILLIAMS:
- From a Flemish Graveyard
- A Monument
- FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG:
- Song of the Dark Ages
- Bête Humaine
- The Gift
- The Leaning Elm
- Prothalamion
- End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Selections from Modern Poets, by Various
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