Ryton Firs

The Dream

All round the knoll, on days of quietest air,

Secrets are being told; and if the trees

Speak out — let them make uproar loud as drums —

'Tis secrets still, shouted instead of whisper'd.

There must have been a warning given once:

No tree, on pain of withering and sawfly,

To reach the slimmest of his snaky toes

Into this mounded sward and rumple it;

All trees stand back: taboo is on this soil. —

The trees have always scrupulously obeyed.

The grass, that elsewhere grows as best it may

Under the larches, countable long nesh blades,

Here in clear sky pads the ground thick and close

As wool upon a Southdown wether's back;

And as in Southdown wool, your hand must sink

Up to the wrist before it find the roots.

A bed for summer afternoons, this grass;

But in the Spring, not too softly entangling

For lively feet to dance on, when the green

Flashes with daffodils. From Marcle way,

From Dymock, Kempley, Newent, Bromesberrow,

Redmarley, all the meadowland daffodils seem

Running in golden tides to Ryton Firs,

To make the knot of steep little wooded hills

Their brightest show: O bella età de l'oro!

Now I breathe you again, my woods of Ryton:

Not only golden with your daffodil-fires

Lying in pools on the loose dusky ground

Beneath the larches, tumbling in broad rivers

Down sloping grass under the cherry trees

And birches: but among your branches clinging

A mist of that Ferrara-gold I first

Loved in the easy hours then green with you;

And as I stroll about you now, I have

Accompanying me — like troops of lads and lasses

Chattering and dancing in a shining fortune —

Those mornings when your alleys of long light

And your brown rosin-scented shadows were

Enchanted with the laughter of my boys.

The Voices in the Dream

Follow my heart, my dancing feet,

Dance as blithe as my heart can beat.

Only can dancing understand

What a heavenly way we pass

Treading the green and golden land,

Daffodillies and grass.

I had a song, too, on my road,

But mine was in my eyes;

For Malvern Hills were with me all the way,

Singing loveliest visible melodies

Blue as a south-sea bay;

And ruddy as wine of France

Breadths of new-turn'd ploughland under them glowed.

'Twas my heart then must dance

To dwell in my delight;

No need to sing when all in song my sight

Moved over hills so musically made

And with such colour played. —

And only yesterday it was I saw

Veil'd in streamers of grey wavering smoke

My shapely Malvern Hills.

That was the last hail-storm to trouble spring:

He came in gloomy haste,

Pusht in front of the white clouds quietly basking,

In such a hurry he tript against the hills

And stumbling forward spilt over his shoulders

All his black baggage held,

Streaking downpour of hail.

Then fled dismayed, and the sun in golden glee

And the high white clouds laught down his dusky ghost.

For all that's left of winter

Is moisture in the ground.

When I came down the valley last, the sun

Just thawed the grass and made me gentle turf,

But still the frost was bony underneath.

Now moles take burrowing jaunts abroad, and ply

Their shovelling hands in earth

As nimbly as the strokes

Of a swimmer in a long dive under water.

The meadows in the sun are twice as green

For all the scatter of fresh red mounded earth,

The mischief of the moles:

No dullish red, Glostershire earth new-delved

In April! And I think shows fairest where

These rummaging small rogues have been at work.

If you will look the way the sunlight slants

Making the grass one great green gem of light,

Bright earth, crimson and even

Scarlet, everywhere tracks

The rambling underground affairs of moles:

Though 'tis but kestrel-bay

Looking against the sun.

But here's the happiest light can lie on ground,

Grass sloping under trees

Alive with yellow shine of daffodils!

If quicksilver were gold,

And troubled pools of it shaking in the sun

It were not such a fancy of bickering gleam

As Ryton daffodils when the air but stirs.

And all the miles and miles of meadowland

The spring makes golden ways,

Lead here, for here the gold

Grows brightest for our eyes,

And for our hearts lovelier even than love.

So here, each spring, our daffodil festival.

How smooth and quick the year

Spins me the seasons round!

How many days have slid across my mind

Since we had snow pitying the frozen ground!

Then winter sunshine cheered

The bitter skies; the snow,

Reluctantly obeying lofty winds,

Drew off in shining clouds,

Wishing it still might love

With its white mercy the cold earth beneath.

But when the beautiful ground

Lights upward all the air,

Noon thaws the frozen eaves,

And makes the rime on post and paling steam

Silvery blue smoke in the golden day.

And soon from loaded trees in noiseless woods

The snows slip thudding down,

Scattering in their trail

Bright icy sparkles through the glittering air;

And the fir-branches, patiently bent so long,

Sigh as they lift themselves to rights again.

Then warm moist hours steal in,

Such as can draw the year's

First fragrance from the sap of cherry wood

Or from the leaves of budless violets;

And travellers in lanes

Catch the hot tawny smell

Reynard's damp fur left as he sneakt marauding

Across from gap to gap:

And in the larch woods on the highest boughs

The long-eared owls like grey cats sitting still

Peer down to quiz the passengers below.

Light has killed the winter and all dark dreams.

Now winds live all in light,

Light has come down to earth and blossoms here,

And we have golden minds.

From out the long shade of a road high-bankt,

I came on shelving fields;

And from my feet cascading,

Streaming down the land,

Flickering lavish of daffodils flowed and fell;

Like sunlight on a water thrill'd with haste,

Such clear pale quivering flame,

But a flame even more marvellously yellow.

And all the way to Ryton here I walkt

Ankle-deep in light.

It was as if the world had just begun;

And in a mind new-made

Of shadowless delight

My spirit drank my flashing senses in,

And gloried to be made

Of young mortality.

No darker joy than this

Golden amazement now

Shall dare intrude into our dazzling lives:

Stain were it now to know

Mists of sweet warmth and deep delicious colour,

Those lovable accomplices that come

Befriending languid hours.

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 wheeled, while light withdrew

Out of the vales and to surging slopes ascended,

Till the loftiest-flaming summit died to blue.

Honey Harvest

Late in March, when the days are growing longer

And sight of early green

Tells of the coming spring and suns grow stronger,

Round the pale willow-catkins there are seen

The year's first honey-bees

Stealing the nectar: and bee-masters know

This for the first sign of the honey-flow.

Then in the dark hillsides the Cherry-trees

Gleam white with loads of blossom where the gleams

Of piled snow lately hung, and richer streams

The honey. Now, if chilly April days

Delay the Apple-blossom, and the May's

First week come in with sudden summer weather,

The Apple and the Hawthorn bloom together,

And all day long the plundering hordes go round

And every overweighted blossom nods.

But from that gathered essence they compound

Honey more sweet than nectar of the gods.

Those blossoms fall ere June, warm June that brings

The small white Clover. Field by scented field,

Round farms like islands in the rolling weald,

It spreads thick-flowering or in wildness springs

Short-stemmed upon the naked downs, to yield

A richer store of honey than the Rose,

The Pink, the Honeysuckle. Thence there flows

Nectar of clearest amber, redolent

Of every flowery scent

That the warm wind upgathers as he goes.

In mid-July be ready for the noise

Of million bees in old Lime-avenues,

As though hot noon had found a droning voice

To ease her soul. Here for those busy crews

Green leaves and pale-stemmed clusters of green strong flowers Build heavy-perfumed, cool, green-twilight bowers

Whence, load by load, through the long summer days

They fill their glassy cells

With dark green honey, clear as chrysoprase,

Which housewives shun; but the bee-master tells

This brand is more delicious than all else.

In August-time, if moors are near at hand,

Be wise and in the evening-twilight load

Your hives upon a cart, and take the road

By night: that, ere the early dawn shall spring

And all the hills turn rosy with the Ling,

Each waking hive may stand

Established in its new-appointed land

Without harm taken, and the earliest flights

Set out at once to loot the heathery heights.

That vintage of the Heather yields so dense

And glutinous a syrup that it foils

Him who would spare the comb and drain from thence

Its dark, full-flavoured spoils:

For he must squeeze to wreck the beautiful

Frail edifice. Not otherwise he sacks

Those many-chambered palaces of wax.

Then let a choice of every kind be made,

And, labelled, set upon your storehouse racks —

Of Hawthorn-honey that of almond smacks:

The luscious Lime-tree-honey, green as jade:

Pale Willow-honey, hived by the first rover:

That delicate honey culled

From Apple-blossom, that of sunlight tastes:

And sunlight-coloured honey of the Clover.

Then, when the late year wastes,

When night falls early and the noon is dulled

And the last warm days are over,

Unlock the store and to your table bring

Essence of every blossom of the spring.

And if, when wind has never ceased to blow

All night, you wake to roofs and trees becalmed

In level wastes of snow,

Bring out the Lime-tree-honey, the embalmed

Soul of a lost July, or Heather-spiced

Brown-gleaming comb wherein sleeps crystallised

All the hot perfume of the heathery slope.

And, tasting and remembering, live in hope.

Miss Thompson Goes Shopping

Miss Thompson at Home

In her lone cottage on the downs,

With winds and blizzards and great crowns

Of shining cloud, with wheeling plover

And short grass sweet with the small white clover,

Miss Thompson lived, correct and meek,

A lonely spinster, and every week

On market-day she used to go

Into the little town below,

Tucked in the great downs' hollow bowl

Like pebbles gathered in a shoal.

She goes a-Marketing So, having washed her plates and cup And banked the kitchen-fire up,

Miss Thompson slipped upstairs and dressed,

Put on her black (her second best),

The bonnet trimmed with rusty plush,

Peeped in the glass with simpering blush,

From camphor-smelling cupboard took

Her thicker jacket off the hook

Because the day might turn to cold.

Then, ready, slipped downstairs and rolled

The hearthrug back; then searched about,

Found her basket, ventured out,

Snecked the door and paused to lock it

And plunge the key in some deep pocket.

Then as she tripped demurely down

The steep descent, the little town

Spread wider till its sprawling street

Enclosed her and her footfalls beat

On hard stone pavement, and she felt

Those throbbing ecstasies that melt

Through heart and mind, as, happy, free,

Her small, prim personality

Merged into the seething strife

Of auction-marts and city life.

She visits the Boot-maker. Serenely down the busy stream

Miss Thompson floated in a dream.

Now, hovering bee-like, she would stop

Entranced before some tempting shop,

Getting in people's way and prying

At things she never thought of buying:

Now wafted on without an aim,

Until in course of time she came

To Watson's bootshop. Long she pries

At boots and shoes of every size —

Brown football-boots with bar and stud

For boys that scuffle in the mud,

And dancing-pumps with pointed toes

Glossy as jet, and dull black bows;

Slim ladies' shoes with two-inch heel

And sprinkled beads of gold and steel —

'How anyone can wear such things!'

On either side the doorway springs

(As in a tropic jungle loom

Masses of strange thick-petalled bloom

And fruits mis-shapen) fold on fold

A growth of sand-shoes rubber-soled,

Clambering the door-posts, branching, spawning

Their barbarous bunches like an awning

Over the windows and the doors.

But, framed among the other stores,

Something has caught Miss Thompson's eye

(O worldliness! O vanity!),

A pair of slippers — scarlet plush.

Miss Thompson feels a conscious blush

Suffuse her face, as though her thought

Had ventured further than it ought.

But O that colour's rapturous singing

And the answer in her lone heart ringing!

She turns (O Guardian Angels, stop her

From doing anything improper!)

She turns; and see, she stoops and bungles

In through the sand-shoes' hanging jungles,

Away from light and common sense,

Into the shop dim-lit and dense

With smells of polish and tanned hide.

Mrs. Watson.

Soon from a dark recess inside

Fat Mrs. Watson comes slip-slop

To mind the business of the shop.

She walks flat-footed with a roll —

A serviceable, homely soul,

With kindly, ugly face like dough,

Hair dull and colourless as tow.

A huge Scotch pebble fills the space

Between her bosom and her face.

One sees her making beds all day.

Miss Thompson lets her say her say:

'So chilly for the time of year.

It's ages since we saw you here.'

Then, heart a-flutter, speech precise,

Describes the shoes and asks the price.

'Them, Miss? Ah, them is six-and-nine.'

Miss Thompson shudders down the spine

(Dream of impossible romance).

She eyes them with a wistful glance,

Torn between good and evil. Yes,

Wrestles with a Temptation;

For half-a-minute and no less

Miss Thompson strives with seven devils,

Then, soaring over earthly levels

And is Saved.

Turns from the shoes with lingering touch —

'Ah, six-and-nine is far too much.

Sorry to trouble you. Good day!'

She visits the Fish-monger.

A little further down the way

Stands Miles's fish-shop, whence is shed

So strong a smell of fishes dead

That people of a subtler sense

Hold their breath and hurry thence.

Miss Thompson hovers there and gazes:

Her housewife's knowing eye appraises

Salt and fresh, severely cons

Kippers bright as tarnished bronze:

Great cods disposed upon the sill,

Chilly and wet, with gaping gill,

Flat head, glazed eye, and mute, uncouth,

Shapeless, wan, old-woman's mouth.

Next a row of soles and plaice

With querulous and twisted face,

And red-eyed bloaters, golden-grey;

Smoked haddocks ranked in neat array;

A group of smelts that take the light

Like slips of rainbow, pearly bright;

Silver trout with rosy spots,

And coral shrimps with keen black dots

For eyes, and hard and jointed sheath

And crisp tails curving underneath.

But there upon the sanded floor,

More wonderful in all that store

Than anything on slab or shelf,

Stood Miles, the fishmonger, himself.

Mr. Miles. Four-square he stood and filled the place.

His huge hands and his jolly face

Were red. He had a mouth to quaff

Pint after pint: a sounding laugh,

But wheezy at the end, and oft

His eyes bulged outwards and he coughed.

Aproned he stood from chin to toe.

The apron's vertical long flow

Warped grandly outwards to display

His hale, round belly hung midway,

Whose apex was securely bound

With apron-strings wrapped round and round.

Outside, Miss Thompson, small and staid,

Felt, as she always felt, afraid

Of this huge man who laughed so loud

And drew the notice of the crowd.

Awhile she paused in timid thought,

Then promptly hurried in and bought

'Two kippers, please. Yes, lovely weather.'

'Two kippers? Sixpence altogether:'

And in her basket laid the pair

Wrapped face to face in newspaper.

Relapses into Temptation:

Then on she went, as one half blind,

For things were stirring in her mind;

Then turned about with fixed intent

And, heading for the bootshop, went

And Falls. Straight in and bought the scarlet slippers

And popped them in beside the kippers.

She visits the Chemist, So much for that.

From there she tacked,

Still flushed by this decisive act,

Westward, and came without a stop

To Mr. Wren the chemist's shop,

And stood awhile outside to see

The tall, big-bellied bottles three —

Red, blue, and emerald, richly bright

Each with its burning core of light.

The bell chimed as she pushed the door.

Spotless the oilcloth on the floor,

Limpid as water each glass case,

Each thing precisely in its place.

Rows of small drawers, black-lettered each

With curious words of foreign speech,

Ranked high above the other ware.

The old strange fragrance filled the air,

A fragrance like the garden pink,

But tinged with vague medicinal stink

Of camphor, soap, new sponges, blent

With chloroform and violet scent.

Mr. Wren. And Wren the chemist, tall and spare,

Stood gaunt behind his counter there.

Quiet and very wise he seemed,

With skull-like face, bald head that gleamed;

Through spectacles his eyes looked kind.

He wore a pencil tucked behind

His ear. And never he mistakes

The wildest signs the doctor makes

Prescribing drugs. Brown paper, string,

He will not use for any thing,

But all in neat white parcels packs

And sticks them up with sealing-wax.

Miss Thompson bowed and blushed, and then

Undoubting bought of Mr. Wren,

Being free from modern scepticism,

A bottle for her rheumatism;

Also some peppermints to take

In case of wind; an oval cake

Of scented soap; a penny square

Of pungent naphthaline to scare

The moth. And after Wren had wrapped

And sealed the lot, Miss Thompson clapped

Them in beside the fish and shoes;

'Good day,' she says, and off she goes.

Is Led away to the Pleasure of the Town,

Beelike Miss Thompson, whither next?

Outside, you pause awhile, perplext,

Your bearings lost. Then all comes back

Such as Groceries and Millinery,

And round she wheels, hot on the track

Of Giles the grocer, and from there

To Emilie the milliner,

There to be tempted by the sight

Of hats and blouses fiercely bright.

(O guard Miss Thompson, Powers that Be,

From Crudeness and Vulgarity.)

And other Allurements

Still on from shop to shop she goes

With sharp bird's-eye, enquiring nose,

Prying and peering, entering some,

Oblivious of the thought of home.

The town brimmed up with deep-blue haze,

But still she stayed to flit and gaze,

Her eyes ablur with rapturous sights,

Her small soul full of small delights,

Empty her purse, her basket filled.

But at length is Convinced of Indiscretion.

The traffic in the town was stilled.

The clock struck six. Men thronged the inns.

Dear, dear, she should be home long since.

And Returns Home.

Then as she climbed the misty downs

The lamps were lighted in the town's

Small streets. She saw them star by star

Multiplying from afar;

Till, mapped beneath her, she could trace

Each street, and the wide square market-place

Sunk deeper and deeper as she went

Higher up the steep ascent.

And all that soul-uplifting stir

Step by step fell back from her,

The glory gone, the blossoming

Shrivelled, and she, a small, frail thing,

Carrying her laden basket. Till

Darkness and silence of the hill

Received her in their restful care

And stars came dropping through the air.

But loudly, sweetly sang the slippers

In the basket with the kippers;

And loud and sweet the answering thrills

From her lone heart on the hills.

Edmund Blunden

The Poor Man's Pig

Already fallen plum-bloom stars the green

And apple-boughs as knarred as old toads' backs

Wear their small roses ere a rose is seen;

The building thrush watches old Job who stacks

The bright-peeled osiers on the sunny fence,

The pent sow grunts to hear him stumping by,

And tries to push the bolt and scamper thence,

But her ringed snout still keeps her to the sty.

Then out he lets her run; away she snorts

In bundling gallop for the cottage door,

With hungry hubbub begging crusts and orts,

Then like the whirlwind bumping round once more;

Nuzzling the dog, making the pullets run,

And sulky as a child when her play's done.

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 threescore-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 dragon's-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 eggshells to fright from coming fruits

The brisk-billed rascals; pausing 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

That both 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.

Perch-Fishing

On the far hill the cloud of thunder grew

And sunlight blurred below; but sultry blue

Burned yet on the valley water where it hoards

Behind the miller's elmen floodgate boards,

And there the wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed

In the vole's empty house, still drove afield

To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees

And build their young ones their hutched nurseries;

Still creaked the grasshoppers' rasping unison

Nor had the whisper through the tansies run

Nor weather-wisest bird gone home.

How then

Should wry eels in the pebbled shallows ken

Lightning coming? troubled up they stole

To the deep-shadowed sullen water-hole,

Among whose warty snags the quaint perch lair.

As cunning stole the boy to angle there,

Muffling least tread, with no noise balancing through

The hangdog alder-boughs his bright bamboo.

Down plumbed the shuttled ledger, and the quill

On the quicksilver water lay dead still.

A sharp snatch, swirling to-fro of the line,

He's lost, he's won, with splash and scuffling shine

Past the low-lapping brandy-flowers drawn in,

The ogling hunchback perch with needled fin.

And there beside him one as large as he,

Following his hooked mate, careless who shall see

Or what befall him, close and closer yet —

The startled boy might take him in his net

That folds the other.

Slow, while on the clay,

The other flounces, slow he sinks away.

What agony usurps that watery brain

For comradeship of twenty summers slain,

For such delights below the flashing weir

And up the sluice-cut, playing buccaneer

Among the minnows; lolling in hot sun

When bathing vagabonds had drest and done;

Rootling in salty flannel-weed for meal

And river shrimps, when hushed the trundling wheel;

Snapping the dapping moth, and with new wonder

Prowling through old drowned barges falling asunder.

And O a thousand things the whole year through

They did together, never more to do.

The Giant Puffball

From what sad star I know not, but I found

Myself new-born below the coppice rail,

No bigger than the dewdrops and as round,

In a soft sward, no cattle might assail.

And so I gathered mightiness and grew

With this one dream kindling in me, that I

Should never cease from conquering light and dew

Till my white splendour touched the trembling sky.

A century of blue and stilly light

Bowed down before me, the dew came again,

The moon my sibyl worshipped through the night,

The sun returned and long abode; but then

Hoarse drooping darkness hung me with a shroud

And switched at me with shrivelled leaves in scorn.

Red morning stole beneath a grinning cloud,

And suddenly clambering over dike and thorn

A half-moon host of churls with flags and sticks

Hallooed and hurtled up the partridge brood,

And Death clapped hands from all the echoing thicks,

And trampling envy spied me where I stood;

Who haled me tired and quaking, hid me by,

And came again after an age of cold,

And hung me in the prison-house adry

From the great crossbeam. Here defiled and old

I perish through unnumbered hours, I swoon,

Hacked with harsh knives to staunch a child's torn hand;

And all my hopes must with my body soon

Be but as crouching dust and wind-blown sand.

The Child's Grave

I came to the churchyard where pretty Joy lies

On a morning in April, a rare sunny day;

Such bloom rose around, and so many birds' cries

That I sang for delight as I followed the way.

I sang for delight in the ripening of spring,

For dandelions even were suns come to earth;

Not a moment went by but a new lark took wing

To wait on the season with melody's mirth.

Love-making birds were my mates all the road,

And who would wish surer delight for the eye

Than to see pairing goldfinches gleaming abroad

Or yellowhammers sunning on paling and sty?

And stocks in the almswomen's garden were blown,

With rich Easter roses each side of the door;

The lazy white owls in the glade cool and lone

Paid calls on their cousins in the elm's chambered core.

This peace, then, and happiness thronged me around.

Nor could I go burdened with grief, but made merry

Till I came to the gate of that overgrown ground

Where scarce once a year sees the priest come to bury.

Over the mounds stood the nettles in pride,

And, where no fine flowers, there kind weeds dared to wave; It seemed but as yesterday she lay by my side,

And now my dog ate of the grass on her grave.

He licked my hand wondering to see me muse so,

And wished I would lead on the journey or home,

As though not a moment of spring were to go

In brooding; but I stood, if her spirit might come

And tell me her life, since we left her that day

In the white lilied coffin, and rained down our tears;

But the grave held no answer, though long I should stay;

How strange that this clay should mingle with hers!

So I called my good dog, and went on my way;

Joy's spirit shone then in each flower I went by,

And clear as the noon, in coppice and ley,

Her sweet dawning smile and her violet eye!

April Byeway

Friend whom I never saw, yet dearest friend,

Be with me travelling on the byeway now

In April's month and mood: our steps shall bend

By the shut smithy with its penthouse brow

Armed round with many a felly and crackt plough:

And we will mark in his white smock the mill

Standing aloof, long numbed to any wind,

That in his crannies mourns, and craves him still;

But now there is not any grain to grind,

And even the master lies too deep for winds to find.

Grieve not at these: for there are mills amain

With lusty sails that leap and drop away

On further knolls, and lads to fetch the grain.

The ash-spit wickets on the green betray

New games begun and old ones put away.

Let us fare on, dead friend, O deathless friend,

Where under his old hat as green as moss

The hedger chops and finds new gaps to mend,

And on his bonfires burns the thorns and dross,

And hums a hymn, the best, thinks he, that ever was.

There the grey guinea-fowl stands in the way,

The young black heifer and the raw-ribbed mare,

And scorn to move for tumbril or for dray,

And feel themselves as good as farmers there.

From the young corn the prick-eared leverets stare

At strangers come to spy the land — small sirs,

We bring less danger than the very breeze

Who in great zig-zag blows the bee, and whirs

In bluebell shadow down the bright green leas;

From whom in frolic fit the chopt straw darts and flees.

The cornel steepling up in white shall know

The two friends passing by, and poplar smile

All gold within; the church-top fowl shall glow

To lure us on, and we shall rest awhile

Where the wild apple blooms above the stile;

The yellow frog beneath blinks up half bold,

Then scares himself into the deeper green.

And thus spring was for you in days of old,

And thus will be when I too walk unseen

By one that thinks me friend, the best that there has been.

All our lone journey laughs for joy, the hours

Like honey-bees go home in new-found light

Past the cow pond amazed with twinkling flowers

And antique chalk-pit newly delved to white,

Or idle snow-plough nearly hid from sight.

The blackbird sings us home, on a sudden peers

The round tower hung with ivy's blackened chains,

Then past the little green the byeway veers,

The mill-sweeps torn, the forge with cobwebbed panes

That have so many years looked out across the plains.

But the old forge and mill are shut and done,

The tower is crumbling down, stone by stone falls;

An ague doubt comes creeping in the sun,

The sun himself shudders, the day appals,

The concourse of a thousand tempests sprawls

Over the blue-lipped lakes and maddening groves,

Like agonies of gods the clouds are whirled,

The stormwind like the demon huntsman roves —

Still stands my friend, though all's to chaos hurled,

The unseen friend, the one last friend in all the world.

William H. Davies

The Captive Lion

Thou that in fury with thy knotted tail

Hast made this iron floor thy beaten drum;

That now in silence walkst thy little space —

Like a sea-captain — careless what may come:

What power has brought thy majesty to this,

Who gave those eyes their dull and sleepy look;

Who took their lightning out, and from thy throat

The thunder when the whole wide forest shook?

It was that man who went again, alone,

Into thy forest dark — Lord, he was brave!

That man a fly has killed, whose bones are left

Unburied till an earthquake digs his grave.

A Bird's Anger

A summer's morning that has but one voice;

Five hundred stocks, like golden lovers, lean

Their heads together, in their quiet way,

And but one bird sings, of a number seen.

It is the lark, that louder, louder sings,

As though but this one thought possessed his mind:

'You silent robin, blackbird, thrush, and finch,

I'll sing enough for all you lazy kind!'

And when I hear him at this daring task,

'Peace, little bird,' I say, 'and take some rest;

Stop that wild, screaming fire of angry song,

Before it makes a coffin of your nest.'

The Villain

While joy gave clouds the light of stars,

That beamed where'er they looked;

And calves and lambs had tottering knees,

Excited, while they sucked;

While every bird enjoyed his song,

Without one thought of harm or wrong —

I turned my head and saw the wind,

Not far from where I stood,

Dragging the corn by her golden hair,

Into a dark and lonely wood.

Love's Caution

Tell them, when you are home again,

How warm the air was now;

How silent were the birds and leaves,

And of the moon's full glow;

And how we saw afar

A falling star:

It was a tear of pure delight

Ran down the face of Heaven this happy night.

Our kisses are but love in flower,

Until that greater time

When, gathering strength, those flowers take wing,

And Love can reach his prime.

And now, my heart's delight,

Good night, good night;

Give me the last sweet kiss —

But do not breathe at home one word of this!

Wasted Hours

How many buds in this warm light

Have burst out laughing into leaves!

And shall a day like this be gone

Before I seek the wood that holds

The richest music known?

Too many times have nightingales

Wasted their passion on my sleep,

And brought repentance soon:

But this one night I'll seek the woods,

The nightingale, and moon.

The Truth

Since I have seen a bird one day,

His head pecked more than half away;

That hopped about, with but one eye,

Ready to fight again, and die —

Ofttimes since then their private lives

Have spoilt that joy their music gives.

So when I see this robin now,

Like a red apple on the bough,

And question why he sings so strong,

For love, or for the love of song;

Or sings, maybe, for that sweet rill

Whose silver tongue is never still —

Ah, now there comes this thought unkind,

Born of the knowledge in my mind:

He sings in triumph that last night

He killed his father in a fight;

And now he'll take his mother's blood —

The last strong rival for his food.

Walter de la Mare

The Moth

Isled in the midnight air,

Musked with the dark's faint bloom,

Out into glooming and secret haunts

The flame cries, 'Come!'

Lovely in dye and fan,

A-tremble in shimmering grace,

A moth from her winter swoon

Uplifts her face:

Stares from her glamorous eyes;

Wafts her on plumes like mist;

In ecstasy swirls and sways

To her strange tryst.

Sotto Voce

To Edward Thomas

The haze of noon wanned silver-grey,

The soundless mansion of the sun;

The air made visible in his ray,

Like molten glass from furnace run,

Quivered o'er heat-baked turf and stone

And the flower of the gorse burned on —

Burned softly as gold of a child's fair hair

Along each spiky spray, and shed

Almond-like incense in the air

Whereon our senses fed.

At foot — a few sparse harebells: blue

And still as were the friend's dark eyes

That dwelt on mine, transfixèd through

With sudden ecstatic surmise.

'Hst!' he cried softly, smiling, and lo,

Stealing amidst that maze gold-green,

I heard a whispering music flow

From guileful throat of bird, unseen: —

So delicate, the straining ear

Scarce carried its faint syllabling

Into a heart caught-up to hear

That inmost pondering

Of bird-like self with self. We stood,

In happy trance-like solitude,

Hearkening a lullay grieved and sweet —

As when on isle uncharted beat

'Gainst coral at the palm-tree's root,

With brine-clear, snow-white foam afloat,

The wailing, not of water or wind —

A husht, far, wild, divine lament,

When Prospero his wizardry bent

Winged Ariel to bind....

Then silence, and o'er-flooding noon.

I raised my head; smiled too. And he —

Moved his great hand, the magic gone —

Gently amused to see

My ignorant wonderment. He sighed.

'It was a nightingale,' he said,

'That sotto voce cons the song

He'll sing when dark is spread;

And Night's vague hours are sweet and long,

And we are laid abed.'

Sephina

Black lacqueys at the wide-flung door

Stand mute as men of wood.

Gleams like a pool the ballroom floor —

A burnished solitude.

A hundred waxen tapers shine

From silver sconces; softly pine

'Cello, fiddle, mandoline,

To music deftly wooed —

And dancers in cambric, satin, silk,

With glancing hair and cheeks like milk,

Wreathe, curtsey, intertwine.

The drowse of roses lulls the air

Wafted up the marble stair.

Like warbling water clucks the talk.

From room to room in splendour walk

Guests, smiling in the æry sheen;

Carmine and azure, white and green,

They stoop and languish, pace and preen

Bare shoulder, painted fan,

Gemmed wrist and finger, neck of swan;

And still the pluckt strings warble on;

Still from the snow-bowered, link-lit street

The muffled hooves of horses beat;

And harness rings; and foam-fleckt bit

Clanks as the slim heads toss and stare

From deep, dark eyes. Smiling, at ease,

Mount to the porch the pomped grandees

In lonely state, by twos, and threes,

Exchanging languid courtesies,

While torches fume and flare.

And now the banquet calls. A blare

Of squalling trumpets clots the air.

And, flocking out, streams up the rout;

And lilies nod to velvet's swish;

And peacocks prim on gilded dish,

Vast pies thick-glazed, and gaping fish,

Towering confections crisp as ice,

Jellies aglare like cockatrice,

With thousand savours tongues entice.

Fruits of all hues barbaric gloom —

Pomegranate, quince and peach and plum,

Mandarine, grape, and cherry clear

Englobe each glassy chandelier,

Where nectarous flowers their sweets distil —

Jessamine, tuberose, chamomill,

Wild-eye narcissus, anemone,

Tendril of ivy and vinery.

Now odorous wines the goblets fill;

Gold-cradled meats the menials bear

From gilded chair to gilded chair:

Now roars the talk like crashing seas,

Foams upward to the painted frieze,

Echoes and ebbs. Still surges in,

To yelp of hautboy and violin,

Plumed and bedazzling, rosed and rare,

Dance-bemused, with cheek aglow,

Stooping the green-twined portal through,

Sighing with laughter, debonair,

That concourse of the proud and fair —

And lo! 'La, la!

Mamma ... Mamma!'

Falls a small cry in the dark and calls —

'I see you standing there!'

Fie, fie, Sephina! not in bed!

Crouched on the staircase overhead,

Like ghost she gloats, her lean hand laid

On alabaster balustrade,

And gazes on and on

Down on that wondrous to and fro

Till finger and foot are cold as snow,

And half the night is gone;

And dazzled eyes are sore bestead;

Nods drowsily the sleek-locked head;

And, vague and far, spins, fading out,

That rainbow-coloured, reeling rout,

And, with faint sighs, her spirit flies

Into deep sleep....

Come, Stranger, peep!

Was ever cheek so wan?

The Titmouse

If you would happy company win,

Dangle a palm-nut from a tree,

Idly in green to sway and spin,

Its snow-pulped kernel for bait; and see,

A nimble titmouse enter in.

Out of earth's vast unknown of air,

Out of all summer, from wave to wave,

He'll perch, and prank his feathers fair,

Jangle a glass-clear wildering stave,

And take his commons there —

This tiny son of life; this spright,

By momentary Human sought,

Plume will his wing in the dappling light,

Clash timbrel shrill and gay —

And into time's enormous nought,

Sweet-fed, will flit away.

Suppose

Suppose ... and suppose that a wild little Horse of Magic

Came cantering out of the sky,

With bridle of silver, and into the saddle I mounted,

To fly — and to fly;

And we stretched up into the air, fleeting on in the sunshine, A speck in the gleam,

On galloping hoofs, his mane in the wind out-flowing,

In a shadowy stream;

And oh, when, all lone, the gentle star of evening

Came crinkling into the blue,

A magical castle we saw in the air, like a cloud of moonlight, As onward we flew;

And across the green moat on the drawbridge we foamed and we snorted,

And there was a beautiful Queen

Who smiled at me strangely; and spoke to my wild little Horse, too

—

A lovely and beautiful Queen;

And she cried with delight — and delight — to her delicate maidens,

'Behold my daughter — my dear!'

And they crowned me with flowers, and then to their harps sate playing,

Solemn and clear;

And magical cakes and goblets were spread on the table;

And at window the birds came in;

Hopping along with bright eyes, pecking crumbs from the platters, And sipped of the wine;

And splashing up — up to the roof tossed fountains of crystal; And Princes in scarlet and green

Shot with their bows and arrows, and kneeled with their dishes Of fruits for the Queen;

And we walked in a magical garden with rivers and bowers,

And my bed was of ivory and gold;

And the Queen breathed soft in my ear a song of enchantment —

And I never grew old....

And I never, never came back to the earth, oh, never and never; How mother would cry and cry!

There'd be snow on the fields then, and all these sweet flowers in the winter

Would wither, and die....

Suppose ... and suppose ...

The Corner Stone

Sterile these stones

By time in ruin laid.

Yet many a creeping thing

Its haven has made

In these least crannies, where falls

Dark's dew, and noonday shade.

The claw of the tender bird

Finds lodgment here;

Dye-winged butterflies poise;

Emmet and beetle steer

Their busy course; the bee

Drones, laden, near.

Their myriad-mirrored eyes

Great day reflect.

By their exquisite farings

Is this granite specked;

Is trodden to infinite dust;

By gnawing lichens decked.

Toward what eventual dream

Sleeps its cold on,

When into ultimate dark

These lives shall be gone,

And even of man not a shadow remain

Of all he has done?

John Drinkwater

Then I asked: 'Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?'

He replied: 'All Poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.'

Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Persuasion

I

At any moment love unheralded

Comes, and is king. Then as, with a fall

Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread

Are withered in untimely burial,

So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by,

And as a beggar walks unfriended ways,

With but remembered beauty to defy

The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days.

Or in that later travelling he comes

Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells

Himself, again, again, forgotten tombs

Are all now that love was, and blindly spells

His royal state of old a glory cursed,

Saying 'I have forgot', and that's the worst.

II

If we should part upon that one embrace,

And set our courses ever, each from each,

With all our treasure but a fading face

And little ghostly syllables of speech;

Should beauty's moment never be renewed,

And moons on moons look out for us in vain,

And each but whisper from a solitude

To hear but echoes of a lonely pain, —

Still in a world that fortune cannot change

Should walk those two that once were you and I,

Those two that once when moon and stars were strange

Poets above us in an April sky,

Heard a voice falling on the midnight sea,

Mute, and for ever, but for you and me.

III

This nature, this great flood of life, this cheat

That uses us as baubles for her coat,

Takes love, that should be nothing but the beat

Of blood for its own beauty, by the throat,

Saying, you are my servant and shall do

My purposes, or utter bitterness

Shall be your wage, and nothing come to you

But stammering tongues that never can confess.

Undaunted then in answer here I cry,

'You wanton, that control the hand of him

Who masquerades as wisdom in a sky

Where holy, holy, sing the cherubim,

I will not pay one penny to your name

Though all my body crumble into shame.'

IV

Woman, I once had whimpered at your hand,

Saying that all the wisdom that I sought

Lay in your brain, that you were as the sand

Should cleanse the muddy mirrors of my thought;

I should have read in you the character

Of oracles that quick a thousand lays,

Looked in your eyes, and seen accounted there

Solomons legioned for bewildered praise.

Now have I learnt love as love is. I take

Your hand, and with no inquisition learn

All that your eyes can tell, and that's to make

A little reckoning and brief, then turn

Away, and in my heart I hear a call,

'I love, I love, I love'; and that is all.

V

When all the hungry pain of love I bear,

And in poor lightless thought but burn and burn,

And wit goes hunting wisdom everywhere,

Yet can no word of revelation learn;

When endlessly the scales of yea and nay

In dreadful motion fall and rise and fall,

When all my heart in sorrow I could pay

Until at last were left no tear at all;

Then if with tame or subtle argument

Companions come and draw me to a place

Where words are but the tappings of content,

And life spreads all her garments with a grace,

I curse that ease, and hunger in my heart

Back to my pain and lonely to depart.

VI

Not anything you do can make you mine,

For enterprise with equal charity

In duty as in love elect will shine,

The constant slave of mutability.

Nor can your words for all their honey breath

Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme,

And though my ear deliver them from death

One day or two, it is so little time.

Nor does your beauty in its excellence

Excel a thousand in the daily sun,

Yet must I put a period to pretence,

And with my logic's catalogue have done,

For act and word and beauty are but keys

To unlock the heart, and you, dear love, are these.

VII

Never the heart of spring had trembled so

As on that day when first in Paradise

We went afoot as novices to know

For the first time what blue was in the skies,

What fresher green than any in the grass,

And how the sap goes beating to the sun,

And tell how on the clocks of beauty pass

Minute by minute till the last is done.

But not the new birds singing in the brake,

And not the buds of our discovery,

The deeper blue, the wilder green, the ache

For beauty that we shadow as we see,

Made heaven, but we, as love's occasion brings,

Took these, and made them Paradisal things.

VIII

The lilacs offer beauty to the sun,

Throbbing with wonder as eternally

For sad and happy lovers they have done

With the first bloom of summer in the sky;

Yet they are newly spread in honour now,

Because, for every beam of beauty given

Out of that clustering heart, back to the bough

My love goes beating, from a greater heaven.

So be my love for good or sorry luck

Bound, it has virtue on this April eve

That shall be there for ever when they pluck

Lilacs for love. And though I come to grieve

Long at a frosty tomb, there still shall be

My happy lyric in the lilac tree.

IX

When they make silly question of my love,

And speak to me of danger and disdain,

And look by fond old argument to move

My wisdom to docility again;

When to my prouder heart they set the pride

Of custom and the gossip of the street,

And show me figures of myself beside

A self diminished at their judgment seat;

Then do I sit as in a drowsy pew

To hear a priest expounding th' heavenly will,

Defiling wonder that he never knew

With stolen words of measured good and ill;

For to the love that knows their counselling,

Out of my love contempt alone I bring.

X

Not love of you is most that I can bring,

Since what I am to love you is the test,

And should I love you more than any thing

You would but be of idle love possessed,

A mere love wandering in appetite,

Counting your glories and yet bringing none,

Finding in you occasions of delight,

A thief of payment for no service done.

But when of labouring life I make a song

And bring it you, as that were my reward,

To let what most is me to you belong,

Then do I come of high possessions lord,

And loving life more than my love of you

I give you love more excellently true.

XI

What better tale could any lover tell

When age or death his reckoning shall write

Than thus, 'Love taught me only to rebel

Against these things, — the thieving of delight

Without return; the gospellers of fear

Who, loving, yet deny the truth they bear,

Sad-suited lusts with lecherous hands to smear

The cloth of gold they would but dare not wear.

And love gave me great knowledge of the trees,

And singing birds, and earth with all her flowers;

Wisdom I knew and righteousness in these,

I lived in their atonement all my hours;

Love taught me how to beauty's eye alone

The secret of the lying heart is known.'

XII

This then at last; we may be wiser far

Than love, and put his folly to our measure,

Yet shall we learn, poor wizards that we are,

That love chimes not nor motions at our pleasure.

We bid him come, and light an eager fire,

And he goes down the road without debating;

We cast him from the house of our desire,

And when at last we leave he will be waiting.

And in the end there is no folly but this,

To counsel love out of our little learning.

For still he knows where rotten timber is,

And where the boughs for the long winter burning;

And when life needs no more of us at all,

Love's word will be the last that we recall.

John Freeman

I Will Ask

I will ask primrose and violet to spend for you

Their smell and hue,

And the bold, trembling anemone awhile to spare

Her flowers starry fair;

Or the flushed wild apple and yet sweeter thorn

Their sweetness to keep

Longer than any fire-bosomed flower born

Between midnight and midnight deep.

And I will take celandine, nettle and parsley, white

In its own green light,

Or milkwort and sorrel, thyme, harebell and meadow-sweet

Lifting at your feet,

And ivy-blossom beloved of soft bees; I will take

The loveliest —

The seeding grasses that bend with the winds, and shake

Though the winds are at rest.

'For me?' you will ask. 'Yes! surely they wave for you

Their smell and hue,

And you away all that is rare were so much less

By your missed happiness.'

Yet I know grass and weed, ivy and apple and thorn

Their whole sweet would keep,

Though in Eden no human spirit on a shining morn

Had awaked from sleep.

The Evening Sky

Rose-bosom'd and rose-limb'd

With eyes of dazzling bright

Shakes Venus mid the twined boughs of the night;

Rose-limb'd, soft-stepping

From low bough to bough,

Shaking the wide-hung starry fruitage — dimmed

Its bloom of snow

By that sole planetary glow.

Venus, avers the astronomer,

Not thus idly dancing goes

Flushing the eternal orchard with wild rose.

She through ether burns

Outpacing planetary earth,

And ere two years triumphantly returns,

And again wave-like swelling flows,

And again her flashing apparition comes and goes.

This we have not seen,

No heavenly courses set,

No flight unpausing through a void serene:

But when eve clears,

Arises Venus as she first uprose

Stepping the shaken boughs among,

And in her bosom glows

The warm light hidden in sunny snows.

She shakes the clustered stars

Lightly, as she goes

Amid the unseen branches of the night,

Rose-limb'd, rose-bosom'd bright.

She leaps: they shake and pale; she glows —

And who but knows

How the rejoiced heart aches

When Venus all his starry vision shakes;

When through his mind

Tossing with random airs of an unearthly wind,

Rose-bosom'd, rose-limb'd,

The mistress of his starry vision arises,

And the boughs glittering sway

And the stars pale away,

And the enlarging heaven glows

As Venus light-foot mid the twined branches goes.

The Caves

Like the tide — knocking at the hollowed cliff

And running into each green cave as if

In the cave's night to keep

Eternal motion grave and deep —

That, even while each broken wave repeats

Its answered knocking and with bruised hand beats

Again, again, again,

Tossed between ecstasy and pain;

Still in the folded hollow darkness swells,

Sinks, swells, and every green-hung hollow fills,

Till there's no room for sound

Save that old anger rolled around;

So into every hollow cliff of life,

Into this heart's deep cave so loud with strife,

In tunnels I knew not,

In lightless labyrinths of thought,

The unresting tide has run and the dark filled,

Even the vibration of old strife is stilled;

The wave returning bears

Muted those time-breathing airs.

— How shall the million-footed tide still tread

These hollows and in each cold void cave spread?

How shall Love here keep

Eternal motion grave and deep?

Moon-Bathers

Falls from her heaven the Moon, and stars sink burning

Into the sea where blackness rims the sea,

Silently quenched. Faint light that the waves hold

Is only light remaining; yet still gleam

The sands where those now-sleeping young moon-bathers

Came dripping out of the sea and from their arms

Shook flakes of light, dancing on the foamy edge

Of quiet waves. They were all things of light

Tossed from the sea to dance under the Moon —

Her nuns, dancing within her dying round,

Clear limbs and breasts silvered with Moon and waves

And quick with windlike mood and body's joy,

Withdrawn from alien vows, by wave and wind

Lightly absolved and lightly all forgetting.

An hour ago they left. Remains the gleam

Of their late motion on the salt sea-meadow,

As loveliest hues linger when the sun's gone

And float in the heavens and die in reedy pools —

So slowly, who shall say when light is gone?

In Those Old Days

In those old days you were called beautiful,

But I have worn the beauty from your face;

The flowerlike bloom has withered on your cheek

With the harsh years, and the fire in your eyes

Burns darker now and deeper, feeding on

Beauty and the remembrance of things gone.

Even your voice is altered when you speak,

Or is grown mute with old anxiety

For me.

Even as a fire leaps into flame and burns

Leaping and laughing in its lovely flight,

And then under the flame a glowing dome

Deepens slowly into blood-like light: —

So did you flame and in flame take delight,

So are you hollow'd now with aching fire.

But I still warm me and make there my home,

Still beauty and youth burn there invisibly

For me.

Now my lips falling on your silver'd skull,

My fingers in the valleys of your cheeks,

Or my hands in your thin strong hands fast caught,

Your body clutched to mine, mine bent to yours:

Now love undying feeds on love beautiful,

Now, now I am but thought kissing your thought ...

— And can it be in your heart's music speaks

A deeper rhythm hearing mine: can it be

Indeed for me?

Caterpillars

Of caterpillars Fabre tells how day after day

Around the rim of a vast earth pot they crawled,

Tricked thither as they filed shuffling out one morn

Head to tail when the common hunger called.

Head to tail in a heaving ring day after day,

Night after slow night, the starving mommets crept,

Each following each, head to tail, day after day,

An unbroken ring of hunger — then it was snapt.

I thought of you, long-heaving, horned green caterpillars, As I lay awake. My thoughts crawled each after each,

Crawling at night each after each on the same nerve,

An unbroken ring of thoughts too sore for speech.

Over and over and over and over again

The same hungry thoughts and the hopeless same regrets,

Over and over the same truths, again and again

In a heaving ring returning the same regrets.

Change

I am that creature and creator who

Loosens and reins the waters of the sea,

Forming the rocky marge anon anew.

I stir the cold breasts of antiquity,

And in the soft stone of the pyramid

Move wormlike; and I flutter all those sands

Whereunder lost and soundless time is hid.

I shape the hills and valleys with these hands,

And darken forests on their naked sides,

And call the rivers from the vexing springs,

And lead the blind winds into deserts strange.

And in firm human bones the ill that hides

Is mine, the fear that cries, the hope that sings.

I am that creature and creator, Change.

Wilfrid Gibson

Fire

In each black tile a mimic fire's aglow,

And in the hearthlight old mahogany,

Ripe with stored sunshine that in Mexico

Poured like gold wine into the living tree

Summer on summer through a century,

Burns like a crater in the heart of night:

And all familiar things in the ingle-light

Glow with a secret strange intensity.

And I remember hidden fires that burst

Suddenly from the midnight while men slept,

Long-smouldering rages in the darkness nursed

That to an instant ravening fury leapt,

And the old terror menacing evermore

A crumbling world with fiery molten core.

Barbara Fell

Stephen, wake up! There's some one at the gate.

Quick, to the window ... Oh, you'll be too late!

I hear the front door opening quietly.

Did you forget, last night, to turn the key?

A foot is on the stairs — nay, just outside

The very room — the door is opening wide...

Stephen, wake up, wake up! Who's there? Who's there?

I only feel a cold wind in my hair...

Have I been dreaming, Stephen? Husband, wake

And comfort me: I think my heart will break.

I never knew you sleep so sound and still....

O my heart's love, why is your hand so chill?

Philip and Phœbe Ware

Who is that woman, Philip, standing there

Before the mirror doing up her hair?

You're dreaming, Phœbe, or the morning light

Mixing and mingling with the dying night

Makes shapes out of the darkness, and you see

Some dream-remembered phantasy maybe.

Yet it grows clearer with the growing day;

And in the cold dawn light her hair is grey:

Her lifted arms are naught but bone: her hands

White withered claws that fumble as she stands

Trying to pin that wisp into its place.

O Philip, I must look upon her face

There in the mirror. Nay, but I will rise

And peep over her shoulder ... Oh, the eyes

That burn out from that face of skin and bone,

Searching my very marrow, are my own.

By the Weir

A scent of Esparto grass — and again I recall

That hour we spent by the weir of the paper-mill

Watching together the curving thunderous fall

Of frothing amber, bemused by the roar until

My mind was as blank as the speckless sheets that wound

On the hot steel ironing-rollers perpetually turning

In the humming dark rooms of the mill: all sense and discerning By the stunning and dazzling oblivion of hill-waters drowned.

And my heart was empty of memory and hope and desire

Till, rousing, I looked afresh on your face as you gazed —

Behind you an old gnarled fruit-tree in one still fire

Of innumerable flame in the sun of October blazed,

Scarlet and gold that the first white frost would spill

With eddying flicker and patter of dead leaves falling —

looked on your face, as an outcast from Eden recalling

A vision of Eve as she dallied bewildered and still

By the serpent-encircled tree of knowledge that flamed

With gold and scarlet of good and evil, her eyes

Rapt on the river of life: then bright and untamed

By the labour and sorrow and fear of a world that dies

Your ignorant eyes looked up into mine; and I knew

That never our hearts should be one till your young lips had tasted The core of the bitter-sweet fruit, and wise and toil-wasted You should stand at my shoulder an outcast from Eden too.

Worlds

Through the pale green forest of tall bracken-stalks,

Whose interwoven fronds, a jade-green sky,

Above me glimmer, infinitely high,

Towards my giant hand a beetle walks

In glistening emerald mail; and as I lie

Watching his progress through huge grassy blades

And over pebble boulders, my own world fades

And shrinks to the vision of a beetle's eye.

Within that forest world of twilight green

Ambushed with unknown perils, one endless day

I travel down the beetle-trail between

Huge glossy boles through green infinity ...

Till flashes a glimpse of blue sea through the bracken asway, And my world is again a tumult of windy sea.

Robert Graves

Lost Love

His eyes are quickened so with grief,

He can watch a grass or leaf

Every instant grow; he can

Clearly through a flint wall see,

Or watch the startled spirit flee

From the throat of a dead man.

Across two counties he can hear,

And catch your words before you speak.

The woodlouse or the maggot's weak

Clamour rings in his sad ear;

And noise so slight it would surpass

Credence: — drinking sound of grass,

Worm-talk, clashing jaws of moth

Chumbling holes in cloth:

The groan of ants who undertake

Gigantic loads for honour's sake —

Their sinews creak, their breath comes thin:

Whir of spiders when they spin,

And minute whispering, mumbling, sighs

Of idle grubs and flies.

This man is quickened so with grief,

He wanders god-like or like thief

Inside and out, below, above,

Without relief seeking lost love.

Morning Phœnix

In my body lives a flame,

Flame that burns me all the day;

When a fierce sun does the same,

I am charred away.

Who could keep a smiling wit,

Roasted so in heart and hide,

Turning on the sun's red spit,

Scorched by love inside?

Caves I long for and cold rocks,

Minnow-peopled country brooks,

Blundering gales of Equinox,

Sunless valley-nooks,

Daily so I might restore

Calcined heart and shrivelled skin,

A morning phœnix with proud roar

Kindled new within.

A Lover Since Childhood

Tangled in thought am I,

Stumble in speech do I?

Do I blunder and blush for the reason why?

Wander aloof do I,

Lean over gates and sigh,

Making friends with the bee and the butterfly?

If thus and thus I do,

Dazed by the thought of you,

Walking my sorrowful way in the early dew,

My heart cut through and through

In this despair of you,

Starved for a word or a look will my hope renew:

Give then a thought for me

Walking so miserably,

Wanting relief in the friendship of flower or tree;

Do but remember, we

Once could in love agree,

Swallow your pride, let us be as we used to be.

Sullen Moods

Love, do not count your labour lost

Though I turn sullen, grim, retired

Even at your side; my thought is crossed

With fancies by old longings fired.

And when I answer you, some days

Vaguely and wildly, do not fear

That my love walks forbidden ways,

Breaking the ties that hold it here.

If I speak gruffly, this mood is

Mere indignation at my own

Shortcomings, plagues, uncertainties;

I forget the gentler tone.

'You,' now that you have come to be

My one beginning, prime and end,

I count at last as wholly 'me,'

Lover no longer nor yet friend.

Friendship is flattery, though close hid;

Must I then flatter my own mind?

And must (which laws of shame forbid)

Blind love of you make self-love blind?

... Do not repay me my own coin,

The sharp rebuke, the frown, the groan;

No, stir my memory to disjoin

Your emanation from my own.

Help me to see you as before

When overwhelmed and dead, almost,

I stumbled on that secret door

Which saves the live man from the ghost.

Be once again the distant light,

Promise of glory not yet known

In full perfection — -wasted quite

When on my imperfection thrown.

The Pier-Glass

Lost manor where I walk continually

A ghost, while yet in woman's flesh and blood;

Up your broad stairs mounting with outspread fingers

And gliding steadfast down your corridors

I come by nightly custom to this room,

And even on sultry afternoons I come

Drawn by a thread of time-sunk memory.

Empty, unless for a huge bed of state

Shrouded with rusty curtains drooped awry

(A puppet theatre where malignant fancy

Peoples the wings with fear). At my right hand

A ravelled bell-pull hangs in readiness

To summon me from attic glooms above

Service of elder ghosts; here at my left

A sullen pier-glass cracked from side to side

Scorns to present the face as do new mirrors

With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy

And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.

Is here no life, nothing but the thin shadow

And blank foreboding, never a wainscot rat

Rasping a crust? Or at the window pane

No fly, no bluebottle, no starveling spider?

The windows frame a prospect of cold skies

Half-merged with sea, as at the first creation,

Abstract, confusing welter. Face about,

Peer rather in the glass once more, take note

Of self, the grey lips and long hair dishevelled,

Sleep-staring eyes. Ah, mirror, for Christ's love

Give me one token that there still abides

Remote, beyond this island mystery,

So be it only this side Hope, somewhere,

In streams, on sun-warm mountain pasturage,

True life, natural breath; not this phantasma.

A rumour, scarcely yet to be reckoned sound,

But a pulse quicker or slower, then I know

My plea is granted; death prevails not yet.

For bees have swarmed behind in a close place

Pent up between this glass and the outer wall.

The combs are founded, the queen rules her court,

Bee-sergeants posted at the entrance-chink

Are sampling each returning honey-cargo

With scrutinizing mouth and commentary,

Slow approbation, quick dissatisfaction —

Disquieting rhythm, that leads me home at last

From labyrinthine wandering. This new mood

Of judgment orders me my present duty,

To face again a problem strongly solved

In life gone by, but now again proposed

Out of due time for fresh deliberation.

Did not my answer please the Master's ear?

Yet, I'll stay obstinate. How went the question,

A paltry question set on the elements

Of love and the wronged lover's obligation?

Kill or forgive? Still does the bed ooze blood?

Let it drip down till every floor-plank rot!

Yet shall I answer, challenging the judgment: —

'Kill, strike the blow again, spite what shall come.'

'Kill, strike, again, again,' the bees in chorus hum.

The Troll's Nosegay

A simple nosegay! was that much to ask?

(Winter still gloomed, with scarce a bud yet showing).

He loved her ill, if he resigned the task.

'Somewhere,' she cried, 'there must be blossom blowing.'

It seems my lady wept and the troll swore

By Heaven he hated tears: he'd cure her spleen;

Where she had begged one flower, he'd shower four-score,

A haystack bunch to amaze a China Queen.

Cold fog-drawn Lily, pale mist-magic Rose

He conjured, and in a glassy cauldron set

With elvish unsubstantial Mignonette

And such vague bloom as wandering dreams enclose.

But she?

Awed,

Charmed to tears,

Distracted,

Yet —

Even yet, perhaps, a trifle piqued — who knows?

Fox's Dingle

Take now a country mood,

Resolve, distil it: —

Nine Acre swaying alive,

June flowers that fill it,

Spicy sweet-briar bush,

The uneasy wren

Fluttering from ash to birch

And back again.

Milkwort on its low stem,

Spread hawthorn tree,

Sunlight patching the wood,

A hive-bound bee...

Girls riding nim-nim-nim,

Ladies, trot-trot,

Gentlemen hard at gallop,

Shouting, steam-hot.

Now over the rough turf

Bridles go jingle,

And there's a well-loved pool,

By Fox's Dingle,

Where Sweetheart, my brown mare,

Old Glory's daughter,

May loll her leathern tongue

In snow-cool water.

The General Elliott

He fell in victory's fierce pursuit,

Holed through and through with shot,

A sabre sweep had hacked him deep

Twixt neck and shoulderknot....

The potman cannot well recall,

The ostler never knew,

Whether his day was Malplaquet,

The Boyne or Waterloo.

But there he hangs for tavern sign,

With foolish bold regard

For cock and hen and loitering men

And wagons down the yard.

Raised high above the hayseed world

He smokes his painted pipe,

And now surveys the orchard ways,

The damsons clustering ripe.

He sees the churchyard slabs beyond,

Where country neighbours lie,

Their brief renown set lowly down;

His name assaults the sky.

He grips the tankard of brown ale

That spills a generous foam:

Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winks

At drunk men lurching home.

No upstart hero may usurp

That honoured swinging seat;

His seasons pass with pipe and glass

Until the tale's complete.

And paint shall keep his buttons bright

Though all the world's forgot

Whether he died for England's pride

By battle, or by pot.

The Patchwork Bonnet

Across the room my silent love I throw,

Where you sit sewing in bed by candlelight,

Your young stern profile and industrious fingers

Displayed against the blind in a shadow-show,

To Dinda's grave delight.

The needle dips and pokes, the cheerful thread

Runs after, follow-my-leader down the seam:

The patchwork pieces cry for joy together,

O soon to sit as a crown on Dinda's head,

Fulfilment of their dream.

Snippets and odd ends folded by, forgotten,

With camphor on a top shelf, hard to find,

Now wake to this most happy resurrection,

To Dinda playing toss with a reel of cotton

And staring at the blind.

Dinda in sing-song stretching out one hand

Calls for the playthings; mother does not hear:

Her mind sails far away on a patchwork Ocean,

And all the world must wait till she touches land;

So Dinda cries in fear,

Then Mother turns, laughing like a young fairy,

And Dinda smiles to see her look so kind,

Calls out again for playthings, playthings, playthings;

And now the shadows make an Umbrian Mary

Adoring, on the blind.

Richard Hughes

The Singing Furies

The yellow sky grows vivid as the sun:

The sea glittering, and the hills dun.

The stones quiver. Twenty pounds of lead

Fold upon fold, the air laps my head.

Both eyes scorch: tongue stiff and bitter:

Flies buzz, but no birds twitter:

Slow bullocks stand with stinging feet,

And naked fishes scarcely stir for heat.

White as smoke,

As jetted steam, dead clouds awoke

And quivered on the Western rim.

Then the singing started: dim

And sibilant as rime-stiff reeds

That whistle as the wind leads.

The South whispered hard and sere,

The North answered, low and clear;

And thunder muffled up like drums

Beat, whence the East wind comes.

The heavy sky that could not weep

Is loosened: rain falls steep:

And thirty singing furies ride

To split the sky from side to side.

They sing, and lash the wet-flanked wind:

Sing, from Col to Hafod Mynd,

And fling their voices half a score

Of miles along the mounded shore:

Whip loud music from a tree,

And roll their pæan out to sea

Where crowded breakers fling and leap,

And strange things throb five fathoms deep.

The sudden tempest roared and died:

The singing furies muted ride

Down wet and slippery roads to hell:

And, silent in their captors' train,

Two fishers, storm-caught on the main:

A shepherd, battered with his flocks;

A pit-boy tumbled from the rocks;

A dozen back-broke gulls, and hosts

Of shadowy, small, pathetic ghosts,

— Of mice and leverets caught by flood;

Their beauty shrouded in cold mud.

Moonstruck

Cold shone the moon, with noise

The night went by.

Trees uttered things of woe:

Bent grass dared not grow:

Ah, desperate man with haggard eyes

And hands that fence away the skies,

On rock and briar stumbling,

Is it fear of the storm's rumbling,

Of the hissing cold rain,

Or lightning's tragic pain

Drives you so madly?

See, see the patient moon;

How she her course keeps

Through cloudy shallows and across black deeps,

Now gone, now shines soon.

Where's cause for fear?

'I shudder and shudder

At her bright light:

I fear, I fear,

That she her fixt course follows

So still and white

Through deeps and shallows

With never a tremor:

Naught shall disturb her.

I fear, I fear

What they may be

That secretly bind her:

What hand holds the reins

Of those sightless forces

That govern her courses.

Is it Setebos

Who deals in her command?

Or that unseen Night-Comer

With tender curst hand?

— I shudder, and shudder.'

Poor storm-wisp, wander!

Wind shall not hurt thee,

Rain not appal thee,

Lightning not blast thee;

Thou art worn so frail,

Only the moonlight pale

To an ash shall burn thee,

To an invisible Pain.

Vagrancy

When the slow year creeps hay-ward, and the skies

Are warming in the summer's mild surprise,

And the still breeze disturbs each leafy frond

Like hungry fishes dimpling in a pond,

It is a pleasant thing to dream at ease

On sun-warmed thyme, not far from beechen trees.

A robin flashing in a rowan-tree,

A wanton robin, spills his melody

As if he had such store of golden tones

That they were no more worth to him than stones:

The sunny lizards dream upon the ledges:

Linnets titter in and out the hedges,

Or swoop among the freckled butterflies.

Down to a beechen hollow winds the track

And tunnels past my twilit bivouac:

Two spiring wisps of smoke go singly up

And scarcely tremble in the leafy air.

— There are more shadows in this loamy cup

Than God could count: and oh, but it is fair:

The kindly green and rounded trunks, that meet

Under the soil with twinings of their feet

And in the sky with twinings of their arms:

The yellow stools: the still ungathered charms

Of berry, woodland herb, and bryony,

And mid-wood's changeling child, Anemone.

Quiet as a grave beneath a spire

I lie and watch the pointed climbing fire,

I lie and watch the smoky weather-cock

That climbs too high, and bends to the breeze's shock,

And breaks, and dances off across the skies

Gay as a flurry of blue butterflies.

But presently the evening shadows in,

Heralded by the night-jar's solitary din

And the quick bat's squeak among the trees;

— Who sudden rises, darting across the air

To weave her filmy web in the Sun's bright hair

That slowly sinks dejected on his knees....

Now is he vanished: the bewildered skies

Flame out a desperate and last surmise;

Then yield to Night, their sudden conqueror.

From pole to pole the shadow of the world

Creeps over heaven, till itself is lit

By the very many stars that wake in it:

Sleep, like a messenger of great import,

Lays quiet and compelling hands athwart

The easy idlenesses of my mind.

— There is a breeze above me, and around:

There is a fire before me, and behind:

But Sleep doth hold me, and I hear no sound.

In the far West the clouds are mustering,

Without hurry, noise, or blustering:

And soon as Body's nightly Sentinel

Himself doth nod, I open furtive eyes....

With darkling hook the Farmer of the Skies

Goes reaping stars: they flicker, one by one,

Nodding a little; tumble, — and are gone.

Poets, Painters, Puddings

Poets, painters, and puddings; these three

Make up the World as it ought to be.

Poets make faces

And sudden grimaces:

They twit you, and spit you

On words: then admit you

To heaven or hell

By the tales that they tell.

Painters are gay

As young rabbits in May:

They buy jolly mugs,

Bowls, pictures, and jugs:

The things round their necks

Are lively with checks,

(For they like something red

As a frame for the head):

Or they'll curse you with oaths,

That tear holes in your clothes.

(With nothing to mend them

You'd best not offend them.)

Puddings should be

Full of currants, for me:

Boiled in a pail,

Tied in the tail

Of an old bleached shirt:

So hot that they hurt,

So huge that they last

From the dim, distant past

Until the crack o' doom

Lift the roof off the room.

Poets, painters, and puddings; these three

Crown the day as it crowned should be.

William Kerr

In Memoriam D. O. M

Chestnut candles are lit again

For the dead that died in spring:

Dead lovers walk the orchard ways,

And the dead cuckoos sing.

Is it they who live and we who are dead?

Hardly the springtime knows

For which today the cuckoo calls,

And the white blossom blows.

Listen and hear the happy wind

Whisper and lightly pass:

'Your love is sweet as hawthorn is,

Your hope green as the grass.

'The hawthorn's faint and quickly gone,

The grass in autumn dies;

Put by your life, and see the spring

With everlasting eyes.'

Past and Present

Daisies are over Nyren, and Hambledon

Hardly remembers any summer gone:

And never again the Kentish elms shall see

Mynn, or Fuller Pilch, or Colin Blythe.

— Nor shall I see them, unless perhaps a ghost

Watching the elder ghosts beyond the moon.

But here in common sunshine I have seen

George Hirst, not yet a ghost, substantial,

His off-drives mellow as brown ale, and crisp

Merry late cuts, and brave Chaucerian pulls;

Waddington's fury and the patience of Dipper;

And twenty easy artful overs of Rhodes,

So many stanzas of the Faerie Queen.

The Audit

Mere living wears the most of life away:

Even the lilies take thought for many things,

For frost in April and for drought in May,

And from no careless heart the skylark sings.

Those cheap utilities of rain and sun

Describe the foolish circle of our years,

Until death takes us, doing all undone,

And there's an end at last to hopes and fears.

Though song be hollow and no dreams come true,

Still songs and dreams are better than the truth:

But there's so much to get, so much to do,

Mary must drudge like Martha, dainty Ruth

Forget the morning music in the corn,

And Rachel grudge when Leah's boys are born.

The Apple Tree

Secret and wise as nature, like the wind

Melancholy or light-hearted without reason,

And like the waxing or the waning moon

Ever pale and lovely: you are like these

Because you are free and live by your own law;

While I, desiring life and half alive,

Dream, hope, regret and fear and blunder on.

Your beauty is your life and my content,

And I will liken you to an apple-tree,

Mary and Margaret playing under the branches,

And everywhere soft shadows like your eyes,

And scattered blossom like your little smiles.

Her New-Year Posy

When I seek the world through

For images of you,

Though apple-blossom is glad

And the lily stately-sad,

Gilliflowers kind of breath,

Rosemary true till death;

Though the wind can stir the grass

To memories as you pass.

And the soft-singing streams

Are music like your dreams;

Though constant stars embrace

The quiet of your face,

Your smile lights up sunrise,

And evening's in your eyes —

Each so shadows its part,

All cannot show your heart;

And weighing the beauty of earth

I see it so little worth,

When reckoned beside you,

That I hold heaven for true

— But all my heaven is you.

Counting Sheep

Half-awake I walked

A dimly-seen sweet hawthorn lane

Until sleep came;

I lingered at a gate and talked

A little with a lonely lamb.

He told me of the great still night,

Of calm starlight,

And of the lady moon, who'd stoop

For a kiss sometimes;

Of grass as soft as sleep, of rhymes

The tired flowers sang:

The ageless April tales

Of how, when sheep grew old,

As their faith told,

They went without a pang

To far green fields, where fall

Perpetual streams that call

To deathless nightingales.

And then I saw, hard by,

A shepherd lad with shining eyes,

And round him gathered one by one

Countless sheep, snow-white;

More and more they crowded

With tender cries,

Till all the field was full

Of voices and of coming sheep.

Countless they came, and I

Watched, until deep

As dream-fields lie

I was asleep.

The Trees at Night

Under vague silver moonlight

The trees are lovely and ghostly,

In the pale blue of the night

There are few stars to see.

The leaves are green still, but brown-blent:

They stir not, only known

By a poignant delicate scent

To the lonely moon blown.

The lonely lovely trees sigh

For summer spent and gone:

A few homing leaves drift by,

Poor souls bewildered and wan.

The Dead

How shall the living be comforted for the dead

When they are gone, and nothing's left behind

But a vague music of the words they said

And a fast-fading image in the mind?

Let no forgetting sully that dim grace;

Our heart's infirmity is too easily won

To set a new love in the old love's place

And seek fresh vanity under the sun.

Time brings to us at last, as night the stars,

The starry silence of eternity:

For there is no discharge in our long wars,

Nor balm for wounds, nor love's security.

Be patient to the end, and you shall sleep

Pillowed on heartsease and forget to weep.

D. H. Lawrence

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?

Was it humility, to feel honoured?

I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid you would kill him.

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, Seeming to lick his lips,

And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,

And slowly turned his head,

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered further,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,

Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.

Harold Monro

Thistledown

This might have been a place for sleep,

But, as from that small hollow there

Hosts of bright thistledown begin

Their dazzling journey through the air,

An idle man can only stare.

They grip their withered edge of stalk

In brief excitement for the wind;

They hold a breathless final talk,

And when their filmy cables part

One almost hears a little cry.

Some cling together while they wait,

And droop and gaze and hesitate,

But others leap along the sky,

Or circle round and calmly choose

The gust they know they ought to use;

While some in loving pairs will glide,

Or watch the others as they pass,

Or rest on flowers in the grass,

Or circle through the shining day

Like silvery butterflies at play.

Some catch themselves to every mound,

Then lingeringly and slowly move

As if they knew the precious ground

Were opening for their fertile love:

They almost try to dig, they need

So much to plant their thistle-seed.

Real Property

Tell me about that harvest field.

Oh! Fifty acres of living bread.

The colour has painted itself in my heart;

The form is patterned in my head.

So now I take it everywhere,

See it whenever I look round;

Hear it growing through every sound,

Know exactly the sound it makes —

Remembering, as one must all day,

Under the pavement the live earth aches.

Trees are at the farther end,

Limes all full of the mumbling bee:

So there must be a harvest field

Whenever one thinks of a linden tree.

A hedge is about it, very tall,

Hazy and cool, and breathing sweet.

Round paradise is such a wall,

And all the day, in such a way,

In paradise the wild birds call.

You only need to close your eyes

And go within your secret mind,

And you'll be into paradise:

I've learnt quite easily to find

Some linden trees and drowsy bees,

A tall sweet hedge with the corn behind.

I will not have that harvest mown:

I'll keep the corn and leave the bread.

I've bought that field; it's now my own:

I've fifty acres in my head.

I take it as a dream to bed.

I carry it about all day....

Sometimes when I have found a friend

I give a blade of corn away.

Unknown Country

Here, in this other world, they come and go

With easy dream-like movements to and fro.

They stare through lovely eyes, yet do not seek

An answering gaze, or that a man should speak.

Had I a load of gold, and should I come

Bribing their friendship, and to buy a home,

They would stare harder and would slightly frown:

I am a stranger from the distant town.

Oh, with what patience I have tried to win

The favour of the hostess of the Inn!

Have I not offered toast on frothing toast

Looking toward the melancholy host;

Praised the old wall-eyed mare to please the groom;

Laughed to the laughing maid and fetched her broom;

Stood in the background not to interfere

When the cool ancients frolicked at their beer;

Talked only in my turn, and made no claim

For recognition or by voice or name,

Content to listen, and to watch the blue

Or grey of eyes, or what good hands can do?

Sun-freckled lads, who at the dusk of day

Stroll through the village with a scent of hay

Clinging about you from the windy hill,

Why do you keep your secret from me still?

You loiter at the corner of the street;

I in the distance silently entreat.

I know too well I'm city-soiled, but then

So are today ten million other men.

My heart is true: I've neither will nor charms

To lure away your maidens from your arms.

Trust me a little. Must I always stand

Lonely, a stranger from an unknown land?

There is a riddle here. Though I'm more wise

Than you, I cannot read your simple eyes.

I find the meaning of their gentle look

More difficult than any learned book.

I pass: perhaps a moment you may chaff

My walk, and so dismiss me with a laugh.

I come: you all, most grave and most polite,

Stand silent first, then wish me calm Good-Night.

When I go back to town some one will say:

'I think that stranger must have gone away.'

And 'Surely!' some one else will then reply.

Meanwhile, within the dark of London, I

Shall, with my forehead resting on my hand,

Not cease remembering your distant land;

Endeavouring to reconstruct aright

How some treed hill has looked in evening light;

Or be imagining the blue of skies

Now as in heaven, now as in your eyes;

Or in my mind confusing looks or words

Of yours with dawnlight, or the song of birds:

Not able to resist, not even keep

Myself from hovering near you in my sleep:

You still as callous to my thought and me

As flowers to the purpose of the bee.

Robert Nichols

Night Rhapsody

How beautiful it is to wake at night,

When over all there reigns the ultimate spell

Of complete silence, darkness absolute,

To feel the world, tilted on axle-tree,

In slow gyration, with no sensible sound,

Unless to ears of unimagined beings,

Resident incorporeal or stretched

In vigilance of ecstasy among

Ethereal paths and the celestial maze.

The rumour of our onward course now brings

A steady rustle, as of some strange ship

Darkling with soundless sail all set and amply filled

By volume of an ever-constant air,

At fullest night, through seas for ever calm,

Swept lovely and unknown for ever on.

How beautiful it is to wake at night,

Embalmed in darkness watchful, sweet, and still,

As is the brain's mood flattered by the swim

Of currents circumvolvent in the void,

To lie quite still and to become aware

Of the dim light cast by nocturnal skies

On a dim earth beyond the window-ledge,

So, isolate from the friendly company

Of the huge universe which turns without,

To brood apart in calm and joy awhile

Until the spirit sinks and scarcely knows

Whether self is, or if self only is,

For ever....

How beautiful to wake at night,

Within the room grown strange, and still, and sweet,

And live a century while in the dark

The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns;

To watch the window open on the night,

A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs,

And, lying thus, to feel dilate within

The press, the conflict, and the heavy pulse

Of incommunicable sad ecstasy,

Growing until the body seems outstretched

In perfect crucifixion on the arms

Of a cross pointing from last void to void,

While the heart dies to a mere midway spark.

All happiness thou holdest, happy night,

For such as lie awake and feel dissolved

The peaceful spice of darkness and the cool

Breath hither blown from the ethereal flowers

That mist thy fields! O happy, happy wounds,

Conditioned by existence in humanity,

That have such powers to heal them! slow sweet sighs

Torn from the bosom, silent wails, the birth

Of such long-treasured tears as pain his eyes,

Who, waking, hears the divine solicitudes

Of midnight with ineffable purport charged.

How beautiful it is to wake at night,

Another night, in darkness yet more still,

Save when the myriad leaves on full-fledged boughs,

Filled rather by the perfume's wandering flood

Than by dispansion of the still sweet air,

Shall from the furthest utter silences

In glimmering secrecy have gathered up

An host of whisperings and scattered sighs,

To loose at last a sound as of the plunge

And lapsing seethe of some Pacific wave,

Which, risen from the star-thronged outer troughs,

Rolls in to wreathe with circling foam away

The flutter of the golden moths that haunt

The star's one glimmer daggered on wet sands.

So beautiful it is to wake at night!

Imagination, loudening with the surf

Of the midsummer wind among the boughs,

Gathers my spirit from the haunts remote

Of faintest silence and the shades of sleep,

To bear me on the summit of her wave

Beyond known shores, beyond the mortal edge

Of thought terrestrial, to hold me poised

Above the frontiers of infinity,

To which in the full reflux of the wave

Come soon I must, bubble of solving foam,

Borne to those other shores — now never mine

Save for a hovering instant, short as this

Which now sustains me ere I be drawn back —

To learn again, and wholly learn, I trust,

How beautiful it is to wake at night.

November

As I walk the misty hill

All is languid, fogged, and still;

Not a note of any bird

Nor any motion's hint is heard,

Save from soaking thickets round

Trickle or water's rushing sound,

And from ghostly trees the drip

Of runnel dews or whispering slip

Of leaves, which in a body launch

Listlessly from the stagnant branch

To strew the marl, already strown,

With litter sodden as its own,

A rheum, like blight, hangs on the briars,

And from the clammy ground suspires

A sweet frail sick autumnal scent

Of stale frost furring weeds long spent;

And wafted on, like one who sleeps,

A feeble vapour hangs or creeps,

Exhaling on the fungus mould

A breath of age, fatigue, and cold.

Oozed from the bracken's desolate track,

By dark rains havocked and drenched black.

A fog about the coppice drifts,

Or slowly thickens up and lifts

Into the moist, despondent air.

Mist, grief, and stillness everywhere....

And in me, too, there is no sound

Save welling as of tears profound,

Where in me cloud, grief, stillness reign,

And an intolerable pain

Begins.

Rolled on as in a flood there come

Memories of childhood, boyhood, home,

And that which, sudden, pangs me most,

Thought of the first-belov'd, long lost,

Too easy lost! My cold lips frame

Tremulously the familiar name,

Unheard of her upon my breath:

'Elizabeth. Elizabeth.'

No voice answers on the hill,

All is shrouded, sad, and still ...

Stillness, fogged brakes, and fog on high.

Only in me the waters cry

Who mourn the hours now slipped for ever,

Hours of boding, joy, and fever,

When we loved, by chance beguiled,

I a boy and you a child —

Child! but with an angel's air,

Astonished, eager, unaware,

Or elfin's, wandering with a grace

Foreign to any fireside race,

And with a gaiety unknown

In the light feet and hair backblown,

And with a sadness yet more strange,

In meagre cheeks which knew to change

Or faint or fired more swift than sight,

And forlorn hands and lips pressed white,

And fragile voice, and head downcast,

Hiding tears, lifted at the last

To speed with one pale smile the wise

Glance of the grey immortal eyes.

How strange it was that we should dare

Compound a miracle so rare

As, 'twixt this pace and Time's next pace,

Each to discern th' elected's face!

Yet stranger that the high sweet fire,

In hearts nigh foreign to desire,

Could burn, sigh, weep, and burn again

As oh, it never has since then!

Most strange of all that we so young

Dared learn but would not speak love's tongue,

Love pledged but in the reveries

Of our sad and dreaming eyes....

Now upon such journey bound me,

Grief, disquiet, and stillness round me,

As bids me where I cannot tell,

Turn I and sigh, unseen, farewell.

Breathe the name as soft as mist,

Lips, which nor kissed her nor were kissed!

And again — a sigh, a death —

'Elizabeth. Elizabeth.'

No voice answers; but the mist

Glows for a moment amethyst

Ere the hid sun dissolves away,

And dimness, growing dimmer grey,

Hides all ... till nothing can I see

But the blind walls enclosing me,

And no sound and no motion hear

But the vague water throbbing near,

Sole voice upon the darkening hill

Where all is blank and dead and still.

J. D. C. Fellow

After London

London Bridge is broken down;

Green is the grass on Ludgate Hill;

I know a farmer in Camden Town

Killed a brock by Pentonville.

I have heard my grandam tell

How some thousand years ago

Houses stretched from Camberwell

Right to Highbury and Bow.

Down by Shadwell's golden meads

Tall ships' masts would stand as thick

As the pretty tufted reeds

That the Wapping children pick.

All the kings from end to end

Of all the world paid tribute then,

And meekly on their knees would bend

To the King of the Englishmen.

Thinks I while I dig my plot,

What if your grandam's tales be true?

Thinks I, be they true or not,

What's the odds to a fool like you?

Thinks I, while I smoke my pipe

Here beside the tumbling Fleet,

Apples drop when they are ripe,

And when they drop are they most sweet.

On a Friend who Died Suddenly upon the Seashore

Quiet he lived, and quietly died;

Nor, like the unwilling tide,

Did once complain or strive

To stay one brief hour more alive.

But as a summer wave

Serenely for a while

Will lift a crest to the sun,

Then sink again, so he

Back to the bright heavens gave

An answering smile;

Then quietly, having run

His course, bowed down his head,

And sank unmurmuringly,

Sank back into the sea,

The silent, the unfathomable sea

Of all the happy dead.

Tenebræ

They say that I shall find him if I go

Along the dusty highways, or the green

Tracks of the downland shepherds, or between

The swaying corn, or where cool waters flow;

And others say, that speak as if they know,

That daily in the cities, in the mean

Dark streets, amid the crowd he may be seen,

With thieves and harlots wandering to and fro.

But I am blind. How shall a blind man dare

Venture along the roaring crowded street,

Or branching roads where I may never hit

The way he has gone? But someday if I sit

Quietly at this corner listening, there

May come this way the slow sound of his feet.

When All is Said

When all is said

And all is done

Beneath the Sun,

And Man lies dead;

When all the earth

Is a cold grave,

And no more brave

Bright things have birth;

When cooling sun

And stone-cold world,

Together hurled,

Flame up as one —

O Sons of Men,

When all is flame,

What of your fame

And splendour then?

When all is fire

And flaming air,

What of your rare

And high desire

To turn the clod

To a thing divine,

The earth a shrine,

And Man the God?

Frank Prewett

To My Mother in Canada, from Sick-Bed in Italy

Dear mother, from the sure sun and warm seas

Of Italy, I, sick, remember now

What sometimes is forgot in times of ease,

Our love, the always felt but unspoken vow.

So send I beckoning hands from here to there,

And kiss your black once, now white thin-grown hair

And your stooped small shoulder and pinched brow.

Here, mother, there is sunshine every day;

It warms the bones and breathes upon the heart;

But you I see out-plod a little way,

Bitten with cold; your cheeks and fingers smart.

Would you were here, we might in temples lie,

And look from azure into azure sky,

And paradise achieve, slipping death's part.

But now 'tis time for sleep: I think no speech

There needs to pass between us what we mean,

For we soul-venturing mingle each with each.

So, mother, pass across the world unseen

And share in me some wished-for dream in you;

For so brings destiny her pledges true,

The mother withered, in the son grown green.

Voices of Women

Met ye my love?

Ye might in France have met him;

He has a wooing smile,

Who sees cannot forget him!

Met ye my Love?

— We shared full many a mile.

Saw ye my Love?

In lands far-off he has been,

With his yellow-tinted hair —

In Egypt such ye have seen;

Ye knew my love?

— I was his brother there.

Heard ye my love?

My love ye must have heard,

For his voice when he will

Tinkles like cry of a bird;

Heard ye my love?

— We sang on a Grecian hill.

Behold your love,

And how shall I forget him,

His smile, his hair, his song?

Alas, no maid shall get him

For all her love,

Where he sleeps a million strong.

The Somme Valley

Comrade, why do you weep?

Is it sorrow for a friend

Who fell, rifle in hand,

His last stand at an end?

The thunder-lipped grey guns

Lament him, fierce and slow,

Where he found his dreamless bed,

Head to head with a foe.

The sweet lark beats on high

For the peace of those who sleep

In the quiet embrace of earth:

Comrade, why do you weep?

Burial Stones

The blue sky arches wide

From hill to hill;

The little grasses stand

Upright and still.

Only these stones to tell

The deadly strife,

The all-important schemes,

The greed for life.

For they are gone, who fought;

But still the skies

Stretch blue, aloof, unchanged,

From rise to rise.

Snow-Buntings

They come fluttering helpless to the ground

Like wreaths of wind-caught snow,

Uttering a plaintive, chirping sound,

And rise and fall, and know not where they go.

So small they are, with feathers ruffled blown,

Adrift between earth desolate and leaden sky;

Nor have they ever known

Any but frozen earth, and scudding clouds on high.

What hand doth guide these hapless creatures small

To sweet seeds that the withered grasses hold? —

The little children of men go hungry all,

And stiffen and cry with numbing cold.

In a sudden gust the flock are whirled away

Uttering a frightened, chirping cry,

And are lost like a wraith of departing day,

Adrift between earth desolate and leaden sky.

The Kelso Road

Morning and evening are mine,

And the bright noon-day;

But night to no man doth belong

When the sad ghosts play.

From Kelso town I took the road

By the full-flood Tweed;

The black clouds swept across the moon

With devouring greed.

Seek ye no peace who tread the night;

I felt above my head

Blowing the cloud's edge, faces wry

In pale fury spread.

Twelve surly elves were digging graves

Beside black Eden brook;

Eleven dug and stared at me,

But one read in a book.

In Birgham trees and hedges rocked,

The moon was drowned in black;

At Hirsel woods I shrieked to find

A fiend astride my back.

His legs he closed about my breast,

His hands upon my head,

Till Coldstream lights beamed in the trees

And he wailed and fled.

Morning and evening are mine,

And the bright noon-heat,

But at night the sad thin ghosts

For their revels meet.

Baldon Lane

As I went down the Baldon lane,

Alone I went, as oft I went,

Weighing if it were loss or gain

To give a maidenhead.

I met, just as the day was spent,

A fancy man, a gentleman,

Who smiled on me, and then began,

'Come sit with me, my maid.'

With him had I no mind to sit

In Baldon lane for loss or gain,

Said I to him with feeble wit,

And close beside him crept;

The branches might have heard my pain,

The sudden cry, the maiden cry, —

My fancy man departed sly,

And woman-like, I wept.

I kept the roads until my bed,

A nine months' time, a weary time,

And then to Baldon woods I fled

In Spring-time weather mild;

The kindly trees, they fear no crime,

So back I came, to Baldon came,

Received their welcome without blame,

And moaned and dropped my child.

The poor brat gasped an hour or so,

A goodly child, a thoughtful child;

Perceiving nought for us but woe

It stretched and sudden died;

But I, when Spring breaks fresh and mild,

To Baldon lane return again,

For there's my home, and women vain

Must hold their homes in pride.

Come Girl, and Embrace

Come girl, and embrace

And ask no more I wed thee;

Know then you are sweet of face,

Soft-limbed and fashioned lovingly; —

Must you go marketing your charms

In cunning woman-like,

And filled with old wives' tales' alarms?

I tell you, girl, come embrace;

What reck we of churchling and priest

With hands on paunch, and chubby face?

Behold, we are life's pitiful least,

And we perish at the first smell

Of death, whither heaves earth

To spurn us cringing into hell.

Come girl, and embrace;

Nay, cry not, poor wretch, nor plead,

But haste, for life strikes a swift pace,

And I burn with envious greed:

Know you not, fool, we are the mock

Of gods, time, clothes, and priests?

But come, there is no time for talk.

Peter Quennell

Procne

(a fragment)

So she became a bird, and bird-like danced

On a long sloe-bough, treading the silver blossom

With a bird's lovely feet;

And shaken blossoms fell into the hands

Of Sunlight. And he held them for a moment

And let them drop.

And in the autumn Procne came again

And leapt upon the crooked sloe-bough singing,

And the dark berries winked like earth-dimmed beads,

As the branch swung beneath her dancing feet.

A Man to a Sunflower

See, I have bent thee by thy saffron hair

— O most strange masker —

Towards my face, thy face so full of eyes

— O almost legendary monster —

Thee of the saffron, circling hair I bend,

Bend by my fingers knotted in thy hair

— Hair like broad flames.

So, shall I swear by beech-husk, spindleberry,

To break thee, saffron hair and peering eye,

— To have the mastery?

Perception

While I have vision, while the glowing-bodied,

Drunken with light, untroubled clouds, with all this cold sphered sky,

Are flushed above trees where the dew falls secretly,

Where no man goes, where beasts move silently,

As gently as light feathered winds that fall

Chill among hollows filled with sighing grass;

While I have vision, while my mind is borne

A finger's length above reality,

Like that small plaining bird that drifts and drops

Among these soft lapped hollows;

Robed gods, whose passing fills calm nights with sudden wind, Whose spears still bar our twilight, bend and fill

Wind-shaken, troubled spaces with some peace,

With clear untroubled beauty;

That I may rise not chill and shrilling through perpetual day, Remote, amazèd, larklike, but may hold

The hours as firm, warm fruit,

This finger's length above reality.

Pursuit

As wind-drowned scents that bring to other hills

Disquieting memories of silences,

Broad silences beyond the memory;

As feathered swaying seeds, as wings of birds

Dappling the sky with honey-coloured gold;

Faint murmurs, clear, keen-winged of swift ideas

Break my small silences;

And I must hunt and come to tire of hunting

Strange laughing thoughts that roister through my mind,

Hopelessly swift to flit; and so I hunt

And come to tire of hunting.

V. Sackville-West

A Saxon Song

Tools with the comely names,

Mattock and scythe and spade,

Couth and bitter as flames,

Clean, and bowed in the blade, —

A man and his tools make a man and his trade.

Breadth of the English shires,

Hummock and kame and mead,

Tang of the reeking byres,

Land of the English breed, —

A man and his land make a man and his creed.

Leisurely flocks and herds,

Cool-eyed cattle that come

Mildly to wonted words,

Swine that in orchards roam, —

A man and his beasts make a man and his home.

Children sturdy and flaxen

Shouting in brotherly strife,

Like the land they are Saxon,

Sons of a man and his wife, —

For a man and his loves make a man and his life.

Mariana in the North

All her youth is gone, her beautiful youth outworn,

Daughter of tarn and tor, the moors that were once her home No longer know her step on the upland tracks forlorn

Where she was wont to roam.

All her hounds are dead, her beautiful hounds are dead,

That paced beside the hoofs of her high and nimble horse,

Or streaked in lean pursuit of the tawny hare that fled

Out of the yellow gorse.

All her lovers have passed, her beautiful lovers have passed, The young and eager men that fought for her arrogant hand, And the only voice which endures to mourn for her at the last Is the voice of the lonely land.

Full Moon

She was wearing the coral taffeta trousers

Someone had brought her from Ispahan,

And the little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,

And the coral-hafted feather fan;

But she ran down a Kentish lane in the moonlight,

And skipped in the pool of the moon as she ran.

She cared not a rap for all the big planets,

For Betelgeuse or Aldebaran,

And all the big planets cared nothing for her,

That small impertinent charlatan;

But she climbed on a Kentish stile in the moonlight,

And laughed at the sky through the sticks of her fan.

Sailing Ships

Lying on Downs above the wrinkling bay

I with the kestrels shared the cleanly day,

The candid day; wind-shaven, brindled turf;

Tall cliffs; and long sea-line of marbled surf

From Cornish Lizard to the Kentish Nore

Lipping the bulwarks of the English shore,

While many a lovely ship below sailed by

On unknown errand, kempt and leisurely;

And after each, oh, after each, my heart

Fled forth, as, watching from the Downs apart,

I shared with ships good joys and fortunes wide

That might befall their beauty and their pride;

Shared first with them the blessèd void repose

Of oily days at sea, when only rose

The porpoise's slow wheel to break the sheen

Of satin water indolently green,

When for'ard the crew, caps tilted over eyes,

Lay heaped on deck; slept; mumbled; smoked; threw dice;

The sleepy summer days; the summer nights

(The coast pricked out with rings of harbour-lights),

The motionless nights, the vaulted nights of June

When high in the cordage drifts the entangled moon,

And blocks go knocking, and the sheets go slapping,

And lazy swells against the sides come lapping;

And summer mornings off red Devon rocks,

Faint inland bells at dawn and crowing cocks;

Shared swifter days, when headlands into ken

Trod grandly; threatened; and were lost again,

Old fangs along the battlemented coast;

And followed still my ship, when winds were most

Night-purified, and, lying steeply over,

She fled the wind as flees a girl her lover,

Quickened by that pursuit for which she fretted,

Her temper by the contest proved and whetted.

Wild stars swept overhead; her lofty spars

Reared to a ragged heaven sown with stars

As leaping out from narrow English ease

She faced the roll of long Atlantic seas.

Her captain then was I, I was her crew,

The mind that laid her course, the wake she drew,

The waves that rose against her bows, the gales, —

Nay, I was more: I was her very sails

Rounded before the wind, her eager keel,

Her straining mast-heads, her responsive wheel,

Her pennon stiffened like a swallow's wing;

Yes, I was all her slope and speed and swing,

Whether by yellow lemons and blue sea

She dawdled through the isles off Thessaly,

Or saw the palms like sheaves of scimitars

On desert's verge below the sunset bars,

Or passed the girdle of the planet where

The Southern Cross looks over to the Bear,

And strayed, cool Northerner beneath strange skies,

Flouting the lure of tropic estuaries,

Down that long coast, and saw Magellan's Clouds arise.

And some that beat up Channel homeward-bound

I watched, and wondered what they might have found,

What alien ports enriched their teeming hold

With crates of fruit or bars of unwrought gold?

And thought how London clerks with paper-clips

Had filed the bills of lading of those ships,

Clerks that had never seen the embattled sea,

But wrote down jettison and barratry,

Perils, Adventures, and the Act of God,

Having no vision of such wrath flung broad;

Wrote down with weary and accustomed pen

The classic dangers of sea-faring men;

And wrote 'Restraint of Princes,' and 'the Acts

Of the King's Enemies,' as vacant facts,

Blind to the ambushed seas, the encircling roar

Of angry nations foaming into war.

Trio

So well she knew them both! yet as she came

Into the room, and heard their speech

Of tragic meshes knotted with her name,

And saw them, foes, but meeting each with each

Closer than friends, souls bared through enmity,

Beneath their startled gaze she thought that she

Broke as the stranger on their conference,

And stole abashed from thence.

Bitterness

Yes, they were kind exceedingly; most mild

Even in indignation, taking by the hand

One that obeyed them mutely, as a child

Submissive to a law he does not understand.

They would not blame the sins his passion wrought.

No, they were tolerant and Christian, saying, 'We

Only deplore ...' saying they only sought

To help him, strengthen him, to show him love; but he

Following them with unrecalcitrant tread,

Quiet, towards their town of kind captivities,

Having slain rebellion, ever turned his head

Over his shoulder, seeking still with his poor eyes

Her motionless figure on the road. The song

Rang still between them, vibrant bell to answering bell,

Full of young glory as a bugle; strong;

Still brave; now breaking like a sea-bird's cry 'Farewell!'

And they, they whispered kindly to him 'Come!

Now we have rescued you. Let your heart heal. Forget!

She was your lawless dark familiar.' Dumb,

He listened, and they thought him acquiescent. Yet,

(Knowing the while that they were very kind)

Remembrance clamoured in him: 'She was wild and free,

Magnificent in giving; she was blind

To gain or loss, and, loving, loved but me, — but me!

'Valiant she was, and comradely, and bold;

High-mettled; all her thoughts a challenge, like gay ships Adventurous, with treasure in the hold.

I met her with the lesson put into my lips,

'Spoke reason to her, and she bowed her head,

Having no argument, and giving up the strife.

She said I should be free. I think she said

That, for the asking, she would give me all her life.'

And still they led him onwards, and he still

Looked back towards her standing there; and they, content, Cheered him and praised him that he did their will.

The gradual distance hid them, and she turned, and went.

Evening

When little lights in little ports come out,

Quivering down through water with the stars,

And all the fishing fleet of slender spars

Range at their moorings, veer with tide about;

When race of wind is stilled and sails are furled,

And underneath our single riding-light

The curve of black-ribbed deck gleams palely white,

And slumbrous waters pool a slumbrous world;

— Then, and then only, have I thought how sweet

Old age might sink upon a windy youth,

Quiet beneath the riding-light of truth,

Weathered through storms, and gracious in retreat.

Edward Shanks

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.

Yet lovely in captivity she lies,

Filled with soft colours, where the wavering 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 Glade

We may raise our voices even in this still glade:

Though the colours and shadows and sounds so fleeting seem, We shall not dispel them. They are not made

Frailly by earth or hands, but immortal in our dream.

We may touch the faint violets with the hands of thought,

Or lay the pale core of the wild arum bare;

And for ever in our minds the white wild cherry is caught, Cloudy against the sky and melting into air.

This which we have seen is eternally ours,

No others shall tread in the glade which now we see;

Their hands shall not touch the frail tranquil flowers,

Nor their hearts faint in wonder at the wild white tree.

Memory

In silence and in darkness memory wakes

Her million sheathèd buds, and breaks

That day-long winter when the light and noise

And hard bleak breath of the outward-looking will

Made barren her tender soil, when every voice

Of her million airy birds was muffled or still.

One bud-sheath breaks:

One sudden voice awakes.

What change grew in our hearts, seeing one night

That moth-winged ship drifting across the bay,

Her broad sail dimly white

On cloudy waters and hills as vague as they?

Some new thing touched our spirits with distant delight,

Half-seen, half-noticed, as we loitered down,

Talking in whispers, to the little town,

Down from the narrow hill

— Talking in whispers, for the air so still

Imposed its stillness on our lips, and made

A quiet equal with the equal shade

That filled the slanting walk. That phantom now

Slides with slack canvas and unwhispering prow

Through the dark sea that this dark room has made.

Or the night of the closed eyes will turn to day,

And all day's colours start out of the gray.

The sun burns on the water. The tall hills

Push up their shady groves into the sky,

And fail and cease where the intense light spills

Its parching torrent on the gaunt and dry

Rock of the further mountains, whence the snow

That softened their harsh edges long is gone,

And nothing tempers now

The hot flood falling on the barren stone.

O memory, take and keep

All that my eyes, your servants, bring you home —

Those other days beneath the low white dome

Of smooth-spread clouds that creep

As slow and soft as sleep,

When shade grows pale and the cypress stands upright,

Distinct in the cool light,

Rigid and solid as a dark hewn stone;

And many another night,

That melts in darkness on the narrow quays,

And changes every colour and every tone,

And soothes the waters to a softer ease,

When under constellations coldly bright

The homeward sailors sing their way to bed

On ships that motionless in harbour float.

The circling harbour-lights flash green and red;

And, out beyond, a steady travelling boat,

Breaking the swell with slow industrious oars,

At each stroke pours

Pale lighted water from the lifted blade.

Now in the painted houses all around

Slow-darkening windows call

The empty unwatched middle of the night.

The tide's few inches rise without a sound.

On the black promontory's windless head,

The last awake, the fireflies rise and fall

And tangle up their dithering skeins of light.

O memory, take and keep

All that my eyes, your servants, bring you home!

Thick through the changing year

The unexpected, rich-charged moments come,

That you twixt wake and sleep

In the lids of the closed eyes shall make appear.

This is life's certain good,

Though in the end it be not good at all

When the dark end arises,

And the stripped, startled spirit must let fall

The amulets that could

Prevail with life's but not death's sad devices.

Then, like a child from whom an older child

Forces its gathered treasures,

Its beads and shells and strings of withered flowers,

Tokens of recent pleasures,

The soul must lose in eyes weeping and wild

Those prints of vanished hours.

Woman's Song

No more upon my bosom rest thee,

Too often have my hands caressed thee,

My lips thou knowest well, too well;

Lean to my heart no more thine ear

My spirit's living truth to hear

— It has no more to tell.

In what dark night, in what strange night,

Burnt to the butt the candle's light

That lit our room so long?

I do not know, I thought I knew

How love could be both sweet and true:

I also thought it strong.

Where has the flame departed? Where,

Amid the empty waste of air,

Is that which dwelt with us?

Was it a fancy? Did we make

Only a show for dead love's sake,

It being so piteous?

No more against my bosom press thee,

Seek no more that my hands caress thee,

Leave the sad lips thou hast known so well;

If to my heart thou lean thine ear,

There grieving thou shalt only hear

Vain murmuring of an empty shell.

The Wind

Blow harder, wind, and drive

My blood from hands and face back to the heart.

Cry over ridges and down tapering coombs,

Carry the flying dapple of the clouds

Over the grass, over the soft-grained plough,

Stroke with ungentle hand the hill's rough hair

Against its usual set.

Snatch at the reins in my dead hands and push me

Out of my saddle, blow my labouring pony

Across the track. You only drive my blood

Nearer the heart from face and hands, and plant there,

Slowly burning, unseen, but alive and wonderful,

A numb, confusèd joy!

This little world's in tumult. Far away

The dim waves rise and wrestle with each other

And fall down headlong on the beach. And here

Quick gusts fly up the funnels of the valleys

And meet their raging fellows on the hill-tops,

And we are in the midst.

This beating heart, enriched with the hands' blood,

Stands in the midst and feels the warm joy burn

In solitude and silence, while all about

The gusts clamour like living, angry birds,

And the gorse seems hardly tethered to the ground.

Blow louder, wind, about

My square-set house, rattle the windows, lift

The trap-door to the loft above my head

And let it fall, clapping. Yell in the trees,

And throw a rotted elm-branch to the ground,

Flog the dry trailers of my climbing rose —

Make deep, O wind, my rest!

A Lonely Place

The leafless trees, the untidy stack

Last rainy summer raised in haste,

Watch the sky turn from fair to black

And watch the river fill and waste;

But never a footstep comes to trouble

The sea-gulls in the new-sown corn,

Or pigeons rising from late stubble

And flashing lighter as they turn.

Or if a footstep comes, 'tis mine

Sharp on the road or soft on grass:

Silence divides along my line

And shuts behind me as I pass.

No other comes, no labourer

To cut his shaggy truss of hay,

Along the road no traveller,

Day after day, day after day.

And even I, when I come here,

Move softly on, subdued and still,

Lonely as death, though I can hear

Men shouting on the other hill.

Day after day, though no one sees,

The lonely place no different seems;

The trees, the stack, still images

Constant in who can say whose dreams?

J. C. Squire

Elegy

I vaguely wondered what you were about,

But never wrote when you had gone away;

Assumed you better, quenched the uneasy doubt

You might need faces, or have things to say.

Did I think of you last evening? Dead you lay.

O bitter words of conscience!

I hold the simple message,

And fierce with grief the awakened heart cries out:

'It shall not be to-day;

It is still yesterday; there is time yet!'

Sorrow would strive backward to wrench the sun,

But the sun moves. Our onward course is set,

The wake streams out, the engine pulses run

Droning, a lonelier voyage is begun.

It is all too late for turning,

You are past all mortal signal,

There will be time for nothing but regret

And the memory of things done!

The quiet voice that always counselled best,

The mind that so ironically played

Yet for mere gentleness forebore the jest.

The proud and tender heart that sat in shade

Nor once solicited another's aid,

Yet was so grateful always

For trifles lightly given,

The silences, the melancholy guessed

Sometimes, when your eyes strayed.

But always when you turned, you talked the more.

Through all our literature your way you took

With modest ease; yet would you soonest pore,

Smiling, with most affection in your look,

On the ripe ancient and the curious nook.

Sage travellers, learnèd printers,

Divines and buried poets,

You knew them all, but never half your lore

Was drawn from any book.

Stories and jests from field and town and port,

And odd neglected scraps of history

From everywhere, for you were of the sort,

Cool and refined, who like rough company:

Carter and barmaid, hawker and bargee,

Wise pensioners and boxers

With whom you drank, and listened

To legends of old revelry and sport

And customs of the sea.

I hear you: yet more clear than all one note,

One sudden hail I still remember best,

That came on sunny days from one afloat

And drew me to the pane in certain quest

Of a long brown face, bare arms and flimsy vest,

In fragments through the branches,

Above the green reflections:

Paused by the willows in your varnished boat

You, with your oars at rest.

Did that come back to you when you were dying?

I think it did: you had much leisure there,

And, with the things we knew, came quietly flying

Memories of things you had seen we knew not where.

You watched again with meditative stare

Places where you had wandered,

Golden and calm in distance:

Voices from all your altering past came sighing

On the soft Hampshire air.

For there you sat a hundred miles away,

A rug upon your knees, your hands gone frail,

And daily bade your farewell to the day,

A music blent of trees and clouds a-sail

And figures in some old neglected tale:

And watched the sunset gathering,

And heard the birdsong fading,

And went within when the last sleepy lay

Passed to a farther vale,

Never complaining, and stepped up to bed

More and more slow, a tall and sunburnt man

Grown bony and bearded, knowing you would be dead

Before the summer, glad your life began

Even thus to end, after so short a span,

And mused a space serenely,

Then fell to easy slumber,

At peace, content. For never again your head

Need make another plan.

Most generous, most gentle, most discreet,

Who left us ignorant to spare us pain:

We went our ways with too forgetful feet

And missed the chance that would not come again,

Leaving with thoughts on pleasure bent, or gain,

Fidelity unattested

And services unrendered:

The ears are closed, the heart has ceased to beat,

And now all proof is vain.

Too late for other gifts, I give you this,

Who took from you so much, so carelessly,

On your far brows a first and phantom kiss,

On your far grave a careful elegy.

For one who loved all life and poetry,

Sorrow in music bleeding,

And friendship's last confession.

But even as I speak that inner hiss

Softly accuses me,

Saying: Those brows are senseless, deaf that tomb,

This is the callous, cold resort of art.

'I give you this.' What do I give? to whom?

Words to the air, and balm to my own heart,

To its old luxurious and commanded smart.

An end to all this tuning,

This cynical masquerading;

What comfort now in that far final gloom

Can any song impart?

O yet I see you dawning from some heaven,

Who would not suffer self-reproach to live

In one to whom your friendship once was given.

I catch a vision, faint and fugitive,

Of a dark face with eyes contemplative,

Deep eyes that smile in silence,

And parted lips that whisper,

'Say nothing more, old friend, of being forgiven,

There is nothing to forgive.'

Meditation in Lamplight

What deaths men have died, not fighting but impotent.

Hung on the wire, between trenches, burning and freezing,

Groaning for water with armies of men so near;

The fall over cliff, the clutch at the rootless grass,

The beach rushing up, the whirling, the turning headfirst; Stiff writhings of strychnine, taken in error or haste,

Angina pectoris, shudders of the heart;

Failure and crushing by flying weight to the ground,

Claws and jaws, the stink of a lion's breath;

Swimming, a white belly, a crescent of teeth,

Agony, and a spirting shredded limb,

And crimson blood staining the green water;

And, horror of horrors, the slow grind on the rack,

The breaking bones, the stretching and bursting skin,

Perpetual fainting and waking to see above

The down-thrust mocking faces of cruel men,

With the power of mercy, who gloat upon shrieks for mercy.

O pity me, God! O God, make tolerable,

Make tolerable the end that awaits for me,

And give me courage to die when the time comes,

When the time comes as it must, however it comes,

That I shrink not nor scream, gripped by the jaws of the vice; For the thought of it turns me sick, and my heart stands still, Knocks and stands still. O fearful, fearful Shadow,

Kill me, let me die to escape the terror of thee!

A tap. Come in! Oh, no, I am perfectly well,

Only a little tired. Take this one, it's softer.

How are things going with you? Will you have some coffee?

Well, of course it's trying sometimes, but never mind,

It will probably be all right. Carry on, and keep cheerful.

I shouldn't, if I were you, meet trouble half-way,

It is always best to take everything as it comes.

Late Snow

The heavy train through the dim country went rolling, rolling, Interminably passing misty snow-covered plough-land ridges That merged in the snowy sky; came turning meadows, fences, Came gullies and passed, and ice-coloured streams under frozen bridges.

Across the travelling landscape evenly drooped and lifted

The telegraph wires, thick ropes of snow in the windless air; They drooped and paused and lifted again to unseen summits, Drawing the eyes and soothing them, often, to a drowsy stare.

Singly in the snow the ghosts of trees were softly pencilled, Fainter and fainter, in distance fading, into nothingness gliding, But sometimes a crowd of the intricate silver trees of fairyland Passed, close and intensely clear, the phantom world hiding.

O untroubled these moving mantled miles of shadowless shadows, And lovely the film of falling flakes; so wayward and slack; But I thought of many a mother-bird screening her nestlings, Sitting silent with wide bright eyes, snow on her back.

Francis Brett Young

Seascape

Over that morn hung heaviness, until,

Near sunless noon, we heard the ship's bell beating

A melancholy staccato on dead metal;

Saw the bare-footed watch come running aft;

Felt, far below, the sudden telegraph jangle

Its harsh metallic challenge, thrice repeated:

Stand to. Half-speed ahead. Slow. Stop her!

They stopped.

The plunging pistons sank like a stopped heart:

She held, she swayed, a hulk, a hollow carcass

Of blistered iron that the grey-green, waveless,

Unruffled tropic waters slapped languidly.

And, in that pause, a sinister whisper ran:

Burial at Sea! a Portuguese official ...

Poor fever-broken devil from Mozambique:

Came on half tight: the doctor calls it heat-stroke.

Why do they travel steerage? It's the exchange:

So many million reis to the pound!

What did he look like? No one ever saw him:

Took to his bunk, and drank and drank and died.

They're ready! Silence!

We clustered to the rail,

Curious and half-ashamed. The well-deck spread

A comfortable gulf of segregation

Between ourselves and death. Burial at sea ...

The master holds a black book at arm's length;

His droning voice comes for'ard: This our brother ...

We therefore commit his body to the deep

To be turned into corruption ... The bo's'n whispers

Hoarsely behind his hand: Now, all together!

The hatch-cover is tilted; a mummy of sailcloth

Well ballasted with iron shoots clear of the poop;

Falls, like a diving gannet. The green sea closes

Its burnished skin; the snaky swell smoothes over ...

While he, the man of the steerage, goes down, down,

Feet foremost, sliding swiftly down the dim water,

Swift to escape

Those plunging shapes with pale, empurpled bellies

That swirl and veer about him. He goes down

Unerringly, as though he knew the way

Through green, through gloom, to absolute watery darkness, Where no weed sways nor curious fin quivers:

To the sad, sunless deeps where, endlessly,

A downward drift of death spreads its wan mantle

In the wave-moulded valleys that shall enfold him

Till the sea give up its dead.

There shall he lie dispersed amid great riches:

Such gold, such arrogance, so many bold hearts!

All the sunken armadas pressed to powder

By weight of incredible seas! That mingled wrack

No livening sun shall visit till the crust

Of earth be riven, or this rolling planet

Reel on its axis; till the moon-chained tides,

Unloosed, deliver up that white Atlantis

Whose naked peaks shall bleach above the slaked

Thirst of Sahara, fringed by weedy tangles

Of Atlas's drown'd cedars, frowning eastward

To where the sands of India lie cold,

And heap'd Himalaya's a rib of coral

Slowly uplifted, grain on grain....

We dream

Too long! Another jangle of alarum

Stabs at the engines: Slow. Half-speed. Full-speed!

The great bearings rumble; the screw churns, frothing

Opaque water to downward-swelling plumes

Milky as wood-smoke. A shoal of flying-fish

Spurts out like animate spray. The warm breeze wakens;

And we pass on, forgetting,

Toward the solemn horizon of bronzed cumulus

That bounds our brooding sea, gathering gloom

That, when night falls, will dissipate in flaws

Of watery lightning, washing the hot sky,

Cleansing all hearts of heat and restlessness,

Until, with day, another blue be born.

Scirocco

Out of that high pavilion

Where the sick, wind-harassed sun

In the whiteness of the day

Ghostly shone and stole away —

Parchèd with the utter thirst

Of unnumbered Libyan sands,

Thou, cloud-gathering spirit, burst

Out of arid Africa

To the tideless sea, and smote

On our pale, moon-coolèd lands

The hot breath of a lion's throat.

And that furnace-heated breath

Blew into my placid dreams

The heart of fire from whence it came:

Haunt of beauty and of death

Where the forest breaks in flame

Of flaunting blossom, where the flood

Of life pulses hot and stark,

Where a wing'd death breeds in mud

And tumult of tree-shadowed streams —

Black waters, desolately hurled

Through the uttermost, lost, dark,

Secret places of the world.

There, O swift and terrible

Being, wast thou born; and thence,

Like a demon loosed from hell,

Stripped with rending wings the dense

Echoing forests, till their bowed

Plumes of trees like tattered cloud

Were toss'd and torn, and cried aloud

As the wood were rack'd with pain:

Thence thou freed'st thy wings, and soon

From the moaning, stricken plain

In whorled eagle-soarings rose

To melt the sun-defeating snows

Of the Mountains of the Moon,

To dull their glaciers with fierce breath,

To slip the avalanches' rein,

To set the laughing torrents free

On the tented desert beneath,

Where men of thirst must wither and die

While the vultures stare in the sun's eye;

Where slowly sifting sands are strown

On broken cities, whose bleaching bones

Whiten in moonlight stone on stone.

Over their pitiful dust thy blast

Passed in columns of whirling sand,

Leapt the desert and swept the strand

Of the cool and quiet sea,

Gathering mighty shapes, and proud

Phantoms of monstrous, wave-born cloud,

And northward drove this panoply

Till the sky seemed charging on the land....

Yet, in that plumèd helm, the most

Of thy hot power was cooled or lost,

So that it came to me at length,

Faint and tepid and shorn of strength,

To shiver an olive-grove that heaves

A myriad moonlight-coloured leaves,

And in the stone-pine's dome set free

A murmur of the middle sea:

A puff of warm air in the night

So spent by its impetuous flight

It scarce invades my pillar'd closes, —

To waft their fragrance from the sweet

Buds of my lemon-coloured roses

Or strew blown petals at my feet:

To kiss my cheek with a warm sigh

And in the tired darkness die.

The Quails

(In the south of Italy the peasants put out the eyes of a captured quail so that its cries may attract the flocks of spring migrants into their nets.)

All through the night

I have heard the stuttering call of a blind quail,

A caged decoy, under a cairn of stones,

Crying for light as the quails cry for love.

Other wanderers,

Northward from Africa winging on numb pinions, dazed

With beating winds and the sobbing of the sea,

Hear, in a breath of sweet land-herbage, the call

Of the blind one, their sister....

Hearing, their fluttered hearts

Take courage, and they wheel in their dark flight,

Knowing that their toil is over, dreaming to see

The white stubbles of Abruzzi smitten with dawn,

And spilt grain lying in the furrows, the squandered gold

That is the delight of quails in their spring mating.

Land-scents grow keener,

Penetrating the dank and bitter odour of brine

That whitens their feathers;

Far below, the voice of their sister calls them

To plenty, and sweet water, and fulfilment.

Over the pallid margin of dim seas breaking,

Over the thickening in the darkness that is land,

They fly. Their flight is ended. Wings beat no more.

Downward they drift, one by one, like dark petals,

Slowly, listlessly falling

Into the mouth of horror:

The nets....

Where men come trampling and crying with bright lanterns,

Plucking their weak, entangled claws from the meshes of net, Clutching the soft brown bodies mottled with olive,

Crushing the warm, fluttering flesh, in hands stained with blood, Till their quivering hearts are stilled, and the bright eyes, That are like a polished agate, glaze in death.

But the blind one, in her wicker cage, without ceasing

Haunts this night of spring with her stuttering call,

Knowing nothing of the terror that walks in darkness,

Knowing only that some cruelty has stolen the light

That is life, and that she must cry until she dies.

I, in the darkness,

Heard, and my heart grew sick. But I know that to-morrow

A smiling peasant will come with a basket of quails

Wrapped in vine-leaves, prodding them with blood-stained fingers, Saying, 'Signore, you must cook them thus, and thus,

With a sprig of basil inside them.' And I shall thank him, Carrying the piteous carcases into the kitchen

Without a pang, without shame.

'Why should I be ashamed? Why should I rail

Against the cruelty of men? Why should I pity,

Seeing that there is no cruelty which men can imagine

To match the subtle dooms that are wrought against them

By blind spores of pestilence: seeing that each of us,

Lured by dim hopes, flutters in the toils of death

On a cold star that is spinning blindly through space

Into the nets of time?'

So cried I, bitterly thrusting pity aside,

Closing my lids to sleep. But sleep came not,

And pity, with sad eyes,

Crept to my side, and told me

That the life of all creatures is brave and pityful

Whether they be men, with dark thoughts to vex them,

Or birds, wheeling in the swift joys of flight,

Or brittle ephemerids, spinning to death in the haze

Of gold that quivers on dim evening waters;

Nor would she be denied.

The harshness died

Within me, and my heart

Was caught and fluttered like the palpitant heart

Of a brown quail, flying

To the call of her blind sister,

And death, in the spring night.

Song at Santa Cruz

Were there lovers in the lanes of Atlantis:

Meeting lips and twining fingers

In the mild Atlantis springtime?

How should I know

If there were lovers in the lanes of Atlantis

When the dark sea drowned her mountains

Many ages ago?

Were there poets in the paths of Atlantis:

Eager poets, seeking beauty

To adorn the women they worshipped?

How can I say

If there were poets in the paths of Atlantis?

For the waters that drowned her mountains

Washed their beauty away.

Were there women in the ways of Atlantis:

Foolish women, who loved, as I do,

Dreaming that mortal love was deathless?

Ask me not now

If there were women in the ways of Atlantis:

There was no woman in all her mountains

Wonderful as thou!