The Project Gutenberg eBook of Poems, 1908-1919

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Title: Poems, 1908-1919

Author: John Drinkwater

Release date: March 27, 2016 [eBook #51575]

Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS, 1908-1919 ***

POEMS

1908-1919

P O E M S

1908-1919

BY

JOHN DRINKWATER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY JOHN DRINKWATER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO

MY WIFE

CONTENTS

RECIPROCITY

1

THE HOURS

2

A TOWN WINDOW

4

MYSTERY

5

THE COMMON LOT

7

PASSAGE

8

THE WOOD

9

HISTORY

10

THE FUGITIVE

12

CONSTANCY

13

SOUTHAMPTON BELLS

15

THE NEW MIRACLE

17

REVERIE

18

PENANCES

26

LAST CONFESSIONAL

27

BIRTHRIGHT

29

ANTAGONISTS

30

HOLINESS

31

THE CITY

32

TO THE DEFILERS

33

A CHRISTMAS NIGHT

34

INVOCATION

35

IMMORTALITY

36

THE CRAFTSMEN

38

SYMBOLS

39

SEALED

40

A PRAYER

43

THE BUILDING

45

THE SOLDIER

48

THE FIRES OF GOD

49

CHALLENGE

60

TRAVEL TALK

61

THE VAGABOND

66

OLD WOMAN IN MAY

67

THE FECKENHAM MEN

68

THE TRAVELLER

70

IN LADY STREET

71

ANTHONY CRUNDLE

75

MAD TOM TATTERMAN

76

FOR CORIN TO-DAY

78

THE CARVER IN STONE

79

ELIZABETH ANN

91

THE COTSWOLD FARMERS

92

A MAN’S DAUGHTER

93

THE LIFE OF JOHN HERITAGE

95

THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON

98

MRS. WILLOW

99

ROUNDELS OF THE YEAR

101

LIEGEWOMAN

105

LOVERS TO LOVERS

106

LOVE’S PERSONALITY

107

PIERROT

108

RECKONING

110

DERELICT

112

WED

113

FORSAKEN

115

DEFIANCE

116

LOVE IN OCTOBER

117

TO THE LOVERS THAT COME AFTER US

118

DERBYSHIRE SONG

119

LOVE’S HOUSE

120

COTSWOLD LOVE

124

WITH DAFFODILS

125

FOUNDATIONS

126

DEAR AND INCOMPARABLE

127

A SABBATH DAY

128

A DEDICATION

134

RUPERT BROOKE

136

ON READING FRANCIS LEDWIDGE’S LAST SONGS

137

IN THE WOODS

138

LATE SUMMER

139

JANUARY DUSK

140

AT GRAFTON

141

DOMINION

142

THE MIRACLE

144

MILLERS DALE

145

WRITTEN AT LUDLOW CASTLE

146

WORDSWORTH AT GRASMERE

147

SUNRISE ON RYDAL WATER

148

SEPTEMBER

150

OLTON POOLS

151

OF GREATHAM

152

MAMBLE

154

OUT OF THE MOON

155

MOONLIT APPLES

156

COTTAGE SONG

157

THE MIDLANDS

158

OLD CROW

160

VENUS IN ARDEN

162

ON A LAKE

163

HARVEST MOON

164

AT AN EARTHWORKS

165

INSTRUCTION

166

HABITATION

167

WRITTEN IN WINTERBORNE CAME CHURCH

169

BUDS

171

BLACKBIRD

172

MAY GARDEN

173

AT AN INN

174

PERSPECTIVE

176

CROCUSES

177

RIDDLES R.F.C.

179

THE SHIPS OF GRIEF

180

NOCTURNE

181

THE PATRIOT

182

EPILOGUE FOR A MASQUE

184

THE GUEST

185

TREASON

186

POLITICS

187

FOR A GUEST ROOM

189

DAY

190

DREAMS

191

RESPONSIBILITY

192

PROVOCATIONS

193

TRIAL

194

CHARGE TO THE PLAYERS

195

CHARACTER

196

REALITY

197

EPILOGUE

198

MOONRISE

200

DEER

201

TO ONE I LOVE

202

TO ALICE MEYNELL

205

PETITION

206

HARVESTING

208

POEMS

1908-1919

RECIPROCITY

I DO not think that skies and meadows are

Moral, or that the fixture of a star

Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees

Have wisdom in their windless silences.

Yet these are things invested in my mood

With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,

That in my troubled season I can cry

Upon the wide composure of the sky,

And envy fields, and wish that I might be

As little daunted as a star or tree.

THE HOURS

THOSE hours are best when suddenly

The voices of the world are still,

And in that quiet place is heard

The voice of one small singing bird,

Alone within his quiet tree;

When to one field that crowns a hill,

With but the sky for neighbourhood,

The crowding counties of my brain

Give all their riches, lake and plain,

Cornland and fell and pillared wood;

When in a hill-top acre, bare

For the seed’s use, I am aware

Of all the beauty that an age

Of earth has taught my eyes to see;

When Pride and Generosity

The Constant Heart and Evil Rage,

Affection and Desire, and all

The passions of experience

Are no more tabled in my mind,

Learning’s idolatry, but find

Particularity of sense

In daily fortitudes that fall

From this or that companion,

Or in an angry gossip’s word;

When one man speaks for Every One,

When Music lives in one small bird,

When in a furrowed hill we see

All beauty in epitome—

Those hours are best; for those belong

To the lucidity of song.

A TOWN WINDOW

BEYOND my window in the night

Is but a drab inglorious street,

Yet there the frost and clean starlight

As over Warwick woods are sweet.

Under the grey drift of the town

The crocus works among the mould

As eagerly as those that crown

The Warwick spring in flame and gold.

And when the tramway down the hill

Across the cobbles moans and rings,

There is about my window-sill

The tumult of a thousand wings.

MYSTERY

THINK not that mystery has place

In the obscure and veilèd face,

Or when the midnight watches are

Uncompanied of moon or star,

Or where the fields and forests lie

Enfolded from the loving eye

By fogs rebellious to the sun,

Or when the poet’s rhymes are spun

From dreams that even in his own

Imagining are half-unknown.

These are not mystery, but mere

Conditions that deny the clear

Reality that lies behind

The weak, unspeculative mind,

Behind contagions of the air

And screens of beauty everywhere,

The brooding and tormented sky,

The hesitation of an eye.

Look rather when the landscapes glow

Through crystal distances as though

The forty shires of England spread

Into one vision harvested,

Or when the moonlit waters lie

In silver cold lucidity;

Those countenances search that bear

Witness to very character,

And listen to the song that weighs

A life’s adventure in a phrase—

These are the founts of wonder, these

The plainer miracles to please

The brain that reads the world aright;

Here is the mystery of light.

THE COMMON LOT

WHEN youth and summer-time are gone,

And age puts quiet garlands on,

And in the speculative eye

The fires of emulation die,

But as to-day our time shall be

Trembling upon eternity,

While, still inconstant in debate,

We shall on revelation wait,

And age as youth will daily plan

The sailing of the caravan.

PASSAGE

WHEN you deliberate the page

Of Alexander’s pilgrimage,

Or say—“It is three years, or ten,

Since Easter slew Connolly’s men,”

Or prudently to judgment come

Of Antony or Absalom,

And think how duly are designed

Case and instruction for the mind,

Remember then that also we,

In a moon’s course, are history.

THE WOOD

I WALKED a nut-wood’s gloom. And overhead

A pigeon’s wing beat on the hidden boughs,

And shrews upon shy tunnelling woke thin

Late winter leaves with trickling sound. Across

My narrow path I saw the carrier ants

Burdened with little pieces of bright straw.

These things I heard and saw, with senses fine

For all the little traffic of the wood,

While everywhere, above me, underfoot,

And haunting every avenue of leaves,

Was mystery, unresting, taciturn.

. . . . . . . . . .

And haunting the lucidities of life

That are my daily beauty, moves a theme,

Beating along my undiscovered mind.

HISTORY

SOMETIMES, when walls and occupation seem

A prison merely, a dark barrier

Between me everywhere

And life, or the larger province of the mind,

As dreams confined,

As the trouble of a dream,

I seek to make again a life long gone,

To be

My mind’s approach and consolation,

To give it form’s lucidity,

Resilient form, as porcelain pieces thrown

In buried China by a wrist unknown,

Or mirrored brigs upon Fowey sea.

Then to my memory comes nothing great

Of purpose, or debate,

Or perfect end,

Pomp, nor love’s rapture, nor heroic hours to spend—

But most, and strangely, for long and so much have I seen,

Comes back an afternoon

Of a June

Sunday at Elsfield, that is up on a green

Hill, and there,

Through a little farm parlour door,

A floor

Of red tiles and blue,

And the air

Sweet with the hot June sun cascading through

The vine-leaves under the glass, and a scarlet fume

Of geranium flower, and soft and yellow bloom

Of musk, and stains of scarlet and yellow glass.

Such are the things remain

Quietly, and for ever, in the brain,

And the things that they choose for history-making pass.

THE FUGITIVE

BEAUTY has come to make no longer stay

Than the bright buds of May

In May-time do.

Beauty is with us for one hour, one hour,

Life is so brief a flower;

Thoughts are so few.

Thoughts are so few with mastery to give

Shape to these fugitive

Dear brevities,

That even in its hour beauty is blind,

Because the shallow mind

Not sees, not sees.

And in the mind of man only can be

Alert prosperity

For beauty brief.

So, what can be but little comes to less

Upon the wilderness

Of unbelief.

And beauty that has but an hour to spend

With you for friend,

Goes outcast by.

But know, but know—for all she is outcast—

It is not she at last,

But you that die.

CONSTANCY

THE shadows that companion me

From chronicles and poetry

More constant and substantial are

Than these my men familiar,

Who draw with me uncertain breath

A little while this side of death;

For you, my friend, may fail to keep

To-morrow’s tryst, so darkly deep

The motions mutable that give

To flesh its brief prerogative,

And in the pleasant hours we make

Together for devotion’s sake,

Always the testament I see

That is our twin mortality.

But those from the recorded page

Keep an eternal pilgrimage.

They stedfastly inhabit here

With no mortality to fear,

And my communion with them

Ails not in the mind’s stratagem

Against the sudden blow, the date

That once must fall unfortunate.

They fret not nor persuade, and when

These graduates I entertain,

I grieve not that I too must fall

As you, my friend, to funeral,

But rather find example there

That, when my boughs of time are bare,

And nothing more the body’s chance

Governs my careful circumstance,

I shall, upon that later birth,

Walk in immortal fields of earth.

SOUTHAMPTON BELLS

I

Long ago some builder thrust

Heavenward in Southampton town

His spire and beamed his bells,

Largely conceiving from the dust

That pinnacle for ringing down

Orisons and Noëls.

In his imagination rang,

Through generations challenging

His peal on simple men,

Who, as the heart within him sang,

In daily townfaring should sing

By year and year again.

II

Now often to their ringing go

The bellmen with lean Time at heel,

Intent on daily cares;

The bells ring high, the bells ring low,

The ringers ring the builder’s peal

Of tidings unawares.

And all the bells’ might well be dumb

For any quickening in the street

Of customary ears;

And so at last proud builders come

With dreams and virtues to defeat

Among the clouding years.

III

Now, waiting on Southampton sea

For exile, through the silver night

I hear Noël! Noël!

Through generations down to me

Your challenge, builder, comes aright,

Bell by obedient bell.

You wake an hour with me; then wide

Though be the lapses of your sleep

You yet shall wake again;

And thus, old builder, on the tide

Of immortality you keep

Your way from brain to brain.

THE NEW MIRACLE

OF old men wrought strange gods for mystery,

Implored miraculous tokens in the skies,

And lips that most were strange in prophecy

Were most accounted wise.

The hearthstone’s commerce between mate and mate,

Barren of wonder, prospered in content,

And still the hunger of their thought was great

For sweet astonishment.

And so they built them altars of retreat

Where life’s familiar use was overthrown,

And left the shining world about their feet,

To travel worlds unknown.

. . . . . . . . . .

We hunger still. But wonder has come down

From alien skies upon the midst of us;

The sparkling hedgerow and the clamorous town

Have grown miraculous.

And man from his far travelling returns

To find yet stranger wisdom than he sought,

Where in the habit of his threshold burns

Unfathomable thought.

REVERIE

HERE in the unfrequented noon,

In the green hermitage of June,

While overhead a rustling wing

Minds me of birds that do not sing

Until the cooler eve rewakes

The service of melodious brakes,

And thoughts are lonely rangers, here,

In shelter of the primrose year,

I curiously meditate

Our brief and variable state.

I think how many are alive

Who better in the grave would thrive,

If some so long a sleep might give

Better instruction how to live;

I think what splendours had been said

By darlings now untimely dead

Had death been wise in choice of these,

And made exchange of obsequies.

I think what loss to government

It is that good men are content—

Well knowing that an evil will

Is folly-stricken too, and still

Itself considers only wise

For all rebukes and surgeries—

That evil men should raise their pride

To place and fortune undefied.

I think how daily we beguile

Our brains, that yet a little while

And all our congregated schemes

And our perplexity of dreams,

Shall come to whole and perfect state.

I think, however long the date

Of life may be, at last the sun

Shall pass upon campaigns undone.

I look upon the world and see

A world colonial to me,

Whereof I am the architect,

And principal and intellect,

A world whose shape and savour spring

Out of my lone imagining,

A world whose nature is subdued

For ever to my instant mood,

And only beautiful can be

Because of beauty is in me.

And then I know that every mind

Among the millions of my kind

Makes earth his own particular

And privately created star,

That earth has thus no single state,

Being every man articulate.

Till thought has no horizon then

I try to think how many men

There are to make an earth apart

In symbol of the urgent heart,

For there are forty in my street,

And seven hundred more in Greet,

And families at Luton Hoo,

And there are men in China, too.

And what immensity is this

That is but a parenthesis

Set in a little human thought,

Before the body comes to naught.

There at the bottom of the copse

I see a field of turnip tops,

I see the cropping cattle pass

There in another field, of grass.

And fields and fields, with seven towns,

A river, and a flight of downs,

Steeples for all religious men,

Ten thousand trees, and orchards ten,

A mighty span that curves away

Into blue beauty, and I lay

All this as quartered on a sphere

Hung huge in space, a thing of fear

Vast as the circle of the sky

Completed to the astonished eye;

And then I think that all I see,

Whereof I frame immensity

Globed for amazement, is no more

Than a shire’s corner, and that four

Great shires being ten times multiplied

Are small on the Atlantic tide

As an emerald on a silver bowl ...

And the Atlantic to the whole

Sweep of this tributary star

That is our earth is but ... and far

Through dreadful space the outmeasured mind

Seeks to conceive the unconfined.

I think of Time. How, when his wing

Composes all our quarrelling

In some green corner where May leaves

Are loud with blackbirds on all eves,

And all the dust that was our bones

Is underneath memorial stones,

Then shall old jealousies, while we

Lie side by side most quietly,

Be but oblivion’s fools, and still

When curious pilgrims ask—“What skill

Had these that from oblivion saves?”—

My song shall sing above our graves.

I think how men of gentle mind,

And friendly will, and honest kind,

Deny their nature and appear

Fellows of jealousy and fear;

Having single faith, and natural wit

To measure truth and cherish it,

Yet, strangely, when they build in thought,

Twisting the honesty that wrought

In the straight motion of the heart,

Into its feigning counterpart

That is the brain’s betrayal of

The simple purposes of love;

And what yet sorrier decline

Is theirs when, eager to confine

No more within the silent brain

Its habit, thought seeks birth again

In speech, as honesty has done

In thought; then even what had won

From heart to brain fades and is lost

In this pretended pentecost,

This their forlorn captivity

To speech, who have not learnt to be

Lords of the word, nor kept among

The sterner climates of the tongue ...

So truth is in their hearts, and then

Falls to confusion in the brain,

And, fading through this mid-eclipse,

It perishes upon the lips.

I think how year by year I still

Find working in my dauntless will

Sudden timidities that are

Merely the echo of some far

Forgotten tyrannies that came

To youth’s bewilderment and shame;

That yet a magisterial gown,

Being worn by one of no renown

And half a generation less

In years than I, can dispossess

Something my circumspecter mood

Of excellence and quietude,

And if a Bishop speaks to me

I tremble with propriety.

I think how strange it is that he

Who goes most comradely with me

In beauty’s worship, takes delight

In shows that to my eager sight

Are shadows and unmanifest,

While beauty’s favour and behest

To me in motion are revealed

That is against his vision sealed;

Yet is our hearts’ necessity

Not twofold, but a common plea

That chaos come to continence,

Whereto the arch-intelligence

Richly in divers voices makes

Its answer for our several sakes.

I see the disinherited

And long procession of the dead,

Who have in generations gone

Held fugitive dominion

Of this same primrose pasturage

That is my momentary wage.

I see two lovers move along

These shadowed silences of song,

With spring in blossom at their feet

More incommunicably sweet

To their hearts’ more magnificence,

Than to the common courts of sense,

Till joy his tardy closure tells

With coming of the curfew bells.

I see the knights of spur and sword

Crossing the little woodland ford,

Riding in ghostly cavalcade

On some unchronicled crusade.

I see the silent hunter go

In cloth of yeoman green, with bow

Strung, and a quiver of grey wings.

I see the little herd who brings

His cattle homeward, while his sire

Makes bivouac in Warwickshire

This night, the liege and loyal man

Of Cavalier or Puritan.

And as they pass, the nameless dead,

Unsung, uncelebrate, and sped

Upon an unremembered hour

As any twelvemonth fallen flower,

I think how strangely yet they live

For all their days were fugitive.

I think how soon we too shall be

A story with our ancestry.

I think what miracle has been

That you whose love among this green

Delightful solitude is still

The stay and substance of my will,

The dear custodian of my song,

My thrifty counsellor and strong,

Should take the time of all time’s tide

That was my season, to abide

On earth also; that we should be

Charted across eternity

To one elect and happy day

Of yellow primroses in May.

The clock is calling five o’clock,

And Nonesopretty brings her flock

To fold, and Tom comes back from town

With hose and ribbons worth a crown,

And duly at The Old King’s Head

They gather now to daily bread,

And I no more may meditate

Our brief and variable state.

PENANCES

THESE are my happy penances. To make

Beauty without a covenant; to take

Measure of time only because I know

That in death’s market-place I still shall owe

Service to beauty that shall not be done;

To know that beauty’s doctrine is begun

And makes a close in sacrifice; to find

In beauty’s courts the unappeasable mind.

LAST CONFESSIONAL

FOR all ill words that I have spoken,

For all clear moods that I have broken,

For all despite and hasty breath,

Forgive me, Love, forgive me, Death.

Death, master of the great assize,

Love, falling now to memories,

You two alone I need to prove,

Forgive me, Death, forgive me, Love.

For every tenderness undone,

For pride when holiness was none

But only easy charity,

O Death, be pardoner to me.

For stubborn thought that would not make

Measure of love’s thought for love’s sake,

But kept a sullen difference,

Take, Love, this laggard penitence.

For cloudy words too vainly spent

To prosper but in argument,

When truth stood lonely at the gate,

On your compassion, Death, I wait.

For all the beauty that escaped

This foolish brain, unsung, unshaped,

For wonder that was slow to move,

Forgive me, Death, forgive me, Love.

For love that kept a secret cruse,

For life defeated of its dues,

This latest word of all my breath—

Forgive me, Love, forgive me, Death.

BIRTHRIGHT

LORD Rameses of Egypt sighed

Because a summer evening passed;

And little Ariadne cried

That summer fancy fell at last

To dust; and young Verona died

When beauty’s hour was overcast.

Theirs was the bitterness we know

Because the clouds of hawthorn keep

So short a state, and kisses go

To tombs unfathomably deep,

While Rameses and Romeo

And little Ariadne sleep.

ANTAGONISTS

GREEN shoots, we break the morning earth

And flourish in the morning’s breath;

We leave the agony of birth

And soon are all midway to death.

While yet the summer of her year

Brings life her marvels, she can see

Far off the rising dust, and hear

The footfall of her enemy.

HOLINESS

IF all the carts were painted gay,

And all the streets swept clean,

And all the children came to play

By hollyhocks, with green

Grasses to grow between,

If all the houses looked as though

Some heart were in their stones,

If all the people that we know

Were dressed in scarlet gowns,

With feathers in their crowns,

I think this gaiety would make

A spiritual land.

I think that holiness would take

This laughter by the hand,

Till both should understand.

THE CITY

A SHINING city, one

Happy in snow and sun,

And singing in the rain

A paradisal strain....

Here is a dream to keep,

O Builders, from your sleep.

O foolish Builders, wake,

Take your trowels, take

The poet’s dream, and build

The city song has willed,

That every stone may sing

And all your roads may ring

With happy wayfaring.

TO THE DEFILERS

GO, thieves, and take your riches, creep

To corners out of honest sight;

We shall not be so poor to keep

One thought of envy or despite.

But know that in sad surety when

Your sullen will betrays this earth

To sorrows of contagion, then

Beelzebub renews his birth.

When you defile the pleasant streams

And the wild bird’s abiding-place,

You massacre a million dreams

And cast your spittle in God’s face.

A CHRISTMAS NIGHT

CHRIST for a dream was given from the dead

To walk one Christmas night on earth again,

Among the snow, among the Christmas bells.

He heard the hymns that are his praise: Noël,

And Christ is Born, and Babe of Bethlehem.

He saw the travelling crowds happy for home,

The gathering and the welcome, and the set

Feast and the gifts, because he once was born,

Because he once was steward of a word.

And so he thought, “The spirit has been kind;

So well the peoples might have fallen from me,

My way of life being difficult and spare.

It is beautiful that a dream in Galilee

Should prosper so. They crucified me once,

And now my name is spoken through the world,

And bells are rung for me and candles burnt.

They might have crucified my dream who used

My body ill; they might have spat on me

Always as in one hour on Golgotha.” ...

And the snow fell, and the last bell was still,

And the poor Christ again was with the dead.

INVOCATION

AS pools beneath stone arches take

Darkly within their deeps again

Shapes of the flowing stone, and make

Stories anew of passing men,

So let the living thoughts that keep,

Morning and evening, in their kind,

Eternal change in height and deep,

Be mirrored in my happy mind.

Beat, world, upon this heart, be loud

Your marvel chanted in my blood,

Come forth, O sun, through cloud on cloud

To shine upon my stubborn mood.

Great hills that fold above the sea,

Ecstatic airs and sparkling skies,

Sing out your words to master me,

Make me immoderately wise.

IMMORTALITY

I

When other beauty governs other lips,

And snowdrops come to strange and happy springs,

When seas renewed bear yet unbuilded ships,

And alien hearts know all familiar things,

When frosty nights bring comrades to enjoy

Sweet hours at hearths where we no longer sit,

When Liverpool is one with dusty Troy,

And London famed as Attica for wit ...

How shall it be with you, and you, and you,

How with us all who have gone greatly here

In friendship, making some delight, some true

Song in the dark, some story against fear?

Shall song still walk with love, and life be brave,

And we, who were all these, be but the grave?

II

No; lovers yet shall tell the nightingale

Sometimes a song that we of old time made,

And gossips gathered at the twilight ale

Shall say, “Those two were friends,” or, “Unafraid

Of bitter thought were those because they loved

Better than most.” And sometimes shall be told

How one, who died in his young beauty, moved,

As Astrophel, those English hearts of old.

And the new seas shall take the new ships home

Telling how yet the Dymock orchards stand,

And you shall walk with Julius at Rome,

And Paul shall be my fellow in the Strand;

There in the midst of all those words shall be

Our names, our ghosts, our immortality.

THE CRAFTSMEN

CONFEDERATE hand and eye

Work to the chisel’s blade,

Setting the grain aglow

Of porch and sturdy beam—

So the strange gods may ply

Strict arms till we are made

Quick as the gods who know

What builds behind this dream.

SYMBOLS

I SAW history in a poet’s song,

In a river-reach and a gallows-hill,

In a bridal bed, and a secret wrong,

In a crown of thorns: in a daffodil.

I imagined measureless time in a day,

And starry space in a waggon-road,

And the treasure of all good harvests lay

In the single seed that the sower sowed.

My garden-wind had driven and havened again

All ships that ever had gone to sea,

And I saw the glory of all dead men

In the shadow that went by the side of me.

SEALED

THE doves call down the long arcades of pine,

The screaming swifts are tiring towards their eaves,

And you are very quiet, O lover of mine.

No foot is on your ploughlands now, the song

Fails and is no more heard among your leaves

That wearied not in praise the whole day long.

I have watched with you till this twilight-fall,

The proud companion of your loveliness;

Have you no word for me, no word at all?

The passion of my thought I have given you,

Striving towards your passion, nevertheless,

The clover leaves are deepening to the dew,

And I am still unsatisfied, untaught.

You lie guarded in mystery, you go

Into your night, and leave your lover naught.

Would I were Titan with immeasurable thews

To hold you trembling, lover of mine, and know

To the full the secret savour that you use

Now to my tormenting. I would drain

Your beauty to the last sharp glory of it;

You should work mightily through me, blood and brain.

Your heart in my heart’s mastery should burn,

And you before my swift and arrogant wit

Should be no longer proudly taciturn.

You should bend back astonished at my kiss,

Your wisdom should be armourer to my pride,

And you, subdued, should yet be glad of this.

The joys of great heroic lovers dead

Should seem but market-gossiping beside

The annunciation of our bridal bed.

And now, my lover earth, I am a leaf,

A wave of light, a bird’s note, a blade sprung

Towards the oblivion of the sickled sheaf;

A mere mote driven against your royal ease,

A tattered eager traveller among

The myriads beating on your sanctuaries.

I have no strength to crush you to my will,

Your beauty is invulnerably zoned,

Yet I, your undefeated lover still,

Exulting in your sap am clear of shame,

And biding with you patiently am throned

Above the flight of desolation’s aim.

You may be mute, bestow no recompense

On all the thriftless leaguers of my soul—

I am at your gates, O lover of mine, and thence

Will I not turn for any scorn you send,

Rebuked, bemused, yet is my purpose whole,

I shall be striving towards you till the end.

A PRAYER

LORD, not for light in darkness do we pray,

Not that the veil be lifted from our eyes,

Nor that the slow ascension of our day

Be otherwise.

Not for a clearer vision of the things

Whereof the fashioning shall make us great,

Not for remission of the peril and stings

Of time and fate.

Not for a fuller knowledge of the end

Whereto we travel, bruised yet unafraid,

Nor that the little healing that we lend

Shall be repaid.

Not these, O Lord. We would not break the bars

Thy wisdom sets about us; we shall climb

Unfettered to the secrets of the stars

In Thy good time.

We do not crave the high perception swift

When to refrain were well, and when fulfil,

Nor yet the understanding strong to sift

The good from ill.

Not these, O Lord. For these Thou hast revealed,

We know the golden season when to reap

The heavy-fruited treasure of the field,

The hour to sleep.

Not these. We know the hemlock from the rose,

The pure from stained, the noble from the base

The tranquil holy light of truth that glows

On Pity’s face.

We know the paths wherein our feet should press,

Across our hearts are written Thy decrees,

Yet now, O Lord, be merciful to bless

With more than these.

Grant us the will to fashion as we feel,

Grant us the strength to labour as we know,

Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel,

To strike the blow.

Knowledge we ask not—knowledge Thou hast lent,

But, Lord, the will—there lies our bitter need,

Give us to build above the deep intent

The deed, the deed.

THE BUILDING

WHENCE these hods, and bricks of bright red clay,

And swart men climbing ladders in the night?

Stilled are the clamorous energies of day,

The streets are dumb, and, prodigal of light,

The lamps but shine upon a city of sleep.

A step goes out into the silence; far

Across the quiet roofs the hour is tolled

From ghostly towers; the indifferent earth may keep

That ragged flotsam shielded from the cold

In earth’s good time: not, moving among men,

Shall he compel so fortunate a star.

Pavements I know, forsaken now, are strange,

Alien walks not beautiful, that then,

In the familiar day, are part of all

My breathless pilgrimage, not beautiful, but dear;

The monotony of sound has suffered change,

The eddies of wanton sound are spent, and clear

To bleak monotonies of silence fall.

And, while the city sleeps, in the central poise

Of quiet, lamps are flaming in the night,

Blown to long tongues by winds that moan between

The growing walls, and throwing misty light

On swart men bearing bricks of bright red clay

In laden hods; and ever the thin noise

Of trowels deftly fashioning the clean

Long lines that are the shaping of proud thought.

Ghost-like they move between the day and day,

These men whose labour strictly shall be wrought

Into the captive image of a dream.

Their sinews weary not, the plummet falls

To measured use from steadfast hands apace,

And momently the moist and levelled seam

Knits brick to brick and momently the walls

Bestow the wonder of form on formless space.

And whence all these? The hod and plummet-line,

The trowels tapping, and the lamps that shine

In long, dust-heavy beams from wall to wall,

The mortar and the bricks of bright red clay,

Ladder and corded scaffolding, and all

The gear of common traffic—whence are they?

And whence the men who use them?

When he came,

God upon chaos, crying in the name

Of all adventurous vision that the void

Should yield up man, and man, created, rose

Out of the deep, the marvel of all things made,

Then in immortal wonder was destroyed

All worth of trivial knowledge, and the close

Of man’s most urgent meditation stayed

Even as his first thought—“Whence am I sprung?”

What proud ecstatic mystery was pent

In that first act for man’s astonishment,

From age to unconfessing age, among

His manifold travel. And in all I see

Of common daily usage is renewed

This primal and ecstatic mystery

Of chaos bidden into many-hued

Wonders of form, life in the void create,

And monstrous silence made articulate.

Not the first word of God upon the deep

Nor the first pulse of life along the day

More marvellous than these new walls that sweep

Starward, these lines that discipline the clay,

These lamps swung in the wind that send their light

On swart men climbing ladders in the night.

No trowel-tap but sings anew for men

The rapture of quickening water and continent,

No mortared line but witnesses again

Chaos transfigured into lineament.

THE SOLDIER

THE large report of fame I lack,

And shining clasps and crimson scars,

For I have held my bivouac

Alone amid the untroubled stars.

My battle-field has known no dawn

Beclouded by a thousand spears;

I’ve been no mounting tyrant’s pawn

To buy his glory with my tears.

It never seemed a noble thing

Some little leagues of land to gain

From broken men, nor yet to fling

Abroad the thunderbolts of pain.

Yet I have felt the quickening breath

As peril heavy peril kissed—

My weapon was a little faith,

And fear was my antagonist.

Not a brief hour of cannonade,

But many days of bitter strife,

Till God of His great pity laid

Across my brow the leaves of life.

THE FIRES OF GOD

I

Time gathers to my name;

Along the ways wheredown my feet have passed

I see the years with little triumph crowned,

Exulting not for perils dared, downcast

And weary-eyed and desolate for shame

Of having been unstirred of all the sound

Of the deep music of the men that move

Through the world’s days in suffering and love.

Poor barren years that brooded over-much

On your own burden, pale and stricken years—

Go down to your oblivion, we part

With no reproach or ceremonial tears.

Henceforth my hands are lifted to the touch

Of hands that labour with me, and my heart

Hereafter to the world’s heart shall be set

And its own pain forget.

Time gathers to my name—

Days dead are dark; the days to be, a flame

Of wonder and of promise, and great cries

Of travelling people reach me—I must rise.

II

Was I not man? Could I not rise alone

Above the shifting of the things that be,

Rise to the crest of all the stars and see

The ways of all the world as from a throne?

Was I not man, with proud imperial will

To cancel all the secrets of high heaven?

Should not my sole unbridled purpose fill

All hidden paths with light when once was riven

God’s veil by my indomitable will?

So dreamt I, little man of little vision,

Great only in unconsecrated pride;

Man’s pity grew from pity to derision,

And still I thought, “Albeit they deride,

Yet is it mine uncharted ways to dare

Unknown to these,

And they shall stumble darkly, unaware

Of solemn mysteries

Whereof the key is mine alone to bear.”

So I forgot my God, and I forgot

The holy sweet communion of men,

And moved in desolate places, where are not

Meek hands held out with patient healing when

The hours are heavy with uncharitable pain;

No company but vain

And arrogant thoughts were with me at my side.

And ever to myself I lied.

Saying “Apart from all men thus I go

To know the things that they may never know.”

III

Then a great change befell;

Long time I stood

In witless hardihood

With eyes on one sole changeless vision set—

The deep disturbèd fret

Of men who made brief tarrying in hell

On their earth travelling.

It was as though the lives of men should be

See circle-wise, whereof one little span

Through which all passed was blackened with the wing

Of perilous evil, bateless misery.

But all beyond, making the whole complete

O’er which the travelling feet

Of every man

Made way or ever he might come to death,

Was odorous with the breath

Of honey-laden flowers, and alive

With sacrificial ministrations sweet

Of man to man, and swift and holy loves,

And large heroic hopes, whereby should thrive

Man’s spirit as he moves

From dawn of life to the great dawn of death.

It was as though mine eyes were set alone

Upon that woeful passage of despair,

Until I held that life had never known

Dominion but in this most troubled place

Where many a ruined grace

And many a friendless care

Ran to and fro in sorrowful unrest.

Still in my hand I pressed

Hope’s fragile chalice, whence I drew deep draughts

That heartened me that even yet should grow

Out of this dread confusion, as of broken crafts

Driven along ungovernable seas,

Prosperous order, and that I should know

After long vigil all the mysteries

Of human wonder and of human fate.

O fool, O only great

In pride unhallowed, O most blind of heart!

Confusion but more dark confusion bred,

Grief nurtured grief, I cried aloud and said,

“Through trackless ways the soul of man is hurled,

No sign upon the forehead of the skies,

No beacon, and no chart

Are given to him, and the inscrutable world

But mocks his scars and fills his mouth with dust.”

And lies bore lies

And lust bore lust,

And the world was heavy with flowerless rods,

And pride outran

The strength of a man

Who had set himself in the place of gods.

IV

Soon was I then to gather bitter shame

Of spirit; I had been most wildly proud—

Yet in my pride had been

Some little courage, formless as a cloud,

Unpiloted save by a vagrant wind,

But still an earnest of the bonds that tame

The legionary hates, of sacred loves that lean

From the high soul of man towards his kind.

And all my grief

Had been for those I watched go to and fro

In uncompassioned woe

Along that little span my unbelief

Had fashioned in my vision as all life.

Now even this so little virtue waned,

For I became caught up into the strife

That I had pitied, and my soul was stained

At last by that most venomous despair,

Self-pity.

I no longer was aware

Of any will to heal the world’s unrest,

I suffered as it suffered, and I grew

Troubled in all my daily trafficking,

Not with the large heroic trouble known

By proud adventurous men who would atone

With their own passionate pity for the sting

And anguish of a world of peril and snares,

It was the trouble of a soul in thrall

To mean despairs,

Driven about a waste where neither fall

Of words from lips of love, nor consolation

Of grave eyes comforting, nor ministration

Of hand or heart could pierce the deadly wall

Of self—of self,—I was a living shame—

A broken purpose. I had stood apart

With pride rebellious and defiant heart,

And now my pride had perished in the flame.

I cried for succour as a little child

Might supplicate whose days are undefiled,—

For tutored pride and innocence are one.

To the gloom has won

A gleam of the sun

And into the barren desolate ways

A scent is blown

As of meadows mown

By cooling rivers in clover days.

V

I turned me from that place in humble wise,

And fingers soft were laid upon mine eyes,

And I beheld the fruitful earth, with store

Of odorous treasure, full and golden grain,

Ripe orchard bounty, slender stalks that bore

Their flowered beauty with a meek content,

The prosperous leaves that loved the sun and rain,

Shy creatures unreproved that came and went

In garrulous joy among the fostering green.

And, over all, the changes of the day

And ordered year their mutable glory laid—

Expectant winter soberly arrayed,

The prudent diligent spring whose eyes have seen

The beauty of the roses uncreate,

Imperial June, magnificent, elate

Beholding all the ripening loves that stray

Among her blossoms, and the golden time

Of the full ear and bounty of the boughs,—

And the great hills and solemn chanting seas

And prodigal meadows, answering to the chime

Of God’s good year, and bearing on their brows

The glory of processional mysteries

From dawn to dawn, the woven leaves and light

Of the high noon, the twilight secrecies,

And the inscrutable wonder of the stars

Flung out along the reaches of the night.

And the ancient might

Of the binding bars

Waned as I woke to a new desire

For the choric song

Of exultant, strong

Earth-passionate men with souls of fire.

VI

’T was given me to hear. As I beheld—

With a new wisdom, tranquil, asking not

For mystic revelation—this glory long forgot,

This re-discovered triumph of the earth

In high creative will and beauty’s pride

Establishèd beyond the assaulting years,

It came to me, a music that compelled

Surrender of all tributary fears,

Full-throated, fierce, and rhythmic with the wide

Beat of the pilgrim winds and labouring seas,

Sent up from all the harbouring ways of earth

Wherein the travelling feet of men have trod,

Mounting the firmamental silences

And challenging the golden gates of God.

We bear the burden of the years

Clean limbed, clear-hearted, open-browed,

Albeit sacramental tears

Have dimmed our eyes, we know the proud

Content of men who sweep unbowed

Before the legionary fears;

In sorrow we have grown to be

The masters of adversity.

Wise of the storied ages we,

Of perils dared and crosses borne,

Of heroes bound by no decree

Of laws defiled or faiths outworn,

Of poets who have held in scorn

All mean and tyrannous things that be;

We prophesy with lips that sped

The songs of the prophetic dead.

Wise of the brief belovèd span

Of this our glad earth-travelling,

Of beauty’s bloom and ordered plan,

Of love and loves compassioning,

Of all the dear delights that spring

From man’s communion with man;

We cherish every hour that strays

Adown the cataract of the days.

We see the clear untroubled skies,

We see the summer of the rose

And laugh, nor grieve that clouds will rise

And wax with every wind that blows,

Nor that the blossoming time will close,

For beauty seen of humble eyes

Immortal habitation has

Though beauty’s form may pale and pass.

Wise of the great unshapen age,

To which we move with measured tread

All girt with passionate truth to wage

High battle for the word unsaid,

The song unsung, the cause unled,

The freedom that no hope can gauge;

Strong-armed, sure-footed, iron-willed

We sift and weave, we break and build.

Into one hour we gather all

The years gone down, the years unwrought

Upon our ears brave measures fall

Across uncharted spaces brought,

Upon our lips the words are caught

Wherewith the dead the unborn call;

From love to love, from height to height

We press and none may curb our might.

VII

O blessed voices, O compassionate hands,

Calling and healing, O great-hearted brothers!

I come to you. Ring out across the lands

Your benediction, and I too will sing

With you, and haply kindle in another’s

Dark desolate hour the flame you stirred in me.

O bountiful earth, in adoration meet

I bow to you; O glory of years to be,

I too will labour to your fashioning.

Go down, go down, unweariable feet,

Together we will march towards the ways

Wherein the marshalled hosts of morning wait

In sleepless watch, with banners wide unfurled

Across the skies in ceremonial state,

To greet the men who lived triumphant days,

And stormed the secret beauty of the world.

CHALLENGE

YOU fools behind the panes who peer

At the strong black anger of the sky,

Come out and feel the storm swing by,

Aye, take its blow on your lips, and hear

The wind in the branches cry.

No. Leave us to the day’s device,

Draw to your blinds and take your ease,

Grow peak’d in the face and crook’d in the knees;

Your sinews could not pay the price

When the storm goes through the trees.

TRAVEL TALK

LADYWOOD, 1912. (TO E. DE S.)

TO the high hills you took me, where desire,

Daughter of difficult life, forgets her lures,

And hope’s eternal tasks no longer tire,

And only peace endures.

Where anxious prayer becomes a worthless thing

Subdued by muted praise,

And asking nought of God and life we bring

The conflict of long days

Into a moment of immortal poise

Among the scars and proud unbuilded spires,

Where, seeking not the triumphs and the joys

So treasured in the world, we kindle fires

That shall not burn to ash, and are content

To read anew the eternal argument.

Nothing of man’s intolerance we know

Here, far from man, among the fortressed hills,

Nor of his querulous hopes.

To what may we attain? What matter, so

We feel the unwearied virtue that fulfils

These cloudy crests and rifts and heathered slopes

With life that is and seeks not to attain,

For ever spends nor ever asks again?

To the high hills you took me. And we saw

The everlasting ritual of sky

And earth and the waste places of the air,

And momently the change of changeless law

Was beautiful before us, and the cry

Of the great winds was as a distant prayer

From a massed people, and the choric sound

Of many waters moaning down the long

Veins of the hills was as an undersong;

And in that hour we moved on holy ground.

To the high hills you took me. Far below

Lay pool and tarn locked up in shadowy sleep;

Above we watched the clouds unhasting go

From hidden crest to crest; the neighbour sheep

Cropped at our side, and swift on darkling wings

The hawks went sailing down the valley wind,

The rock-bird chattered shrilly to its kind;

And all these common things were holy things.

From ghostly Skiddaw came the wind in flight.

By Langdale Pikes to Coniston’s broad brow,

From Coniston to proud Helvellyn’s height,

The eloquent wind, the wind that even now

Whispers again its story gathered in

For seasons of much traffic in the ways

Where men so straitly spin

The garment of unfathomable days.

To the high hills you took me. And we turned

Our feet again towards the friendly vale,

And passed the banks whereon the bracken burned

And the last foxglove bells were spent and pale,

Down to a hallowed spot of English land

Where Rotha dreams its way from mere to mere,

Where one with undistracted vision scanned

Life’s far horizons, he who sifted clear

Dust from the grain of being, making song

Memorial of simple men and minds

Not bowed to cunning by deliberate wrong,

And conversed with the spirit of the winds,

And knew the guarded secrets that were sealed

In pool and pine, petal and vagrant wing,

Throning the shepherd folding from the field,

Robing anew the daffodils of spring.

We crossed the threshold of his home and stood

Beside his cottage hearth where once was told

The day’s adventure drawn from fell and wood,

And wisdom’s words and love’s were manifold,

Where, in the twilight, gossip poets met

To read again their peers of older time,

And quiet eyes of gracious women set

A bounty to the glamour of the rhyme.

There is a wonder in a simple word

That reinhabits fond and ghostly ways,

And when within the poet’s walls we heard

One white with ninety years recall the days

When he upon his mountain paths was seen,

We answered her strange bidding and were made

One with the reverend presence who had been

Steward of kingly charges unbetrayed.

And to the little garden-close we went,

Where he at eventide was wont to pass

To watch the willing day’s last sacrament,

And the cool shadows thrown along the grass,

To read again the legends of the flowers,

Lighten with song th’ obscure heroic plan,

To contemplate the process of the hours,

And think on that old story which is man.

The lichened apple-boughs that once had spent

Their blossoms at his feet, in twisted age

Yet knew the wind, and the familiar scent

Of heath and fern made sweet his hermitage.

And, moving so beneath his cottage-eaves,

His song upon our lips, his life a star,

A sign, a storied peace among the leaves,

Was he not with us then? He was not far.

To the high hills you took me. We had seen

Much marvellous traffic in the cloudy ways,

Had laughed with the white waters and the green,

Had praised and heard the choric chant of praise,

Communed anew with the undying dead,

Resung old songs, retold old fabulous things,

And, stripped of pride, had lost the world and led

A world refashioned as unconquered kings.

And the good day was done, and there again

Where in your home of quietness we stood,

Far from the sight and sound of travelling men,

And watched the twilight climb from Lady-wood

Above the pines, above the visible streams,

Beyond the hidden sources of the rills,

Bearing the season of uncharted dreams

Into the silent fastness of the hills.

Peace on the hills, and in the valleys peace;

And Rotha’s moaning music sounding clear;

The passing-song of wearied winds that cease,

Moving among the reeds of Rydal Mere;

The distant gloom of boughs that still unscarred

Beside their poet’s grave due vigil keep—

With us were these, till night was throned and starred

And bade us to the benison of sleep.

THE VAGABOND

I KNOW the pools where the grayling rise,

I know the trees where the filberts fall,

I know the woods where the red fox lies,

The twisted elms where the brown owls call.

And I’ve seldom a shilling to call my own,

And there’s never a girl I’d marry,

I thank the Lord I’m a rolling stone

With never a care to carry.

I talk to the stars as they come and go

On every night from July to June,

I’m free of the speech of the winds that blow,

And I know what weather will sing what tune.

I sow no seed and I pay no rent,

And I thank no man for his bounties,

But I’ve a treasure that’s never spent,

I’m lord of a dozen counties.

OLD WOMAN IN MAY

“Old woman by the hedgerow

In gown of withered black,

With beads and pins and buttons

And ribbons in your pack—

How many miles do you go?

To Dumbleton and back?”

“To Dumbleton and back, sir,

And round by Cotsall Hill,

I count the miles at morning,

At night I count them still,

A Jill without a Jack, sir,

I travel with a will.”

“It’s little men are paying

For such as you can do,

You with the grey dust in your hair

And sharp nails in your shoe,

The young folks go a-Maying,

But what is May to you?”

“I care not what they pay me

While I can hear the call

Of cattle on the hillside,

And watch the blossoms fall

In a churchyard where maybe

There’s company for all.”

THE FECKENHAM MEN

THE jolly men at Feckenham

Don’t count their goods as common men,

Their heads are full of silly dreams

From half-past ten to half-past ten,

They’ll tell you why the stars are bright,

And some sheep black and some sheep white.

The jolly men at Feckenham

Draw wages of the sun and rain,

And count as good as golden coin

The blossoms on the window-pane,

And Lord! they love a sinewy tale

Told over pots of foaming ale.

Now here’s a tale of Feckenham

Told to me by a Feckenham man,

Who, being only eighty years,

Ran always when the red fox ran,

And looked upon the earth with eyes

As quiet as unclouded skies.

These jolly men of Feckenham

One day when summer strode in power

Went down, it seems, among their lands

And saw their bean fields all in flower—

“Wheat-ricks,” they said, “be good to see;

What would a rick of blossoms be?”

So straight they brought the sickles out

And worked all day till day was done,

And builded them a good square rick

Of scented bloom beneath the sun.

And was not this I tell to you

A fiery-hearted thing to do?

THE TRAVELLER

WHEN March was master of furrow and fold,

And the skies kept cloudy festival

And the daffodil pods were tipped with gold

And a passion was in the plover’s call,

A spare old man went hobbling by

With a broken pipe and a tapping stick,

And he mumbled—“Blossom before I die,

Be quick, you little brown buds, be quick.

“I ’ve weathered the world for a count of years—

Good old years of shining fire—

And death and the devil bring no fears,

And I ’ve fed the flame of my last desire;

I ’m ready to go, but I ’d pass the gate

On the edge of the world with an old heart sick

If I missed the blossoms. I may not wait—

The gate is open—be quick, be quick.”

IN LADY STREET

ALL day long the traffic goes

In Lady Street by dingy rows

Of sloven houses, tattered shops—

Fried fish, old clothes and fortune-tellers—

Tall trams on silver-shining rails,

With grinding wheels and swaying tops,

And lorries with their corded bales,

And screeching cars. “Buy, buy!” the sellers

Of rags and bones and sickening meat

Cry all day long in Lady Street.

And when the sunshine has its way

In Lady Street, then all the grey

Dull desolation grows in state

More dull and grey and desolate,

And the sun is a shamefast thing,

A lord not comely-housed, a god

Seeing what gods must blush to see,

A song where it is ill to sing,

And each gold ray despiteously

Lies like a gold ironic rod.

Yet one grey man in Lady Street

Looks for the sun. He never bent

Life to his will, his travelling feet

Have scaled no cloudy continent,

Nor has the sickle-hand been strong.

He lives in Lady Street; a bed,

Four cobwebbed walls.

But all day long

A time is singing in his head

Of youth in Gloucester lanes. He hears

The wind among the barley-blades,

The tapping of the woodpeckers

On the smooth beeches, thistle-spades

Slicing the sinewy roots; he sees

The hooded filberts in the copse

Beyond the loaded orchard trees,

The netted avenues of hops;

He smells the honeysuckle thrown

Along the hedge. He lives alone,

Alone—yet not alone, for sweet

Are Gloucester lanes in Lady Street.

Aye, Gloucester lanes. For down below

The cobwebbed room this grey man plies

A trade, a coloured trade. A show

Of many-coloured merchandise

Is in his shop. Brown filberts there,

And apples red with Gloucester air,

And cauliflowers he keeps, and round

Smooth marrows grown on Gloucester ground,

Fat cabbages and yellow plums,

And gaudy brave chrysanthemums.

And times a glossy pheasant lies

Among his store, not Tyrian dyes

More rich than are the neck-feathers;

And times a prize of violets,

Or dewy mushrooms satin-skinned

And times an unfamiliar wind

Robbed of its woodland favour stirs

Gay daffodils this grey man sets

Among his treasure.

All day long

In Lady Street the traffic goes

By dingy houses, desolate rows

Of shops that stare like hopeless eyes.

Day long the sellers cry their cries,

The fortune-tellers tell no wrong

Of lives that know not any right,

And drift, that has not even the will

To drift, toils through the day until

The wage of sleep is won at night.

But this grey man heeds not at all

The hell of Lady Street. His stall

Of many-coloured merchandise

He makes a shining paradise,

As all day long chrysanthemums

He sells, and red and yellow plums

And cauliflowers. In that one spot

Of Lady Street the sun is not

Ashamed to shine and send a rare

Shower of colour through the air;

The grey man says the sun is sweet

On Gloucester lanes in Lady Street.

ANTHONY CRUNDLE

Here lies the body of

ANTHONY CRUNDLE,

Farmer, of this parish,

Who died in 1849 at the age of 82.

“He delighted in music.”

R. I. P.

And of

SUSAN,

For fifty-three years his wife,

Who died in 1860, aged 86.

ANTHONY CRUNDLE of Dorrington Wood

Played on a piccolo. Lord was he,

For seventy years, of sheaves that stood

Under the perry and cider tree;

Anthony Crundle, R.I.P.

And because he prospered with sickle and scythe,

With cattle afield and labouring ewe,

Anthony was uncommonly blithe,

And played of a night to himself and Sue;

Anthony Crundle, eighty-two.

The earth to till, and a tune to play,

And Susan for fifty years and three,

And Dorrington Wood at the end of day ...

May providence do no worse by me;

Anthony Crundle, R.I.P.

MAD TOM TATTERMAN

“Old man, grey man, good man scavenger,

Bearing is it eighty years upon your crumpled back?

What is it you gather in the frosty weather,

Is there any treasure here to carry in your sack?”

. . . . . . . . . .

“I’ve a million acres and a thousand head of cattle,

And a foaming river where the silver salmon leap;

But I’ve left fat valleys to dig in sullen alleys

Just because a twisted star rode by me in my sleep.

“I’ve a brain is dancing to an old forgotten music

Heard when all the world was just a crazy flight of dreams,

And don’t you know I scatter in the dirt along the gutter

Seeds that little ladies nursed by Babylonian streams?

“Mad Tom Tatterman, that is how they call me.

Oh, they know so much, so much, all so neatly dressed;

I’ve a tale to tell you—come and listen, will you?—

One as ragged as the twigs that make a magpie’s nest.

“Ragged, oh, but very wise. You and this and that man,

All of you are making things that none of you would lack,

And so your eyes grow dusty, and so your limbs grow rusty—

But mad Tom Tatterman puts nothing in his sack.

“Nothing in my sack, sirs, but the Sea of Galilee

Was walked for mad Tom Tatterman, and when I go to sleep

They’ll know that I have driven through the acres of broad heaven

Flocks are whiter than the flocks that all your shepherds keep.”

FOR CORIN TO-DAY

OLD shepherd in your wattle cote,

I think a thousand years are done

Since first you took your pipe of oat

And piped against the risen sun,

Until his burning lips of gold

Sucked up the drifting scarves of dew

And bade you count your flocks from fold

And set your hurdle stakes anew.

And then as now at noon you ’ld take

The shadow of delightful trees,

And with good hands of labour break

Your barley bread with dairy cheese,

And with some lusty shepherd mate

Would wind a simple argument,

And bear at night beyond your gate

A loaded wallet of content.

O Corin of the grizzled eye,

A thousand years upon your down

You’ve seen the ploughing teams go by

Above the bells of Avon’s town;

And while there’s any wind to blow

Through frozen February nights,

About your lambing pens will go

The glimmer of your lanthorn lights.

THE CARVER IN STONE

HE was a man with wide and patient eyes,

Grey, like the drift of twitch-fires blown in June

That, without fearing, searched if any wrong

Might threaten from your heart. Grey eyes he had

Under a brow was drawn because he knew

So many seasons to so many pass

Of upright service, loyal, unabased

Before the world seducing, and so, barren

Of good words praising and thought that mated his.

He carved in stone. Out of his quiet life

He watched as any faithful seaman charged

With tidings of the myriad faring sea,

And thoughts and premonitions through his mind

Sailing as ships from strange and storied lands

His hungry spirit held, till all they were

Found living witness in the chiselled stone.

Slowly out of the dark confusion, spread

By life’s innumerable venturings

Over his brain, he would triumph into the light

Of one clear mood, unblemished of the blind

Legions of errant thought that cried about

His rapt seclusion: as a pearl unsoiled,

Nay, rather washed to lonelier chastity,

In gritty mud. And then would come a bird,

A flower, or the wind moving upon a flower,

A beast at pasture, or a clustered fruit,

A peasant face as were the saints of old,

The leer of custom, or the bow of the moon

Swung in miraculous poise—some stray from the world

Of things created by the eternal mind

In joy articulate. And his perfect mood

Would dwell about the token of God’s mood,

Until in bird or flower or moving wind

Or flock or shepherd or the troops of heaven

It sprang in one fierce moment of desire

To visible form.

Then would his chisel work among the stone,

Persuading it of petal or of limb

Or starry curve, till risen anew there sang

Shape out of chaos, and again the vision

Of one mind single from the world was pressed

Upon the daily custom of the sky

Or field or the body of man.

His people

Had many gods for worship. The tiger-god,

The owl, the dewlapped bull, the running pard,

The camel and the lizard of the slime,

The ram with quivering fleece and fluted horn,

The crested eagle and the doming bat

Were sacred. And the king and his high priests

Decreed a temple, wide on columns huge,

Should top the cornlands to the sky’s far line.

They bade the carvers carve along the walls

Images of their gods, each one to carve

As he desired, his choice to name his god....

And many came; and he among them, glad

Of three leagues’ travel through the singing air

Of dawn among the boughs yet bare of green,

The eager flight of the spring leading his blood

Into swift lofty channels of the air,

Proud as an eagle riding to the sun....

An eagle, clean of pinion—there’s his choice.

Daylong they worked under the growing roof,

One at his leopard, one the staring ram,

And he winning his eagle from the stone,

Until each man had carved one image out,

Arow beyond the portal of the house.

They stood arow, the company of gods,

Camel and bat, lizard and bull and ram,

The pard and owl, dead figures on the wall,

Figures of habit driven on the stone

By chisels governed by no heat of the brain

But drudges of hands that moved by easy rule.

Proudly recorded mood was none, no thought

Plucked from the dark battalions of the mind

And throned in everlasting sight. But one

God of them all was witness of belief

And large adventure dared. His eagle spread

Wide pinions on a cloudless ground of heaven,

Glad with the heart’s high courage of that dawn

Moving upon the ploughlands newly sown,

Dead stone the rest. He looked, and knew it so.

Then came the king with priests and counsellors

And many chosen of the people, wise

With words weary of custom, and eyes askew

That watched their neighbour face for any news

Of the best way of judgment, till, each sure

None would determine with authority,

All spoke in prudent praise. One liked the owl

Because an owl blinked on the beam of his barn.

One, hoarse with crying gospels in the street,

Praised most the ram, because the common folk

Wore breeches made of ram’s wool. One declared

The tiger pleased him best,—the man who carved

The tiger-god was halt out of the womb—

A man to praise, being so pitiful.

And one, whose eyes dwelt in a distant void,

With spell and omen pat upon his lips,

And a purse for any crystal prophet ripe,

A zealot of the mist, gazed at the bull—

A lean ill-shapen bull of meagre lines

That scarce the steel had graved upon the stone—

Saying that here was very mystery

And truth, did men but know. And one there was

Who praised his eagle, but remembering

The lither pinion of the swift, the curve

That liked him better of the mirrored swan.

And they who carved the tiger-god and ram,

The camel and the pard, the owl and bull,

And lizard, listened greedily, and made

Humble denial of their worthiness,

And when the king his royal judgment gave

That all had fashioned well, and bade that each

Re-shape his chosen god along the walls

Till all the temple boasted of their skill,

They bowed themselves in token that as this

Never had carvers been so fortunate.

Only the man with wide and patient eyes

Made no denial, neither bowed his head.

Already while they spoke his thought had gone

Far from his eagle, leaving it for a sign

Loyally wrought of one deep breath of life,

And played about the image of a toad

That crawled among his ivy leaves. A queer

Puff-bellied toad, with eyes that always stared

Sidelong at heaven and saw no heaven there,

Weak-hammed, and with a throttle somehow twisted

Beyond full wholesome draughts of air, and skin

Of wrinkled lips, the only zest or will

The little flashing tongue searching the leaves.

And king and priest, chosen and counsellor,

Babbling out of their thin and jealous brains,

Seemed strangely one; a queer enormous toad

Panting under giant leaves of dark,

Sunk in the loins, peering into the day.

Their judgment wry he counted not for wrong

More than the fabled poison of the toad

Striking at simple wits; how should their thought

Or word in praise or blame come near the peace

That shone in seasonable hours above

The patience of his spirit’s husbandry?

They foolish and not seeing, how should he

Spend anger there or fear—great ceremonies

Equal for none save great antagonists?

The grave indifference of his heart before them

Was moved by laughter innocent of hate,

Chastising clean of spite, that moulded them

Into the antic likeness of his toad

Bidding for laughter underneath the leaves.

He bowed not, nor disputed, but he saw

Those ill-created joyless gods, and loathed,

And saw them creeping, creeping round the walls,

Death breeding death, wile witnessing to wile,

And sickened at the dull iniquity

Should be rewarded, and for ever breathe

Contagion on the folk gathered in prayer.

His truth should not be doomed to march among

This falsehood to the ages. He was called,

And he must labour there; if so the king

Would grant it, where the pillars bore the roof

A galleried way of meditation nursed

Secluded time, with wall of ready stone

In panels for the carver set between

The windows—there his chisel should be set,—

It was his plea. And the king spoke of him,

Scorning, as one lack-fettle, among all these

Eager to take the riches of renown;

One fearful of the light or knowing nothing

Of light’s dimension, a witling who would throw

Honour aside and praise spoken aloud

All men of heart should covet. Let him go

Grubbing out of the sight of these who knew

The worth of substance; there was his proper trade.

A squat and curious toad indeed.... The eyes,

Patient and grey, were dumb as were the lips,

That, fixed and governed, hoarded from them all

The larger laughter lifting in his heart.

Straightway about his gallery he moved,

Measured the windows and the virgin stone,

Till all was weighed and patterned in his brain.

Then first where most the shadow struck the wall,

Under the sills, and centre of the base,

From floor to sill out of the stone was wooed

Memorial folly, as from the chisel leapt

His chastening laughter searching priest and king—

A huge and wrinkled toad, with legs asplay,

And belly loaded, leering with great eyes

Busily fixed upon the void.

All days

His chisel was the first to ring across

The temple’s quiet; and at fall of dusk

Passing among the carvers homeward, they

Would speak of him as mad, or weak against

The challenge of the world, and let him go

Lonely, as was his will, under the night

Of stars or cloud or summer’s folded sun,

Through crop and wood and pastureland to sleep.

None took the narrow stair as wondering

How did his chisel prosper in the stone,

Unvisited his labour and forgot.

And times when he would lean out of his height

And watch the gods growing along the walls,

The row of carvers in their linen coats

Took in his vision a virtue that alone

Carving they had not nor the thing they carved.

Knowing the health that flowed about his close

Imagining, the daily quiet won

From process of his clean and supple craft,

Those carvers there, far on the floor below,

Would haply be transfigured in his thought

Into a gallant company of men

Glad of the strict and loyal reckoning

That proved in the just presence of the brain

Each chisel-stroke. How surely would he prosper

In pleasant talk at easy hours with men

So fashioned if it might be—and his eyes

Would pass again to those dead gods that grew

In spreading evil round the temple walls;

And, one dead pressure made, the carvers moved

Along the wall to mould and mould again

The self-same god, their chisels on the stone

Tapping in dull precision as before,

And he would turn, back to his lonely truth.

He carved apace. And first his people’s gods,

About the toad, out of their sterile time,

Under his hand thrilled and were recreate.

The bull, the pard, the camel and the ram,

Tiger and owl and bat—all were the signs

Visibly made body on the stone

Of sightless thought adventuring the host

That is mere spirit; these the bloom achieved

By secret labour in the flowing wood

Of rain and air and wind and continent sun....

His tiger, lithe, immobile in the stone,

A swift destruction for a moment leashed,

Sprang crying from the jealous stealth of men

Opposed in cunning watch, with engines hid

Of torment and calamitous desire.

His leopard, swift on lean and paltry limbs,

Was fear in flight before accusing faith.

His bull, with eyes that often in the dusk

Would lift from the sweet meadow grass to watch

Him homeward passing, bore on massy beam

The burden of the patient of the earth.

His camel bore the burden of the damned,

Being gaunt, with eyes aslant along the nose.

He had a friend, who hammered bronze and iron

And cupped the moonstone on a silver ring,

One constant like himself, would come at night

Or bid him as a guest, when they would make

Their poets touch a starrier height, or search

Together with unparsimonious mind

The crowded harbours of mortality.

And there were jests, wholesome as harvest ale

Of homely habit, bred of hearts that dared

Judgment of laughter under the eternal eye:

This frolic wisdom was his carven owl.

His ram was lordship on the lonely hills,

Alert and fleet, content only to know

The wind mightily pouring on his fleece,

With yesterday and all unrisen suns

Poorer than disinherited ghosts. His bat

Was ancient envy made a mockery,

Cowering below the newer eagle carved

Above the arches with wide pinion spread,

His faith’s dominion of that happy dawn.

And so he wrought the gods upon the wall,

Living and crying out of his desire,

Out of his patient incorruptible thought,

Wrought them in joy was wages to his faith.

And other than the gods he made. The stalks

Of bluebells heavy with the news of spring,

The vine loaded with plenty of the year,

And swallows, merely tenderness of thought

Bidding the stone to small and fragile flight;

Leaves, the thin relics of autumnal boughs,

Or massed in June....

All from their native pressure bloomed and sprang

Under his shaping hand into a proud

And governed image of the central man,—

Their moulding, charts of all his travelling.

And all were deftly ordered, duly set

Between the windows, underneath the sills,

And roofward, as a motion rightly planned,

Till on the wall, out of the sullen stone,

A glory blazed, his vision manifest,

His wonder captive. And he was content.

And when the builders and the carvers knew

Their labour done, and high the temple stood

Over the cornlands, king and counsellor

And priest and chosen of the people came

Among a ceremonial multitude

To dedication. And, below the thrones

Where king and archpriest ruled above the throng,

Highest among the ranked artificers

The carvers stood. And when, the temple vowed

To holy use, tribute and choral praise

Given as was ordained, the king looked down

Upon the gathered folk, and bade them see

The comely gods fashioned about the walls,

And keep in honour men whose precious skill

Could so adorn the sessions of their worship,

Gravely the carvers bowed them to the ground.

Only the man with wide and patient eyes

Stood not among them; nor did any come

To count his labour, where he watched alone

Above the coloured throng. He heard, and looked

Again upon his work, and knew it good,

Smiled on his toad, passed down the stair unseen

And sang across the teeming meadows home.

ELIZABETH ANN

THIS is the tale of Elizabeth Ann,

Who went away with her fancy man.

Ann was a girl who hadn’t a gown

As fine as the ladies who walk the town.

All day long from seven to six

Ann was polishing candlesticks,

For Bishops and crapulous Millionaires

To buy for their altars or bed-chambers.

And youth in a year and a year will pass,

But there’s never an end of polishing brass.

All day long from seven to six—

Seventy thousand candlesticks.

So frail and lewd Elizabeth Ann

Went away with her fancy man.

You Bishops and crapulous Millionaires,

Give her your charity, give her your prayers.

THE COTSWOLD FARMERS

SOMETIMES the ghosts forgotten go

Along the hill-top way,

And with long scythes of silver mow

Meadows of moonlit hay,

Until the cocks of Cotswold crow

The coming of the day.

There’s Tony Turkletob who died

When he could drink no more,

And Uncle Heritage, the pride

Of eighteen-twenty-four,

And Ebenezer Barleytide,

And others half a score.

They fold in phantom pens, and plough

Furrows without a share,

And one will milk a faery cow,

And one will stare and stare,

And whistle ghostly tunes that now

Are not sung anywhere.

The moon goes down on Oakridge lea,

The other world’s astir,

The Cotswold farmers silently

Go back to sepulchre,

The sleeping watchdogs wake, and see

No ghostly harvester.

A MAN’S DAUGHTER

THERE is an old woman who looks each night

Out of the wood.

She has one tooth, that isn’t too white.

She isn’t too good.

She came from the north looking for me,

About my jewel.

Her son, she says, is tall as can be;

But, men say, cruel.

My girl went northward, holiday making,

And a queer man spoke

At the woodside once when night was breaking,

And her heart broke.

For ever since she has pined and pined,

A sorry maid;

Her fingers are slack as the wool they wind,

Or her girdle-braid.

So now shall I send her north to wed,

Who here may know

Only the little house of the dead

To ease her woe?

Or keep her for fear of that old woman,

As a bird quick-eyed,

And her tall son who is hardly human,

At the woodside?

She is my babe and my daughter dear,

How well, how well.

Her grief to me is a fourfold fear,

Tongue cannot tell.

And yet I know that far in that wood

Are crumbling bones,

And a mumble mumble of nothing that’s good,

In heathen tones.

And I know that frail ghosts flutter and sigh

In brambles there,

And never a bird or beast to cry—

Beware, beware,—

While threading the silent thickets go

Mother and son,

Where scrupulous berries never grow,

And airs are none.

And her deep eyes peer at eventide

Out of the wood,

And her tall son waits by the dark woodside

For maidenhood.

And the little eyes peer, and peer, and peer;

And a word is said.

And some house knows, for many a year,

But years of dread.

THE LIFE OF JOHN HERITAGE

BORN in the Cotswolds in eighteen-forty or so,

Bred on a hill-top that seemed the most of the world

Until he travelled the valleys, and found what a wonder

Of leagues from Gloucester lay to Stroud or Ciceter,

John Heritage was a tiler. He split the stone,

After the frosts, and learnt the laying of tiles,

And was famous about the shire. And he was friendly

With Cotswold nature, hearing the hidden rooks

In Golden Vale, and the thin bleat of goats,

And the rattling harness of Trilly’s teams at plough,

And Richard Parker’s scythe for many years,

As he went upon his tiling; and the great landmarks,

As loops of the Severn seen from Bisley Hill,

Were his familiars, something of his religion.

And he prospered, as men do. His little wage

Yet left a little over his wedded needs,

And here a cottage he bought, and there another,

About the Cotswolds, built of the royallest stone

That’s quarried in England, until he could think of age

With an easy mind; and an acre of land was his

Where at hay-harvest he worked a little from tiling,

Making his rick maturely or damning the wind

That scattered the swathes beyond his fork’s controlling.

And he trotted ajog to the town on market Thursdays,

Driving a stout succession of good black geldings,

That cropped his acre some twenty years apiece.

And he was an honest neighbour; and so he grew old,

And five strong sons, grizzled and middle-aged,

Carried him down the hill, and on a stone

The mason cut—“John Heritage, who died,

Fearing the Lord, at the age of seventy-six.”

And I know that some of us shatter our hearts on earth,

With mightier aims than ever John Heritage knew,

And think such things as never the tiler thought,

Because of our pride and our eagerness of mind ...

But a life complete is a great nobility,

And there’s a wisdom biding in Cotswold stone,

While we in our furious intellectual travel

Fall in with strange foot-fellows on the road.

THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON

ONE of those old men fearing no man,

Two hundred broods his eaves have known

Since they cut on a Sapperton churchyard stone—

“Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton, Yeoman.”

At dusk you can hear the yeomen calling

The cattle still to Sapperton stalls,

And still the stroke of the woodman falls

As Thomas of Tarlton heard it falling.

I walked these meadows in seventeen-hundred,

Seed of his loins, a dream that stirred

Beyond the shape of a yeoman’s word,

So faint that but unawares he wondered.

And now, from the weeds of his tomb uncomely,

I travel again the tracks he made,

And walks at my side the yeoman shade

Of Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton dumbly.

MRS. WILLOW

MRS. Thomas Willow seems very glum.

Her life, perhaps, is very lonely and hum-drum,

Digging up potatoes, cleaning out the weeds,

Doing the little for a lone woman’s needs.

Who was her husband? How long ago?

What does she wonder? What does she know?

Why does she listen over the wall,

Morning and noon-time and twilight and all,

As though unforgotten were some footfall?

“Good morning, Mrs. Willow.” “Good morning, sir,”

Is all the conversation I can get from her.

And her path-stones are white as lilies of the wood,

And she washes this and that till she must be very good.

She sends no letters, and no one calls,

And she doesn’t go whispering beyond her walls;

Nothing in her garden is secret, I think—

That’s all sun-bright with foxglove and pink,

And she doesn’t hover around old cupboards and shelves

As old people do who have buried themselves;

She has no late lamps, and she digs all day

And polishes and plants in a common way,

But glum she is, and she listens now and then

For a footfall, a footfall, a footfall again,

And whether it’s hope, or whether it’s dread,

Or a poor old fancy in her head,

I shall never be told; it will never be said.

ROUNDELS OF THE YEAR

I caught the changes of the year

In soft and fragile nets of song,

For you to whom my days belong.

For you to whom each day is dear

Of all the high processional throng,

I caught the changes of the year

In soft and fragile nets of song.

And here some sound of beauty, here

Some note of ancient, ageless wrong

Reshaping as my lips were strong,

I caught the changes of the year

In soft and fragile nets of song,

For you to whom my days belong.

I

The spring is passing through the land

In web of ghostly green arrayed,

And blood is warm in man and maid.

The arches of desire have spanned

The barren ways, the debt is paid,

The spring is passing through the land

In web of ghostly green arrayed.

Sweet scents along the winds are fanned

From shadowy wood and secret glade

Where beauty blossoms unafraid,

The spring is passing through the land

In web of ghostly green arrayed

And blood is warm in man and maid.

II

Proud insolent June with burning lips

Holds riot now from sea to sea,

And shod in sovran gold is she.

To the full flood of reaping slips

The seeding-tide by God’s decree,

Proud insolent June with burning lips

Holds riot now from sea to sea.

And all the goodly fellowships

Of bird and bloom and beast and tree

Are gallant of her company—

Proud insolent June with burning lips

Holds riot now from sea to sea,

And shod in sovran gold is she.

III

The loaded sheaves are harvested,

The sheep are in the stubbled fold,

The tale of labour crowned is told.

The wizard of the year has spread

A glory over wood and wold,

The loaded sheaves are harvested,

The sheep are in the stubbled fold.

The yellow apples and the red

Bear down the boughs, the hazels hold

No more their fruit in cups of gold.

The loaded sheaves are harvested,

The sheep are in the stubbled fold,

The tale of labour crowned is told.

IV

The year is lapsing into time

Along a deep and songless gloom,

Unchapleted of leaf or bloom.

And mute between the dusk and prime

The diligent earth resets her loom,—

The year is lapsing into time

Along a deep and songless gloom.

While o’er the snows the seasons chime

Their golden hopes to reillume

The brief eclipse about the tomb,

The year is lapsing into time

Along a deep and songless gloom

Unchapleted of leaf or bloom.

V

Not wise as cunning scholars are,

With curious words upon your tongue,

Are you for whom my song is sung.

But you are wise of cloud and star,

And winds and boughs all blossom-hung,

Not wise as cunning scholars are,

With curious words upon your tongue.

Surely, clear child of earth, some far

Dim Dryad-haunted groves among,

Your lips to lips of knowledge clung—

Not wise as cunning scholars are,

With curious words upon your tongue,

Are you for whom my song is sung.

LIEGEWOMAN

YOU may not wear immortal leaves

Nor yet go laurelled in your days,

But he believes

Who loves you with most intimate praise

That none on earth has ever gone,

In whom a cleanlier spirit shone.

You may be unremembered when

Our chronicles are piled in dust:

No matter than—

None ever bore a lordlier lust

To know the savour sweet or sour

Down to the dregs of every hour.

And this your epitaph shall be—

“Within life’s house her eager words

Continually

Lightened as wings of arrowy birds:

She was life’s house-fellow, she knew

The passion of him, soul and thew.”

LOVERS TO LOVERS

Our love forsworn

Was very love upon a day,

Bitterness now, forlorn,

This tattered love once went as proud a way

As any born.

You well have kept

Your love from all corrupting things,

Your house of love is swept

And bright for use; whatso each season brings

You may accept

In pride. But we?

Our date of love is dead. Our blind

Brief moment was to be

The sum, yet was it signed as yours, and signed

Indelibly.

LOVE’S PERSONALITY

IF I had never seen

Thy sweet grave face,

If I had never known

Thy pride as of a queen,

Yet would another’s grace

Have led me to her throne.

I should have loved as well

Not loving thee,

My faith had been as strong

Wrought by another spell;

Her love had grown to be

As thine for fire and song.

Yet is our love a thing

Alone, austere,

A new and sacred birth

That we alone could bring

Through flames of faith and fear

To pass upon the earth.

As one who makes a rhyme

Of his fierce thought,

With momentary art

May challenge change and time,

So is the love we wrought

Not greatest, but apart.

PIERROT

Pierrot alone,

And then Pierrette,

And then a story to forget.

Pierrot alone.

Pierrette among the apple boughs

Come down and take a Pierrot’s kiss,

The moon is white upon your brows,

Pierrette among the apple boughs,

Your lips are cold, and I would set

A rose upon your lips, Pierrette,

A rosy kiss,

Pierrette, Pierrette.

And then Pierrette.

I’ve left my apple boughs, Pierrot,

A shadow now is on my face,

But still my lips are cold, and O

No rose is on my lips, Pierrot,

You laugh, and then you pass away

Among the scented leaves of May,

And on my face

The shadows stay.

And then a story to forget.

The petals fall upon the grass,

And I am crying in the dark,

The clouds above the white moon pass—

My tears are falling on the grass;

Pierrot, Pierrot, I heard your vows

And left my blossomed apple boughs,

And sorrows dark

Are on my brows.

RECKONING

I HEARD my love go laughing

Beyond the bolted door,

I saw my love go riding

Across the windy moor,

And I would give my love no word

Because of evil tales I heard.

Let fancy men go laughing,

Let light men ride away,

Bruised corn is not for my mill,

What’s paid I will not pay,—

And so I thought because of this

Gossip that poisoned clasp and kiss.

Four hundred men went riding,

And he the best of all,

A jolly man for labour,

A sinewy man and tall;

I watched him go beyond the hill,

And shaped my anger with my will.

At night my love came riding

Across the dusky moor,

And other two rode with him

Who knocked my bolted door,

And called me out and bade me see

How quiet a man a man could be.

And now the tales that stung me

And gave my pride its rule,

Are worth a beggar’s broken shoe

Or the sermon of a fool,

And all I know and all I can

Is, false or true, he was my man.

DERELICT

THE cloudy peril of the seas,

The menace of mid-winter days,

May break the scented boughs of ease

And lock the lips of praise,

But every sea its harbour knows,

And every winter wakes to spring,

And every broken song the rose

Shall yet resing.

But comfortable love once spent

May not re-shape its broken trust,

Or find anew the old content,

Dishonoured in the dust;

No port awaits those tattered sails,

No sun rides high above that gloom,

Unchronicled those half-told tales

Shall time entomb.

WED

I MARRIED him on Christmas morn,—

Ah woe betide, ah woe betide,

Folk said I was a comely bride,—

Ah me forlorn.

All braided was my golden hair,

And heavy then, and shining then,

My limbs were sweet to madden men,—

O cunning snare.

My beauty was a thing they say

Of large renown,—O dread renown,—

Its rumour travelled through the town,

Alas the day.

His kisses burn my mouth and brows,—

O burning kiss, O barren kiss,—

My body for his worship is,

And so he vows.

But daily many men draw near

With courtly speech and subtle speech;

I gather from the lips of each

A deadly fear.

As he grows sullen I grow cold,

And whose the blame? Not mine the blame;

Their passions round me as a flame

All fiercely fold.

And oh, to think that he might be

So proudly set, above them set,

If he might but awaken yet

The soul of me.

Will no man seek and seeking find

The soul of me, the soul of me?

Nay, even as they are, so is he,

And all are blind.

On Christmas morning we were wed,

Ah me the morn, the luckless morn;

Now poppies burn along the corn,

Would I were dead.

FORSAKEN

THE word is said, and I no more shall know

Aught of the changing story of her days,

Nor any treasure that her lips bestow.

And I, who loving her was wont to praise

All things in love, now reft of music go

With silent step down unfrequented ways.

My soul is like a lonely market-place,

Where late were laughing folk and shining steeds

And many things of comeliness and grace;

And now between the stones are twisting weeds,

No sound there is, nor any friendly face,

Save for a bedesman telling o’er his beads.

DEFIANCE

O WIDE the way your beauty goes,

For all its feigned indifference,

And every folly’s path it knows,

And every humour of pretence.

But I can be as false as are

The rainbow loves which are your days,

And I will gladly go and far,

Content with your immediate praise.

Your lips, the shyer lover’s bane,

I take with disputation none,

And am your kinsman in disdain

When all is excellently done.

LOVE IN OCTOBER

THE fields, the clouds, the farms and farming gear,

The drifting kine, the scarlet apple trees ...

Not of the sun but separate are these,

And individual joys, and very dear;

Yet when the sun is folded, they are here

No more, the drifting skies: the argosies

Of wagoned apples: still societies

Of elms: red cattle on the stubbled year.

So are you not love’s whole estate. I owe

In many hearts more dues than I shall pay;

Yet is your heart the spring of all love’s light,

And should your love weary of me and go

With all its thriving beams out of my day,

These many loves would founder in that night.

TO THE LOVERS THAT COME

AFTER US

LOVERS, a little of this your happy time

Give to the thought of us who were as you,

That we, whose dearest passion in your prime

Is but a winter garment, may renew

Our love in yours, our flesh in your desire,

Our tenderness in your discovering kiss,

For we are half the fuel of your fire,

As ours was fed by Marc and Beatrice.

Remember us, and, when you too are dead,

Our prayer with yours shall fall upon love’s spring

That all our ghostly loves be comforted

In those yet later lover’s love-making;

So shall oblivion bring his dust to spill

On brain and limbs, and we be lovers still.

DERBYSHIRE SONG

COME loving me to Darley Dale

In spring time or sickle time,

And we will make as proud a tale

As lovers in the antique prime

Of Harry or Elizabeth.

With kirtle green and nodding flowers

To deck my hair and little waist,

I ’ll be worth a lover’s hours....

Come, fellow, thrive, there is no haste

But soon is worn away in death.

Soon shall the blood be tame, and soon

Our bodies lie in Darley Dale,

Unreckoning of jolly June,

With tongues past telling any tale;

My man, come loving me to-day.

I have a wrist is smooth and brown,

I have a shoulder smooth and white,

I have my grace in any gown

By sun or moon or candle-light....

Come Darley way, come Darley way.

LOVE’S HOUSE

I

I know not how these men or those may take

Their first glad measure of love’s character,

Or whether one should let the summer make

Love’s festival, and one the falling year.

I only know that in my prime of days

When my young branches came to blossoming,

You were the sign that loosed my lips in praise,

You were the zeal that governed all my spring.

II

In prudent counsel many gathered near,

Forewarning us of deft and secret snares

That are love’s use. We heard them as we hear

The ticking of a clock upon the stairs.

The troops of reason, careful to persuade,

Blackened love’s name, but love was more than these,

For we had wills to venture unafraid

The trouble of unnavigable seas.

III

Their word was but a barren seed that lies

Undrawn of the sun’s health and undesired,

Because the habit of their hearts was wise,

Because the wisdom of their tongues was tired.

For in the smother of contentious pride,

And in the fear of each tumultuous mood,

Our love has kept serenely fortified

And unusurped one stedfast solitude.

IV

Dark words, and hasty humours of the blood

Have come to us and made no longer stay

Than footprints of a bird upon the mud

That in an hour the tide will take away.

But not March weather over ploughlands blown,

Nor cresses green upon their gravel bed,

Are beautiful with the clean rigour grown

Of quiet thought our love has piloted.

V

I sit before the hearths of many men,

When speech goes gladly, eager to withhold

No word at all, yet when I pass again

The last of words is captive and untold.

We talk together in love’s house, and there

No thought but seeks what counsel you may give,

And every secret trouble from its lair

Comes to your hand, no longer fugitive.

VI

I woo the world, with burning will to be

Delighted in all fortune it may find,

And still the strident dogs of jealousy

Go mocking down the tunnels of my mind.

Only for you my contemplation goes

Clean as a god’s, undarkened of pretence,

Most happy when your garner overflows,

Achieving in your prosperous diligence.

VII

When from the dusty corners of my brain

Comes limping some ungainly word or deed,

I know not if my dearest friend’s disdain

Be durable or brief, spent husk or seed.

But your rebuke and that poor fault of mine

Go straitly outcast, and we close the door,

And I, no promise asking and no sign,

Stand blameless in love’s presence as before.

VIII

A beggar in the ditch, I stand and call

My questions out upon the queer parade

Of folk that hurry by, and one and all

Go down the road with never answer made.

I do not question love. I am a lord

High at love’s table, and the vigilant king,

Unquestioned, from the hubbub at the board

Leans down to me and tells me everything.

COTSWOLD LOVE

BLUE skies are over Cotswold

And April snows go by,

The lasses turn their ribbons

For April’s in the sky,

And April is the season

When Sabbath girls are dressed,

From Rodboro’ to Campden,

In all their silken best.

An ankle is a marvel

When first the buds are brown,

And not a lass but knows it

From Stow to Gloucester town.

And not a girl goes walking

Along the Cotswold lanes

But knows men’s eyes in April

Are quicker than their brains.

It’s little that it matters,

So long as you’re alive,

If you’re eighteen in April,

Or rising sixty-five,

When April comes to Amberley

With skies of April blue,

And Cotswold girls are briding

With slyly tilted shoe.

WITH DAFFODILS

I SEND you daffodils, my dear,

For these are emperors of spring,

And in my heart you keep so clear

So delicate an empery,

That none but emperors could be

Ambassadors endowed to bring

My messages of honesty.

My mind makes faring to and fro,

Deft or bewildered, dark or kind,

That not the eye of God may know

Which motion is of true estate

And which a twisted runagate

Of all the farings of my mind,

And which has honesty for mate.

Only my love for you is clean

Of scandal’s use, and though, may be,

Far rangers have my passions been,—

Since thus the word of Eden went,—

Yet of the springs of my content,

My very wells of honesty

Are you the only firmament.

FOUNDATIONS

THOSE lovers old had rare conceits

To make persuasion beautiful,

Or rail upon the pretty fool

Who would not share those wanton sweets

That, guarded, soon are bitterness.

But we, my love, can look on these

Old tournaments of wit, and say

What novices of love were they,

Who loved by seasons and degrees,

And in the rate of more and less.

We will not make of love a stale

For deft and nimble argument,

Nor shall denial and consent

Be processes whereof shall fail

One surety that we possess.

DEAR AND INCOMPARABLE

DEAR and incomparable

Is that love to me

Flowing out of the woodlands,

Out of the sea;

Out of the firmament breathing

Between pasture and sky,

For no reward is cherished here

To reckon by.

It is not of my earning,

Nor forfeit I can

This love that flows upon

The poverty of man,

Though faithless and unkind

I sleep and forget

This love that asks no wage of me

Waits my waking yet.

Of such is the love, dear,

That you fold me in,

It knows no governance

Of virtue or sin;

From nothing of my achieving

Shall it enrichment take,

And the glooms of my unworthiness

It will not forsake.

A SABBATH DAY

IN FIVE WATCHES

I. MORNING

(TO M. C.)

YOU were three men and women two,

And well I loved you, all of you,

And well we kept the Sabbath day.

The bells called out of Malvern town,

But never bell could call us down

As we went up the hill away.

Was it a thousand years ago

Or yesterday that men were so

Zealous of creed and argument?

Here wind is brother to the rain,

And the hills laugh upon the plain,

And the old brain-gotten feuds are spent.

Bring lusty laughter, lusty jest,

Bring each the song he names the best,

Bring eager thought and speech that’s keen,

Tell each his tale and tell it out,

The only shame be prudent doubt,

Bring bodies where the lust is clean.

II. FULL DAY

(TO K. D.)

WE moved along the gravelled way

Between the laurels and the yews,

Some touch of old enchantment lay

About us, some remembered news

Of men who rode among the trees

With burning dreams of Camelot,

Whose names are beauty’s litanies,

As Galahad and Launcelot.

We looked along the vaulted gloom

Of boughs unstripped of winter’s bane,

As for some pride of scarf and plume

And painted shield and broidered rein,

And through the cloven laurel walls

We searched the darkling pines and pale

Beech-boles and woodbine coronals,

As for the passing of the Grail.

But Launcelot no travel keeps,

For brother Launcelot is dead,

And brother Galahad he sleeps

This long while in his quiet bed,

And we are all the knights that pass

Among the yews and laurels now.

They are but fruit among the grass,

And we but fruit upon the bough.

No coloured blazon meets us here

Of all that courtly company;

Elaine is not, nor Guenevere,

The dream is but of dreams that die.

But yet the purple violet lies

Beside the golden daffodil,

And women strong of limb and wise

And fierce of blood are with us still.

And never through the woodland goes

The Grail of that forgotten quest,

But still about the woodland flows

The sap of God made manifest

In boughs that labour to their time,

And birds that gossip secret things,

And eager lips that seek to rhyme

The latest of a thousand springs.

III. DUSK

(TO E. S. V.)

WE come from the laurels and daffodils

Down to the homestead under the fell,

We’ve gathered our hunger upon the hills,

And that is well.

Howbeit to-morrow gives or takes,

And leads to barren or flowering ways,

We’ve a linen cloth and wheaten cakes,

For which be praise.

Here in the valley at lambing-time

The shepherd folk of their watching tell

While the shadows up to the beacon climb,

And that is well.

Let be what may when we make an end

Of the laughter and labour of all our days

We’ve men to friend and women to friend,

For whom be praise.

IV. EVENSONG

(TO B. M.)

COME, let us tell it over,

Each to each by the fireside,

How that earth has been a swift adventure for us,

And the watches of the day as a gay song and a right song,

And now the traveller wind has found a bed,

And the sheep crowd under the thorn.

Good was the day and our travelling,

And now there is evensong to sing.

Night, and along the valleys

Watch the eyes of the homesteads.

The dark hills are very still and still are the stars.

Patiently under the ploughlands the wheat moves and the barley.

The secret hour of love is upon the sky,

And our thought in praise is aflame.

Sing evensong as well we may

For our travel upon this Sabbath day.

Earth, we have known you truly,

Heard your mutable music,

Have been your lovers and felt the savour of you,

And you have quickened in us the blood’s fire and the heart’s fire.

We have wooed and striven with you and made you ours

By the strength sprung out of your loins.

Lift the latch on its twisted thong,

And an end be made of our evensong.

V. NIGHT

(TO H. S. S.)

THE barriers of sleep are crossed

And I alone am yet awake,

Keeping another Pentecost

For that new visitation’s sake

Of life descending on the hills

In blackthorn bloom and daffodils.

At peace upon my pillow lain

I celebrate the spirit come

In spring’s immutable youth again

Across the lands of Christendom;

I hear in all the choral host

The coming of the Holy Ghost.

The sacrament of bough and blade,

Of populous folds and building birds

I take, till now an end is made

Of praise and ceremonial words,

And I too turn myself to keep

The quiet festival of sleep.

March 1913.

A DEDICATION

(TO E. G.)

I

SOMETIMES youth comes to age and asks a blessing,

Or counsel, or a tale of old estate,

Yet youth will still be curiously guessing

The old man’s thought when death is at his gate;

For all their courteous words they are not one,

This youth and age, but civil strangers still,

Age with the best of all his seasons done,

Youth with his face towards the upland hill.

Age looks for rest while youth runs far and wide,

Age talks with death, which is youth’s very fear,

Age knows so many comrades who have died,

Youth burns that one companion is so dear.

So, with good will, and in one house, may dwell

These two, and talk, and all be yet to tell.

II

But there are men who, in the time of age,

Sometimes remember all that age forgets:

The early hope, the hardly compassed wage,

The change of corn, and snow, and violets;

They are glad of praise; they know this morning brings

As true a song as any yesterday;

Their labour still is set to many things,

They cry their questions out along the way.

They give as who may gladly take again

Some gift at need; they move with gallant ease

Among all eager companies of men;

And never signed of age are such as these.

They speak with youth, and never speak amiss;

Of such are you; and what is youth but this?

RUPERT BROOKE

(DIED APRIL 23, 1915)

TO-DAY I have talked with old Euripides;

Shakespeare this morning sang for my content

Of chimney-sweepers; through the Carian trees

Comes beating still the nightingales’ lament;

The Tabard ales to-day are freshly brewed;

Wordsworth is with me, mounting Loughrigg Fell;

All timeless deaths in Lycid are renewed,

And basils blossom yet for Isabel.

Quick thoughts are these; they do not pass; they gave

Only to death such little, casual things

As are the noteless levies of the grave,—

Sad flesh, weak verse, and idle marketings.

So my mortality for yours complains,

While our immortal fellowship remains.

ON READING FRANCIS LEDWIDGE’S

LAST SONGS

AT April’s end, when blossoms break

To birth upon my apple-tree,

I know the certain year will take

Full harvest of this infancy.

At April’s end, when comes the dear

Occasion of your valley tune,

I know your beauty’s arc is here,

A little ghostly morning moon.

Yet are these fosterlings of rhyme

As fortunately born to spend

Happy conspiracies with time

As apple flowers at April’s end.

IN THE WOODS

I WAS in the woods to-day,

And the leaves were spinning there,

Rich apparelled in decay,—

In decay more wholly fair

Than in life they ever were.

Gold and rich barbaric red

Freakt with pale and sapless vein,

Spinning, spinning, spun and sped

With a little sob of pain

Back to harbouring earth again.

Long in homely green they shone

Through the summer rains and sun,

Now their humbleness is gone,

Now their little season run,

Pomp and pageantry begun.

Sweet was life, and buoyant breath,

Lovely too; but for a day

Issues from the house of death

Yet more beautiful array:

Hark, a whisper—“Come away.”

One by one they spin and fall,

But they fall in regal pride:

Dying, do they hear a call

Rising from an ebbless tide,

And, hearing, are beatified?

LATE SUMMER

THOUGH summer long delayeth

Her blue and golden boon,

Yet now at length she stayeth

Her wings above the noon;

She sets the waters dreaming

To murmurous leafy tones,

The weeded waters gleaming

Above the stepping-stones.

Where fern and ivied willow

Lean o’er the seaward brook,

I read a volume mellow—

A poet’s fairy-book;

The seaward brook is narrow,

The hazel spans its pride,

And like a painted arrow

The king-bird keeps the tide.

JANUARY DUSK

AUSTERE and clad in sombre robes of grey,

With hands upfolded and with silent wings,

In unimpassioned mystery the day

Passes; a lonely thrush its requiem sings.

The dust of night is tangled in the boughs

Of leafless lime and lilac, and the pine

Grows blacker, and the star upon the brows

Of sleep is set in heaven for a sign.

Earth’s little weary peoples fall on peace

And dream of breaking buds and blossoming,

Of primrose airs, of days of large increase,

And all the coloured retinue of spring.

AT GRAFTON

GOD laughed when he made Grafton

That’s under Bredon Hill,

A jewel in a jewelled plain.

The seasons work their will

On golden thatch and crumbling stone,

And every soft-lipped breeze

Makes music for the Grafton men

In comfortable trees.

God’s beauty over Grafton

Stole into roof and wall,

And hallowed every pavèd path

And every lowly stall,

And to a woven wonder

Conspired with one accord

The labour of the servant,

The labour of the Lord.

And momently to Grafton

Comes in from vale and wold

The sound of sheep unshepherded,

The sound of sheep in fold,

And, blown along the bases

Of lands that set their wide

Frank brows to God, comes chanting

The breath of Bristol tide.

DOMINION

I WENT beneath the sunny sky

When all things bowed to June’s desire,—

The pansy with its steadfast eye,

The blue shells on the lupin spire,

The swelling fruit along the boughs,

The grass grown heady in the rain,

Dark roses fitted for the brows

Of queens great kings have sung in vain;

My little cat with tiger bars,

Bright claws all hidden in content;

Swift birds that flashed like darkling stars

Across the cloudy continent;

The wiry-coated fellow curled

Stump-tailed upon the sunny flags;

The bees that sacked a coloured world

Of treasure for their honey-bags.

And all these things seemed very glad,

The sun, the flowers, the birds on wing,

The jolly beasts, the furry-clad

Fat bees, the fruit, and everything.

But gladder than them all was I,

Who, being man, might gather up

The joy of all beneath the sky,

And add their treasure to my cup,

And travel every shining way,

And laugh with God in God’s delight,

Create a world for every day,

And store a dream for every night.

THE MIRACLE

COME, sweetheart, listen, for I have a thing

Most wonderful to tell you—news of spring.

Albeit winter still is in the air,

And the earth troubled, and the branches bare,

Yet down the fields to-day I saw her pass—

The spring—her feet went shining through the grass.

She touched the ragged hedgerows—I have seen

Her finger-prints, most delicately green;

And she has whispered to the crocus leaves,

And to the garrulous sparrows in the eaves.

Swiftly she passed and shyly, and her fair

Young face was hidden in her cloudy hair.

She would not stay, her season is not yet,

But she has reawakened, and has set

The sap of all the world astir, and rent

Once more the shadows of our discontent.

Triumphant news—a miracle I sing—

The everlasting miracle of spring.

MILLERS DALE

BAREFOOT we went by Millers Dale

When meadowsweet was golden gloom

And happy love was in the vale

Singing upon the summer bloom

Of gipsy crop and branches laid

Of willows over chanting pools,

Barefoot by Millers Dale we made

Our summer festival of fools.

Folly bright-eyed, and quick, and young

Was there with all his silly plots,

And trotty wagtail stepped among

The delicate forget-me-nots,

And laughter played with us above

The rocky shelves and weeded holes

And we had fellowship to love

The pigeons and the water-voles.

Time soon shall be when we are all

Stiller than ever runs the Wye,

And every bitterness shall fall

To-morrow in obscurity,

And wars be done, and treasons fail,

Yet shall new friends go down to greet

The singing rocks of Millers Dale,

And willow pools and meadowsweet.

WRITTEN AT LUDLOW CASTLE

(IN THE HALL WHERE COMUS WAS

FIRST PERFORMED)

WHERE wall and sill and broken window-frame

Are bright with flowers unroofed against the skies,

And nothing but the nesting jackdaws’ cries

Breaks the hushed even, once imperial came

The muse that moved transfiguring the name

Of Puritan, and beautiful and wise

The verses fell, forespeaking Paradise,

And poetry set all this hall aflame.

Now silence has come down upon the place

Where life and song so wonderfully went,

And the mole’s afoot now where that passion rang,

Yet Comus now first moves his laurelled pace,

For song and life for ever are unspent,

And they are more than ghosts who lived and sang.

WORDSWORTH AT GRASMERE

THESE hills and waters fostered you

Abiding in your argument

Until all comely wisdom drew

About you, and the years were spent.

Now over hill and water stays

A world more intimately wise,

Built of your dedicated days,

And seen in your beholding eyes.

So, marvellous and far, the mind,

That slept among them when began

Waters and hills, leaps up to find

Its kingdom in the thought of man.

SUNRISE ON RYDAL WATER

(TO E. DE S.)

COME down at dawn from windless hills

Into the valley of the lake,

Where yet a larger quiet fills

The hour, and mist and water make

With rocks and reeds and island boughs

One silence and one element,

Where wonder goes surely as once

It went

By Galilean prows.

Moveless the water and the mist,

Moveless the secret air above,

Hushed, as upon some happy tryst

The poised expectancy of love;

What spirit is it that adores

What mighty presence yet unseen?

What consummation works apace

Between

These rapt enchanted shores?

Never did virgin beauty wake

Devouter to the bridal feast

Than moves this hour upon the lake

In adoration to the east;

Here is the bride a god may know,

The primal will, the young consent,

Till surely upon the appointed mood

Intent

The god shall leap—and, lo,

Over the lake’s end strikes the sun,

White, flameless fire; some purity

Thrilling the mist, a splendour won

Out of the world’s heart. Let there be

Thoughts, and atonements, and desires,

Proud limbs, and undeliberate tongue,

Where now we move with mortal oars

Among

Immortal dews and fires.

So the old mating goes apace,

Wind with the sea, and blood with thought,

Lover with lover; and the grace

Of understanding comes unsought

When stars into the twilight steer,

Or thrushes build among the may,

Or wonder moves between the hills,

And day

Comes up on Rydal mere.

SEPTEMBER

WIND and the robin’s note to-day

Have heard of autumn and betray

The green long reign of summer.

The rust is falling in the leaves,

September stands beside the sheaves,

The new, the happy comer.

Not sad my season of the red

And russet orchards gaily spread

From Cholesbury to Cooming,

Nor sad when twilit valley trees

Are ships becalmed on misty seas,

And beetles go abooming.

Now soon shall come the morning crowds

Of starlings, soon the coloured clouds

From oak and ash and willow,

And soon the thorn and briar shall be

Rich in their crimson livery,

In scarlet and in yellow.

Spring laughed and thrilled a million veins,

And summer shone above her rains

To fill September’s faring;

September talks as kings who know

The world’s way and superbly go

In robes of wisdom’s wearing.

OLTON POOLS

(TO G. C. G.)

NOW June walks on the waters,

And the cuckoo’s last enchantment

Passes from Olton pools.

Now dawn comes to my window

Breathing midsummer roses,

And scythes are wet with dew.

Is it not strange for ever

That, bowered in this wonder,

Man keeps a jealous heart?...

That June and the June waters,

And birds and dawn-lit roses,

Are gospels in the wind,

Fading upon the deserts,

Poor pilgrim revelations?...

Hist ... over Olton pools!

OF GREATHAM

(TO THOSE WHO LIVE THERE)

FOR peace, than knowledge more desirable

Into your Sussex quietness I came,

When summer’s green and gold and azure fell

Over the world in flame.

And peace upon your pasture-lands I found,

Where grazing flocks drift on continually,

As little clouds that travel with no sound

Across a windless sky.

Out of your oaks the birds call to their mates

That brood among the pines, where hidden deep

From curious eyes a world’s adventure waits

In columned choirs of sleep.

Under the calm ascension of the night

We heard the mellow lapsing and return

Of night-owls purring in their groundling flight

Through lanes of darkling fern.

Unbroken peace when all the stars were drawn

Back to their lairs of light, and ranked along

From shire to shire the downs out of the dawn

Were risen in golden song.

. . . . . . . . . .

I sing of peace who have known the large unrest

Of men bewildered in their travelling,

And I have known the bridal earth unblest

By the brigades of spring.

I have known that loss. And now the broken thought

Of nations marketing in death I know,

The very winds to threnodies are wrought

That on your downlands blow.

I sing of peace. Was it but yesterday

I came among your roses and your corn?

Then momently amid this wrath I pray

For yesterday reborn.

MAMBLE

I NEVER went to Mamble

That lies above the Teme,

So I wonder who’s in Mamble,

And whether people seem

Who breed and brew along there

As lazy as the name,

And whether any song there

Sets alehouse wits aflame.

The finger-post says Mamble,

And that is all I know

Of the narrow road to Mamble,

And should I turn and go

To that place of lazy token

That lies above the Teme,

There might be a Mamble broken

That was lissom in a dream.

So leave the road to Mamble

And take another road

To as good a place as Mamble

Be it lazy as a toad;

Who travels Worcester county

Takes any place that comes

When April tosses bounty

To the cherries and the plums.

OUT OF THE MOON

MERELY the moonlight

Piercing the boughs of my may-tree,

Falling upon my ferns;

Only the night

Touching my ferns with silver bloom

Of sea-flowers here in the sleeping city—

And suddenly the imagination burns

With knowledge of many a dark significant doom

Out of antiquity,

Sung to hushed halls by troubadours

Who knew the ways of the heart because they had seen

The moonlight washing the garden’s deeper green

To silver flowers,

Falling with tidings out of the moon, as now

It falls on the ferns under my may-tree bough.

MOONLIT APPLES

AT the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,

And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those

Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes

A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.

A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then

There is no sound at the top of the house of men

Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again

Dapples the apples with deep-sea light.

They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams;

On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams

Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams,

And quiet is the steep stair under.

In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep.

And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep

Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep

On moon-washed apples of wonder.

COTTAGE SONG

MORNING and night I bring

Clear water from the spring,

And through the lyric noon

I hear the larks in tune,

And when the shadows fall

There’s providence for all.

My garden is alight

With currants red and white;

And my blue curtains peep

On starry courses deep,

When down her silver tides

The moon on Cotswold rides.

My path of paven grey

Is thoroughfare all day

For fellowship, till time

Bids us with candles climb

The little whitewashed stair

Above my lavender.

THE MIDLANDS

BLACK in the summer night my Cotswold hill

Aslant my window sleeps, beneath a sky

Deep as the bedded violets that fill

March woods with dusky passion. As I lie

Abed between cool walls I watch the host

Of the slow stars lit over Gloucester plain,

And drowsily the habit of these most

Beloved of English lands moves in my brain,

While silence holds dominion of the dark,

Save when the foxes from the spinneys bark.

I see the valleys in their morning mist

Wreathed under limpid hills in moving light,

Happy with many a yeoman melodist:

I see the little roads of twinkling white

Busy with fieldward teams and market gear

Of rosy men, cloth-gaitered, who can tell

The many-minded changes of the year,

Who know why crops and kine fare ill or well;

I see the sun persuade the mist away,

Till town and stead are shining to the day.

I see the wagons move along the rows

Of ripe and summer-breathing clover-flower,

I see the lissom husbandman who knows

Deep in his heart the beauty of his power,

As, lithely pitched, the full-heaped fork bids on

The harvest home. I hear the rickyard fill

With gossip as in generations gone,

While wagon follows wagon from the hill.

I think how, when our seasons all are sealed,

Shall come the unchanging harvest from the field.

I see the barns and comely manors planned

By men who somehow moved in comely thought,

Who, with a simple shippon to their hand,

As men upon some godlike business wrought;

I see the little cottages that keep

Their beauty still where since Plantagenet

Have come the shepherds happily to sleep,

Finding the loaves and cups of cider set;

I see the twisted shepherds, brown and old,

Driving at dusk their glimmering sheep to fold.

And now the valleys that upon the sun

Broke from their opal veils, are veiled again,

And the last light upon the wolds is done,

And silence falls on flocks and fields and men;

And black upon the night I watch my hill,

And the stars shine, and there an owly wing

Brushes the night, and all again is still,

And, from this land of worship that I sing,

I turn to sleep, content that from my sires

I draw the blood of England’s midmost shires.

OLD CROW

THE bird in the corn

Is a marvellous crow.

He was laid and was born

In the season of snow;

And he chants his old catches

Like a ghost under hatches.

He comes from the shades

Of his wood very early,

And works in the blades

Of the wheat and the barley,

And he’s happy, although

He’s a grumbleton crow.

The larks have devices

For sunny delight,

And the sheep in their fleeces

Are woolly and white;

But these things are the scorn

Of the bird in the corn.

And morning goes by,

And still he is there,

Till a rose in the sky

Calls him back to his lair

In the boughs where the gloom

Is a part of his plume.

But the boy in the lane

With his gun, by and by,

To the heart of the grain

Will narrowly spy,

And the twilight will come,

And no crow will fly home.

VENUS IN ARDEN

NOW Love, her mantle thrown,

Goes naked by,

Threading the woods alone,

Her royal eye

Happy because the primroses again

Break on the winter continence of men.

I saw her pass to-day

In Warwickshire,

With the old imperial way,

The old desire,

Fresh as among those other flowers they went

More beautiful for Adon’s discontent.

Those other years she made

Her festival

When the blue eggs were laid

And lambs were tall,

By the Athenian rivers while the reeds

Made love melodious for the Ganymedes.

And now through Cantlow brakes,

By Wilmcote hill,

To Avon-side, she makes

Her garlands still,

And I who watch her flashing limbs am one

With youth whose days three thousand years are done.

ON A LAKE

SWEET in the rushes

The reed-singers make

A music that hushes

The life of the lake;

The leaves are dumb,

And the tides are still,

And no calls come

From the flocks on the hill.

Forgotten now

Are nightingales,

And on his bough

The linnet fails,—

Midway the mere

My mirrored boat

Shall rest and hear

A slenderer note.

Though, heart, you measure

But one proud rhyme,

You build a treasure

Confounding time—

Sweet in the rushes

The reed-singers make

A music that hushes

The life of the lake.

HARVEST MOON

“Hush!” was my whisper

At the stair-top

When the waggoners were down below

Home from the barley-crop.

Through the high window

Looked the harvest moon,

While the waggoners sang

A harvest tune,—

“Hush!” was my whisper when

Marjory stept

Down from her attic-room,

A true-love-adept.

“Fill a can, fill a can,”

Waggoners of heart were they,

“Harvest-home, harvest-home,

Barleycorn is home to-day.” ...

“Marjory, hush now—

Harvest—you hear?”—

Red was the moon’s rose

On the full year,

The cobwebs shook, so well

Did the waggoners sing—

“Hush!”—there was beauty at

That harvesting.

AT AN EARTHWORKS

RINGED high with turf the arena lies,

The neighbouring world unseen, unheard,

Here are but unhorizoned skies,

And on the skies a passing bird,

The conies and a wandering sheep,

The castings of the chambered mole,—

These, and the haunted years that keep

Lost agonies of blood and soul.

They say that in the midnight moon

The ghostly legions gather yet,

And hear a ghostly timbrel-tune,

And see a ghostly combat met.

These are but yeoman’s tales. And here

No marvel on the midnight falls,

But starlight marvellously clear,

Being girdled in these shadowy walls.

Yet now strange glooms of ancestry

Creep on me through this morning light,

Some spectral self is seeking me ...

I will not parley with the night.

INSTRUCTION

I HAVE a place in a little garden,

That laurel-leaf and fern

Keep a cool place though fires of summer

All the green grasses burn.

Little cool winds creep there about

When winds all else are dead,

And tired limbs there find gentle keeping,

And humours of sloth are shed.

So do your songs come always to me,

Poets of age and age,

Clear and cool as rivers of wind

Threading my hermitage,

Stilling my mind from tribulation

Of life half-seen, half-heard,

With images made in the brain’s quietness,

And the leaping of a word.

HABITATION

HIGH up in the sky there, now, you know,

In this May twilight, our cottage is asleep,

Tenantless, and no creature there to go

Near it but Mrs. Fry’s fat cows, and sheep

Dove-coloured, as is Cotswold. No one hears

Under that cherry-tree the night-jars yet,

The windows are uncurtained; on the stairs

Silence is but by tip-toe silence met.

All doors are fast there. It is a dwelling put by

From use for a little, or long, up there in the sky.

Empty; a walled-in silence, in this twilight of May—

A home for lovers, and friendly withdrawing, and sleep,

With none to love there, nor laugh, nor climb from the day

To the candles and linen.... Yet in the silence creep,

This minute, I know, little ghosts, little virtuous lives,

Breathing upon that still, insensible place,

Touching the latches, sorting the napkins and knives,

And such for the comfort of being, and bowls for the grace,

That roses will brim; they are creeping from that room to this,

One room, and two, till the four are visited ... they,

Little ghosts, little lives, are our thoughts in this twilight of May,

Signs that even the curious man would miss,

Of travelling lovers to Cotswold, signs of an hour,

Very soon, when up from the valley in June will ride

Lovers by Lynch to Oakridge up in the wide

Bow of the hill, to a garden of lavender flower....

The doors are locked; no foot falls; the hearths are dumb—

But we are there—we are waiting ourselves who come.

WRITTEN IN WINTERBORNE CAME

CHURCH

(William Barnes, 1801-1886)

To Mrs. Thomas Hardy

I DO not use to listen well

At sermon time,

I ’ld rather hear the plainest rhyme

Than tales the parsons tell;

The homespun of experience

They will not wear,

But walk a transcendental air

In dusty rags of sense.

But humbly in your little church

Alone I watch;

Old rector, lift again the latch,

Here is a heart to search.

Come, with a simple word and wise

Quicken my brain,

And while upon the painted pane

The painted butterflies

Beat in the early April beams,

You shall instruct

My spirit in the knowledge plucked

From your still Dorset dreams.

Your word shall strive with no obscure

Debated text,

Your vision being unperplexed,

Your loving purpose pure.

I know you’ll speak of April flowers,

Or lambs in pen,

Or happy-hearted maids and men

Weaving their April hours.

Or rising to your thought will come,

For lessoning,

Those lovers of an older spring,

That now in tombs are dumb.

And brooding in your theme shall be,

Half said, half heard,

The presage of a poet’s word

To mock mortality.

. . . . . . . . . .

The years are on your grave the while,

And yet, almost,

I think to see your surpliced ghost

Stand hesitant in the aisle,

Find me sole congregation there,

Assess my mood,

Know mine a kindred solitude,

And climb the pulpit-stair.

BUDS

THE raining hour is done,

And, threaded on the bough,

The May-buds in the sun

Are shining emeralds now.

As transitory these

As things of April will,

Yet, trembling in the trees,

Is briefer beauty still.

For, flowering from the sky

Upon an April day,

Are silver buds that lie

Amid the buds of May.

The April emeralds now,

While thrushes fill the lane,

Are linked along the bough

With silver buds of rain.

And, straightly though to earth

The buds of silver slip,

The green buds keep the mirth

Of that companionship.

BLACKBIRD

HE comes on chosen evenings,

My blackbird bountiful, and sings

Over the gardens of the town

Just at the hour the sun goes down.

His flight across the chimneys thick,

By some divine arithmetic,

Comes to his customary stack,

And couches there his plumage black,

And there he lifts his yellow bill,

Kindled against the sunset, till

These suburbs are like Dymock woods

Where music has her solitudes,

And while he mocks the winter’s wrong

Rapt on his pinnacle of song,

Figured above our garden plots

Those are celestial chimney-pots.

MAY GARDEN

A SHOWER of green gems on my apple-tree

This first morning of May

Has fallen out of the night, to be

Herald of holiday—

Bright gems of green that, fallen there,

Seem fixed and glowing on the air.

Until a flutter of blackbird wings

Shakes and makes the boughs alive,

And the gems are now no frozen things,

But apple-green buds to thrive

On sap of my May garden, how well

The green September globes will tell.

Also my pear-tree has its buds,

But they are silver yellow,

Like autumn meadows when the floods

Are silver under willow,

And here shall long and shapely pears

Be gathered while the autumn wears.

And there are sixty daffodils

Beneath my wall....

And jealousy it is that kills

This world when all

The spring’s behaviour here is spent

To make the world magnificent.

AT AN INN

WE are talkative proud, and assured, and self-sufficient,

The quick of the earth this day;

This inn is ours, and its courtyard, and English history,

And the Post Office up the way.

The stars in their changes, and heavenly speculation,

The habits of birds and flowers,

And character bred of poverty and riches,

All these are ours.

The world is ours, and these its themes and its substance,

And of these we are free men and wise;

Among them all we move in possession and judgment,

For a day, till it dies.

But in eighteen-hundred-and-fifty, who were the tenants,

Sure and deliberate as we?

They knew us not in the time of their ascension,

Their self-sufficiency.

And in nineteen-hundred-and-fifty this inn shall flourish,

And history still be told,

And the heat of blood shall thrive, and speculation,

When we are cold.

PERSPECTIVE

IN the Wheatsheaf parlour I sat to see

The story of Chippington street go by,

The squire, and dames of little degree,

And drovers with cattle and flocks to cry.

And these were all as my creatures there,

Twinkling to and fro in the sun,

And placidly I had joy, had care,

Of all their labours and dealings done.

Into the parlour strode me then

Two fellows fiercely set at odds,

To whom the difference of men

Gave the sufficiency of God.

They saw me, and they stept beyond

To a chamber within earshot still,

And each on each of broken bond,

And honour, and inflexible will,

Railed. And loud the little inn grew,

But nothing I cared their quarrel to learn,

Though the issue tossing between the two

They deemed the bait of the world’s concern.

Only I thought how most are men

Fantastic when they most are proud,

And out of my laughter I looked again

On the flowing figures of Chippington crowd.

CROCUSES

TO E. H. C.

DESIRES,

Little determined desires,

Gripped by the mould,

Moving so hardly among

The earth, of whose heart they were bred,

That is old; it is old,

Not gracious to little desires such as these,

But apter for work on the bases of trees,

Whose branches are hung

Overhead,

Very mightily, there overhead.

Through the summer they stirred,

They strove to the bulbs after May,

Until harvest and song of the bird

Went together away;

And ever till coming of snows

They worked in the mould, for undaunted were those

Swift little determined desires, in the earth

Without sign, any day,

Ever shaping to marvels of birth,

Far away.

And we went

Without heed

On our way,

Never knowing what virtue was spent,

Day by day,

By those little desires that were gallant to breed

Such beauty as fortitude may.

Not once in our mind

Was that corner of earth under trees,

Very mighty and tall,

As we travelled the roads and the seas,

And gathered the wage of our kind,

And were laggard or trim to the call

Of the duties that lengthen the hours

Into seasons that flourish and fall.

And blind,

In the womb of the flowers,

Unresting they wrought,

In the bulbs, in the depth of the year,

Buried far from our thought;

Till one day, when the thrushes were clear

In their note it was spring—and they know—

Unheeding we came into sight

Of that corner forgotten, and lo,

They had won through the meshes of mould,

And treasuries lay in the light,

Of ivory, purple, and gold.

RIDDLES, R.F.C.[1]

(1916)

HE was a boy of April beauty; one

Who had not tried the world; who, while the sun

Flamed yet upon the eastern sky, was done.

Time would have brought him in her patient ways—

So his young beauty spoke—to prosperous days,

To fulness of authority and praise.

He would not wait so long. A boy, he spent

His boy’s dear life for England. Be content:

No honour of age had been more excellent.

[1] Lieutenant Stewart G. Ridley, Royal Flying Corps, sacrificed his life in the Egyptian desert in an attempt to save a comrade. He was twenty years of age.

THE SHIPS OF GRIEF

ON seas where every pilot fails

A thousand thousand ships to-day

Ride with a moaning in their sails,

Through winds grey and waters grey.

They are the ships of grief. They go

As fleets are derelict and driven,

Estranged from every port they know,

Scarce asking fortitude of heaven.

No, do not hail them. Let them ride

Lonely as they would lonely be ...

There is an hour will prove the tide,

There is a sun will strike the sea.

NOCTURNE

O ROYAL night, under your stars that keep

Their golden troops in charted motion set,

The living legions are renewed in sleep

For bloodier battle yet.

O royal death, under your boundless sky

Where unrecorded constellations throng,

Dispassionate those other legions lie,

Invulnerably strong.

THE PATRIOT

SCARCE is my life more dear to me,

Brief tutor of oblivion,

Than fields below the rookery

That comfortably looks upon

The little street of Piddington.

I never think of Avon’s meadows,

Ryton woods or Rydal mere,

Or moon-tide moulding Cotswold shadows,

But I know that half the fear

Of death’s indifference is here.

I love my land. No heart can know

The patriot’s mystery, until

It aches as mine for woods ablow

In Gloucestershire with daffodil,

Or Bicester brakes that violets fill.

No man can tell what passion surges

For the house of his nativity

In the patriot’s blood, until he purges

His grosser mood of jealousy,

And comes to meditate with me

Of gifts of earth that stamp his brain

As mine the pools of Ludlow mill,

The hazels fencing Trilly’s Lane,

And Forty Acres under Brill,

The ferry under Elsfield hill.

These are what England is to me,

Not empire, nor the name of her

Ranging from pole to tropic sea.

These are the soil in which I bear

All that I have of character.

That men my fellows near and far

May live in like communion,

Is all I pray; all pastures are

The best beloved beneath the sun;

I have my own; I envy none.

EPILOGUE FOR A MASQUE

A LITTLE time they lived again, and lo!

Back to the quiet night the shadows go,

And the great folds of silence once again

Are over fools and kings and fighting-men.

A little while they went with stumbling feet,

With spears of hate, and love all flowery sweet,

With wondering hearts and bright adventurous wills,

And now their dust is on a thousand hills.

We dream of them, as men unborn shall dream

Of us, who strive a little with the stream

Before we too go out beyond the day,

And are as much a memory as they.

And Death, so coming, shall not seem a thing

Of any fear, nor terrible his wing.

We too shall be a tale on earth, and time

Shall shape our pilgrimage into a rhyme.

THE GUEST

SOMETIMES I feel that death is very near,

And, with half-lifted hand,

Looks in my eyes, and tells me not to fear,

But walk his friendly land,

Comrade with him, and wise

As peace is wise.

Then, greatly though my heart with pity moves

For dear imperilled loves,

I somehow know

That death is friendly so,

A comfortable spirit; one who takes

Long thought for all our sakes.

I wonder; will he come that friendly way,

That guest, or roughly in the appointed day?

And will, when the last drops of life are spilt,

My soul be torn from me,

Or, like a ship truly and trimly built,

Slip quietly to sea?

TREASON

WHAT time I write my roundelays,

I am as proud as princes gone,

Who built their empires in old days,

As Tamburlaine or Solomon;

And wisely though companions then

Say well it is and well I sing,

Assured above the praise of men

I am a solitary king.

But when I leave that straiter mood,

That lonely hour, and put aside

The continence of solitude,

I fall in treason to my pride,

And if a witling’s word be spent

Upon my song in jealousy,

In anger and in argument

I am as derelict as he.

POLITICS

YOU say a thousand things,

Persuasively,

And with strange passion hotly I agree,

And praise your zest,

And then

A blackbird sings

On April lilac, or fieldfaring men,

Ghostlike, with loaded wain,

Come down the twilit lane

To rest,

And what is all your argument to me?

Oh, yes—I know, I know,

It must be so—

You must devise

Your myriad policies,

For we are little wise,

And must be led and marshalled, lest we keep

Too fast a sleep

Far from the central world’s realities.

Yes, we must heed—

For surely you reveal

Life’s very heart; surely with flaming zeal

You search our folly and our secret need;

And surely it is wrong

To count my blackbird’s song,

My cones of lilac, and my wagon team,

More than a world of dream.

But still

A voice calls from the hill—

I must away—

I cannot hear your argument to-day.

FOR A GUEST ROOM

ALL words are said,

And may it fall

That, crowning these,

You here shall find

A friendly bed,

A sheltering wall,

Your body’s ease,

A quiet mind.

May you forget

In happy sleep

The world that still

You hold as friend,

And may it yet

Be ours to keep

Your friendly will

To the world’s end.

For he is blest

Who, fixed to shun

All evil, when

The worst is known,

Counts, east and west,

When life is done,

His debts to men

In love alone.

DAY

DAWN is up at my window, and in the May-tree

The finches gossip, and tits, and beautiful sparrows

With feathers bright and brown as September hazels.

The sunlight is here, filtered through rosy curtains,

Docile and disembodied, a ghost of sunlight,

A gentle light to greet the dreamer returning.

Part the curtains. I give you salutation

Day, clear day; let us be friendly fellows.

Come.... I hear the Liars about the city.

DREAMS

WE have our dreams; not happiness.

Great cities are upon the hill

To lighten all our dream, and still

We have no cities to possess

But cities built of bitterness.

We see gay fellows top to toe,

And girls in rainbow beauty bright—

’Tis but of silly dreams I write,

For up and down the streets we know,

The scavengers and harlots go.

Give me a dozen men whose theme

Is honesty, and we will set

On high the banner of dreams ... and yet

Thousands will pass us in a stream,

Nor care a penny what we dream.

RESPONSIBILITY

YOU ploughmen at the gate,

All that you are for me

Is of my mind create,

And in my brain to be

A figure newly won

From the world’s confusion.

And if you are of grace,

That’s honesty for me,

And if of evil face,

Recorded then shall be

Dishonour that I saw

Not beauty, but the flaw.

PROVOCATIONS

I AM no merry monger when

I see the slatterns of the town:

I hate to think of docile men

Whose angers all are driven down;

For sluts make joy a thing obscene,

And in contempt is nothing clean.

I like to see the ladies walk

With heels to set their chins atilt:

I like to hear the clergy talk

Of other clergy’s people’s guilt;

For happy is the amorous eye,

And indignation clears the sky.

TRIAL

BEAUTY of old and beauty yet to be,

Stripped of occasion, have security;

This hour it is searches the judgment through,

When masks of beauty walk with beauty too.

CHARGE TO THE PLAYERS

THE TROJAN WOMEN, BIRMINGHAM REPERTORY

THEATRE, APRIL 1918

SHADES, that our town-fellows have come

To hear rewake for Christendom

This cleansing of a Pagan wrong

In flowing tides of tragic song,—

You shadows that the living call

To walk again the Trojan wall,—

You lips and countenance renewed

Of an immortal fortitude,—

Know that, among the silent rows

Of these our daily town-fellows,

Watching the shades with these who bring

But mortal ears to this you sing,

There somewhere sits the Greek who made

This gift of song, himself a shade.

CHARACTER

IF one should tell you that in such a spring

The hawthorn boughs into the blackbird’s nest

Poured poison, or that once at harvesting

The ears were stony, from so manifest

Slander of proven faith in tree and corn

You would turn unheeding, knowing him forsworn.

Yet now, when one whose life has never known

Corruption, as you know: whose days have been

As daily tidings in your heart of lone

And gentle courage, suffers the word unclean

Of envious tongues, doubting you dare not cry—

“I have been this man’s familiar, and you lie.”

REALITY

IT is strange how we travel the wide world over,

And see great churches and foreign streets,

And armies afoot and kings of wonder,

And deeds a-doing to fill the sheets

That grave historians will pen

To ferment the brains of simple men.

And all the time the heart remembers

The quiet habit of one far place,

The drawings and books, the turn of a passage,

The glance of a dear familiar face,

And there is the true cosmopolis,

While the thronging world a phantom is.

EPILOGUE

COME tell us, you that travel far

With brave or shabby merchandise,

Have you saluted any star

That goes uncourtiered in the skies?

Do you remember leaf or wing

Or brook the willows leant along,

Or any small familiar thing

That passed you as you went along?

Or does the trade that is your lust

Drive you as yoke-beasts driven apace,

Making the world a road of dust

From market-place to market-place?

Your traffic in the grain, the wine,

In purple and in cloth of gold,

In treasure of the field and mine,

In fables of the poets told,—

But have you laughed the wine-cups dry

And on the loaves of plenty fed,

And walked, with all your banners high,

In gold and purple garmented?

And do you know the songs you sell

And cry them out along the way?

And is the profit that you tell

After your travel day by day

Sinew and sap of life, or husk—

Dead coffer-ware or kindled brain?

And do you gather in the dusk

To make your heroes live again?

If the grey dust is over all,

And stars and leaves and wings forgot,

And your blood holds no festival—

Go out from us; we need you not.

But if you are immoderate men,

Zealots of joy, the salt and sting

And savour of life upon you—then

We call you to our counselling.

And we will hew the holy boughs

To make us level rows of oars,

And we will set our shining prows

For strange and unadventured shores.

Where the great tideways swiftliest run

We will be stronger than the strong

And sack the cities of the sun

And spend our booty in a song.

MOONRISE

WHERE are you going, you pretty riders?—

To the moon’s rising, the rising of death’s moon,

Where the waters move not, and birds are still and songless,

Soon, very soon.

Where are you faring to, you proud Hectors?

Through battle, out of battle, under the grass,

Dust behind your hoof-beats rises, and into dust,

Clouded, you pass.

I’m a pretty rider, I’m a proud Hector,

I as you a little am pretty and proud;

I with you am riding, riding to the moonrise,

So sing we loud—

“Out beyond the dust lies mystery of moonrise,

We go to chiller learning than is bred in the sun,

Hectors, and riders, and a simple singer,

Riding as one.”

DEER

SHY in their herding dwell the fallow deer.

They are spirits of wild sense. Nobody near

Comes upon their pastures. There a life they live,

Of sufficient beauty, phantom, fugitive,

Treading as in jungles free leopards do,

Printless as evelight, instant as dew.

The great kine are patient, and home-coming sheep

Know our bidding. The fallow deer keep

Delicate and far their counsels wild,

Never to be folded reconciled

To the spoiling hand as the poor flocks are:

Lightfoot, and swift, and unfamiliar,

These you may not hinder, unconfined

Beautiful flocks of the mind.

TO ONE I LOVE

AS I walked along the passage, in the night, beyond the stairs,

In the dark,

I was afraid,

Suddenly,

As will happen you know, my dear, it will often happen.

I knew the walls at my side,

Knew the drawings hanging there, the order of their placing,

And the door where my bed lay beyond,

And the window on the landing—

There was even a little ray of moonlight through it—

All was known, familiar, my comfortable home;

And yet I was afraid,

Suddenly,

In the dark, like a child, of nothing,

Of vastness, of eternity, of the queer pains of thought,

Such as used to trouble me when I heard,

When I was little, the people talk

On Sundays of “As it was in the Beginning,

Is Now, and Ever Shall Be....”

I am thirty-six years old,

And folk are friendly to me,

And there are no ghosts that should have reason to haunt me,

And I have tempted no magical happenings

By forsaking the clear noons of thought

For the wizardries that the credulous take

To be golden roads to revelation.

I knew all was simplicity there,

Without conspiracy, without antagonism,

And yet I was afraid,

Suddenly,

A child, in the dark, forlorn....

And then, as suddenly,

I was aware of a profound, a miraculous understanding,

Knowledge that comes to a man

But once or twice, as a bird’s note

In the still depth of the night

Striking upon the silence ...

I stood at the door, and there

Was mellow candle-light,

And companionship, and comfort,

And I knew

That it was even so,

That it must be even so

With death.

I knew

That no harm could have touched me out of my fear,

Because I had no grudge against anything,

Because I had desired

In the darkness, when fear came,

Love only, and pity, and fellowship,

And it would have been a thing monstrous,

Something defying nature

And all the simple universal fitness

For any force there to have come evilly

Upon me, who had no evil in my heart,

But only trust, and tenderness

For every presence about me in the air,

For the very shadow about me,

Being a little child for no one’s envy.

And I knew that God

Must understand that we go

To death as little children,

Desiring love so simply, and love’s defence,

And that he would be a barren God, without humour,

To cheat so little, so wistful, a desire,

That he created

In us, in our childishness ...

And I may never again be sure of this,

But there, for a moment,

In the candle-light,

Standing at the door,

I knew.

TO ALICE MEYNELL

I TOO have known my mutinies,

Played with improvident desires,

Gone indolently vain as these

Whose lips from undistinguished choirs

Mock at the music of our sires.

I too have erred in thought. In hours

When needy life forbade me bring

To song the brain’s unravished powers,

Then had it been a temperate thing

Loosely to pluck an easy string.

Yet thought has been, poor profligate,

Sin’s period. Through dear and long

Obedience I learn to hate

Unhappy lethargies that wrong

The larger loyalties of song.

And you upon your slender reed,

Most exquisitely tuned, have made

For every singing heart a creed.

And I have heard; and I have played

My lonely music unafraid,

Knowing that still a friendly few,

Turning aside from turbulence,

Cherish the difficult phrase, the due

Bridals of disembodied sense

With the new word’s magnificence.

PETITION

O LORD, I pray: that for each happiness

My housemate brings I may give back no less

Than all my fertile will;

That I may take from friends but as the stream

Creates again the hawthorn bloom adream

Above the river sill;

That I may see the spurge upon the wall

And hear the nesting birds give call to call,

Keeping my wonder new;

That I may have a body fit to mate

With the green fields, and stars, and streams in spate,

And clean as clover-dew;

That I may have the courage to confute

All fools with silence when they will dispute,

All fools who will deride;

That I may know all strict and sinewy art

As that in man which is the counterpart,

Lord, of Thy fiercest pride;

That somehow this beloved earth may wear

A later grace for all the love I bear,

For some song that I sing;

That, when I die, this word may stand for me—

He had a heart to praise, an eye to see,

And beauty was his king.

HARVESTING

PALE sheaves of oats, pocked by untimely rain,

Under October skies,

Teased and forlorn,

Ungathered lie where still the tardy wain

Comes not to seal

The seasons of the corn,

From prime to June, with running barns of grain.

Now time with me is at the middle year,

The register of youth

Is now to sing ...

My thoughts are ripe, my moods are in full ear;

That they should fail

Of harvesting,

Uncarried on cold fields, is all my fear.

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS

U. S. A.

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Table of Contents

P O E M S 1908-1919

CONTENTS

POEMS 1908-1919

RECIPROCITY

THE HOURS

A TOWN WINDOW

MYSTERY

THE COMMON LOT

PASSAGE

THE WOOD

HISTORY

THE FUGITIVE

CONSTANCY

SOUTHAMPTON BELLS

I

II

III

THE NEW MIRACLE

REVERIE

PENANCES

LAST CONFESSIONAL

BIRTHRIGHT

ANTAGONISTS

HOLINESS

THE CITY

TO THE DEFILERS

A CHRISTMAS NIGHT

INVOCATION

IMMORTALITY

I

II

THE CRAFTSMEN

SYMBOLS

SEALED

A PRAYER

THE BUILDING

THE SOLDIER

THE FIRES OF GOD

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

CHALLENGE

TRAVEL TALK

THE VAGABOND

OLD WOMAN IN MAY

THE FECKENHAM MEN

THE TRAVELLER

IN LADY STREET

ANTHONY CRUNDLE

MAD TOM TATTERMAN

FOR CORIN TO-DAY

THE CARVER IN STONE

ELIZABETH ANN

THE COTSWOLD FARMERS

A MAN’S DAUGHTER

THE LIFE OF JOHN HERITAGE

THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON

MRS. WILLOW

ROUNDELS OF THE YEAR

I

II

III

IV

V

LIEGEWOMAN

LOVERS TO LOVERS

LOVE’S PERSONALITY

PIERROT

RECKONING

DERELICT

WED

FORSAKEN

DEFIANCE

LOVE IN OCTOBER

TO THE LOVERS THAT COME AFTER US

DERBYSHIRE SONG

LOVE’S HOUSE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

COTSWOLD LOVE

WITH DAFFODILS

FOUNDATIONS

DEAR AND INCOMPARABLE

A SABBATH DAY IN FIVE WATCHES

I. MORNING (TO M. C.)

II. FULL DAY (TO K. D.)

III. DUSK (TO E. S. V.)

IV. EVENSONG (TO B. M.)

V. NIGHT (TO H. S. S.)

A DEDICATION (TO E. G.)

I

II

RUPERT BROOKE (DIED APRIL 23, 1915)

ON READING FRANCIS LEDWIDGE’S LAST SONGS

IN THE WOODS

LATE SUMMER

JANUARY DUSK

AT GRAFTON

DOMINION

THE MIRACLE

MILLERS DALE

WRITTEN AT LUDLOW CASTLE (IN THE HALL WHERE COMUS WAS FIRST PERFORMED)

WORDSWORTH AT GRASMERE

SUNRISE ON RYDAL WATER (TO E. DE S.)

SEPTEMBER

OLTON POOLS (TO G. C. G.)

OF GREATHAM (TO THOSE WHO LIVE THERE)

MAMBLE

OUT OF THE MOON

MOONLIT APPLES

COTTAGE SONG

THE MIDLANDS

OLD CROW

VENUS IN ARDEN

ON A LAKE

HARVEST MOON

AT AN EARTHWORKS

INSTRUCTION

HABITATION

WRITTEN IN WINTERBORNE CAME CHURCH (William Barnes, 1801-1886)

BUDS

BLACKBIRD

MAY GARDEN

AT AN INN

PERSPECTIVE

CROCUSES TO E. H. C.

RIDDLES, R.F.C.[1] (1916)

THE SHIPS OF GRIEF

NOCTURNE

THE PATRIOT

EPILOGUE FOR A MASQUE

THE GUEST

TREASON

POLITICS

FOR A GUEST ROOM

DAY

DREAMS

RESPONSIBILITY

PROVOCATIONS

TRIAL

CHARGE TO THE PLAYERS THE TROJAN WOMEN, BIRMINGHAM REPERTORY THEATRE, APRIL 1918

CHARACTER

REALITY

EPILOGUE

MOONRISE

DEER

TO ONE I LOVE

TO ALICE MEYNELL

PETITION

HARVESTING

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE