The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,’ said Alice.

  ‘It gets easier further on,’ Humpty Dumpty replied.

  ‘I sent to them again to say

  “It will be better to obey”.

  The fishes answered, with a grin,

  “Why, what a temper you are in!”

  I told them once, I told them twice:

  They would not listen to advice.

  I took a kettle large and new,

  Fit for the deed I had to do.

  My heart went hop, my heart went thump:

  I filled the kettle at the pump.

  Then some one came to me and said

  “The little fishes are in bed.”

  I said to him, I said it plain,

  “Then you must wake them up again.”

  I said it very loud and clear:

  I went and shouted in his ear.’

  Humpty Dumpty raised his voice almost to a scream as he repeated this verse, and Alice thought, with a shudder, ‘I wouldn’t have been the messenger for anything!’

  ‘But he was very stiff and proud:

  He said, “You needn’t shout so loud!”

  And he was very proud and stiff:

  He said “I’d go and wake them, if –”

  I took a corkscrew from the shelf:

  I went to wake them up myself.

  And when I found the door was locked,

  I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked.

  And when I found the door was shut,

  I tried to turn the handle, but –’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Is that all?’ Alice timidly asked.

  ‘That’s all,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ‘Good-bye.’

  CHRISTINA ROSSETTI from Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book

  Dead in the cold, a song-singing thrush,

  Dead at the foot of a snowberry bush, –

  Weave him a coffin of rush,

  Dig him a grave where the soft mosses grow,

  Raise him a tombstone of snow.

  *

  A city plum is not a plum;

  A dumb-bell is no bell, though dumb;

  A party rat is not a rat;

  A sailor’s cat is not a cat;

  A soldier’s frog is not a frog;

  A captain’s log is not a log.

  *

  If a pig wore a wig,

  What could we say?

  Treat him as a gentleman,

  And say ‘Good-day.’

  If his tail chanced to fail,

  What could we do? –

  Send him to the tailoress

  To get one new.

  *

  I caught a little ladybird

  That flies far away;

  I caught a little lady wife

  That is both staid and gay.

  Come back, my scarlet ladybird,

  Back from far away;

  I weary of my dolly wife,

  My wife that cannot play.

  She’s such a senseless wooden thing

  She stares the livelong day;

  Her wig of gold is stiff and cold

  And cannot change to grey.

  ROBERT BROWNING [Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in a Painting of ‘The Judgement of Paris’]

  He gazed and gazed and gazed and gazed,

  Amazed, amazed, amazed, amazed.

  CHRISTINA ROSSETTI By the Sea 1875

  Why does the sea moan evermore?

  Shut out from heaven it makes its moan,

  It frets against the boundary shore;

  All earth’s full rivers cannot fill

  The sea, that drinking thirsteth still.

  Sheer miracles of loveliness

  Lie hid in its unlooked-on bed:

  Anemones, salt, passionless,

  Blow flower-like; just enough alive

  To blow and multiply and thrive.

  Shells quaint with curve, or spot, or spike,

  Encrusted live things argus-eyed,

  All fair alike, yet all unlike,

  Are born without a pang, and die

  Without a pang, and so pass by.

  COVENTRY PATMORE Magna est Veritas1877

  Here, in this little Bay,

  Full of tumultuous life and great repose,

  Where, twice a day,

  The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,

  Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,

  I sit me down.

  For want of me the world’s course will not fail:

  When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;

  The truth is great, and shall prevail,

  When none cares whether it prevail or not.

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS The Windhover:

  To Christ our Lord

  I caught this morning morning’s minion, king

  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

  In his ecstacy! then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

  Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

  Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

  Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

  Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

  (1918)

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS Pied Beauty

  Glory be to God for dappled things –

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

  For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

  Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

  And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

  All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

  With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

  He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

  Praise him.

  (1918)

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS from The Wreck of the Deutschland

  To the

  happy memory of five Franciscan nuns

  exiles by the Falck Laws

  drowned between midnight and morning of

  Dec. 7th, 1875

  PART THE FIRST

  Thou mastering me

  God! giver of breath and bread;

  World’s strand, sway of the sea;

  Lord of living and dead;

  Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,

  And after it almost unmade, what with dread,

  Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?

  Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

  I did say yes

  0 at lightning and lashed rod;

  Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess

  Thy terror, O Christ, O God;

  Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:

  The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod

  Hard down with a horror of height:

  And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

  The frown of his face

  Before me, the hurtle of hell

  Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?

  I whirled out wings that spell

  And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.

  My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,

  Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,

  To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

 
I am soft sift

  In an hourglass – at the wall

  Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,

  And it crowds and it combs to the fall;

  I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,

  But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall

  Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein

  Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

  I kiss my hand

  To the stars, lovely-asunder

  Starlight, wafting him out of it; and

  Glow, glory in thunder;

  Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:

  Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,

  His mystery must be instressed, stressed;

  For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.

  Not out of his bliss

  Springs the stress felt

  Nor first from heaven (and few know this)

  Swings the stroke dealt –

  Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,

  That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt –

  But it rides time like riding a river

  (And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).

  It dates from day

  Of his going in Galilee;

  Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;

  Manger, maiden’s knee;

  The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat:

  Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be,

  Though felt before, though in high flood yet –

  What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,

  Is out with it! Oh,

  We lash with the best or worst

  Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe

  Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,

  Gush! – flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,

  Brim, in a flash, full! – Hither then, last or first,

  To hero of Calvary, Christ,’s feet –

  Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it – men go.

  Be adored among men,

  God, three-numbered form;

  Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,

  Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.

  Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,

  Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;

  Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:

  Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

  With an anvil-ding

  And with fire in him forge thy will

  Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring

  Through him, melt him but master him still:

  Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,

  Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill,

  Make mercy in all of us, out of us all

  Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

  (1918)

  ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE A Forsaken Garden 1878

  In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

  At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

  Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

  The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

  A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

  The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

  Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

  Now lie dead.

  The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,

  To the low last edge of the long lone land.

  If a step should sound or a word be spoken,

  Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand?

  So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,

  Through branches and briars if a man make way,

  He shall find no life but the sea-wind’s, restless

  Night and day.

  The dense hard passage is blind and stifled

  That crawls by a track none turn to climb

  To the strait waste place that the years have rifled

  Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.

  The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;

  The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.

  The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,

  These remain.

  Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;

  As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;

  From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,

  Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.

  Over the meadows that blossom and wither

  Rings but the note of a sea-bird’s song;

  Only the sun and the rain come hither

  All year long.

  The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels

  One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.

  Only the wind here hovers and revels

  In a round where life seems barren as death.

  Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,

  Haply, of lovers none ever will know,

  Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping

  Years ago.

  Heart handfast in heart as they stood, ‘Look thither’,

  Did he whisper? ‘look forth from the flowers to the sea;

  For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,

  And men that love lightly may die – but we?’

  And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,

  And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,

  In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,

  Love was dead.

  Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?

  And were one to the end – but what end who knows?

  Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,

  As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.

  Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?

  What love was ever as deep as a grave?

  They are loveless now as the grass above them