by Paul Keegan
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
(1918)
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes its self; myself speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
Í say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
(1918)
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON from Treasure Island
Pirate Ditty
Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest –
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest –
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Last night we had a thunderstorm in style.
The wild lightning streaked the airs,
As though my God fell down a pair of stairs.
The thunder boomed and bounded all the while;
All cried and sat by water-side and stile –
To mop our brow had been our chief of cares.
I lay in bed with a Voltairean smile,
The terror of good, simple guilty pairs,
And made this rondeau in ironic style,
Last night we had a thunderstorm in style.
Our God the Father fell down-stairs,
The stark blue lightning went its flight, the while,
The very rain you might have heard a mile –
The strenuous faithful buckled to their prayers.
1882WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
Everything passes and vanishes;
Everything leaves its trace;
And often you see in a footstep
What you could not see in a face.
1884AMY LEVY Epitaph
(On a Commonplace Person Who Died in Bed)
This is the end of him, here he lies:
The dust in his throat, the worm in his eyes,
The mould in his mouth, the turf on his breast;
This is the end of him, this is best.
He will never lie on his couch awake,
Wide-eyed, tearless, till dim daybreak.
Never again will he smile and smile
When his heart is breaking all the while.
He will never stretch out his hands in vain
Groping and groping – never again.
Never ask for bread, get a stone instead,
Never pretend that the stone is bread.
Never sway and sway ’twixt the false and true,
Weighing and noting the long hours through.
Never ache and ache with the chok’d-up sighs;
This is the end of him, here he lies.
1885ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON To E. FitzGerald
Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange,
Where once I tarried for a while,
Glance at the wheeling Orb of change,
And greet it with a kindly smile;
Whom yet I see as there you sit
Beneath your sheltering garden-tree,
And while your doves about you flit,
And plant on shoulder, hand and knee,
Or on your head their rosy feet,
As if they knew your diet spares
Whatever moved in that full sheet
Let down to Peter at his prayers;
Who live on milk and meal and grass;
And once for ten long weeks I tried
Your table of Pythagoras,
And seemed at first ‘a thing enskied’
(As Shakespeare has it) airy-light
To float above the ways of men,
Then fell from that half-spiritual height
Chilled, till I tasted flesh again
One night when earth was winter-black,
And all the heavens flashed in frost;
And on me, half-asleep, came back
That wholesome heat the blood had lost,
And set me climbing icy capes
And glaciers, over which there rolled
To meet me long-armed vines with grapes
Of Eshcol hugeness; for the cold
Without, and warmth within me, wrought
To mould the dream, but none can say
That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought,
Who reads your golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well;
A planet equal to the sun
Which cast it, that large infidel
Your Omar; and your Omar drew
Full-handed plaudits from our best
In modern letters, and from two,
Old friends outvaluing all the rest,
Two voices heard on earth no more;
But we old friends are still alive,
And I am nearing seventy-four,
While you have touched at seventy-five,
And so I send a birthday line
Of greeting; and my son, who dipt
In some forgotten book of mine
With sallow scraps of manuscript,
And dating many a year ago,
Has hit on this, which you will take
My Fitz, and welcome, as I know
Less for its own than for the sake
Of one recalling gracious times,
When, in our younger London days,
You found some merit in my rhymes,
And I more pleasure in your praise.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves
Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous,… stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earlstars, stárs principal, overbend us,
Fire-féaturing heaven. For earth her being has unbound; her dapple is at end, as-
Tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; self ín self steepèd and páshed – qúite
Disremembering, dismémbering all now. Heart, you round me right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.
Only the beakleaved boughs dragonish damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, pack
Now her all in twó flocks, twó folds – black, white; right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a world where bút these twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung,
sheathe- and shelterless, thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.
(1918)
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
(1918)
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI from A Trip to Paris and Belgium 1886
1
from LONDON TO FOLKESTONE
(Half-past one to half-past five)
A constant keeping-past of shaken trees,
And a bewildered glitter of loose road;
Banks of bright growth, with single blades atop
Against white sky; and wires – a constant chain –
That seem to draw the clouds along with them
(Things which one stoops against the light to see
Through the low window; shaking by at rest,
Or fierce like water as the swiftness grows);
And, seen through fences or a bridge far off,
Trees that in moving keep their intervals
Still one ’twixt bar and bar; and then at times
Long reaches of green level, where one cow,
Feeding among her fellows that feed on,
Lifts her slow neck, and gazes for the sound.
(… )
Brick walls we pass between, passed so at once
That for the suddenness I cannot know
Or what, or where begun, or where at end.
Sometimes a Station in grey quiet; whence,
With a short gathered champing of pent sound,
We are let out upon the air again.
Now nearly darkness; knees and arms and sides
Feel the least touch, and close about the face
A wind of noise that is along like God.
Pauses of water soon, at intervals,
That has the sky in it; – the reflexes
O’ the trees move towards the bank as we go by,
Leaving the water’s surface plain. I now
Lie back and close my eyes a space; for they
Smart from the open forwardness of thought
Fronting the wind –
– I did not scribble more,
Be certain, after this; but yawned, and read,
And nearly dozed a little, I believe;
Till, stretching up against the carriage-back,
I was roused altogether, and looked out
To where, upon the desolate verge of light,
Yearned, pale and vast, the iron-coloured sea.
(…)
XVI
ANTWERP TO GHENT
We are upon the Scheldt. We know we move
Because there is a floating at our eyes
Whatso they seek; and because all the things
Which on our outset were distinct and large
Are smaller and much weaker and quite grey,
And at last gone from us. No motion else.
We are upon the road. The thin swift moon
Runs with the running clouds that are the sky,
And with the running water runs – at whiles
Weak ’neath the film and heavy growth of reeds.
The country swims with motion. Time itself
Is consciously beside us, and perceived.
Our speed is such the sparks our engine leaves
Are burning after the whole train has passed.
The darkness is a tumult. We tear on,
The roll behind us and the cry before,
Constantly, in a lull of intense speed
And thunder. Any other sound is known
Merely by sight. The shrubs, the trees your eye
Scans for their growth, are far along in haze.
The sky has lost its clouds, and lies away
Oppressively at calm: the moon has failed:
Our speed has set the wind against us. Now
Our engine’s heat is fiercer, and flings up
Great glares alongside. Wind and steam and speed
And clamour and the night. We are in Ghent.
ANONYMOUS Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye 1887
While going the road to sweet Athy,
Hurroo! Hurroo!
While going the road to sweet Athy,
Hurroo! Hurroo!
While going the road to sweet Athy,
A stick in my hand and a drop in my eye,
A doleful damsel I heard cry:
Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!
With drums and guns and guns and drums,
The enemy nearly slew ye!
My darling dear, you look so queer,
Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!
‘Where are your eyes that looked so mild?
Hurroo! Hurroo!
Where are your eyes that looked so mild?
Hurroo! Hurroo!
Where are your eyes that looked so mild
When my poor heart you first beguiled?
Why did you run from me and the child?
Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!
‘Where are the legs with which you run?
Hurroo! Hurroo!
Where are the legs with which you run?
Hurroo! Hurroo!
Where are the legs with which you run,
When you went to carry a gun? –
Indeed your dancing days are done!
Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!
‘It grieved my heart to see you sail,
Hurroo! Hurroo!
It grieved my heart to see you sail,
Hurroo! Hurroo!
It grieved my heart to see you sail,
Though from my heart you took leg bail, –
Like a cod you’re doubled up head and tail,
Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!
‘You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,
