by Paul Keegan
Nor a thread of her hair,
No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby
I may picture her there.
1900THOMAS HARDY The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
WALTER DE LA MARE The Birthnight 1906
Dearest, it was a night
That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;
A sighing wind ran faintly white
Along the willows, and the cedar boughs
Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across
The starry silence of their antique moss:
No sound save rushing air
Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,
And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,
Thou, lovely thing.
WALTER DE LA MARE Autumn
There is a wind where the rose was;
Cold rain where sweet grass was;
And clouds like sheep
Stream o’er the steep
Grey skies where the lark was.
Nought gold where your hair was;
Nought warm where your hand was;
But phantom, forlorn,
Beneath the thorn,
Your ghost where your face was.
Sad winds where your voice was;
Tears, tears where my heart was;
And ever with me,
Child, ever with me,
Silence where hope was.
WALTER DE LA MARE Napoleon
‘What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky;
Soldiers, this solitude
Through which we go
Is I.’
1908MARY E. COLERIDGE No Newspapers
Where, to me, is the loss
Of the scenes they saw – of the sounds they heard;
A butterfly flits across,
Or a bird;
The moss is growing on the wall,
I heard the leaf of the poppy fall.
MICHAEL FIELD (KATHERINE BRADLEY and EDITH COOPER) The Mummy Invokes His Soul
Down to me quickly, down! I am such dust,
Baked, pressed together; let my flesh be fanned
With thy fresh breath; come from thy reedy land
Voiceful with birds; divert me, for I lust
To break, to crumble – prick with pores this crust! –
And fall apart, delicious, loosening sand.
Oh, joy, I feel thy breath, I feel thy hand
That searches for my heart, and trembles just
Where once it beat. How light thy touch, thy frame!
Surely thou perchest on the summer trees…
And the garden that we loved? Soul, take thine ease,
I am content, so thou enjoy the same
Sweet terraces and founts, content, for thee,
To burn in this immense torpidity.
JOHN DAVIDSON Snow 1909
I
‘Who affirms that crystals are alive?’
I affirm it, let who will deny:–
Crystals are engendered, wax and thrive,
Wane and wither: I have seen them die.
Trust me, masters, crystals have their day
Eager to attain the perfect norm,
Lit with purpose, potent to display
Facet, angle, colour, beauty, form.
II
Water-crystals need for flower and root
Sixty clear degrees, no less, no more;
Snow, so fickle, still in this acute
Angle thinks, and learns no other lore:
Such its life, and such its pleasure is,
Such its art and traffic, such its gain,
Evermore in new conjunctions this
Admirable angle to maintain.
Crystalcraft in every flower and flake
Snow exhibits, of the welkin free:
Crystalline are crystals for the sake,
All and singular, of crystalry.
Yet does every crystal of the snow
Individualise, a seedling sown
Broadcast, but instinct with power to grow
Beautiful in beauty of its own.
Every flake with all its prongs and dints
Burns ecstatic as a new-lit star:
Men are not more diverse, finger-prints
More dissimilar than snow-flakes are.
Worlds of men and snow endure, increase,
Woven of power and passion to defy
Time and travail: only races cease,
Individual men and crystals die.
III
Jewelled shapes of snow whose feathery showers,
Fallen or falling wither at a breath,
All afraid are they, and loth as flowers
Beasts and men to tread the way to death.
Once I saw upon an object-glass,
Martyred underneath a microscope,
One elaborate snow-flake slowly pass,
Dying hard, beyond the reach of hope.
Still from shape to shape the crystal changed,
Writhing in its agony; and still,
Less and less elaborate, arranged
Potently the angle of its will.
Tortured to a simple final form,
Angles six and six divergent beams,
Lo, in death it touched the perfect norm
Verifying all its crystal dreams!
IV
Such the noble tragedy of one
Martyred snow-flake. Who can tell the fate
Heinous and uncouth of showers undone,
Fallen in cities! – showers that expiate
Errant lives from polar worlds adrift
Where the great millennial snows abide;
Castaways from mountain-chains that lift
Snowy summits in perennial pride;
Nomad snows, or snows in evil day
Born to urban ruin, to be tossed,
Trampled, shovelled, ploughed, and swept away
Down the seething sewers: all the frost
Flowers of heaven melted up with lees,
Offal, recrement, but every flake
Showing to the last in fixed degrees
Perfect crystals for the crystal’s sake.
V
Usefulness of snow is but a chance
Here in temperate climes with winter sent,
Sheltering earth’s prolonged hibernal trance:
All utility is accident.
Sixty clear degrees the joyful snow,
Practising economy of means,
Fashions endless beauty in, and so
Glorifie
s the universe with scenes
Arctic and antarctic: stainless shrouds,
Ermine woven in silvery frost, attire
Peaks in every land among the clouds
Crowned with snows to catch the morning’s fire.
J. M. SYNGE On an Island
You’ve plucked a curlew, drawn a hen,
Washed the shirts of seven men,
You’ve stuffed my pillow, stretched the sheet,
And filled the pan to wash your feet,
You’ve cooped the pullets, wound the clock,
And rinsed the young men’s drinking crock;
And now we’ll dance to jigs and reels,
Nailed boots chasing girls’ naked heels,
Until your father’ll start to snore,
And Jude, now you’re married, will stretch on the floor.
1910J. M. SYNGE The ’Mergency Man
He was lodging above in Coom,
And he’d the half of the bailiff’s room.
Till a black night came in Coomasaharn
A night of rains you’d swamp a star in.
‘To-night,’ says he, ‘with the devil’s weather
The hares itself will quit the heather,
I’ll catch my boys with a latch on the door,
And serve my process on near a score.’
The night was black at the fording place
And the flood was up in a whitened race
But devil a bit he’d turn his face,
Then the peelers said, ‘Now mind your lepping,
How can you see the stones for stepping?
We’ll wash our hands of your bloody job.’
‘Wash and welcome,’ says he, ‘begob.’
He made two leps with a run and dash,
Then the peelers heard a yell and splash.
And the ’Mergency man in two days and a bit
Was found in the ebb tide stuck in a net.
1911W. H. DAVIES Sheep
When I was once in Baltimore,
A man came up to me and cried,
‘Come, I have eighteen hundred sheep,
And we will sail on Tuesday’s tide.
‘If you will sail with me, young man,
I’ll pay you fifty shillings down;
These eighteen hundred sheep I take
From Baltimore to Glasgow town.’
He paid me fifty shillings down,
I sailed with eighteen hundred sheep;
We soon had cleared the harbour’s mouth,
We soon were in the salt sea deep.
The first night we were out at sea
Those sheep were quiet in their mind;
The second night they cried with fear –
They smelt no pastures in the wind.
They sniffed, poor things, for their green fields,
They cried so loud I could not sleep:
For fifty thousand shillings down
I would not sail again with sheep.
THOMAS HARDY The Convergence of the Twain 1912
(Lines on the loss of the Titanic)
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’…
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her – so gaily great –
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
T. E. HULME Autumn
A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
T. E. HULME Image
Old houses were scaffolding once
and workmen whistling.
(1960)
EZRA POUND The Return
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the ‘Wing’d-with-Awe,’
Inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
