The Penguin Book of English Verse

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The Penguin Book of English Verse Page 109

by Paul Keegan


  These the keen-scented;

  These were the souls of blood.

  Slow on the leash,

  pallid the leash-men!

  EZRA POUND In a Station of the Metro 1913

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

  Petals on a wet, black bough.

  1914H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) Oread

  Whirl up, sea –

  whirl your pointed pines,

  splash your great pines

  on our rocks,

  hurl your green over us,

  cover us with your pools of fir.

  THOMAS HARDY from Poems of 1912–13

  The Walk

  You did not walk with me

  Of late to the hill-top tree

  By the gated ways,

  As in earlier days;

  You were weak and lame,

  So you never came,

  And I went alone, and I did not mind,

  Not thinking of you as left behind.

  I walked up there to-day

  Just in the former way:

  Surveyed around

  The familiar ground

  By myself again:

  What difference, then?

  Only that underlying sense

  Of the look of a room on returning thence.

  The Voice

  Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

  Saying that now you are not as you were

  When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

  But as at first, when our day was fair.

  Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

  Standing as when I drew near to the town

  Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

  Even to the original air-blue gown!

  Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

  Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

  You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

  Heard no more again far or near?

  Thus I; faltering forward,

  Leaves around me falling,

  Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

  And the woman calling.

  After a Journey

  Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;

  Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

  Up the cliff, down, till I’m lonely, lost,

  And the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me.

  Where you will next be there’s no knowing,

  Facing round about me everywhere,

  With your nut-coloured hair,

  And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

  Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

  Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;

  What have you now found to say of our past –

  Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?

  Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?

  Things were not lastly as firstly well

  With us twain, you tell?

  But all’s closed now, despite Time’s derision.

  I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

  To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,

  The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

  At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,

  And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

  That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,

  When you were all aglow,

  And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

  Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,

  The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,

  Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,

  For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.

  Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,

  The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!

  I am just the same as when

  Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

  At Castle Boterel

  As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,

  And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,

  I look behind at the fading byway,

  And see on its slope, now glistening wet,

  Distinctly yet

  Myself and a girlish form benighted

  In dry March weather. We climb the road

  Beside a chaise. We had just alighted

  To ease the sturdy pony’s load

  When he sighed and slowed.

  What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of

  Matters not much, nor to what it led, –

  Something that life will not be balked of

  Without rude reason till hope is dead,

  And feeling fled.

  It filled but a minute. But was there ever

  A time of such quality, since or before,

  In that hill’s story? To one mind never,

  Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,

  By thousands more.

  Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,

  And much have they faced there, first and last,

  Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;

  But what they record in colour and cast

  Is – that we two passed.

  And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,

  In mindless rote, has ruled from sight

  The substance now, one phantom figure

  Remains on the slope, as when that night

  Saw us alight.

  I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,

  I look back at it amid the rain

  For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,

  And I shall traverse old love’s domain

  Never again.

  W. B. YEATS The Cold Heaven

  Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven

  That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,

  And thereupon imagination and heart were driven

  So wild that every casual thought of that and this

  Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season

  With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;

  And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,

  Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,

  Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,

  Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent

  Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken

  By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

  W. B. YEATS The Magi

  Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,

  In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

  Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky

  With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

  And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

  And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

  Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,

  The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

  CHARLOTTE MEW Fame

  Sometimes in the over-heated house, but not for long,

  Smirking and speaking rather loud,

  I see myself among the crowd,

  Where no one fits the singer to his song,

  Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces

  Of the people who are always on my stair;

  They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places;

  But could I spare

  In the blind Earth’s great silences and spaces,

  The din, the scuffle, the long stare

  If I went back and it was not there?

  Back to the old known things that are the new,

  The folded glory of the gorse, the sweet-briar air,

  To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we dor />
  And the divine, wise trees that do not care

  Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair!

  God! If I might! And before I go hence

  Take in her stead

  To our tossed bed,

  One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.

  Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence –

  A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white,

  A blot upon the night,

  The moon’s dropped child!

  EZRA POUND The Gypsy1915

  ‘Est-ce que vous avez vu des autres – des

  camarades – avec des singes ou des ours?’

  A Stray Gipsy – A.D. 1912

  That was the top of the walk, when he said:

  ‘Have you seen any others, any of our lot,

  With apes or bears?’

  – A brown upstanding fellow

  Not like the half-castes,

  up on the wet road near Clermont.

  The wind came, and the rain,

  And mist clotted about the trees in the valley,

  And I’d the long ways behind me,

  gray Arles and Biaucaire,

  And he said, ‘Have you seen any of our lot?’

  I’d seen a lot of his lot…

  ever since Rhodez,

  Coming down from the fair

  of St. John,

  With caravans, but never an ape or a bear.

  EZRA POUND from Cathay

  from the Chinese of Rihaku

  The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

  While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

  I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

  You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

  You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

  And we went on living in the village of Chokan:

  Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

  At fourteen I married My Lord you.

  I never laughed, being bashful.

  Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

  Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

  At fifteen I stopped scowling,

  I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

  Forever and forever and forever.

  Why should I climb the look out?

  At sixteen you departed,

  You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,

  And you have been gone five months.

  The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

  You dragged your feet when you went out.

  By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

  Too deep to clear them away!

  The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

  The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

  Over the grass in the West garden;

  They hurt me. I grow older.

  If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

  Please let me know beforehand,

  And I will come out to meet you

  As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

  Lament of the Frontier Guard

  By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,

  Lonely from the beginning of time until now!

  Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.

  I climb the towers and towers

  to watch out the barbarous land:

  Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.

  There is no wall left to this village.

  Bones white with a thousand frosts,

  High heaps, covered with trees and grass;

  Who brought this to pass?

  Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?

  Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?

  Barbarous kings.

  A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,

  A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,

  Three hundred and sixty thousand,

  And sorrow, sorrow like rain.

  Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.

  Desolate, desolate fields,

  And no children of warfare upon them,

  No longer the men for offence and defence.

  Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,

  With Riboku’s name forgotten,

  And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

  RUPERT BROOKE Peace

  Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

  With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power.

  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

  Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.

  Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

  And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

  And all the little emptiness of love!

  Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,

  Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,

  Naught broken save this body, lost but breath:

  Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there

  But only agony, and that has ending:

  And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

  RUPERT BROOKE Heaven

  Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,

  Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)

  Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,

  Each secret fishy hope or fear.

  Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;

  But is there anything Beyond?

  This life cannot be All, they swear,

  For how unpleasant, if it were!

  One may not doubt that, somehow, Good

  Shall come of Water and of Mud;

  And, sure, the reverent eye must see

  A Purpose in Liquidity.

  We darkly know, by Faith we cry,

  The future is not Wholly Dry.

  Mud unto mud! – Death eddies near –

  Not here the appointed End, not here!

  But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,

  Is wetter water, slimier slime!

  And there (they trust) there swimmeth One

  Who swam ere rivers were begun,

  Immense, of fishy form and mind,

 

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