The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  To have squeezed the universe into a ball

  To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

  To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

  Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ –

  If one, settling a pillow by her head,

  Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.

  That is not it, at all.’

  And would it have been worth it, after all,

  Would it have been worth while,

  After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

  After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor –

  And this, and so much more? –

  It is impossible to say just what I mean!

  But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

  Would it have been worth while

  If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

  And turning toward the window, should say:

  ‘That is not it at all,

  That is not what I meant, at all.’

  …..

  No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

  Am an attendant lord, one that will do

  To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

  Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

  Deferential, glad to be of use,

  Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

  Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

  At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –

  Almost, at times, the Fool.

  I grow old… I grow old…

  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

  I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

  I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

  I do not think that they will sing to me.

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

  Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

  When the wind blows the water white and black.

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

  Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

  T. S. ELIOT Aunt Helen

  Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,

  And lived in a small house near a fashionable square

  Cared for by servants to the number of four.

  Now when she died there was silence in heaven

  And silence at her end of the street.

  The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet –

  He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.

  The dogs were handsomely provided for,

  But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.

  The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,

  And the footman sat upon the dining-table

  Holding the second housemaid on his knees –

  Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

  ISAAC ROSENBERG Break of Day in the Trenches

  The darkness crumbles away.

  It is the same old druid Time as ever,

  Only a live thing leaps my hand,

  A queer sardonic rat,

  As I pull the parapet’s poppy

  To stick behind my ear.

  Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

  Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

  Now you have touched this English hand

  You will do the same to a German

  Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

  To cross the sleeping green between.

  It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

  Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

  Less chanced than you for life,

  Bonds to the whims of murder,

  Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

  The torn fields of France.

  What do you see in our eyes

  At the shrieking iron and flame

  Hurled through still heavens?

  What quaver – what heart aghast?

  Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

  Drop, and are ever dropping;

  But mine in my ear is safe –

  Just a little white with the dust.

  (1922)

  ISAAC ROSENBERG August 1914

  What in our lives is burnt

  In the fire of this?

  The heart’s dear granary?

  The much we shall miss?

  Three lives hath one life –

  Iron, honey, gold.

  The gold, the honey gone –

  Left is the hard and cold.

  Iron are our lives

  Molten right through our youth.

  A burnt space through ripe fields,

  A fair mouth’s broken tooth.

  (1937)

  ISAAC ROSENBERG

  A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,

  Babylon and Rome:

  Not Paris raped tall Helen,

  But this incestuous worm,

  Who lured her vivid beauty

  To his amorphous sleep.

  England! famous as Helen

  Is thy betrothal sung

  To him the shadowless,

  More amorous than Solomon.

  (1937)

  THOMAS HARDY During Wind and Rain

  They sing their dearest songs –

  He, she, all of them – yea,

  Treble and tenor and bass,

  And one to play;

  With the candles mooning each face.…

  Ah, no; the years O!

  How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

  They clear the creeping moss –

  Elders and juniors – aye,

  Making the pathways neat

  And the garden gay;

  And they build a shady seat.…

  Ah, no; the years, the years;

  See, the white storm-birds wing across.

  They are blithely breakfasting all –

  Men and maidens – yea,

  Under the summer tree,

  With a glimpse of the bay,

  While pet fowl come to the knee….

  Ah, no; the years O!

  And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

  They change to a high new house,

  He, she, all of them – aye,

  Clocks and carpets and chairs

  On the lawn all day,

  And brightest things that are theirs.…

  Ah, no; the years, the years;

  Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

  EDWARD THOMAS Old Man

  Old Man, or Lad’s-love, – in the name there’s nothing

  To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man,

  The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,

  Growing with rosemary and lavender.

  Even to one that knows it well, the names

  Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:

  At least, what that is clings not to the names

  In spite of time. And yet I like the names.

  The herb itself I like not, but for certain

  I love it, as some day the child will love it

  Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush

  Whenever she goes in or out of the house.

  Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling

  The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps

  Thinking, perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs

  Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still

  But half as tall as she, though it is as old;

  So well she clips it. Not a word she says;

  And I can only wonder how much hereafter

  She will remember, with that bitter scent,

  Of garden rows, and ancient damson-trees

  Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door,

  A low thick bush beside the door, a
nd me

  Forbidding her to pick.

  As for myself,

  Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.

  I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,

  Sniff them and think and sniff again and try

  Once more to think what it is I am remembering,

  Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,

  Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,

  With no meaning, than this bitter one.

  I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray

  And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;

  Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait

  For what I should, yet never can, remember:

  No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush

  Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside,

  Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;

  Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.

  EDWARD THOMAS Tall Nettles

  Tall nettles cover up, as they have done

  These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough

  Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:

  Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

  This corner of the farmyard I like most:

  As well as any bloom upon a flower

  I like the dust on the nettles, never lost

  Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

  EDWARD THOMAS Blenheim Oranges

  Gone, gone again,

  May, June, July,

  And August gone,

  Again gone by,

  Not memorable

  Save that I saw them go,

  As past the empty quays

  The rivers flow.

  And now again,

  In the harvest rain,

  The Blenheim oranges

  Fall grubby from the trees,

  As when I was young –

  And when the lost one was here –

  And when the war began

  To turn young men to dung.

  Look at the old house,

  Outmoded, dignified,

  Dark and untenanted,

  With grass growing instead

  Of the footsteps of life,

  The friendliness, the strife;

  In its beds have lain

  Youth, love, age and pain:

  I am something like that;

  Only I am not dead,

  Still breathing and interested

  In the house that is not dark: –

  I am something like that:

  Not one pane to reflect the sun,

  For the schoolboys to throw at –

  They have broken every one.

  EDWARD THOMAS Rain

  Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

  On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me

  Remembering again that I shall die

  And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks

  For washing me cleaner than I have been

  Since I was born into this solitude.

  Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:

  But here I pray that none whom once I loved

  Is dying tonight or lying still awake

  Solitary, listening to the rain,

  Either in pain or thus in sympathy

  Helpless among the living and the dead,

  Like a cold water among broken reeds,

  Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,

  Like me who have no love which this wild rain

  Has not dissolved except the love of death,

  If love it be towards what is perfect and

  Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

  WILFRED OWEN Futility 1918

  Move him into the sun –

  Gently its touch awoke him once,

  At home, whispering of fields half-sown.

  Always it woke him, even in France,

  Until this morning and this snow.

  If anything might rouse him now

  The kind old sun will know.

  Think how it wakes the seeds –

  Woke once the clays of a cold star.

  Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides

  Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?

  Was it for this the clay grew tall?

  – O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

  To break earth’s sleep at all?

  WILFRED OWEN Anthem for Doomed Youth

  What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

  – Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

  Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

  Can patter out their hasty orisons.

  No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

  Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –

  The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

  And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

  What candles may be held to speed them all?

  Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

  Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

  The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

  Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

  And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

  (1920)

  WILFRED OWEN The Send-Off

  Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way

  To the siding-shed,

  And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

  Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray

  As men’s are, dead.

  Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp

  Stood staring hard,

  Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.

  Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp

  Winked to the guard.

  So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.

  They were not ours:

  We never heard to which front these were sent;

  Nor there if they yet mock what women meant

  Who gave them flowers.

  Shall they return to beating of great bells

  In wild train-loads?