The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  And Mrs Roebeck will be there.

  And then to-morrow someone says

  That someone else has made a hit

  In one of Mister Twister’s plays,

  And off we go to yawn at it;

  And when it’s petered out we quit

  For number 20, Taunton Square,

  And smoke, and drink, and dance a bit: –

  And Mrs Roebeck will be there.

  And so through each declining phase

  Of emptied effort, jaded wit,

  And day by day of London days

  Obscurely, more obscurely, lit;

  Until the uncertain shadows flit

  Announcing to the shuddering air

  A Darkening, and the end of it: –

  And Mrs Roebeck will be there.

  Envoi

  Prince, on their iron thrones they sit,

  Impassable to our despair,

  The dreadful Guardians of the Pit: –

  And Mrs Roebeck will be there.

  W. B. YEATS Leda and the Swan

  A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

  Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

  By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

  He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

  How can those terrified vague fingers push

  The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

  And how can body, laid in that white rush,

  Bur feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

  A shudder in the loins engenders there

  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

  And Agamemnon dead.

  Being so caught up,

  So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

  Did she put on his knowledge with his power

  Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

  1925ROBERT GRAVES Love Without Hope

  Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher

  Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter,

  So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly

  Singing about her head, as she rode by.

  ROBERT BRIDGES To Francis Jammes

  ’Tis April again in my garden, again the grey stone-wall

  Is prankt with yellow alyssum and lilac aubrey-cresses;

  Half-hidden the mavis caroleth in the tassely birchen tresses

  And awhile on the sunny air a cuckoo tuneth his call:

  Now cometh to mind a singer whom country joys enthral,

  Francis Jammes, so grippeth him Nature in her caresses

  She hath steep’d his throat in the honey’d air of her wildernesses

  With beauty that countervails the Lutetian therewithal.

  You are here in spirit, dear poet, and bring a motley group,

  Your friends, afore you sat stitching your heavenly trousseau –

  The courteous old road-mender, the queer Jean Jacques Rousseau,

  Columbus, Confucius, all to my English garden they troop,

  Under his goatskin umbrella the provident Robinson Crusoe,

  And the ancestor dead long ago in Domingo or Guadaloupe.

  EDMUND BLUNDEN The Midnight Skaters

  The hop-poles stand in cones,

  The icy pond lurks under,

  The pole-tops steeple to the thrones

  Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder;

  But not the tallest there, ’tis said,

  Could fathom to this pond’s black bed.

  Then is not death at watch

  Within those secret waters?

  What wants he but to catch

  Earth’s heedless sons and daughters?

  With but a crystal parapet

  Between, he has his engines set.

  Then on, blood shouts, on, on,

  Twirl, wheel and whip above him,

  Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,

  Use him as though you love him;

  Court him, elude him, reel and pass,

  And let him hate you through the glass.

  BASIL BUNTING from Villon

  Remember, imbeciles and wits,

  sots and ascetics, fair and foul,

  young girls with little tender tits,

  that DEATH is written over all.

  Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul

  they are so rotten, old and thin,

  or firm and soft and warm and full –

  fellmonger Death gets every skin.

  All that is piteous, all that’s fair,

  all that is fat and scant of breath,

  Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,

  is Death’s collateral:

  Three score and ten years after sight

  of this pay me your pulse and breath

  value received. And who dare cite,

  as we forgive our debtors, Death?

  Abelard and Eloise,

  Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne,

  Genée, Lopokova, all these

  die, die in pain.

  And General Grant and General Lee,

  Patti and Florence Nightingale,

  like Tyro and Antiope

  drift among ghosts in Hell,

  know nothing, are nothing, save a fume

  driving across a mind

  preoccupied with this: our doom

  is, to be sifted by the wind,

  heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands.

  We are less permanent than thought.

  The Emperor with the Golden Hands

  is still a word, a tint, a tone,

  insubstantial-glorious,

  when we ourselves are dead and gone

  and the green grass growing over us.

  EDWIN MUIR Childhood

  Long time he lay upon the sunny hill,

  To his father’s house below securely bound.

  Far off the silent, changing sound was still,

  With the black islands lying thick around.

  He saw each separate height, each vaguer hue,

  Where the massed islands rolled in mist away,

  And though all ran together in his view

  He knew that unseen straits between them lay.

  Often he wondered what new shores were there.

  In thought he saw the still light on the sand,

  The shallow water clear in tranquil air,

  And walked through it in joy from strand to strand.

  Over the sound a ship so slow would pass

  That in the black hill’s gloom it seemed to lie.

  The evening sound was smooth like sunken glass,

  And time seemed finished ere the ship passed by.

  Grey tiny rocks slept round him where he lay,

  Moveless as they, more still as evening came,

  The grasses threw straight shadows far away,

  And from the house his mother called his name.

  HUGH MACDIARMID from Sangschaw

  The Watergaw

  Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle

  I saw yon antrin thing,

  A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht

  Ayont the on-ding;

  5

  An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied

  Afore ye deed!

  There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose

  That nicht – an’ nane i’ mine;

  But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht

  10

  Ever sin’ syne;

  An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken

  What your look meant then.

  HUGH MACDIARMID The Eemis Stane

  I’ the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht

  The warl’ like an eemis stane

  Wags i’ the lift;

  An’ my eerie memories fa’

  5

  Like a yowdendrift.

  Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read

  The words cut oot i’ the stane

  Had the fug o’ fame

  An’ history’s hazelra
w

  10

  No’ yirdit thaim.

  1926HUGH MACDIARMID Empty Vessel

  I met ayont the cairney

  A lass wi’ tousie hair

  Singin’ till a bairnie

  That was nae langer there.

  5

  Wunds wi’ warlds to swing

  Dinna sing sae sweet,

  The licht that bends owre a’ thing

  Is less ta’en up wi’t.

  HUGH MACDIARMID from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle

  O wha’s the bride that cairries the bunch

  O’ thistles blinterin’ white?

  Her cuckold bridegroom little dreids

  What he sall ken this nicht.

  5

  For closer than gudeman can come

  And closer to’r than hersel’,

  Wha didna need her maidenheid

  Has wrocht his purpose fell.

  O wha’s been here afore me, lass,

  10

  And hoo did he get in?

  – A man that deed or I was born

  This evil thing has din.

  And left, as it were on a corpse,

  Your maidenheid to me?

  15

  – Nae lass, gudeman, sin’ Time began

  ‘S hed ony mair to gi’e.

  But I can gi’e ye kindness, lad,

  And a pair o’ willin’ hands,

  And you sail ha’e my briests like stars,

  20

  My limbs like willow wands,

  And on my lips ye’ll heed nae mair,

  And in my hair forget,

  The seed o’ a’ the men that in

  My virgin womb ha’e met…

  JAMES JOYCE from Pomes Penyeach 1927

  Bahnhofstrasse

  The eyes that mock me sign the way

  Whereto I pass at eve of day,

  Grey way whose violet signals are

  The trysting and the twining star.

  Ah star of evil! star of pain!

  Highhearted youth comes not again

  Nor old heart’s wisdom yet to know

  The signs that mock me as I go.

  (written 1918)

  THOMAS HARDY Lying Awake 1928

  You, Morningtide Star, now are steady-eyed, over the east,

  I know it as if I saw you;

  You, Beeches, engrave on the sky your thin twigs, even the least;

  Had I paper and pencil I’d draw you.

  You, Meadow, are white with your counterpane cover of dew,

  I see it as if I were there;

  You, Churchyard, are lightening faint from the shade of the yew,

  The names creeping out everywhere.

  AUSTIN CLARKE The Planter’s Daughter

  When night stirred at sea

  And the fire brought a crowd in,

  They say that her beauty

  Was music in mouth

  And few in the candlelight

  Thought her too proud,

  For the house of the planter

  Is known by the trees.

  Men that had seen her

  Drank deep and were silent,

  The women were speaking

  Wherever she went –

  As a bell that is rung

  Or a wonder told shyly,

  And O she was the Sunday

  In every week.

  W. B. YEATS Sailing to Byzantium

  That is no country for old men. The young

  In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,

  – Those dying generations – at their song,

  The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

  Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

  Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

  Caught in that sensual music all neglect

  Monuments of unageing intellect.

  An aged man is but a paltry thing,

  A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

  Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

  For every tatter in its mortal dress,

  Nor is there singing school but studying

  Monuments of its own magnificence;

  And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

  To the holy city of Byzantium.

  O sages standing in God’s holy fire

  As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

  Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

  And be the singing-masters of my soul.

  Consume my heart away; sick with desire

  And fastened to a dying animal

  It knows not what it is; and gather me

  Into the artifice of eternity.

  Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  W. B. YEATS from Meditations in Time of Civil War

  V The Road at My Door

  An affable Irregular,

  A heavily-built Falstaffian man,

  Comes cracking jokes of civil war

  As though to die by gunshot were

  The finest play under the sun.

  A brown Lieutenant and his men,

  Half dressed in national uniform,

  Stand at my door, and I complain

  Of the foul weather, hail and rain,

  A pear tree broken by the storm.

  I count those feathered balls of soot

  The moor-hen guides upon the stream,

  To silence the envy in my thought;

  And turn towards my chamber, caught

  In the cold snows of a dream.

  VI The Stare’s Nest by My Window

  The bees build in the crevices

  Of loosening masonry, and there

  The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

  My wall is loosening; honey-bees,