And staring ruffe steal up the stream
Hard by their glutted tyrant, now
Still as a sunken bough.
He on the sandbank lies,
Sunning himself long hours
With stony gorgon eyes:
Westward the hot sun lowers.
Sudden the grey pike changes, and quivering poises for slaughter;
Intense terror wakens around him, the shoals scud awry, but there chances
A chub unsuspecting; the prowling fins quicken, in fury he lances;
And the miller that opens the hatch stands amazed at the whirl in the water.
1919
The Unchangeable
Though I within these two last years of grace
Have seen bright Ancre scourged to brackish mire,
And meagre Belgian becks by dale and chace
Stamped into sloughs of death with battering fire, –
Spite of all this, I sing you high and low,
My old loves, waters, be you shoal or deep,
Waters whose lazy and continual flow
Learns at the drizzling weir the tongue of sleep.
For Sussex cries from primrose lags and brakes,
‘Why do you leave my woods untrod so long?
Still float the bronze carp on my lilied lakes,
Still the wood-fairies round my spring wells throng;
And chancing lights on willowy waterbreaks
Dance to the dabbling brooks’ midsummer song.’
1917
A Waterpiece
The wild-rose bush lets loll
Her sweet-breathed petals on the pearl-smooth pool,
The bream-pool overshadowed with the cool
Of oaks where myriad mumbling wings patrol.
There the live dimness burrs with droning glees
Of hobby-horses with their starting eyes,
And violet humble-bees and dizzy flies;
That from the dewsprings drink the honeyed lees.
Up the slow stream the immemorial bream
(For when had Death dominion over them?)
Through green pavilions of ghost leaf and stem,
A conclave of blue shadows in a dream,
Glide on; idola that forgotten plan,
Incomparably wise, the doom of man.
1919
A Country God
When groping farms are lanterned up
And stolchy ploughlands hid in grief,
And glimmering byroads catch the drop
That weeps from sprawling twig and leaf,
And heavy-hearted spins the wind
Among the tattered flags of Mirth, –
Then who but I flit to and fro,
With shuddering speech, with mope and mow,
And glass the eyes of Earth?
Then haunt I by some moaning brook
Where lank and snaky brambles swim
Or where the hill pines swartly look
I whirry through the dark and hymn
A dull-voiced dirge and threnody,
An echo of the world’s sad drone
That now appals the friendly stars –
O wail for blind brave youth whose wars
Turn happiness to stone.
How rang my cavern-shades of old
To my melodious pipes, and then
My bright-haired bergomask patrolled
Each lawn and plot for laughter’s din:
Never a sower flung broadcast,
No hedger brished nor scythesman swung,
Nor maiden trod the purpling press,
But I was by to guard and bless
And for their solace sung.
* * *
But now the sower’s hand is writhed
In livid death, the bright rhythm stolen,
The gold grain flatted and unscythed,
The boars in the vineyard, gnarled and sullen,
Havocking the grapes; and the pouncing wind
Spins the spattered leaves of the glen
In a mockery dance, death’s hue-and-cry;
With all my murmurous pipes flung by,
And summer not to come again.
1918
In Festubert
Now everything that shadowy thought
Lets peer with bedlam eyes at me
From alleyways and thoroughfares
Of cynic and ill memory
Lifts a gaunt head, sullenly stares,
Shuns me as a child has shunned
A hizzing dragonfly that daps
Above his mudded pond.
Now bitter frosts, muffling the morn
In old days, crunch the grass anew;
There, where the floods made fields forlorn
The glinzy ice grows thicker through.
The pollards glower like mummies when
Thieves pierce the long-locked pyramid,
Inscrutable as those dead men
With painted mask and balm-cloth hid;
And all the old delight is cursed
Redoubling present undelight.
Splinter, crystal, splinter and burst;
And sear no more with second sight.
1916
Perch-Fishing
For G.W. Palmer
On the far hill the cloud of thunder grew
And sunlight blurred below: but sultry blue
Burned yet on the valley water where it hoards
Behind the miller’s elmen floodgate boards,
And there the wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed
In the vole’s empty house, still drove afield
To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees
And build their young ones their hutched nurseries;
Still creaked the grasshoppers’ rasping unison
Nor had the whisper through the tansies run
Nor weather-wisest bird gone home.
How then
Should wry eels in the pebbled shallows ken
Lightning coming? troubled up they stole
To the deep-shadowed sullen water-hole,
Among whose warty snags the quaint perch lair.
As cunning stole the boy to angle there,
Muffling least tread, with no noise balancing through
The hangdog alder-boughs his bright bamboo.
Down plumbed the shuttled ledger, and the quill
On the quicksilver water lay dead still.
A sharp snatch, swirling to-fro of the line,
He’s lost, he’s won, with splash and scuffling shine
Past the low-lapping brandy-flowers drawn in,
The ogling hunchback perch with needled fin.
And there beside him one as large as he,
Following his hooked mate, careless who shall see
Or what befall him, close and closer yet –
The startled boy might take him in his net
That folds the other.
Slow, while on the clay
The other flounces, slow he sinks away.
What agony usurps that watery brain
For comradeship of twenty summers slain,
For such delights below the flashing weir
And up the sluice-cut, playing buccaneer
Among the minnows; lolling in hot sun
When bathing vagabonds had drest and done;
Rootling in salty flannel-weed for meal
And river-shrimps, when hushed the trundling wheel;
Snapping the dapping moth, and with new wonder
Prowling through old drowned barges falling asunder.
And O a thousand things the whole year through
They did together, never more to do.
1919
Malefactors
Nailed to these green laths long ago,
You cramp and shrivel into dross,
Blotched with mildews, gnawed with moss,
And now the eye can scarcely know
The snake among you from the kite –
So sharp does Death’s fang bite.
<
br /> I guess your stories; you were shot
Hovering above the miller’s chicks;
And you, coiled on his threshold bricks –
Hissing, you died; and you, Sir Stoat,
Dazzled with stableman’s lantern stood
And tasted crabtree wood.
Here then you leered-at luckless churls,
Clutched to your clumsy gibbet, shrink
To shapeless orts; hard by the brink
Of this black scowling pond that swirls
To turn the wheel beneath the mill,
The wheel so long since still.
There’s your revenge, the wheel at tether,
The miller gone, the white planks rotten,
The very name of the mill forgotten,
Dimness and silence met together…
Felons of fur and feather, can
There lurk some crime in man –
In man your executioner,
Whom here Fate’s cudgel battered down?
Did he too filch from squire and clown?…
The damp gust makes the ivy whir
Like passing death, the sluices well,
Dreary as a passing-bell.
1919
Clare’s Ghost
Pitch-dark night shuts in, and the rising gale
Is full of the presage of rain,
And there comes a withered wail
From the wainscot and jarring pane,
And a long funeral surge
Like a wood-god’s dirge,
Like the wash of the shoreward tides, from the firs on the crest.
The shaking hedges blacken, the last gold flag
Lowers from the west;
The Advent bell moans wild like a witch hag
In the storm’s unrest,
And the lychgate lantern’s candle weaves a shroud,
And the unlatched gate shrieks loud.
Up fly the smithy sparks, but are baffled from soaring
By the pelting scurry, and ever
As puff the bellows, a multitude more outpouring
Die foiled in the endeavour;
And a stranger stands with me here in the glow
Chinked through the door, and marks
The sparks
Perish in whirlpool wind, and if I go
To the delta of cypress, where the glebe gate cries,
I see him there, with his streaming hair
And his eyes
Piercing beyond our human firmament,
Lit with a burning deathless discontent.
1917
The Shepherd and other poems of peace and war (1922)
11th R.S.R.
How bright a dove’s wing shows against the sky
When thunder’s blackening up in monstrous cloud;
How silver clear against war’s hue and cry
Each syllable of peace the gods allowed!
Even common things in anguish have grown rare
As legends of a richer life gone by,
Like flowers that in their time are no one’s care,
But blooming late are loved and grudged to die.
What mercy is it, that I live and move,
If haunted ever by war’s agony?
Nature is love and will remember love,
And kindly uses those whom fear set free;
Let me not even think of you as dead,
O never dead! you live, your old songs yet
Pass me each day, your faith still routs my dread,
Your past and future are my parapet.
You looked before and after! these calm shires,
The doting sun, the orchards all aflame,
These joyful flocking swallows round the spires,
Bonfires and turreted stacks – well may you claim,
Still seeing these sweet familiar bygones, all!
Still dwells in you their has-been, their to-be,
And walking in their light you fear no fall.
This is your holding: mine, across the sea,
Where much I find to trace old friendship by:
‘Here one bade us farewell,’ ‘Here supped we then,’
‘Wit never sweeter fell than that July’ –
Even sometimes comes the praise of better men.
The land lies like a jewel in the mind,
And featured sharp shall lie when other fades,
And through its veins the eternal memories wind
As that lost column down its colonnades.
Flat parcelled fields the scanty paths scored through,
Woods where no guns thrust their lean muzzles out,
Small smoky inns, we laughed at war’s ado!
And clutching death, to hear, fell into doubt.
Christ at each crossroad hung, rich belfries tolling,
Old folks a-digging, weathercocks turned torches,
Half-hearted railways, flimsy millsails rolling –
Not one, but by the host for ever marches.
Forefathers
Here they went with smock and crook,
Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade,
Here they mudded out the brook
And here their hatchet cleared the glade:
Harvest-supper woke their wit,
Huntsmen’s moon their wooings lit.
From this church they led their brides,
From this church themselves were led
Shoulder-high; on these waysides
Sat to take their beer and bread.
Names are gone – what men they were
These their cottages declare.
Names are vanished, save the few
In the old brown Bible scrawled;
These were men of pith and thew,
Whom the city never called;
Scarce could read or hold a quill,
Built the barn, the forge, the mill.
On the green they watched their sons
Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
As my father once watched me;
While the bat and beetle flew
On the warm air webbed with dew.
Unrecorded, unrenowned,
Men from whom my ways begin,
Here I know you by your ground
But I know you not within –
All is mist, and there survives
Not a moment of your lives.
Like the bee that now is blown
Honey-heavy on my hand,
From his toppling tansy-throne
In the green tempestuous land, –
I’m in clover now, nor know
Who made honey long ago.
November Morning
From the night storm sad wakes the winter day
With sobbings round the yew, and far-off surge
Of broadcast rain; the old house cries dismay,
And rising floods gleam silver on the verge
Of sackclothed skies and melancholy grounds.
On the black hop-pole slats the weazen bine,
The rooks with terror’s tumult take their rounds,
Under the eaves the chattering sparrows pine.
Waked by the bald light from his bed of straw,
The beggar shudders out to steal and gnaw
Sheep’s locusts: leaves the last of many homes –
Where mouldered apples and black shoddy lie,
Hop-shovels spluttered, wickered flasks flung by,
And sharded pots and rusty curry combs.
Spring Night
Through the smothered air the wicker finds
A muttering voice, ‘crick’ cries the embered ash,
Sharp rains knap at the panes beyond the blinds,
The flues and eaves moan, the jarred windows clash;
And like a sea breaking its barriers, flooding
New green abysses with untold uproar,
The cataract nightwind whelms the time of budding,
Swooping in sightless fury off the moor
&
nbsp; Into our valley. Not a star shines. Who
Would guess the martin and the cuckoo come,
The pear in bloom, the bloom gone from the plum,
The cowslips countless as a morning dew?
So mad it blows, so truceless and so grim,
As if day’s host of flowers were a moment’s whim.
Sheet Lightning
When on the green the rag-tag game had stopt
And red the lights through alehouse curtains glowed,
The clambering brake drove out and took the road.
Then on the stern moors all the babble dropt
Among those merry men, who felt the dew
Sweet to the soul and saw the southern blue
Thronged with heat lightning miles and miles abroad,
Working and whickering, snakish, winged and clawed,
Or like an old carp lazily rising and shouldering.
Long the slate cloud flank shook with the death-white smouldering:
Yet not a voice.
The night drooped oven-hot;
Then where the turnpike pierced the black wood plot,
Tongues wagged again and each man felt the grim
Destiny of the hour speak through him,
And then tales came of dwarfs on Starling Hill
And those young swimmers drowned at the roller Mill,
Where on the drowsiest noon an undertow
Famishing for life boiled like a pot below:
And how two higglers at the Walnut Tree
Had curst the Lord in thunderstorm and He
Had struck them dead as soot with lightning then –
It left the tankards whole, it chose the men.
Many a lad and many a lass was named
Who once stept bold and proud; but death had tamed
Their revel on the eve of May; cut short
Selected Poems Page 3
