Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  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.
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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