With glory and anguish striving, drew far on
And all became a drone, that in decline
From summer’s bravery changed to autumn chill,
And as the music vague and piteous grew,
I saw the mist die from its pleasant charm,
Now fierce with early frost its numb shroud lay
Along sad ridges, and as one aloof
I saw the praying rockets mile on mile
Climb all too weak from those entangled there
Climb for the help that could not help them there;
And even these purple vapours died away
And left the surly evening brown as clay
Upon those ridges battered into chaos
Whence one deep moaning, one deep moaning came.
Masks of Time (1925)
Harvest
So there’s my year, the twelvemonth duly told,
Since last I climbed this brow and gloated round
Upon the lands heaped with their wheaten gold,
And now again they spread with wealth imbrowned,
And thriftless I meanwhile,
What honeycombs have I to take, what sheaves to pile?
I see some shrivelled fruits upon my tree,
And gladly would self-kindness feign them sweet;
The bloom smelled heavenly, can these stragglers be
The fruit of that bright birth? and this wry wheat,
Can this be from those spires
Which I, or fancy, saw leap to the spring sun’s fires?
I peer and count, but anxious is not rich,
My harvest is not come, the weeds run high
Even poison-berries ramping from the ditch
Have stormed the undefended ridges by;
What Michaelmas is mine!
The fields I thought to serve, for sturdier tillage pine.
But hush – Earth’s valleys sweet in leisure lie,
And I among them, wandering up and down,
Will taste their berries, like a bird or fly,
And of their gleanings make both feast and crown;
The Sun’s eye laughing looks,
And Earth accuses none that goes among her stooks.
A Dream
Unriddle this. Last night my dream
Took me along a sullen stream,
A water drifting black and ill,
With idiot swirls, and silent still.
As if it had been Pactolus
And I of gold sands amorous
I went determined on its bank,
Stopped in that breath of dim and dank,
And in my hand (in dream’s way) took
A living fish to bait my hook,
A living fish, not gudgeon quite
Nor dace nor roach, a composite;
Then ghoulishly with fingers, yet
With aching mind, I strove to get
The pang of shackling metal through
The mouth of that poor mad perdu,
And (ran the bitter fancy’s plot)
To tie his body in a knot.
While thus I groped and grasped and coiled
And he in horror flapped and foiled,
I saw how on the clay around
Young shining fishes leapt and clowned,
And often turned their eyes on me,
Begging their watery liberty,
Most sad and odd. But, thought I, now
I have no time for helping you,
And then at length my bait was hooked,
His shuddering tail grotesquely crooked.
Black was the secret-dimpling stream,
I flounced him to the line’s extreme,
And then, his mercy! gladdening me
Who just had been his agony,
Some monstrous mouth beat out his brain,
The line cut wide its graphs of strain.
I knew my prize, and fought my best
With thought and thew – then the fight ceased.
Sobbing I feared the quarry gone,
But no, the dead-weight showed him on,
Slow to the mould I pulled the huge
Half-legend from his subterfuge,
And as he from the water thrust
His head, and cleared its scurf and must,
Two eyes as old as Adam stared
On mine. And now he lay unbared:
My glory! On the bleak bank lay
A carcass effigy in clay,
A trunk of vague and lethal mass
Such as might lie beneath filmed glass,
Where on the pane the buzzing fly
Batters to win the desperate sky.
Intimations of Mortality
– I am only the phrase
Of an unknown musician;
By a gentle voice spoken
I stole forth and met you
In halcyon days.
Yet, frail as I am, you yourself shall be broken
Before we are parted; I have but one mission:
Till death to beset you.
– I am only the glowing
Of a dead afternoon,
When you, full of wonder,
Your hand in your mother’s,
Up great streets were going.
Pale was my flame, and the cold sun fell under
The blue heights of houses; but I shall gleam on
In your life past all others.
– I am only the bloom
Of an apple-tree’s roses,
That stooped to the grass
Where the robins were nesting
In an old vessel’s womb.
Dead is the tree, and your steps may not pass
The place where it smiled; but I’ll come, till death closes
My ghostly molesting.
– You phantoms, pursue me,
Be upon me, amaze me,
Though nigh all your presence
With sorrow enchant me,
With sorrow renew me!
Songless and gleamless, I near no new pleasance,
In subtle returnings of ecstasy raise me,
To my winding-sheet haunt me!
Strange Perspective
Happy the herd that in the heat of summer
Wades in the waters where the willows cool them,
From a murmuring midday that singes the meadow;
And naked at noon there naughtiness wantons
From bank bold jumping, and bough down dandling,
Of chimed hour chainless, and churlish duty.
I see the glad set, who am far off sentenced;
Their lily limbs dazzle over long dry pastures,
And, rude though ridges are risen between us,
Miles of mountains morosely upthrusting;
And dim and downward my gaze now droops,
My pool beyond pasture by a strange perspective
Is plain, and plunging its playmates gleam,
Hustling the staid herd into hazardous shadows.
Two Voices
‘There’s something in the air,’ he said
In the large parlour cool and bare,
The plain words in his hearers bred
A tumult, yet in silence there
All waited; wryly gay, he left the phrase,
Ordered the march, and bade us go our ways.
‘We’re going South, man’; as he spoke
The howitzer with huge ping-bang
Racked the light hut; as thus he broke
The death-news, bright the skylarks sang;
He took his riding-crop and humming went
Among the apple-trees all bloom and scent.
Now far withdraws the roaring night
Which wrecked our flower after the first
Of those two voices; misty light
Shrouds Thiepval Wood and all its worst:
But still ‘There’s something in the air’ I hear,
And still ‘We’re going South, man,’ deadly near.
Preparations for Victory
My soul, dread not
the pestilence that hags
The valley; flinch not you, my body young,
At these great shouting smokes and snarling jags
Of fiery iron: the dice may not be flung
As yet that claims you. Manly move among
These ruins, and what you must do, do well;
Look, here are gardens, there mossed boughs are hung
With apples whose bright cheeks none might excel,
And here’s a house as yet unshattered by a shell.
‘I’ll do my best,’ the soul makes sad reply,
‘And I will mark the yet unmurdered tree,
The tokens of dear homes that court the eye,
And yet I see them not as I would see.
Hovering between, a ghostly enemy
Sickens the light, and poisoned, withered, wan,
The least defiled turns desperate to me.’
The body, poor unpitied Caliban,
Parches and sweats and grunts to win the name of Man.
Hours, days, eternities, like swelling waves
Pass on, and still we drudge in this dark maze,
The bombs and coils and cans by strings of slaves
Are borne to serve the coming day of days;
Grey sleep in slimy cellars scarce allays
With its brief blank the burden. Look, we lose;
The sky is gone, the lightless, drenching haze
Of rainstorms chills the bone; earth, air are foes,
The black fiend leaps brick-red as life’s last picture goes.
Zero
O rosy red, O torrent splendour
Staining all the Orient sky,
O celestial work of wonder,
A million mornings in one dye!
What, does the artist of creation
Try some new plethora of flame,
For his eyes’ fresh fascination,
Has the old cosmic fire grown tame?
In what subnatural strange awaking
Is this body, which seems mine?
These feet towards that blood-burst making,
These ears which thunder, these hands which twine
On grotesque iron? Icy-clear
The air of a mortal day shocks sense,
My shaking men pant after me here.
The acid vapours hovering dense,
The fury whizzing in dozens down,
The clattering rafters, clods calcined,
The blood in the flints and the trackway brown,
I see I am clothed and in my right mind;
The dawn but hangs behind the goal.
What is that artist’s joy to me?
Here limps poor Jock with a gash in the poll,
His red blood now is the red I see.
The swooning white of him, and that red!
These bombs in boxes, the craunch of shells,
The second-hand flitting round; ahead!
It’s plain, we were born for this, naught else.
At Senlis Once
O how comely it was and how reviving
When with clay and with death no longer striving
Down firm roads we came to houses
With women chattering and green grass thriving.
Now though rains in a cataract descended,
We could glow, with our tribulation ended –
Count not days, the present only
Was thought of, how could it ever be expended?
Clad so cleanly, this remnant of poor wretches
Picked up life like the hens in orchard ditches,
Gazed on the mill-sails, heard the church-bell,
Found an honest glass all manner of riches.
How they crowded the barn with lusty laughter,
Hailed the pierrots and shook each shadowy rafter,
Even could ridicule their own sufferings,
Sang as though nothing but joy came after!
Pillbox
Just see what’s happening Worley. – Worley rose
And round the angled doorway thrust his nose,
And Sergeant Hoad went too to snuff the air.
Then war brought down his fist, and missed the pair!
Yet Hoad was scratched by a splinter, the blood came,
And out sprang terrors that he’d striven to tame,
A good man, Hoad, for weeks. I’m blown to bits,
He groans, he screams. Come Bluffer, where’s your wits?
Says Worley, Bluffer, you’ve a blighty, man!
All in the pillbox urged him, here began
His freedom: Think of Eastbourne and your dad.
The poor man lay at length and brief and mad
Flung out his cry of doom; soon ebbed and dumb
He yielded. Worley with a tot of rum
And shouting in his face could not restore him.
The ship of Charon over channel bore him.
All marvelled even on that most deathly day
To see this life so spirited away.
The Welcome
He’d scarcely come from leave and London,
Still was carrying a leather case,
When he surprised Headquarters pillbox
And sat down sweating in the filthy place.
He was a tall, lean, pale-looked creature,
With nerves that seldom ceased to wince,
Past war had long preyed on his nature,
And war had doubled in horror since.
There was a lull, the adjutant even
Came to my hole: ‘You cheerful sinner,
If nothing happens till half-past seven,
Come over then, we’re going to have dinner.’
Back he went with his fierce red head;
We were sourly canvassing his jauntiness, when
Something happened at Headquarters pillbox.
‘Don’t go there,’ cried one of my men.
The shell had struck right into the doorway,
The smoke lazily floated away;
There were six men in that concrete doorway,
Now a black muckheap blocked the way.
Inside, one who had scarcely shaken
The air of England out of his lungs
Was alive, and sane; it shall be spoken
While any of those who were there have tongues.
The Ancre at Hamel
Where tongues were loud and hearts were light
I heard the Ancre flow;
Waking oft at the mid of night
I heard the Ancre flow.
I heard it crying, that sad rill,
Below the painful ridge,
By the burnt unraftered mill
And the relic of a bridge.
And could this sighing water seem
To call me far away,
And its pale word dismiss as dream
The voices of to-day?
The voices in the bright room chilled
And that mourned on alone,
The silence of the full moon filled
With that brook’s troubling tone.
The struggling Ancre had no part
In these new hours of mine,
And yet its stream ran through my heart,
I heard it grieve and pine,
As if its rainy tortured blood
Had swirled into my own
When by its battered bank I stood
And shared its wounded moan.
English Poems (1926)
Country Sale
Under the thin green sky, the twilight day,
The old home lies in public sad array,
Its time being come, the lots ranged out in rows,
And to each lot a ghost. The gathering grows
With every minute, neckcloths and gold pins;
Poverty’s purples; red necks, horny skins,
Odd peeping eyes, thin lips and hooking chins.
Then for the skirmish, and the thrusting groups
Bidding for tubs and wire and chicken coops,
While yet the women hang apart and eye
> Their friends and foes and reckon who will buy.
The noisy field scarce knows itself, not one
Takes notice of the old man’s wavering moan
Who hobbles with his hand still brushing tears
And cries how this belonged here sixty years,
And picks his brother’s picture from the mass
Of frames; and still from heap to heap folks pass.
The strife of tongues even tries the auctioneer,
Who, next the dealer smirking to his leer,
A jumped-up jerky cockerel on his box,
Runs all his rigs, cracks all his jokes and mocks;
‘Madam, now never weary of well-doing,’
The heavy faces gleam to hear him crowing.
And swift the old home’s fading. Here he bawls
The white four-poster, with its proud recalls,
But we on such old-fashioned lumber frown;
‘Passing away at a florin,’ grins the clown.
Here Baskett’s Prayer Book with his black and red
Finds no more smile of welcome than the bed,
Though policeman turn the page with wisdom’s looks:
The hen-wives see no sense in such old books.
Here painted trees and well-feigned towers arise,
And ships before the wind, that sixpence buys.
All’s sold; then hasty vanmen pile and rope
Their loads, and ponies stumble up the slope
And all are gone, the trampled paddock’s bare;
The children round the building run and blare,
Thinking what times these are! not knowing how
The heavy-handed fate has brought them low,
Till quarter loaf be gone too soon today,
And none is due tomorrow. Long, then, play,
And make the lofts re-echo through the eve,
And sweeten so the bitter taking-leave.
So runs the world away. Years hence shall find
Selected Poems Page 6
