Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  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