Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  The mother weeping to her lonely mind,

  In some new place, thin set with makeshift gear,

  For the home she had before the fatal year;

  And still to this same anguish she’ll recur,

  Reckoning up her fine old furniture,

  The tall clock with his church-bell time of day,

  The mirror where so deep the image lay,

  The china with its rivets numbered all,

  Seeming to have them in her hands – poor soul,

  Trembling and crying how these, loved so long,

  So beautiful, all went for an old song.

  Winter: East Anglia

  In a frosty sunset

  So fiery red with cold

  The footballers’ onset

  Rings out glad and bold;

  Then boys from daily tether

  With famous dogs at heel

  In starlight meet together

  And to farther hedges steal;

  Where the rats are pattering

  In and out the stacks,

  Owls with hatred chattering

  Swoop at the terriers’ backs

  And, frost forgot, the chase grows hot

  Till a rat’s a foolish prize,

  But the cornered weasel stands his ground,

  Shrieks at the dogs and the boys set round,

  Shrieks as he knows they stand all round,

  And hard as winter dies.

  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.

  The Puzzle

  The cuckoo with a strong flute,

  The orchard with a mild sigh,

  Bird and blossom so salute

  The rainbow sky.

  The brown herd in the green shade,

  The parson in his lawn chair,

  Poor and gentry both evade

  The furnace air.

  The moon-inveigled mushroom,

  The crocus with her frail horn,

  Gaze in dumb dread through the gloom

  Of late moist morn.

  The dead leaf on the highlands,

  The old tramp on the mill drove,

  Each whirls on nor understands

  God’s freezing love.

  Achronos

  The trunks of trees which I knew glorious green,

  Which I saw felled last year, already show

  Rust-red their rounds, the twisting path between

  Takes its new way already plain as though

  It went this way since years and years ago.

  The plough I saw my friend so often guide,

  Snapped on the sly snag at the spinney side,

  Lies rusting there where brambles overflow;

  As gulfed in limbo lake as buried coins,

  Which, once both bread and wine, now nothing mean.

  The spider dates it not but spins in the heat,

  For what’s time past? but present time is sweet.

  Think, in that churchyard lies fruit of our loins,

  – The child who bright as pearl shone into breath

  With the Egyptian’s first-born shares coeval death.

  Warning to Troops

  What soldier guessed that where the stream descended

  In country dance beneath the colonnade

  Of elms which cooled the halted troop, it played

  Sly music, barely noted, never ended?

  Or who, from war’s concerns a moment missed,

  At some church door turned white as came to him

  One gold note struck by the hidden organist,

  One note long-drawn through caverns cool and dim?

  O marcher, hear. But when thy route and tramp

  Pause by some falling stream, or holy door,

  Be the deaf adder; bear not back to camp

  That embryo music. Double not thy war.

  Shun all such sweet prelusion. March, sing, roar,

  Lest perilous silence gnaw thee evermore.

  In a Country Churchyard

  Earth is a quicksand; yon square tower

  Would still seem bold,

  But its bleak flinty strength each hour

  Is losing hold.

  Small sound of gasping undertow

  In this green bed!

  Who shuts the gate will shut it slow,

  Here sleep the dead.

  Here sleep, or slept; here, chance, they sleep,

  Though still this soil

  As mad and clammed as shoals acreep

  Around them boil.

  The earth slips down to the low brown

  Moss-eaten wall

  Each year, and nettles and grasses drown

  Its crumbling crawl.

  The dog-rose and ox-daisies on

  Time’s tide come twirling,

  And bubble and die where Joy is gone –

  Sleep well, my darling.

  Seldom the sexton with shrewd grin

  Near thy grave-cloth,

  With withered step and mumble thin

  Awakes eve’s moth.

  Not a farm boy dares here destroy,

  Through red-toothed nettles,

  The chiff-chaff’s nest, to strew the shells

  Like fallen petals.

  The silver-hooded moth upsprings,

  The silver hour,

  And wanders on with happy wings

  By the hush tower,

  That reels and whirs, and never drops,

  That still is going;

  For quicksand not an instant stops

  Its deadly flowing.

  And is Joy up and dancing there

  Where deepening blue

  Asks a new star? and is that her hair

  There freshed with dew?

  Here, O the skull of some small wretch,

  Some slaughtered jot,

  Bones white as leaf-strigs or chopped twitch,

  Thus turned fate’s plot.

  So lies thy skull? This earth, even this

  Like quicksand weaves.

  Sleep well, my darling, though I kiss

  Lime or dead leaves.

  Sleep in the flux as on the breast,

  In the vortex loll;

  In mid simoom, my innocence, rest;

  In lightning’s soul

  Bower thyself! But, joyous eyes,

  The deeps drag dull –

  O morning smile and song, so lies

  Thy tiny skull?

  Retreat (1928)

  Solutions

  The swallow flew like lightning over the green

  And through the gate-bars (a hand’s breadth between);

  He hurled his blackness at that chink and won;

  The problem scarcely rose and it was done.

  The spider, chance-confronted with starvation,

  Took up another airy situation;

  His working legs, as it appeared to me,

  Had mastered practical geometry.

  The old dog dreaming in his frowsy cask

  Enjoyed his rest and did not drop his task;

  He knew the person of ‘no fixed abode,’

  And challenged as he shuffled down the road.

  These creatures which (Buffon and I agree)

  Lag far behind the human f
aculty

  Worked out the question set with satisfaction

  And promptly took the necessary action.

  By this successful sang-froid I, employed

  On ‘Who wrote Shakespeare?’ justly felt annoyed,

  And seeing an evening primrose by the fence

  Beheaded it for blooming insolence.

  An Infantryman

  Painfully writhed the few last weeds upon those houseless uplands,

  Cleft pods had dropt their blackened seeds into the trampled clay,

  Wind and rain were running loose, and icy flew the whiplash;

  Masked guns like autumn thunder drummed the outcast year away.

  Hidden a hundred yards ahead with winter’s blinding passion,

  The mule-beat track appeared half-dead, even war’s hot blood congealed;

  The half-dug trenches brimmed like troughs, the camps lay slushed and empty,

  Unless those bitter whistlings proved Death’s army in the field.

  Over the captured ridge above the hurt battalion waited,

  And hardly had sense left to prove if ghost or living passed

  From hole to hole with sunken eyes and slow ironic orders,

  While fiery fountains burst and clanged – and there your lot was cast.

  Yet I saw your health and youth go brightening to the vortex,

  The ghosts on guard, the storm uncouth were then no match for you;

  You smiled, you sang, your courage rang, and to this day I hear it,

  Sunny as a may-day dance, along that spectral avenue.

  Departure

  The beech leaves caught in a moment gust

  Run like bowled pennies in the autumn’s dust

  And topple; frost like rain

  Comes spangling down; through the prismy trees

  Phoebus mistakes our horse for his,

  Such glory clothes his mane.

  The stream makes his glen music alone

  And plays upon shell and pot and stone –

  Our life’s after-refrain;

  Till in the sky the tower’s old song

  Reads us the hour, and reads it wrong,

  And carter-like comes whistling along

  Our casual Anglian train.

  The Match

  In a round cavern of glass, in steely water

  (None yet so comfortless appalled the day)

  A man-eel poised, his lacquer-skin disported

  In desert reds and wharfy green; his eyes too

  Burned like beads of venom.

  Beyond the glass the torturer stood, with thrustings,

  Passes, grimaces, toothy grins, warped oeillades.

  To this black magic mania’s eel retorted

  With fierce yet futile muzzle, and lancing darted

  In an electric rapine, against the wall

  Of glass, or life: those disputants of nothing,

  So acidly attracting, lovingly loathing,

  Driven by cold radii, goblin lovers, seemed yet

  The difficult dumb-show of my generation.

  Undertones of War (1928)

  The Zonnebeke Road

  Morning, if this late withered light can claim

  Some kindred with that merry flame

  Which the young day was wont to fling through space!

  Agony stares from each grey face,

  And yet the day is come; stand down! stand down!

  Your hands unclasp from rifles while you can;

  The frost has pierced them to the bended bone?

  Why see old Stevens there, that iron man,

  Melting the ice to shave his grotesque chin!

  Go ask him, shall we win?

  I never liked this bay, some foolish fear

  Caught me the first time that I came in here;

  That dugout fallen in awakes, perhaps,

  Some formless haunting of some corpse’s chaps.

  True, and wherever we have held the line,

  There were such corners, seeming-saturnine

  For no good cause.

  Now where the Haymarket starts,

  There is no place for soldiers with weak hearts;

  The minenwerfers have it to the inch.

  Look, how the snow-dust whisks along the road,

  Piteous and silly; the stones themselves must flinch

  In this east wind; the low sky like a load

  Hangs over, a dead-weight. But what a pain

  Must gnaw where its clay cheek

  Crushes the shell-chopped trees that fang the plain –

  The ice-bound throat gulps out a gargoyle shriek.

  The wretched wire before the village line

  Rattles like rusty brambles on dead bine,

  And there the daylight oozes into dun;

  Black pillars, those are trees where roadways run.

  Even Ypres now would warm our souls; fond fool,

  Our tour’s but one night old, seven more to cool!

  O screaming dumbness, O dull clashing death,

  Shreds of dead grass and willows, homes and men,

  Watch as you will, men clench their chattering teeth

  And freeze you back with that one hope, disdain.

  Concert Party: Busseboom

  The stage was set, the house was packed,

  The famous troop began;

  Our laughter thundered, act by act;

  Time light as sunbeams ran.

  Dance sprang and spun and neared and fled,

  Jest chirped at gayest pitch,

  Rhythm dazzled, action sped

  Most comically rich.

  With generals and lame privates both

  Such charms worked wonders, till

  The show was over: lagging, loth

  We faced the sunset chill;

  And standing on the sandy way,

  With the cracked church peering past,

  We heard another matinée,

  We heard the maniac blast

  Of barrage south by Saint Eloi,

  And the red lights flaming there

  Called madness: Come, my bonny boy,

  And dance to the latest air.

  To this new concert, white we stood;

  Cold certainty held our breath;

  While men in tunnels below Larch Wood

  Were kicking men to death.

  Vlamertinghe: Passing the Château, July 1917

  ‘And all her silken flanks with garlands drest’ –

  But we are coming to the sacrifice.

  Must those have flowers who are not yet gone West?

  May those have flowers who live with death and lice?

  This must be the floweriest place

  That earth allows; the queenly face

  Of the proud mansion borrows grace for grace

  Spite of those brute guns lowing at the skies.

  Bold great daisies’ golden lights,

  Bubbling roses’ pinks and whites –

  Such a gay carpet! poppies by the million;

  Such damask! such vermilion!

  But if you ask me, mate, the choice of colour

  Is scarcely right; this red should have been duller.

  Gouzeaucourt: the Deceitful Calm

  How unpurposed, how inconsequential

  Seemed those southern lines when in the pallor

  Of the dying winter

  First we went there!

  Grass thin-waving in the wind approached them,

  Red roofs in the near view feigned survival,

  Lovely mockers, when we

  There took over.

  There war’s holiday seemed, nor though at known times

  Gusts of flame and jingling steel descended

  On the bare tracks, would you

  Picture death there.

  Snow or rime-frost made a solemn silence,

  Bluish darkness wrapped in dangerous safety;

  Old hands thought of tidy

  Living-trenches!

  There it was, my dears, that I departed,

>   Scarce a greater traitor ever! There too

  Many of you soon paid for

  That false mildness.

  La Quinque Rue

  O road in dizzy moonlight bleak and blue,

  With forlorn effigies of farms besprawled,

  With trees bitterly bare or snapped in two,

  Why riddle me thus – attracted and appalled?

  For surely now the grounds both left and right

  Are tilled, and scarless houses undismayed

  Glow in the lustrous mercy of sweet night

  And one may hear the flute or fiddle played.

  Why lead me then

  Through the foul-gorged, the cemeterial fen

  To fear’s sharp sentries? Why do dreadful rags

  Fur these bulged banks, and feebly move to the wind?

  That battered drum, say why it clacks and brags?

  Another and another! what’s behind?

  How is it that these flints flame out fire’s tongue,

  Shrivelling my thought? these collapsed skeletons,

  What are they, and these iron hunks among?

  Why clink those spades, why glare these startling suns

  And topple to the wet and crawling grass,

  Where the strange briars in taloned hedges twine?

  O road, I know those muttering groups you pass,

  I know those moments shrill as shivered glass;

  But, I am told, to-night you safely shine

  To trim roofs and cropped fields; the error’s mine.

  ‘Trench Nomenclature’

  Genius named them, as I live! What but genius could compress