In a title what man’s humour said to man’s supreme distress?
Jacob’s Ladder ran reversed, from earth to a fiery pit extending,
With not angels but poor Angles, those for the most part descending.
Thence Brock’s Benefit commanded endless fireworks by two nations,
Yet some voices there were raised against the rival coruscations.
Picturedrome peeped out upon a dream, not Turner could surpass,
And presently the picture moved, and greyed with corpses and morass.
So down south; and if remembrance travel north, she marvels yet
At the sharp Shakespearean names, and with sad mirth her eyes are wet.
The Great Wall of China rose, a four-foot breastwork, fronting guns
That, when the word dropped, beat at once its silly ounces with brute tons;
Odd Krab Krawl on paper looks, and odd the foul-breathed alley twisted,
As one feared to twist there too, if Minnie, forward quean, insisted.
Where the Yser at Dead End floated on its bloody waters
Dead and rotten monstrous fish, note (east) The Pike and Eel headquarters.
Ah, such names and apparitions! name on name! what’s in a name?
From the fabled vase the genie in his shattering horror came.
Another Journey from Béthune to Cuinchy
I see you walking
To a pale petalled sky,
And the green silent water
Is resting there by;
It seems like bold madness
But that ‘you’ is I.
I long to interpret
That voice of a bell
So silver and simple,
Like a wood-dove-egg shell,
On the bank where you are walking –
It was I heard it well.
At the lock the sky bubbles
Are dancing and dying,
Some the smallest of pearls,
Some moons, and all flying,
Returning and melting –
You watched them, half-crying.
This is Marie-Louise,
You need not have told me –
I remember her eyes
And the Cognac she sold me –
It is you that are sipping it;
Even so she cajoled me.
Her roof and her windows
Were nothing too sound,
And here and there holes
Some forty feet round
(Antiquer than Homer)
Encipher the ground.
Do you jib at my tenses?
Who’s who? you or I?
Do you own Béthune
And is that grave eastward sky?
Béthune is miles off now,
’Ware wire and don’t die.
The telegraph posts
Have revolted at last,
And old Perpendicular
Leans to the blast,
The rigging hangs ragging
From each plunging mast.
What else would you fancy,
For here it is war?
My thanks, you young upstart,
I’ve been here before –
I know this Division,
And hate this damned Corps.
‘Kingsclere’ hath its flowers,
And piano to boot;
The coolest of cellars,
– Your finest salute!
You fraudulent wretch –
You appalling recruit!
O haste, for the darnel
Hangs over the trench,
As yellow as the powder
Which kills with a stench!
Shall you go or I go?
O I’ll go – don’t mench!
But both of us slither
Between the mossed banks,
And through thirsty chalk
Where the red-hatted cranks
Have fixed a portcullis
With notice-board – thanks!
A mad world, my masters!
Whose masters? my lad,
If you are not I,
It is I who am mad;
Let’s report to the company,
Your mess, egad.
Well, now sir (though lime juice
Is nothing to aid),
This young fellow met me,
And kindly essayed
To guide me – but now it seems
I am betrayed.
He says that he is I,
And that I am not he;
But the same omened sky
Led us both, we agree, –
If we cannot commingle,
Pray take him and me.
For where the numb listener
Lies in the dagged weed,
I’ll see your word law,
And this youth has agreed
To let me use his name –
Take the will for the deed.
And what if the whistle
Of the far-away train
Come moan-like through mist
Over Coldstream Lane,
Come mocking old love
Into waking again?
And the thinkings of life,
Whether those of your blood,
Or the manifold soul
Of field and of flood –
What if they come to you
Bombed in the mud?
Well, now as afore
I should wince so, no doubt,
And still to my star
I should cling, all about,
And muddy one midnight
We all will march out.
– Sir, this man may talk,
But he surely omits
That a shell any moment
May blow us to bits;
On this rock his identity-
Argument splits.
I see him walking
In a golden-green ground,
Where pinafored babies
And skylarks abound,
But that’s his own business.
My time for trench round.
Flanders Now
There, where before no master action struck
The grim Fate in the face, and cried ‘What now?’,
Where gain and commonplace lay in their ruck,
And pulled the beetroots, milked the muddy cow,
Heard the world’s rumours, wished themselves good luck,
And slept, and rose, and lived and died somehow, –
A light is striking keen as angels’ spears,
Brightness outwelling, cool as roses, there;
From every crossroad majesty appears,
Each cottage gleams like Athens on the air;
Ghosts by broad daylight, answered not by fears
But bliss unwordable, are walking there.
Who thirsts, or aches, or gropes as going blind?
Friend, drink with me at these fair-foliaged wells,
Or on the bruised life lay this unction kind,
Or mark this light that lives in lily-bells,
There rests and always shall the wandering mind,
Those clumsy farms today grow miracles:
Since past each wall and every common mark,
Field path and wooden bridge, there once went by
The flower of manhood, daring the huge dark,
The famished cold, the roaring in the sky;
They died in splendour, these who claimed no spark
Of glory save the light in a friend’s eye.
The Watchers
I heard the challenge ‘Who goes there?’
Close-kept but mine through midnight air;
I answered and was recognised
And passed, and kindly thus advised:
‘There’s someone crawlin’ through the grass
By the red ruin, or there was,
And them machine guns been a firin’
All the time the chaps was wirin’,
So sir if you’re goin’ out
You’ll keep your ’ead well down no doubt.’
When will the stern fine ‘Who goes there?’
Meet me again in midnight air?
And the gruff sentry’s kindness, when
Will kindness have such power again?
It seems, as now I wake and brood,
And know my hour’s decrepitude,
That on some dewy parapet
The sentry’s spirit gazes yet,
Who will not speak with altered tone
When I at last am seen and known.
Near and Far (1929)
The Author’s Last Words to His Students
Forgive what I, adventuring highest themes,
Have spoiled and darkened, and the awkward hand
That longed to point the moral of man’s dreams
But shut the wicket-gates of fairyland:
So by too harsh intrusion
Left colourless confusion.
For even the glories that I most revered,
Seen through my gloomed perspective in strange mood,
Were not what to our British seers appeared;
I spoke of peace, I made a solitude,
Herding with deathless graces
My hobbling commonplaces.
Forgive that eyeless lethargy which chilled
Your ardours and I fear dimmed much fine gold –
What your bright passion, leaping ages, thrilled
To find and claim, and yet I dared withhold;
These and all chance offences
Against your finer senses.
And I will ever pray for your souls’ health,
Remembering how, deep-burdened, eager-eyed,
You loved imagination’s commonwealth,
Following with smiling wonder that frail guide
Who hears beyond the ocean
The voice of your devotion.
Familiarity
Dance not your spectral dance at me;
I know you well!
Along this lane there lives no tree
But I can tell.
I know each fall and rise and twist;
You – why, a wildflower in the mist,
The moon, the mist.
Sound not that long alarm, grey tower,
I know you well;
This is your habit at this hour,
You and your bell!
If once, I heard a hundred times
Through evening’s ambuscade your chimes –
Dark tower, your chimes.
Enforce not that no-meaning so,
Familiar stream;
Whether you tune it high or low,
I know your theme;
A proud-fed but a puny rill,
A meadow brook, poured quick and shrill –
Alone and shrill.
Sprawl not so monster-like, blind mist;
I know not ‘seems’;
I am too old a realist
To take sea-dreams
From you, or think a great white Whale
Floats through our hawthorn-scented vale –
This foam-cold vale.
A Sunrise in March
While on my cheek the sour and savage wind
Confuses soul with sense, while unamazed
I view the siege of pale-starred horror raised
By dawn whose waves charge stern and crimson-lined,
In cold blue tufts of battle-smoke afar,
And sable crouching thickets by my way –
While I thus droop, the living land grows gay
With starry welcomes to the conquering star!
From every look-out whence they watch him win
(That angry Cromwell!) high on thorn and bine
The selfless wildbirds hail their holy light:
With changes free as flute or violin,
To naked fields they peal as proud and fine
As though they had not dreamed of death all night.
The Kiln
Beside the creek where seldom oar or sail
Adventures, and the gulls whistling like men
Patrol the pasture of the falling tide,
Like Timon’s mansion stands the silent kiln.
Half citadel, half temple, strong it stands
With layered stones built into cavernous curves,
The fire-vault now as cool as leaves and stones
And dews can be. Here came my flitting thought,
The only visitor of a sunny day,
Except the half-mad wasp that fights with all,
The leaping cricket in his apple-green,
And emerald beetle with his golden helmet;
While the south wind woke all the colony
Of sorrels and sparse daisies, berried ivies
And thorns bowed down with sloes, and brambles red
Offering a feast that no child came to take.
In these unwanted derelicts of man
Nature has touched the picture with a smile
Of more than usual mystery; the far heights
With thunderous forest marshalled are her toil,
But this her toy, her petty larceny
That pleased her, lurking like a gipsy girl.
My thought came here with artfulness like hers
To spy on her, and, though she fled, pursued
To where on eastern islands, in the cells
Of once grave seers, her iris woos the wind.
The Correlation
Again that yellow dusk or light along
The winter hills: again the trees’ black claws
Waiting and working by the bridge of space:
Again the tower, among tombs a huge tomb;
White scattered birds, a black horse in the meads,
And the eel-track of the brown stream fringing by.
Would understanding win herself my vote,
Now, having known this crisis thirty years,
She should decide me why it overwhelms
My chart of time and history; should declare
What in the spirit of a man long schooled
To human concept and devotion dear,
Upraised by sure example, undefiled
By misery and defeat, still in the sun –
What stirs in him, and finds its brother-self,
From that late sky. Again that sky, that tower
These effigies and wizardries of chance,
Those soundless vollies of pale and distant birds
Have taken him, and from his whirring toils
Made him as far away, as unconcerned,
As consonant with the Power as its bare trees.
The Deeper Friendship
Were all eyes changed, were even poetry cold,
Were those long systems of hope that I tried to deploy
Skeletons, still I should keep one final hold,
Since clearer and clearer returns my first-found joy.
I would go, once more, through the sunless autumn in trouble;
Thin and cold rain dripping down through branches black,
Streams hoarse-hurrying and pools spreading over the stubble,
And the waggoner leaving the hovel under his sack
Would guide me along by the gate and deserted siding,
The inn with the tattered arbour, the choking weir;
And yet, security there would need small guiding.
I know one hearth, one love that shine beyond fear.
There, though the sharpest storm and flood were abroad,
And the last husk and leaf were stripped from the tree,
I would sue for peace where the rats and mice have gnawed,
And well content that Nature should bury me.
The Blind Lead the Blind
Dim stars like snowflakes are fluttering in heaven,
Down the cloud-mountains by wind-torrents riven;
There are still chances, but one more than all
Slowly burns out on the sea’s dark wall –
The best ever given.
One, the divinest, goes down to the dark,
In a re
d sullen vanishing, a poor stifled spark.
You, who have reason, were staring at this
As though by your gaze it would clear the abyss –
It was once your sea-mark.
Hear on the shore too the sighed monotones
Of waves that in weakness slip past the purled stones;
The seethe of blown sand round the dry fractured hull,
Salt-reeds and tusked fence; hear the struck gull
With death in his bones.
Slow comes the net in, that’s filled with frustration;
Night ends the day of thwart discreation;
I would be your miracle-worker, sad friend,
Bid a music for you and a new star ascend, –
But I know isolation.
Report on Experience
I have been young, and now am not too old;
And I have seen the righteous forsaken,
His health, his honour and his quality taken.
This is not what we were formerly told.
I have seen a green country, useful to the race,
Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,
Even the last rat and the last kestrel banished –
God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.
I knew Seraphina; Nature gave her hue,
Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.
I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;
She turned to harlotry; – this I took to be new.
Say what you will, our God sees how they run.
These disillusions are His curious proving
That He loves humanity and will go on loving;
Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.
A Connoisseur
Presume not that grey idol with the scythe
And hourglass of the stern perpetual sands
Selected Poems Page 8
