Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  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