Selected Poems
Page 9
To be a mere insensate mill of hours,
Unawed by battles, unbeguiled with flowers;
Think, this old Merlin may be vexed or blithe,
And for the future stretches hungry hands.
No last year’s bride discovers more caprice
Than this bald magpie smuggling up his wit,
And in his crumbling belfry, where the cost
Of high-born death in plundered ruin’s lost,
Nodding his glory to each glittering piece
Of glass or jewel that his fancy hit.
Close in the shop of some lean artisan,
Who carves a snuff-box for Squire Harkaway,
Time stoops, and stares, and knows his destined prize:
Croesus shall hunt this modest merchandise
When frieze and pillar of a master’s plan
Are crushed in waggon-tracks to bind the clay.
There stalled theology makes angels weep
In twenty volumes blazoned red and gold,
And there a broadside’s bawled about the street;
Time fetched his halfpence out and bought a sheet.
The twenty volumes slumber in a heap,
The ballad among heirlooms lives enrolled.
Lordly oration thronged the sculptured roof,
And pamphleteered in plaudits through the town;
The charlatan proclaimed his draughts and pills,
And tossed the crowd his woodcuts and his bills;
From rhetoric’s remains Time flies aloof,
And hears the quack still pattering to the clown.
Voluptuous canvas! Venus in May-bloom,
Sunshine of vital gold, faun-twinkling groves,
Harmonious limbs and volant veils, go mourn;
For you will lie with fire, while Time has borne
The blue-daubed frigate from the servants’ room
To swell the mad collection of his loves.
Values
Till darkness lays a hand on these grey eyes
And out of man my ghost is sent alone,
It is my chance to know that force and size
Are nothing but by answered undertone.
No beauty even of absolute perfection
Dominates here – the glance, the pause, the guess
Must be my amulets of resurrection;
Raindrops may murder, lightning may caress.
There I was tortured, but I cannot grieve;
There crowned and palaced – visibles deceive.
That storm of belfried cities in my mind
Leaves me my vespers cool and eglantined.
From love’s wide-flowering mountain-side I chose
This sprig of green, in which an angel shows.
Later poems from Poems 1914–1930 (1930)
Into the Salient
Sallows like heads in Polynesia,
With few and blood-stuck hairs,
Mud-layered cobble-stones,
Soldiers in smoky sheds, blackening uniforms and walls with their cookery;
Shell-holes in roofs, in roads,
Even in advertisements
Of bicycles and beer;
The Middle Ages gone to sleep, and woken up to this, –
A salvo, four flat slamming explosions.
When you come out the wrong side of the ruin, you are facing Hill Sixty,
Hill Sixty is facing you.
You have been planted on the rim of a volcano,
Which will bring forth its fruit – at any second.
Better to be shielded from these facts;
There is a cellar, or was just now.
If the wreck isn’t knocked in on us all,
We may emerge past the two Belgian policemen,
The owners’ representatives,
Standing in their capes on the steps of the hollow estaminet
Open at all hours to all the winds
At the Poperinghe end of Ypres.
O if we do, if time will pass in time,
We will march
With rifles butt-upwards, in our teeth, any way you like,
Into seven days of country where you come out any door.
Premature Rejoicing
What’s that over there?
Thiepval Wood.
Take a steady look at it; it’ll do you good.
Here, these glasses will help you. See any flowers?
There sleeps Titania (correct – the Wood is ours);
There sleeps Titania in a deep dugout,
Waking, she wonders what all the din’s about,
And smiles through her tears, and looks ahead ten years,
And sees her Wood again, and her usual Grenadiers,
All in green,
Music in the moon;
The burnt rubbish you’ve just seen
Won’t beat the Fairy Queen;
All the same, it’s a shade too soon
For you to scribble rhymes
In your army book
About those times;
Take another look;
That’s where the difficulty is, over there.
To Joy
Is not this enough for moan
To see this babe all motherless –
A babe beloved – thrust out alone
Upon death’s wilderness?
Our tears fall, fall, fall – I would weep
My blood away to make her warm,
Who never went on earth one step,
Nor heard the breath of the storm.
How shall you go, my little child,
Alone on that most wintry wild?
A Japanese Evening
Round us the pines are darkness
That with a wild melodious piping rings
While in the ditches
Slow as toads in English gardens
The little landcrabs move.
We re-discover our path,
And, coming to the cottage, are greeted
With hierophantic usherings and oracles,
And a grin behind the screen, I imagine.
We guess full fathom five, and take up the chopsticks.
The metal-blue cucumber slices,
Rice, string beans,
And green tea over,
The housekeeper looking kindly amazement
At the master of the house
Soon makes all shipshape.
After all, they possess an American clock,
A very fine, a high-collar clock.
She sits on the mat, awaiting the next oddity.
Lanterns moon the outer darkness,
And merrily in come floating
(So gently they foot the honourable straw)
Three young girls, who sit them down.
A conference;
Almost the Versailles of the Far East:
The master, beaming,
His white hair in the lamplight seeming brighter with his pleasure,
Asks me what I call O tsuki sama.
Moon.
Mooon.
Moon.
He has got it; right first time,
But not the next.
Moooni.
(The housekeeper cannot suppress her giggles,
Okashii, she says, and so it is.)
We now pass naturally to the
Electric Light.
But he will not have that,
There are no things like that in heaven and earth
In his philology.
I repeat – what I said;
He repeats – what he said.
We close at Erecturiku Rightu.
We fasten also on:
The cat, who becomes catsu,
The dog, who proceeds doggi,
(And I suspect has rabies beginning);
Himself, O-Ji-San, Orudu Genturuman,
And all sorts of enigmas.
The girls are quicker, more nimble-throated,
And will reproduce exactly the word, but he lays the law down;
Having re-orientated Fan,
Into Weino,
He instructs them how it ought to be pronounced,
Obediently young Japan reiterates his decision,
Not without an ocular hint to the stranger
That they have concealed the other rendering in their minds …
I hear their voices tinkling, lessening
Over the firefly grass,
Along the seething sand below the pines,
At the end of the entertainment.
Under a Thousand Words
‘A thousand words on Courage.’ – This request
Dropped on me like a bomb on a sandbag shelter,
And after much vague mental repetition
Ranging from La Boisselle to Lord Macaulay,
And metaphysical cross-examination
On memories of conspicuous gallant conduct,
I gave it up.
That afternoon our boat
Touched on a mud-flat, which we chose to cross,
And as we waddled through it, a three-inch crab
Disputed progress; one of his arms was gone;
The other he held ready like a boxer,
And backed and sidled to our every movement,
His one arm ready; and to command full view
Of the two monsters who had crossed the frontier,
He strained his body backward, and stood tilted,
Parrying every stroke we acted at him,
Eyeing us, holding the line.
‘But you call this instinct.’
The Sunlit Vale
I saw the sunlit vale, and the pastoral fairy-tale;
The sweet and bitter scent of the may drifted by;
And never have I seen such a bright bewildering green,
But it looked like a lie,
Like a kindly meant lie.
When gods are in dispute, one a Sidney, one a brute,
It would seem that human sense might not know, might not spy;
But though nature smile and feign where foul play has stabbed and slain,
There’s a witness, an eye,
Nor will charms blind that eye.
Nymph of the upland song and the sparkling leafage young,
For your merciful desire with these charms to beguile,
For ever be adored; muses yield you rich reward;
But you fail, though you smile –
That other does not smile.
To Themis (1931)
Incident in Hyde Park, 1803
The impulses of April, the rain-gems, the rose-cloud,
The frilling of flowers in the westering love-wind!
And here through the Park come gentlemen riding,
And there through the Park come gentlemen riding,
And behind the glossy horses Newfoundland dogs follow.
Says one dog to the other, ‘This park, sir, is mine, sir.’
The reply is not wanting; hoarse clashing and mouthing
Arouses the masters.
Then Colonel Montgomery, of the Life Guards, dismounts.
‘Whose dog is this?’ The reply is not wanting,
From Captain Macnamara, Royal Navy: ‘My dog.’
‘Then call your dog off, or by God he’ll go sprawling.’
‘If my dog goes sprawling, you must knock me down after.’
‘Your name?’ ‘Macnamara, and yours is –’ ‘Montgomery.’
‘And why, sir, not call your dog off?’ ‘Sir, I chose
Not to do so, no man has dictated to me yet,
And you, I propose, will not change that.’ ‘This place,
For adjusting disputes, is not proper’ – and the Colonel,
Back to the saddle, continues, ‘If your dog
Fights my dog, I warn you, I knock your dog down.
For the rest, you are welcome to know where to find me,
Colonel Montgomery; and you will of course
Respond with the due information.’ ‘Be sure of it.’
Now comes the evening, green-twinkling, clear-echoing,
And out to Chalk-farm the Colonel, the Captain,
Each with his group of believers, have driven.
Primrose Hill on an April evening
Even now in a fevered London
Sings a vesper sweet; but these
Will try another music. Hark!
These are the pistols; let us test them; quite perfect.
Montgomery, Macnamara six paces, two faces;
Montgomery, Macnamara – both speaking together
In nitre and lead, the style is incisive,
Montgomery fallen, Macnamara half-falling,
The surgeon exploring the work of the evening –
And the Newfoundland dogs stretched at home in the firelight.
The coroner’s inquest; the view of one body;
And then, pale, supported, appears at Old Bailey
James Macnamara, to whom this arraignment:
You stand charged
That you
With force and arms
Did assault Robert Montgomery,
With a certain pistol
Of the value of ten shillings,
Loaded with powder and a leaden bullet,
Which the gunpowder, feloniously exploded,
Drove into the body of Robert Montgomery,
And gave
One mortal wound;
Thus you did kill and slay
The said Robert Montgomery.
O heavy imputation! O dead that yet speaks!
O evening transparency, burst to red thunder!
Speak, Macnamara. He, tremulous as a windflower,
Exactly imparts what had slaughtered the Colonel,
‘Insignificant the origin of the fact now before you;
Defending our dogs, we grew warm; that was nature;
That heat of itself had not led to disaster.
From defence to defiance was the leap that destroyed.
At once he would have at my deity, Honour –
“If you are offended you know where to find me.”
On one side, I saw the wide mouths of Contempt,
Mouth to mouth working, a thousand vile gunmouths;
On the other my Honour; Gentlemen of the Jury,
I am a Captain in the British Navy.’
Then said Lord Hood: ‘For Captain Macnamara,
He is a gentleman and so says the Navy.’
Then said Lord Nelson: ‘I have known Macnamara
Nine years, a gentleman, beloved in the Navy,
Not to be affronted by any man, true,
Yet as I stand here before God and my country,
Macnamara has never offended, and would not,
Man, woman, child.’ Then a spring-tide of admirals,
Almost Neptune in person, proclaim Macnamara
Mild, amiable, cautious, as any in the Navy;
And Mr. Garrow rises, to state that if need be,
To assert the even temper and peace of his client,
He would call half the Captains in the British Navy.
Now we are shut from the duel that Honour
Must fight with the Law; no eye can perceive
The fields wherein hundreds of shadowy combats
Must decide between a ghost and a living idolon –
A ghost with his army of the terrors of bloodshed,
A half-ghost with the grand fleet of names that like sunrise
Have dazzled the race with their march on the ocean.
Twenty minutes. How say you?
Not guilty.
Then from his chair with his surgeon the Captain
Walks home to his dog, his friends’ acclamations
Supplying some colour to the pale looks he had,
Less pale than Montgomery’s; and Honour rides on.
Winter Stars
Fierce in flaming millions, ready to strike they stood,
The stars of unknown will, above our field and wood;
You who
have seen the midnight preparing a dawn of war
May raise imagination to see them ready to roar
Their sparkling death-way down; and while they waited the order
Some came flying from nowhere, and launched what looked like murder,
Rushing beyond our border, and detonating too far
For us to hear. No need to hear. Watching each angry star
I thought our thicket lifted its stack of bayonets
Stiffly against the overthrow of Nature’s parapets;
And marching amain from the highlands came our stream to see this through;
Deep and hoarse and gathering force, it swore to die or do;
Under the intelligence of strange foes, it sang to itself and chance,
Answering all that wildfire with the gleam of its foaming advance.
The Kiss
I am for the woods against the world,
But are the woods for me?
I have sought them sadly anew, fearing
My fate’s mutability,
Or that which action and process make
Of former sympathy.
Strange that those should arrive strangers
Who were once entirely at home.
Colonnade, sunny wall and warren,
Islet, osier, foam,
Buds and leaves and selves seemed
Safe to the day of doom.
By-roads following, and this way wondering,
I spy men abroad
In orchards, knarred and woody men
Whose touch is bough and bud;
Co-arboreal sons of landscape.
Then in windstript wood
Is the cracking of stems; and under the thorn
With a kobold’s closeness lurks
The wanderer with his knife and rods,
That like a bald rook works;
His woman-rook about the thicket
Prowls at the hazel-forks.
Sheep lying out by the swollen river
Let the flood roll down
Without so much as a glance; they know it;