The hurling seas of brown
Cannot persuade the ferrying moorhen
Her one willow will drown.
This way wondering, I renew
Some sense of common right;
And through my armour of imposition
Win the Spring’s keen light,
Till for the woods against the world
I kiss the aconite.
The Recovery
From the dark mood’s control
I free my limbs; there’s light still in the West.
The most virtuous, chaste, melodious soul
Never was better blest.
Here medicine for the mind
Lies in a gilded shade; this feather stirs
And my faith lives; the touch of this tree’s rind, –
And temperate sense recurs.
No longer the loud pursuit
Of self-made clamour dulls the ear; here dwell
Twilight societies, twig, fungus, root,
Soundless, and speaking well.
Beneath the accustomed dome
Of this chance-planted, many-centuried tree
The snake-marked earthly multitudes are come
To breathe their hour like me.
The leaf comes curling down,
Another and another, gleam on gleam;
Above, celestial leafage glistens on,
Borne by time’s blue stream.
The meadow-stream will serve
For my refreshment; that high glory yields
Imaginings that slay; the safe paths curve
Through unexalted fields
Like these, where now no more
My early angels walk and call and fly,
But the mouse stays his nibbling, to explore
My eye with his bright eye.
Halfway House (1932)
The Memorial, 1914–1918
Against this lantern, shrill, alone
The wind springs out of the plain.
Such winds as this must fly and moan
Round the summit of every stone
On every hill; and yet a strain
Beyond the measure elsewhere known
Seems here.
Who cries? who mingles with the gale?
Whose touch, so anxious and so weak, invents
A coldness in the coldness? in this veil
Of whirling mist what hue of clay consents?
Can atoms intercede?
And are those shafted bold constructions there,
Mines more than golden, wheels that outrace need,
Crowded corons, victorious chimneys – are
Those touched with question too? pale with the dream
Of those who in this aether-stream
Are urging yet their painful, wounded theme?
Day flutters as a curtain, stirred
By a hidden hand; the eye grows blurred.
Those towers, uncrystalled, fade.
The wind from the north and east and south
Comes with its starved white mouth
And at this crowning trophy cannot rest –
No, speaks as something past plain words distressed.
Be still, if these your voices are; this monolith
For you and your high sleep was made.
Some have had less.
No gratitude in deathlessness?
No comprehension of the tribute paid?
You would speak still? Who with?
November 1, 1931
We talked of ghosts; and I was still alive;
And I that very day was thirty-five;
Alone once more, I stared about my room
And wished some ghost would be a friend and come;
I cared not of what shape or semblance; terror
Was nothing in comparison with error;
I wished some ghost would come, to talk of fate,
And tell me why I drove my pen so late,
And help with observations on my knack
Of being always on the bivouac,
Here and elsewhere, for ever changing ground,
Finding and straightway losing what I found,
Baffled in time, fumbling each sequent date,
Mistaking Magdalen for the Menin Gate.
This much I saw without transmortal talk,
That war had quite changed my sublunar walk –
Forgive me, dear, honoured and saintly friends;
Ingratitude suspect not; this transcends.
Forgive, O sweet red-smiling love, forgive,
If this is life, for your delight I live;
How every lamp, how every pavement flames
Your beauty at me, and your faith acclaims!
But from my silences your kindness grew,
And I surrendered for the time to you,
And still I hold you glorious and my own,
I’d take your hands, your lips; but I’m alone.
So I was forced elsewhere, and would accost
For colloquy and guidance some kind ghost.
As one that with a serious trust was sent
Afar, and bandits seized him while he went,
And long delayed, so I; I yearned to catch
What I should know before my grave dispatch
Was to be laid before that General
Who in a new Time cries ‘backs to the wall’.
No ghost was granted me; and I must face
Uncoached the masters of that Time and Space,
And there with downcast murmurings set out
What my gross late appearance was about.
Choice or Chance (1934)
The Surprise
Shot from the zenith of desire
Some faultless beams found where I lay,
Not much expecting such white fire
Across a slow close working-day.
What great song then sang the brook,
The fallen pillar’s grace how new;
The vast white oaks like cowslips shook –
And I was winged, and flew to you.
The Cottage at Chigasaki
That well you drew from is the coldest drink
In all the country Fuji looks upon;
And me, I never come to it but I think
The poet lived here once who one hot noon
Came dry and eager, and with wonder saw
The morning glory about the bucket twined,
Then with a holy heart went out to draw
His gallon where he might; the poem’s signed
By him and Nature. We need not retire,
But freely dip, and wash away the salt
And sand we’ve carried from the sea’s blue fire;
Discuss a melon; and without great fault,
Though comfort is not poetry’s best friend,
We’ll write a poem too, and sleep at the end.
Lark Descending
A singing firework; the sun’s darling;
Hark how creation pleads!
Then silence: see, a small grey bird
That runs among the weeds.
The Branch Line
Professing loud energy, out of the junction departed
The branch-line engine. The small train rounded the bend
Watched by us pilgrims of summer, and most by me, –
Who had known this picture since first my travelling started,
And knew it as sadly pleasant, the usual end
Of singing returns to beloved simplicity.
The small train went from view behind the plantation,
Monotonous, – but there’s a grace in monotony!
I felt its journey, I watched in imagination
Its brown smoke spun with sunshine wandering free
Past the great weir with its round flood-mirror beneath,
And where the magpie rises from orchard shadows,
And among the oasts, and like a rosy wreath
Mimicking children’s flower-play in the meadows.
The thing so easy, so daily, of so s
mall stature
Gave me another picture: of war’s warped face
Where still the sun and the leaf and the lark praised nature,
But no little engine bustled from place to place;
Then summer succeeded summer, yet only ghosts
Or tomorrow’s ghosts could venture hand or foot
In the track between the terrible telegraph-posts, –
The end of all things lying between the hut
Which lurked this side, and the shattered local train
That.
So easy it was; and should that come again –.
The Lost Battalion
‘To dream again.’ That chance. There were no fences,
No failures, no impossibles, no tenses.
Here’s the huge sulky ship, the captain’s room,
The swilling decks like hillsides, the iron boom
Of ocean’s pugilism, black faces, low
Corner-cabals – ‘Where are we bound? d’ye know?’
And now, long months being drummed into our lives,
The bells ring back and fro, the boat arrives –
We’ve seen this place, does no one know its name?
Name missing. But we’ll get there all the same.
It’s all the same. I thought the war was done.
We’ll have to hurry, the Battalion’s gone.
How on again? Only an Armistice.
I thought my nerves weren’t quite so bad as this.
That white house hangs on strangely, turn sharp right,
And the instant war spreads grey and mute in sight.
I feel my old gear on my back, and know
My general job in this forthcoming show;
But what’s the catch, the difference? Someone speak!
Name wanted, or I shan’t get there this week.
At Rugmer
Among sequestered farms and where brown orchards
Weave in the thin and coiling wind, and where
The pale cold river ripples still as moorhens
Work their restless crossing,
Among such places, when October warnings
Sound from each kex and thorn and shifting leaf,
We well might wander, and renew some stories
Of a dim time when we were kex and thorn,
Sere leaf, ready to hear a hissing wind
Whip down and wipe us out; our season seemed
At any second closing.
So, we were wrong. But we have lived this landscape,
And have an understanding with these shades.
An Ominous Victorian
I am the Poems of the late Eliza Cook,
For sixty odd years I have occupied this nook;
I remember myself as a bright young book
On a bookseller’s ormolu table.
Just beside me I had quite a nice friend,
Mrs. Hemans’s Works, and at the far end
Was one called It’s Never Too Late to Mend,
And a print of the Tower of Babel.
We were a pretty pair, Mrs. H. and I,
My crimson velvet was the best you could buy;
She wore green – and a love of a tie, –
I suppose it would now look tawdry.
One fine morning she was taken, as I heard,
For a prize to a Miss Georgiana Bird.
Then my turn came – I’d to carry the word
Of ‘Podgers, with love to Audrey.’
Some little time I was much in request,
Either she read me or hugged me to her breast,
And several sorts of ferns were pressed
Between my red-ruled pages.
O if only I could warn some of you young books,
Who are taken in like me by loving looks,
–There was no name then like Eliza Cook’s;
It’s preparedness that assuages.
Then, one night (I can almost see it still)
A letter came; she put down her quill,
And read, and stormed, ‘I should like to kill
That two-faced miscreant Podgers’;
And she flung me under the settee, where
I lay in want of light and air,
Enduring the supercilious stare
Of the Works of Samuel Rogers
That always stood on the bracket – well,
There’s not much really left to tell,
I was rescued by the housemaid Nell
Who hadn’t no time for reading,
But on the whatnot made me do
For a lamp (of the horridest butcher-blue)
To stand on; and she shrouded me, too,
In a mat of her mother’s beading.
And here I am, and yet I suppose
I’d better not grumble, as this world goes,
For I see I’m outstaying rows and rows
Of the newest immortal fiction;
And Rogers has vanished – I don’t know where –
With his Pleasures of Memory – and I don’t care;
I presume he’s propping the leg of a chair
With his sniffy elegant diction.
An Elegy and other poems (1937)
Late Light
Come to me where the swelling wind assails the wood with a sea-like roar,
While the yellow west is still afire; come borne by the wind up the hillside track;
There is quiet yet, and brightness more
Than day’s clear fountains to noon rayed back
If you will come;
If you will come, and against this fall
Of leaves and light and what seemed time,
Now changed to haste, against them all
Glow, calm and young; O help me climb
Above the entangling phantoms harrying
Shaken ripeness, unsighted prime;
Come unwithering and unvarying –
Tell claw-handed Decline to scrawl
A million menaces on the wall
For whom it will; while safe we two
Move where no knife-gust ever blew,
And no boughs crack, and no bells toll,
Through the tempest’s ominous interval,
Penitential low recall.
Writing a Sketch of a Forgotten Poet
Here this great summer day,
While the fields are wild
With flowers you name, I stay,
And have learnedly compiled
From shaky books, too few,
Dry registers,
Something of the living you;
And have gleaned your verse.
You might have laughed to see,
With this rich sun,
One pent in a library
Who else might run
Free in the flashing sweet
Life-lavishing air.
Or, lover of books, you’d greet
Such constancy and care.
You might have laughed to hear
Your stanzas read –
If it were not so clear
The dead are dead.
What gulfs between us lie!
I had thought them crossed,
Dreaming to gratify
Your unimpatient ghost.
In My Time
Touched with a certain silver light
In each man’s retrospection,
There are important hours; some others
Seem to grow kingfisher’s feathers,
Or glow like sunflowers; my affection
In the first kind finds more delight.
I would not challenge you to discover
Finally why you dwell
In this ward or that of your experience.
Men may vary without variance.
Each vase knows the note, the bell,
Which thrills it like a lover.
When I am silent, when a distance
Dims my response, forgive;
Accept that when the past has beckoned,
There is no help; all else comes second;
Agree, the way to live
Is not to dissect existence.
All the more waive common reason
If the passion when revealed
Seem of poor blood; if the silver hour
Be nothing but an uncouth, shot-torn tower,
And a column crossing a field,
Bowed men, to a dead horizon.
Minority Report
That you have given us others endless means
To modify the dreariness of living,
Machines which even change men to machines;
That you have been most honourable in giving;
That thanks to you we roar through space at speed
Past dreams of wisest science not long since,
And listen in to news we hardly need,
And rumours that might make Horatius wince,
Of modes of sudden death devised by you,
And promising protection against those –
All this and more I know, and what is due
Of praise would offer, couched more fitly in prose.
But such incompetence and such caprice
Clog human nature that, for all your kindness,
Some shun loud-speakers as uncertain peace,
And fear flood-lighting is a form of blindness;
The televisonary world to come,
The petrol-driven world already made,
Appear not to afford these types a crumb
Of comfort. You will win; be not dismayed.
Let those pursue their fantasy, and press
For obsolete illusion, let them seek
Mere moonlight in the last green loneliness;
Your van will be arriving there next week.
‘Can You Remember?’
Selected Poems Page 10
