Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  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?’