Selected Poems

by Edmund Blunden

  Yes, I still remember

  The whole thing in a way;

  Edge and exactitude

  Depend on the day.

  Of all that prodigious scene

  There seems scanty loss,

  Though mists mainly float and screen

  Canal, spire and fosse;

  Though commonly I fail to name

  That once obvious Hill,

  And where we went and whence we came

  To be killed, or kill.

  Those mists are spiritual

  And luminous-obscure,

  Evolved of countless circumstance

  Of which I am sure;

  Of which, at the instance

  Of sound, smell, change and stir,

  New-old shapes for ever

  Intensely recur.

  And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,

  Young, heroic, mild;

  And some incurable, twisted,

  Shrieking, dumb, defiled.

  On a Picture by Dürer

  Sonnenuntergang

  Where found you, Dürer, that strange group of trees,

  That seared, shamed, mutilated group still standing

  To tell us This is War: where found you these?

  I did not guess, when last I saw shells landing

  Smash on the track beside, how old they were.

  They had been good tall pines, I saw, but not

  Of such great bole as argued they stood there

  When your antiquity might pass the spot.

  A thousand of us who as yet survive

  From what was modern war the other day

  Could recognise them, killed in the great Drive

  Which strewed so many bones in glory’s way.

  But, you, your date was wrong. From which of your towers

  Saw you that night across the centuries,

  Under that cloud with baleful eye slits, ours –

  Our sign, our shape, our dumb but eloquent trees?

  Cricket, I Confess

  ‘Sir, I cannot profess to understand

  One thing in England’ – and Sakabé scanned

  My face to be sure there was no offence astir, –

  ‘It is Cricket, I confess. In the English character

  That’s the chief puzzle I have. ‘“My horn is dry,”

  If you don’t understand it, no more do I.’

  Far out in the valley the sun was gilding green

  Those meadows which in England most are seen,

  Where churchyard, church, inn, forge and loft stand round

  With cottages, and through the ages bound

  The duckpond, and the stocks, and cricket-ground.

  And I fell silent, while kind memories played

  Bat and ball in the sunny past, not much dismayed

  Why these things were, and why I liked them so.

  O my Relf and Jessop and Hutchings long ago.

  On Several Occasions (1939)

  To W.O. and His Kind

  If even you, so able and so keen,

  And master of the business you reported

  Seem now almost as though you had never been,

  And in your simple purpose nearly thwarted,

  What hope is there? What harvest from those hours

  Deliberately, and in the name of truth,

  Endured by you? Your witness moves no Powers,

  And younger youth resents your sentient youth.

  You would have stayed me with some parable,

  The grain of mustard seed, the boy that thrust

  His arm into the leaking dyke to quell

  The North Sea’s onrush. Would you were not dust.

  With you I might invent, and make men try,

  Some kindly shelter from this frantic sky.

  Poems 1930–1940 (1941)

  In May 1916: Near Richebourg St Vaast

  The green brook played, talked unafraid

  As though like me it gladly quitted

  The shabby, shattered zones of fire

  With barbed wire webbed, with burnt scars pitted.

  It was my hour, and sunset’s flower;

  Now I could breathe and shed my trouble;

  The track even here had danger in it,

  And the next farm lay a heap of rubble.

  So being alone, my last job done,

  I followed the course of that lithe water

  Westward in blossoming waywardness,

  Such beauty neighbouring so much slaughter,

  With ray and song beguiled along;

  It seemed the war, for all its cunning,

  Had missed this orchard brook, or some

  Especial fortune kept it running;

  Half scared at this, something amiss,

  I doubted whether cursed illusion

  Had seized my brain and lured me on

  To some intolerable conclusion;

  So paused, went back to the general track,

  The safer way for soldiers’ walking:

  And as the stream’s last murmur stilled,

  Our sixty pounders started talking.

  Company Commander, 1917

  ‘How lovely are the messengers that preach us the gospel of peace.’

  So sang my friend, the company commander, in the trough of war,

  Amid interminable shocks and snags, expecting no release.

  It was not irony that prompted his song; though the daily score

  Of casualities was even at the moment employing his pen,

  And though his ridiculous shelter could stop no missile more

  Than an empty bully-tin, being the target of daily torrents

  Of hissing, shattering shells; yet no shell tore

  Through VID.’s own armament; signing returns and warrants

  He recalled old music, commanded, guarded, jollied his men.

  ‘O for the peace that floweth like a river.’

  That too he sang, and damned, at each pause, the red-tabbed Brigade,

  Whose orders for grimness more than the frost-spell made us shiver;

  Through VID.’s mild music loomed some bomb-and-bayonet raid.

  Dead lies my friend, the fighter, from whom I have rarely heard

  Against a human enemy one unhumorous word.

  The Sum of All

  So rise, enchanting haunting faithful

  Music of life recalled and now revealing

  Unity; now discerned beyond

  Fear, obscureness, casualty,

  Exhaustion, shame and wreck,

  As what was best,

  As what was deeply well designed.

  So rise, as a clear hill road with steady ascension,

  Issuing from drifted outskirts, huddled houses,

  Casual inns where guests may enter and wait

  Many a moment till the hostess find them;

  Thence ever before the carter, passing the quarries,

  The griffin-headed gateways,

  Windmill, splashing rill, derelict sheepfold,

  Tower of a thousand years –

  Through the pinewoods,

  Where warm stones lodge the rose-leaf butterfly;

  Crossing the artillery ranges whose fierce signs

  Mean nothing now, whose gougings look like

  Bird-baths now; and last, the frontier farm

  And guard-house made of bracken.

  Rising to this old eyrie, quietly forsaken,

  You bear me on, and not me only.

  All difference sheds away,

  All shrivelling of the sense, anxious prolepsis,

  Injury, staring suspicion,

  Fades into pure and wise advance.

  So rise; so let me pass.

  Shells By a Stream (1944)

  What is Winter?

  The haze upon the meadow

  Denies the dying year,

  For the sun’s within it, something bridal

  Is more than dreaming here.

  There is no end, no severance,

  No moment of
deliverance,

  No quietus made,

  Though quiet abounds and deliverance moves

  In that sunny shade.

  What is winter? a word,

  A figure, a clever guess.

  That time-word does not answer to

  This drowsy wakefulness.

  The secret stream scorns interval

  Though the calendar shouts one from the wall;

  The spirit has no last days;

  And death is no more dead than this

  Flower-haunted haze.

  Timber

  In the avenues of yesterday

  A tree might have a thing to say.

  Horsemen then heard

  From the branches a word

  That sent them serious on their way.

  A tree, – a beam, a box, a crutch,

  Costing so little or so much;

  Wainscot or stair,

  Barge, baby’s chair,

  A pier, a flute, a mill, a hutch.

  That tree uprooted lying there

  Will make such things with knack and care,

  Unless you hear

  From its boughs too clear

  The word that has whitened the traveller’s hair.

  A Prospect of Swans

  Walking the river way to change our note

  From the hard season and harder care,

  Marvelling we found the swans.

  The swans on sullen swollen dykes afloat

  Or moored on tussocks, a full company there,

  White breasts and necks, advance and poise and stir

  Filling the scene, while rays of steel and bronze

  From the far dying sun touched the dead reeds.

  So easy was the manner of each one,

  So sure and wise the course of all their needs,

  So free their unity, in that level sun

  And floodland tipped with sedge and osiery,

  It might have been where man was yet to be,

  Some mere where none but swans were ever kings,

  Where gulls might hunt, a wide flight in from sea,

  And page-like small birds come: all innocent wings.

  O picture of some first divine intent,

  O young world which perhaps was modelled thus,

  Where even hard winter meant

  No disproportion, hopeless hungers none,

  And set no task which could not well be done.

  Now this primeval pattern gleamed at us

  Right near the town’s black smoke-towers and the roar

  Of trains bearing the sons of man to war.

  Thoughts of Thomas Hardy

  ‘Are you looking for someone, you who come pattering

  Along this empty corridor, dead leaf, to my door,

  And before I had noticed that leaves were now dying?’

  ‘No, nobody; but the way was open.

  The wind blew that way.

  There was no other way.

  And why your question?’

  ‘O, I felt I saw someone with forehead bent downward

  At the sound of your coming,

  And he in that sound

  Looked aware of a vaster threne of decline,

  And considering a law of all life.

  Yet he lingered, one lovingly regarding

  Your particular fate and experience, poor leaf.’

  The Vanishing Land

  Flashing far, tolling sweet, telling of a city fine

  The steeple cons the country round, and signals farm and kiln and mine,

  Inns by the road are each one good, the carters here are friendly men,

  And this is a country where I mean to come again and come again.

  There was a child, though, last time I was passing by St Hubert shrine,

  A child whose torn black frock and thin white cheek in memory brighter shine

  Than abeles and than spires. I said, I pledge this blossom’s better growth,

  And so began, but one day failed; what sightless hours, and busy sloth

  Followed, and now the child is lost, and no voice comes on any wind;

  The silver spire gets farther off, and the inns are difficult to find.

  After the Bombing and other short poems (1949)

  The Tree in the Goods Yard

  So sigh, that hearkening pasts arouse

  In the magic circle of your boughs, –

  So timelessly, on sound’s deep sea,

  Sail your unfurled melody,

  My small dark Tree.

  Who set you in this smoky yard

  None tells me; it might seem too hard

  A fate for a tree whose place should be

  With a sounding proud-plumed company

  By a glittering sea.

  And yet you live with liking here,

  Are well, have some brocade to wear,

  And solitary, mysteriously

  Revoice light airs as sighs, which free

  Tombed worlds for me.

  After the Bombing

  My hesitant design it was, in a time when no man feared,

  To make a poem on the last poor flower to have grown on the patch of land

  Where since a grey enormous stack of shops and offices reared

  Its bulk as though to eternity there to stand.

  Moreover I dreamed of a lyrical verse to welcome another flower,

  The first to blow on that hidden site when the concrete block should cease

  Gorging the space; it could not be mine to foretell the means, the hour,

  But nature whispered something of a longer lease.

  We look from the street now over a breezy wilderness of bloom,

  Now, crowding its colours between the sills and cellars, hosts of flame

  And foam, pearl-pink and thunder-red, befriending the makeshift tomb

  Of a most ingenious but impermanent claim.

  From the Flying-Boat

  Into the blue undisturbable main

  The blue streams flow,

  In time they flow

  Out of chasms vaporous, spurs far-whitening, winding gorges

  Woven of snow;

  This height we gain.

  The country enlarges.

  There the mountain cloudland, and far at the verge

  Cliff-cloudlands upsurge;

  Here, countless, an archipelago –

  How the islands tower in their strength, quincunxes so

  May confront such eyes as understand them, down below;

  And yet up here I hardly know,

  So little is this brilliant change, although

  It extends in kingdom bright, so fast we go

  Into apparent eternity – but, truth is, all things flow.

  And now I am mounted aloft and have taken a wing,

  Into the blue undisturbable oceaning,

  More prospect than pyramidal Egypt, or perhaps the mountains of the moon could bring,

  With whom shall we meet in this place?

  Why hides He His face?

  The Halted Battalion

  One hour from far returns: Each man we had

  Was well content that hour, the time, the place,

  And war’s reprieve combining. Each good face

  Stood easy, and announced life not too bad.

  Then almost holy came a light, a sense,

  And whence it came I did not then inquire;

  Simple the scene, – a château wall, a spire,

  Towpath, swing-bridge, canal with bulrush fence.

  Still I, as dreamer known, that morning saw

  The others round me taken with a dream.

  I wonder since that never one of them

  Recalls it; but how should they? We who draw

  Picture and meaning are dreamless, we

  Are sentinels of time while the rest are free.

  High Elms, Bracknell

  Two buds we took from thousands more

  In Shelley’s garden overgrown,

  Beneath our roof they are now full-blown,


  A royal pair, a scarlet twain

  Through whose warm lives our thoughts explore

  Back through long years to come at one

  Which Shelley loved in sun or rain.

  Fleeting’s the life of these strange flowers,

  Enchanting poppies satin-frilled,

  Dark-purple hearts, yet these rebuild

  A distant world, a summer dead*

  Millions of poppy-lives ere ours,

  And Shelley’s visionary towers

  Come nearer in their Indian red;

  Not but some shadow of despair

  In this dark purple ominous

  From that high summer beckons us;

  And such a shadow, such a doom

  Was lurking in the garden there.

  We could not name the incubus,

  Save that it haunted Shelley’s home.

  Was it that through the same glass door

  With weary heart, uncertain why,

  But first discerning love can die,

  Harriet had moved, alone and slow;

  Or Shelley in the moonlight bore

  The cold curt word Necessity

  From poppies that had seemed to know?

  Then tracing the lost path between

  The herbs and flowers and wilderness,

  Whose was the phantom of our guess

  Drawn by that quiet deserted pond

  With little boat, now scarcely seen

  For tears or bodings? Whose distress

  Darkened the watery diamond?