Three Summers since I chose a maid,
Too young maybe – but more’s to do
At harvest-time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter’s day.
Her smile went out, and ’twasn’t a woman –
More like a little frightened fay.
One night, in the Fall, she runned away.
‘Out ’mong the sheep, her be,’ they said,
’Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wasn’t there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her, fast.
She does the work about the house
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to chat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk keep away.
‘Not near, not near!’ her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The women say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.
Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me?
The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie’s spotted feathers lie
On the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden up to Christmas-time.
What’s Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house than we!
She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,
The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her – her eyes, her hair, her hair!
CHARLOTTE MEW
On the Road to the Sea
We passed each other, turned and stopped for half an hour, then went our way,
I who make other women smile did not make you –
But no man can move mountains in a day.
So this hard thing is yet to do.
But first I want your life: – before I die I want to see
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes,
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,
Yet on brown fields there lies
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies
And in grey sea?
I want what world there is behind your eyes,
I want your life and you will not give it me.
Now, if I look, I see you walking down the years,
Young, and through August fields – a face, a thought, a
swinging dream perched on a stile –;
I would have liked (so vile we are!) to have taught you tears
But most to have made you smile.
To-day is not enough or yesterday: God sees it all –
Your length on sunny lawns, the wakeful rainy nights –; tell me –; (how vain to ask),
but it is not a question – just a call –;
Show me then, only your notched inches climbing up the garden wall,
I like you best when you are small.
Is this a stupid thing to say
Not having spent with you one day?
No matter; I shall never touch your hair
Or hear the little tick behind your breast,
Still it is there,
And as a flying bird
Brushes the branches where it may not rest
I have brushed your hand and heard
The child in you: I like that best
So small, so dark, so sweet; and were you also then too grave and wise?
Always I think. Then put your far off little hand in mine;
– Oh! let it rest;
I will not stare into the early world beyond the opening eyes,
Or vex or scare what I love best.
But I want your life before mine bleeds away –
Here – not in heavenly hereafters – soon, –
I want your smile this very afternoon,
(The last of all my vices, pleasant people used to say,
I wanted and I sometimes got – the Moon!)
You know, at dusk, the last bird’s cry,
And round the house the flap of the bat’s low flight,
Trees that go black against the sky
And then – how soon the night!
No shadow of you on any bright road again,
And at the darkening end of this – what voice? whose kiss? As if you’d say!
It is not I who have walked with you, it will not be I who take away
Peace, peace, my little handful of the gleaner’s grain
From your reaped fields at the shut of day.
Peace! Would you not rather die
Reeling, – with all the cannons at your ear?
So, at least, would I,
And I may not be here
To-night, to-morrow morning or next year.
Still I will let you keep your life a little while,
See dear?
I have made you smile.
CHARLOTTE MEW
The Trees are Down
– and he cried with a loud voice:
Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees –
– Revelation
They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all.
I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.
The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now! –)
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.
It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.
It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying –
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
‘Hurt not the trees.’
CHARLOTTE MEW
Rooms
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady sl
owing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide –
Rooms where for good or for ill – things died.
But there is the room where we two lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun – in the rain.
CHARLOTTE MEW
Ballade of Genuine Concern
A child at Brighton has been left to drown;
A railway train has jumped the line at Crewe;
I haven’t got the change for half a crown;
I can’t imagine what on earth to do …
Three bisons have stampeded from the Zoo,
A German fleet has anchored in the Clyde;
By God the wretched country’s up the flue!
– The ice is breaking up on every side.
What! Further news? Rhodesian stocks are down?
England, my England, can the news be true?
Cannot the Duke be got to come to town?
Or will not Mr Hooper pull us through?
And now the Bank is stopping payment, too,
The chief cashier has cut his throat and died,
And Scotland Yard has failed to find a clue:
– The ice is breaking up on every side.
A raging mob inflamed by Charley Brown
Is tearing up the rails at Waterloo;
They’ve hanged the Chancellor in wig and gown,
The Speaker, and the Chief Inspector, too!
Police! Police! Is this the road to Kew?
I can’t keep up: my garter’s come untied:
I shall be murdered by the savage crew.
– The ice is breaking up on every side.
ENVOI
Prince of the Empire, Prince of Timbuctoo
Prince eight feet round and nearly four feet wide,
Do try to run a little faster, do –
– The ice is breaking up on every side.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Hannaker Mill
Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Hannaker Hill.
And the briar grows ever since then so blindly
And ever since then the clapper is still,
And the sweeps have fallen from Hannaker Mill.
Hannaker Hill is in desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
And Spirits that call on a falling nation,
Spirits that loved her calling aloud:
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.
Spirits that call and no one answers;
Hannaker’s down and England’s done.
Wind and thistle for pipe and dancers,
And never a ploughman under the sun:
Never a ploughman. Never a one.
HILAIRE BELLOC
The Villain
While joy gave clouds the light of stars,
That beamed where’er they looked;
And calves and lambs had tottering knees,
Excited, while they sucked;
While every bird enjoyed his song,
Without one thought of harm or wrong –
I turned my head and saw the wind,
Not far from where I stood,
Dragging the corn by her golden hair,
Into a dark and lonely wood.
W. H. DAVIES
No
A drear, wind-weary afternoon,
Drenched with rain was the autumn air;
As weary, too, though not of the wind,
I fell asleep in my chair.
Lost in that slumber I dreamed a dream
And out of its strangeness in stealth awoke;
No longer alone. Though who was near
I opened not eyes to look;
But stayed for a while in half-heavenly joy,
Half-earthly grief; nor moved:
More conscious, perhaps, than – had she been there –
Of whom, – and how much, – I loved.
WALTER DE LA MARE
The Birthnight
Dearest, it was a night
That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;
A sighing wind ran faintly white
Along the willows, and the cedar boughs
Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across
The starry silence of their antique moss:
No sound save rushing air
Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,
And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,
Thou, lovely thing.
WALTER DE LA MARE
The Rolling English Road
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.
My friends we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Ballade of Liquid Refreshment
Last night we started with some dry vermouth;
Some ancient sherry with a golden glow;
Then many flagons of the soul of fruit
Such as Burgundian vineyards only grow;
A bottle each of port was not de trop;
And then old brandy till the east was pink
– But talking makes me hoarse as any crow.
Excuse me while I go and have a drink.
Some talk of Alexander: some impute
Absorbency to Mirabeau-Tonneau;
Some say that General Grant and King Canute,
Falstaff and Pitt and Edgar Allan Poe,
Prince Charlie, Carteret, Hans Breitmann – so
The list goes on – they say that these could clink
The can, and take their liquor – A propos!
Excuse me while I go and have a drink.
Spirit of all that lives, from God to brute,
Spirit of love and life, of sun and snow,
Spirit of leaf and limb, of race and root,
How wonderfully art thou prison’d! Lo!
I quaff the cup, I feel the magic flow,
And Superman succeeds to Missing Link,
(I say, ‘I quaff’; but am I quaffing? No!
Excuse me while I go and have a drink.)
ENVOI
Hullo there, Prince! Is that you down below
Kicking and frying by the brimstone brink?
Well, well! It had to come some time, you
know.
Excuse me while I go and have a drink.
E. C. BENTLEY
Adlestrop
Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
N o one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
EDWARD THOMAS
Words
Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
As the winds use
A crack in a wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me,
You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
The Map and the Clock Page 23
