Carnaval buried long, and Pierrot dead.’
Sonnet
This is no time for prayers or words or song;
With folded hands we sit and slowly stare,
The world’s old wheels go round, and like a fair
The clowns and peepshows ever pass along.
Our brains are dumb with cold and worn with strife,
And every day has lingered on our faces,
Marking its usual course and weary paces
With cruel cunning care and sober knife.
Fate, like a sculptor working with great tools,
Now moulds his genius into clever ways;
Our souls are cut and torn all for his praise
When his great masterpiece is praised by fools;
But Death has beaten him, and takes the pride
From the strong hands that held us till we died.
War
And yet we live while others die for us;
Live in the glory of sweet summer, still
Knowing not death, but knowing that life will
Be merciless to them – and so to us.
Blood lies too rich on many battlefields,
Too many crowns are made for solemn sorrow;
We rise from weeping, and the cruel morrow
Has nought, but to a further sorrow yields.
No god is yet arisen, who with fair
Firm judgement shall arrest this course of war
And make destruction cease; say: ‘Nature’s law
Too long hath broken been.’ None yet may dare
Hold out a mighty hand, bid Death withdraw,
Or break the current of this world-despair.
Monkery!
Oh multitude of popish monkery,
Give up your praying, spare your incense now,
For God has long forgotten your faint hearts
And your long self-inflicted suffering.
Give over challenging the wicked world
To steal your contrite souls from sacrifice;
This is no age of prophets, who with vows
Lived long in wildernesses, burnt at stake,
Or were translated into glorious heaven
Without the knowledgeable fear of death.
Put out the alter candles one by one,
Close down your sainted books and liturgies,
Untie the chaplets of your gathered beads,
And bow farewell to sanctity of church
(Recluseful ease wherein were spent your days).
This is a time of strife and war and death;
Against all these no prayers of man prevail;
But all the term of Time’s impatience now
Is loosely rampant, and destruction comes
To burn and pillage what was long thought safe.
But when once more the passionate earth is bound
And quieted by plenitude of peace
There must arise a greater, truer life
Above the formula of mere religion;
And as the ancient order passeth ever
Into the transmutation of the new,
So must all practices of former days
Sink in the silent whirlpool of the past.
1917
The curtains of the sky are tightly drawn;
As in a horrid sunken maze the sun
Is veiled with wickedness, and all the streets
Shine horribly and wanly at noontide.
Now all the precious greenery of trees,
Remaining deaf to the command of spring,
Is still imprisoned by late lagging time;
And in the silence of the winter night
There are as yet no signs of moon or dawn;
And in the minds of men there is no hope,
No spark of courage to foresee the end
Of the long-reigning period of this war.
While like the murmur of a thousand clocks
Wild apprehensions crowd into the days,
And force their weary fingers at our throats.
There is no use in putting on a mask
And crying ‘kamerad’ to death and strife;
There is no way to close our troubled hearts
To all the things that we have known before
(Yet then found loopholes to escape therefrom).
Each day a fever that’s both new and old
Will come and struggle with our weariness.
And there will be no spring, no summer more
When the sweet smile of heaven rests on earth;
No faith, nor enterprise. Secretly still
We shall go slinking through the web of Time;
And when the war is ended, glorious dreams
That have been planned and nurtured with our blood
(Conceived of faith in blind futurity)
Will float unseizable from our weak hands;
And there will be no joy of road or sea,
No freedom of fresh countries and rich towns,
No glory in a peace that comes too late.
Promise
Had I a clearer brain, imagination,
A flowing pen, and better-ending rhymes,
A firmer heart devoid of hesitation,
Unbiased happiness these troubled times,
With pleasure in this discontented life,
Forgetfulness of sorrow and of pain:
Triumphant victory over fear and strife,
Daring to look behind, and look again
Ahead for all the slowly coming days:
See nothing but the carnivals of peace,
Forget the dreams of death and other ways
Men have imagined for their own decrease –
I’d write a song to conquer all our tears
Lasting forever through the folding years.
Lament
I am an angry child’s last broken toy,
Left over from the games of yesterday,
Forgotten in a corner, cast away
By the tired hands of some small peevish boy.
I am a broken idol of last year,
Once worshipped richly in a golden shrine,
A deathless god that nations called divine,
Yet found another whom they did prefer.
I am an exiled king without his crown,
A dying poet with a tattered mask,
A starving beggar who may nothing ask,
And a religion that has been cast down.
Mood
Smoke-stacks, coal-stacks, hay-stacks, slack,
Colourless, scentless, pointless, dull,
Railways, highways, roadways black,
Grantham, Birmingham, Leeds, and Hull.
Steamers, passengers, convoys, trains,
Merchandise travelling over the sea,
Smutty streets and factory lanes –
What can these ever mean to me?
The Knave of Spades
You are the Knave of Spades; I swear you are
No other personage, no other card
In any pack has that satanic eye.
You are the soul of highway robbery,
And you have nimbly mocked at all those toys,
Pistols and crossbones, horses, masks and skulls;
For you have been too swift in every chase
And now you hover round forgotten gibbets,
Staring, and laugh. Again you are a wild
Great stamping Tartar full of ecstasy;
Your speech is suave, yet like a scimitar
Cleaves the white air with blazing irony.
I love you, Longhi’s darkest lurking shadow,
Appearing suddenly, as quickly gone
Back to your eighteenth-century lagoons;
I am not sure you weren’t that famous snake
That is accused of having tempted Eve
With apple-talk; (you knew how well to lie).
I hope that I shall never live to see
In your dark face the sign of any pain
Or an
y creeping sorrow that spoils pride;
(The pride of devils that may never suffer).
I think you have been king of your desires,
First granting them, then turning them to dust;
Weirwolf, enchanter, sometimes Harlequin,
A bitter Harlequin of curious moods
When midnight trembles and the West meets East…
God knows what more, but I prefer just now
To think of you as that same Knave of Spades,
A fiendish rebel with no heart; and yet
You are my love, the witchcraft of my faith.
Psalm
It makes you blind and mad; tears like a fire
Tears at the root of things, destroying all
Till the last flame is out, but love goes on.
Sometimes it gladdens you with valiancy,
Oh false fleet feeling that dies down too soon
Under the waters of reaction. True,
Love is a thing you shall not do without,
Nor having, hold it; bitter salted bread,
Disguised like shameful poison at a feast;
And those two brimming cups each side of you
Really contain the drunkenness of pain
And not the intoxicants of earthly wine.
You may not spurn this unknown hedge-row guest
That others jeer at, till he frightens them
With a thrown-off disguise; for love slips in
Behind you unawares. Some call him life,
The cowards call him death, and close their eyes
Under the ardent passion-flames of pain.
Love has the brave in his especial care,
And leads them open-eyed through all the worlds
Of hell and heaven; what wonder then if some
Go mad with climbing to such altitudes
Forgetting the descent? Heroes alone
Love takes for his unknown and ultimate ends,
And turns for them the thorns to passion-flowers
That never fade – immortalising love.
But dreary horny-handed fate sets out
Drawing the scattered back into the net;
And when the racing of the mill is done,
If love has pardoned you, and pitied you,
Comes from the wreck a phoenix, and you’ve got –
Friendship, that topmost solitary star.
Prayer
Oh God, make me incapable of prayer,
Too brave for supplication, too secure
To feel the taunt of danger! Let my heart
Be tightened mightily to withstand pain,
And make me suffer singly, without loss.
Now let me bear alone the ageing world
On firmer shoulders than the giant Atlas.
Make me symbolically iconoclast,
The ideal Antichrist, the Paradox.
Sirens
Your life – ship at sea, your moods – the winds,
The currents moving and the threatening rocks
That guard old fairylands of promises;
Those pleasant possibilities of Time
When the great seas go down and harbour seems
Of sure attainment, when the racing storm
And mangled foaming have been harvested
By the calm quietude of silent eves.
Then shall you see a port with welcome joy,
And trim the sails, steer on the craft with care.
The weary crew of your imaginings
Grown sceptical with suffering of salt waves
And striving days of stress and storm, now kneels,
And with a fervour got from prayers vouchsafed
Gives thanks to Fate. Oh false-illusioned souls,
The sanctity of harbour is too short!
You have forgot no ship has any home
Other than tumult; battling with the speed
Of the great multitudes and waves of thought,
The drastic hurricanes of huge emotion,
Despairing, long, flat calms of misery
when rowing fails – precipitous heights and deeps
Of wild mid-ocean madness, shifting sands
Where patience runs aground and perishes;
And yet you deem it freedom! Life at sea,
Tossed round forever, battered, staggering on
To finish voyages and recommence.
Better maybe at last unstop our ears
And follow the songs of sirens, guilelessly,
Down to the depths of some enchanted death
Where pain has been forgotten, tears shut out,
And old out-grown emotions turned away;
Where, like a miracle maybe, we’d find
Reflection of the same soft paradise,
Rare as on earth, but now attainable.
Evenings
Now when you hear the musing of a bell
Let loose in summer evenings, mark the poise
Of summer clouds, the mutability
Of pallid twilights from a tower’s crest –
When you have loved the last long sentiment
Slipped onto earth from sunset, seen the stars
Come pale and faltering, the blaze of flowers
Grow dim and grey, and all the stuff of night
Rise up around you almost menacing –
When you have lost the guide of colour, seen
The daylight like a workman trudging home
Oblivious of your thoughts and leaving you
Silent beside the brim of seas grown still,
Placid and strange. When you have lingered there,
And shuddered at the magic of a moon
That will not sleep, but needs your vigilance
And seizes on the musings of your soul
Till you are made fanatical and wild,
Torn with old conflicts and the internal fire
Of passion and love, excessive grief of tears
And all the revolutions found in life –
What then? your body shall be crucified,
Your spirit tortured, and perhaps found good
Enough a tribute for some ultimate art.
The River Nene
Oh the eternal sweetness of the river
Under mysterious sunsets, creeping on
Through meadows flowerless and low; today
Sleeping they stretch in silent mellowness.
No April flowers are here, no butterflies
Trilling on spotted cowslips, for today
Nature’s communion with the darkening season
Sets amber berries glowing, clustered birds
Whispering in autumn hedgerows. In the sky
Clouds meditate and slowly pass to westward;
The velvet greens are smoothed – I have walked long
Illumined by the purity of sunset
Soft as a kiss; stood on the gentle hills
And wondered at the world, this delicate
Sweet solitude of midland river valley
That wanders as a dream. I have gone by
The murmurous mill, the greyness of a village,
And loved the vesperal merging of the day
Into completed acquiescent night;
Found here the long reposeful altitudes
That guide the soul to heavens temporal.
Voyages North
The strange effects of afternoons!
Hours interminable, melting like honey-drops
In an assemblage of friends…
Or jagged, stretching hard unpleasant fingers
As we go by, hurrying through the crowds –
People agape at shops, Regent Street congested
With the intolerable army of winter road-workers
Picking; then in the Café Royal
Belated drunkards toying with a balloon
Bought from a pedlar – streets and stations
Serried together like cheap print, swinging trains
With conversational travellers arguing on
the Opera –
Newspapers, agitation of the mind and fingers,
The first breath of country dispelling undue meditation
With the reposeful promise of village firesides;
Greetings at meeting – But if I were free
I would go on, see all the northern continents
Stretch out before me under winter sunsets;
Look into the psychology
Of Iceland, and plumb the imaginations
Of travellers outlandish, talking and drinking
With stern strange companies of merchants;
I should learn
More than one could remember, walk through the days
Enjoying the remoteness, and laughing in foreign places;
I should cure my heart of longing and impatience
And all the penalties of thought-out pleasure,
Those aftermaths of degradation
That come when silly feasts are done.
I should be wise and prodigal, spending these new delights
With the conviction of a millionaire
Made human by imagination – they should be
The important steps that lead to happiness
And independence of the mind; then should I say
Final farewell to streets of memories,
Forget the analytical introspection
And the subjective drowsiness of mind,
Stamping into the dust all staleness of things outgrown,
Stand on a northern hilltop shouting at the sun!
The Love Story
The time for fairy-tales is past; secure
The latch was shut on children’s dreams, but one
Escaped, and daring fled into the world
Where growing magically, men called it Love…
In secret hurrying through the troubled nights
Like feverish criminals that fear pursuit
We hide the gold of our discovery,
Trembling to look on it; ah, where shall be
Selected Poems Page 6
