Rings him to vespers and to well-thumbed books;
His soul cries forth in anguish; Satan looks
Into his heart from out a neighbouring hell:
‘Priesthood, Eusebius, thou shalt surely miss’…
Hurrying the tearful youth Christ’s cross to kiss.
Iris of Memories
Do you remember in those summer days
When we were young how often we’d devise
Together the future? No surprise
Or turn of fate should part us, and our ways
Ran each by each; we picked the future’s woof
Adventure searching, till these Sussex hours
Should bring us new adventure, while the flowers
About us waved in harvest plumes. Aloof
The house stood dark in green and gold of hay,
The house that we would leave fresh in the morn
To run the country on some quest forlorn,
Greeting the hop-pickers upon our way.
And there were wandering journeys to the sea
In dusty trains; there thrilling on the sands
Your scarlet dress grew vivid, and your hands
Evoked with witty gesture, palms of glee,
Things we had laughed at lovingly – for then,
Ah even then we loved our memories –
Till later under pale quiescent skies
We travelled homeward tired of towns and men,
Telling our dreams more slowly. So the moon
Crept up the stony hill between the hops,
(Full fields of ghosts become, where shadow stops
Across our stride); and all the stars of June
Breathed up the poignance of unbounded roses.
We heard the rustle in the sombre trees
Heavy with bats and owlish noise; the breeze
Brought on its flutter sound of gate that closes
Far in a meadow. Sometimes you would tell
Stories to chill one in this midnight hour,
Until your fancy trembled at the power
The story held to frighten you as well.
The air grew full of dawn and we would yet
Talk of our morrows and our yesterdays;
Outside the birds grew tremulous with praise
In the hot sunrise. We shall not forget
The slumbering hours of hayfields where the river
Between its hedges near the passing train,
Faltered unseen and voiceless, then again
Flowed out with dipping birds and fish aquiver;
For here we wandered silent, read strange things,
And had, how often, many a verse essayed,
Truant unfinished poems – as they played
Their shadowy game in the mind’s fairy-rings,
Unseizably they mocked at our endeavour.
Then were there later days, with autumn rain
Damp in the haunted house, and so again
You would become a legendary inventor;
Weaving dark plays by firelight till sunset,
And thunder passing hence great moths came out
Sealing the redescended calm no doubt…
Iris of memories we shall not forget.
Mary Queen of Scots
From the Queen’s Quiar
The little throat in ruffle of stiff gold,
The impatient tear that creeps through her suspense
In chapel ecstasy, the while her cold
White face in anguish turns to the immense
Remoteness of the northern solitudes,
Tasting the exile; then the teeming days
Of court adventure while her sorrow broods,
Heavy with tragedies. Her spirit prays,
Made ardent, and in hot uncertainty
Accepts sweet page’s love and ruffian lover –
So is her longing warm at sudden fire,
Hid from the jealous storms that go above her
Drawing more close about her destiny,
Until the ending to such heart’s desire.
Ballad of 5 Rue De L’Etoile
When you are dazed with antics of the street,
And weary of its tumult, and the fleet
Of turbulent traffic, faces, gestures, cries,
Turn to a dipping alley where the skies
Remoter seem from the intemperate light,
And here spend cooler hours until the night;
Pausing within a street of downward coil
That slinks obscurely from the vast Etoile.
All at your hand that you may wish for: take
The succulent fruit-store opposite to slake
Parched eyes with scarlet colour and fresh green.
When to my room you’ve climbed, and having been
Struck for a moment by fantastic deer
That on my curtains dance, turn patient ear
To story of the house and those that dwell
Discreet behind their pearl-grey walls and sell
Some, their light loves, and some, their willing brain.
For we are motely as a summer train
Is motley with its eager passengers
Ardent for seasides and the country stars.
I’ll tell you how the women come and go,
Seemly and neat – for love will have it so;
Love that must climb some narrow midnight stair
Up several floors, demands good comfort there,
And comfort finding maybe will return –
And so their eyes can laugh, their lips can burn
With many a passion patiently (though then
Their thoughts may longing turn to other men);
Yet life has put them here and brought success,
Out of their minds are gone the days of stress,
And beauty is well served, and love as well.
Behind this silent door is one who’ll tell
one day his vivid stories to the world,
Woven in poetry; yet now is furled
In brooding subtleties and runs the town,
Well-pleased returning arm-in-arm with dawn.
Then in hot sleepless nights no doubt revolves
Past dubious pleasures and makes new resolves;
Forgoing cafés and on work intent,
Those times forgetting, ill or swiftly spent
By oily river of mid-afternoons
Or light half-sinister of Paris moons,
Such things, and joys insidious of the heart…
Yet with all these it being hard to part,
Goes out when weariness has been refreshed
To lovely Paris that has his soul enmeshed
Now for some season.
Then on higher floors
Live unknown behind their closed grey doors
That bar curiosity – all these I deem
Go light-foot, heavy-heart; as in a dream
Pass companies with half-remembered faces,
Silent, unmeddlesome to other places,
Nothing to you or me in this retreat,
Less than the cobbled noises of the street –
They are the background to our liberty,
So that with fresher steps our destiny
This Paris June, through all the streets a-flower
Advance toward us in the evening hour.
Memory at the Fair
I knew not whence my sorrow came that night,
For we were dumb together sorrow and I,
Walking the Paris streets, until a cry
Rose from an autumn fair. I saw the white
Smoke curled above the noise of those bright places
Where spin the fortune-wheels; in flying swings
I rode the frosty air, and tossed the rings
At gaudy prizes. But in the darker spaces
Beyond this fiery turmoil stood my dreams:
Once ancient memory like a ghostly clown
Peered grimly at the scene with many a frown,
G
rimacing disenchantment – for it seems
He mourned the past, adventurous time of chance,
Whispering to me, ‘Where is now Romance?’
Adolescence
I am in years almost the century’s child,
At grips with still the same uncertainty
That was attendant to me at the school.
The classics set before us, twenty voices
Took up enunciation, I was dumb –
Then goaded by the teacher’s stony finger
Trembling arose to read a meagre essay.
Next History went by, its wars and glories,
And politics that fill young minds with dust
Or Corn-laws and Reform – severe decades
When England topped the century with Victoria.
But we might never know Queen Katharine
Who ruled imperially adventurous in Russia,
Nor hear the Borgias’ crimes, the papal swindles;
For us no pages on the Medicis,
No panorama of past things in Rome,
But thorny sums, and German verbs rapped out.
For Art we had the photographic torsos
Of Jove and all his Venuses, with words
That lay less easy on the lecturer’s tongue:
We never doubted that her themes were Whitman,
Browning and Wordsworth – here we had examples,
Morals and principles… (‘Now these two terms
Must be explained to show you’ve understood.’)
The winter spent at this came Tennyson.
By half-past twelve all done the rest would go
With confident memories, but I forgetful
Scattered the lesson’s fragments in the street,
And hated life, with adolescent sense
Of wrong that dallies with tearful introspection.
I knew I could not learn, despite the prize
Between my hands the day that I was free.
* * * * * *
That summer went in solitude, with thoughts
Humming in concourse, as the thronging stars
Appear before the eyes of travellers
Descending to new lands on hurrying feet.
If at some time each man says: ‘world is mine,’
Then doubtless rang this clamour in my heart,
And many a fire was lit and worshipped there,
Ascetically, with pride, and so with longing.
I held the very world’s perplexities,
Throbbing of questions, stirring of heart’s blood
Urging hysterical things till dawn had come.
* * * * * *
A year of riot grew, with carnivals,
Music and wines beneath the million lamps
That flanked the thresholds of advancing war.
There were no ruins yet; each hour was gold
That reddened in the fires of its adventure –
Then had I thought of aftermaths, and stood
Uncertainly between the opened gates
Scanning the crossroads of a violent world.
The April Hour
The eagle above a cloudless solitude,
The wan grey rocks and songless silent spaces –
Here wandered lovers happy, old at heart,
Young with life’s pulsing in their sorrow-freed eyes,
Moved through late-shadowed glades and spokes of spring.
The early year had paused, and turned to radiance
This delicate hour of love; so were we calm,
Borne on the glad fulfilment of the moment,
Half-kin with the high soaring of the eagle.
Premature Spring
Let us go out my love to the strange spring weather,
See how the jonquils stiffen upon the lawn;
I have picked the first – from its triple garland of yellow
A fragrance is wafted to us on the uppermost terrace,
Hand-clasped and exultant, at gaze on the mists of the sea.
Though a nebulous morning has risen, its clouds and its shadows
Will part in the delicate sunshine – ah, see how they flow
Far back to the mountains, revealing a tender horizon
Uncertain as yet in the tremulous flush of the tide…
And here in the grass adolescent that thrills with the spring
Let us dream for a while of this hour, we are one with these things.
Sonnet
Here at the cross-roads we will part as friends
Going a little journey from each other;
Shoulder your memories, and I will gather
In these fresh fields all things that fortune sends
For when I find you next. Thus in some street
We know not yet, or in some autumn valley
Being met again, our thoughts as one will sally,
That all our partings make reunion sweet.
Far sweeter than the unbroken melody
That we must play each hour, each night, each dawn,
Till all our notes be spent and singing gone –
What use in songs enforced, what harmony?
But good are the adventures found alone
That we shall tell, no longer solitary.
Mist
When in the formal silence settled suddenly
Flutter strange thoughts within a room of mirrors,
Which shall we cling to, which shall we forget?
Memories of hours gone hither, words of daylight,
Now in the glimmering night, the night of mirrors,
Unpitied martyrs of their forced reflections.
Spray on sea, wan winter leaves blown skyward
Traceless remaining – Even as the dust
Rises oblivion merciful, and the gleam
Fades from the mirrors with our departing faces.
In the Valley of Willows
There is a mystery in the willow tree,
It sways in tremulous tide of light and shadows
Over the many waters where I see
This summer float upon a stream of shallows,
Curling about the pools whence lilies come.
By these in brooding twilight hour I dream
Of willow’s secret, and walking see them dumb,
So faint in valley-mist that now they seem
Wreathed spirits risen for sorrow or for warning.
Nature’s mythology is in their leaves
That flush with gold upon the crest of morning,
More vivid than laurel crowns that history weaves
In every century for her heroes dead.
It is of other stories they would tell,
Bending and pensive, each with tufted head
Borne as a sheaf of waves on noon’s hot swell
When breezes sing to them, and stir the great
Hillsides with harmony.
The forest trees
Are dark behind an imperial harvest’s state.
A dim horizon circles; there, to please
The fervent eyes of travellers, go by
Pale happy clouds that hesitate and drift
Caressing earth, until the evening sky
Floats in with growing shadows, then they lift
White bosoms to the sunset and are gone,
Processing in swan-state to other spheres.
In mutability of autumn tone
An ambered willow bends, the valley fears
Great winds blown overland or from the sea.
I will not listen to the leaf that stirred
Uneasily, first herald of what must be
When all the winter’s shouting gales are heard.
At Martin-Eglise
Beyond these buttercups of summer fields,
Past willows grey with light and poplars trembling,
I see the heavy woods’ green waves dissembling
Dark fancies and dark shadows; then it yields
A sudden road that curls about the valley,
Thre
ading the golden grasses and the corn.
Here is a chorus to arouse the morn,
Bird-voices thrilling – here the fish that dally
Between the currents of a wayward stream.
In these long August hours I fall to musing,
Weaving of stories that will never be,
Till sombre grows the wood. Then shall I dream
Once more those memories that brook no choosing,
Wave upon wave arising as at sea?
Bottles, Mirrors and Alchemy
A room of oak, ascetic; panelled walls
With here and there a faded ancestor
Of whom they tell dark legends – hints at cross-road
Robbery, and fables of midnight daring;
Dark in the shadow hang the portraits grim.
Behold a mirror that has seen last century
Pass laughing in to many a Christmas banquet,
Clouded before the eyes of weeping damsels
That were sequestered here, or crossed in love –
And now it shines for us: I hazard questions.
‘How is it you have kept those flagons still,
Bottles and demi-johns the firelight plays on?’
‘Some eighteenth-century Falstaff held them last,
We drink in smaller measure…’ Your voice is silent.
And so I look between the four tall candles
And sink into a latent zone of fancies;
Knowing the winter winds outside the pane,
The mirrors hiding memories, mocking us.
It seems in their perspective I can see
An old-time alchemist at work on things:
Disordered golds and dross lie at his feet,
And doubt has stemmed his feverish research.
Look, here’s a vial full of scalding purple,
Broken in anger, bubbling with scattered atoms –
‘Have you the toad’s eye, Wizard – viper’s tongue,
And secret incantations for the foe
That you are moulding as a waxen puppet?’
Oh – while this owl is hooting you are gone…
Selected Poems Page 8
