by Edna Longley
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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,
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Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Tears
It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen –
Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall – that day
When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out
But still all equals in their rage of gladness
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Upon the scent, made one, like a great dragon
In Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun
And once bore hops: and on that other day
When I stepped out from the double-shadowed Tower
Into an April morning, stirring and sweet
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And warm. Strange solitude was there and silence.
A mightier charm than any in the Tower
Possessed the courtyard. They were changing guard,
Soldiers in line, young English countrymen,
Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums
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And fifes were playing ‘The British Grenadiers’.
The men, the music piercing that solitude
And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed,
And have forgotten since their beauty passed.
Over the Hills
Often and often it came back again
To mind, the day I passed the horizon ridge
To a new country, the path I had to find
By half-gaps that were stiles once in the hedge,
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The pack of scarlet clouds running across
The harvest evening that seemed endless then
And after, and the inn where all were kind,
All were strangers. I did not know my loss
Till one day twelve months later suddenly
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I leaned upon my spade and saw it all,
Though far beyond the sky-line. It became
Almost a habit through the year for me
To lean and see it and think to do the same
Again for two days and a night. Recall
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Was vain: no more could the restless brook
Ever turn back and climb the waterfall
To the lake that rests and stirs not in its nook,
As in the hollow of the collar-bone
Under the mountain’s head of rush and stone.
The Lofty Sky
Today I want the sky,
The tops of the high hills,
Above the last man’s house,
His hedges, and his cows,
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Where, if I will, I look
Down even on sheep and rook,
And of all things that move
See buzzards only above: –
Past all trees, past furze
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And thorn, where naught deters
The desire of the eye
For sky, nothing but sky.
I sicken of the woods
And all the multitudes
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Of hedge-trees. They are no more
Than weeds upon this floor
Of the river of air
Leagues deep, leagues wide, where
I am like a fish that lives
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In weeds and mud and gives
What’s above him no thought.
I might be a tench for aught
That I can do today
Down on the wealden clay.
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Even the tench has days
When he floats up and plays
Among the lily leaves
And sees the sky, or grieves
Not if he nothing sees:
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While I, I know that trees
Under that lofty sky
Are weeds, fields mud, and I
Would arise and go far
To where the lilies are.
The Cuckoo
That’s the cuckoo, you say. I cannot hear it.
When last I heard it I cannot recall; but I know
Too well the year when first I failed to hear it –
It was drowned by my man groaning out to his sheep ‘Ho! Ho!’
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Ten times with an angry voice he shouted
‘Ho! Ho!’ but not in anger, for that was his way.
He died that Summer, and that is how I remember
The cuckoo calling, the children listening, and me saying, ‘Nay.’
And now, as you said, ‘There it is!’ I was hearing
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Not the cuckoo at all, but my man’s ‘Ho! Ho!’ instead.
And I think that even if I could lose my deafness
The cuckoo’s note would be drowned by the voice of my dead.
Swedes
They have taken the gable from the roof of clay
On the long swede pile. They have let in the sun
To the white and gold and purple of curled fronds
Unsunned. It is a sight more tender-gorgeous
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At the wood-corner where Winter moans and drips
Than when, in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings,
A boy crawls down into a Pharaoh’s tomb
And, first of Christian men, beholds the mummy,
God and monkey, chariot and throne and vase,
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Blue pottery, alabaster, and gold.
But dreamless long-dead Amen-hotep lies.
This is a dream of Winter, sweet as Spring.
The Unknown Bird
Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
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Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.
Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off –
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As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is – I told men
What I had heard.
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I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
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Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
’Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
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For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
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A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.
The Mill-Pond
The sun blazed while the thunder yet
Added a boom:
A wagtail flickered bright over
The mill-pond’s gloom:
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Less than the cooing in the alder
Isles of the pool
Sounded the thunder through t
hat plunge
Of waters cool.
Scared starlings on the aspen tip
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Past the black mill
Outchattered the stream and the next roar
Far on the hill.
As my feet dangling teased the foam
That slid below
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A girl came out. ‘Take care!’ she said –
Ages ago.
She startled me, standing quite close
Dressed all in white:
Ages ago I was angry till
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She passed from sight.
Then the storm burst, and as I crouched
To shelter, how
Beautiful and kind, too, she seemed,
As she does now!
Man and Dog
‘’Twill take some getting.’ ‘Sir, I think ’twill so.’
The old man stared up at the mistletoe
That hung too high in the poplar’s crest for plunder
Of any climber, though not for kissing under:
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Then he went on against the north-east wind –
Straight but lame, leaning on a staff new-skinned,
Carrying a brolly, flag-basket, and old coat, –
Towards Alton, ten miles off. And he had not
Done less from Chilgrove where he pulled up docks.
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’Twere best, if he had had ‘a money-box’,
To have waited there till the sheep cleared a field
For what a half-week’s flint-picking would yield.
His mind was running on the work he had done
Since he left Christchurch in the New Forest, one
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Spring in the ’seventies, – navvying on dock and line
From Southampton to Newcastle-on-Tyne, –
In ’seventy-four a year of soldiering
With the Berkshires, – hoeing and harvesting
In half the shires where corn and couch will grow.
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His sons, three sons, were fighting, but the hoe
And reap-hook he liked, or anything to do with trees.
He fell once from a poplar tall as these:
The Flying Man they called him in hospital.
‘If I flew now, to another world I’d fall.’
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He laughed and whistled to the small brown bitch
With spots of blue that hunted in the ditch.
Her foxy Welsh grandfather must have paired
Beneath him. He kept sheep in Wales and scared
Strangers, I will warrant, with his pearl eye
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And trick of shrinking off as he were shy,
Then following close in silence for – for what?
‘No rabbit, never fear, she ever got,
Yet always hunts. Today she nearly had one:
She would and she wouldn’t. ’Twas like that. The bad one!
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She’s not much use, but still she’s company,
Though I’m not. She goes everywhere with me.
So Alton I must reach tonight somehow:
I’ll get no shakedown with that bedfellow
From farmers. Many a man sleeps worse tonight
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Than I shall.’ ‘In the trenches.’ ‘Yes, that’s right.
But they’ll be out of that – I hope they be –
This weather, marching after the enemy.’
‘And so I hope. Good luck.’ And there I nodded
‘Good-night. You keep straight on.’ Stiffly he plodded;
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And at his heels the crisp leaves scurried fast,
And the leaf-coloured robin watched. They passed,
The robin till next day, the man for good,
Together in the twilight of the wood.
Beauty
What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph –
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‘Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.’ Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
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Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
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For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.
The Gypsy
A fortnight before Christmas Gypsies were everywhere:
Vans were drawn up on wastes, women trailed to the fair.
‘My gentleman,’ said one, ‘You’ve got a lucky face.’
‘And you’ve a luckier,’ I thought, ‘if such a grace
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And impudence in rags are lucky.’ ‘Give a penny
For the poor baby’s sake.’ ‘Indeed I have not any
Unless you can give change for a sovereign, my dear.’
‘Then just half a pipeful of tobacco can you spare?’
I gave it. With that much victory she laughed content.
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I should have given more, but off and away she went
With her baby and her pink sham flowers to rejoin
The rest before I could translate to its proper coin
Gratitude for her grace. And I paid nothing then,
As I pay nothing now with the dipping of my pen
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For her brother’s music when he drummed the tambourine
And stamped his feet, which made the workmen passing grin,
While his mouth-organ changed to a rascally Bacchanal dance
‘Over the hills and far away’. This and his glance
Outlasted all the fair, farmer and auctioneer,
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Cheap-jack, balloon-man, drover with crooked stick, and steer,
Pig, turkey, goose, and duck, Christmas corpses to be.
Not even the kneeling ox had eyes like the Romany.
That night he peopled for me the hollow wooded land,
More dark and wild than stormiest heavens, that I searched and scanned
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Like a ghost new-arrived. The gradations of the dark
Were like an underworld of death, but for the spark
In the Gypsy boy’s black eyes as he played and stamped his tune,
‘Over the hills and far away’, and a crescent moon.
Ambition
Unless it was that day I never knew
Ambition. After a night of frost, before
The March sun brightened and the South-west blew,
Jackdaws began to shout and float and soar
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Already, and one was racing straight and high
Alone, shouting like a black warrior
Challenges and menaces to the wide sky.
With loud long laughter then a woodpecker
Ridiculed the sadness of the owl’s last cry.
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And through the valley where all the folk astir
Made only plumes of pearly smoke to tower
Over dark trees and white meadows happier
Than was Elysium in that happy hour,
A train that roared along raised after it
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And carried with it a motionless white bower
Of purest cloud, from end to end close-knit,
So fair it touched the roar with silence. Time
Was powerless while that lasted. I could sit
And t
hink I had made the loveliness of prime,
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Breathed its life into it and were its lord,
And no mind lived save this ’twixt clouds and rime.
Omnipotent I was, nor even deplored
That I did nothing. But the end fell like a bell:
The bower was scattered; far off the train roared.
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But if this was ambition I cannot tell.
What ’twas ambition for I know not well.
House and Man
One hour: as dim he and his house now look
As a reflection in a rippling brook,
While I remember him; but first, his house.
Empty it sounded. It was dark with forest boughs
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That brushed the walls and made the mossy tiles
Part of the squirrels’ track. In all those miles
Of forest silence and forest murmur, only
One house – ‘Lonely!’ he said, ‘I wish it were lonely’ –
Which the trees looked upon from every side,
And that was his.
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He waved good-bye to hide
A sigh that he converted to a laugh.
He seemed to hang rather than stand there, half
Ghost-like, half like a beggar’s rag, clean wrung
And useless on the briar where it has hung
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Long years a-washing by sun and wind and rain.
But why I call back man and house again
Is that now on a beech-tree’s tip I see
As then I saw – I at the gate, and he
In the house darkness, – a magpie veering about,
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A magpie like a weathercock in doubt.
Parting
The Past is a strange land, most strange.
Wind blows not there, nor does rain fall:
If they do, they cannot hurt at all.
Men of all kinds as equals range
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The soundless fields and streets of it.
Pleasure and pain there have no sting,
The perished self not suffering
That lacks all blood and nerve and wit,
And is in shadow-land a shade.
