by Edna Longley
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.
This was the best of May – the small brown birds
Wisely reiterating endlessly
What no man learnt yet, in or out of school.
I built myself a house of glass
I built myself a house of glass:
It took me years to make it:
And I was proud. But now, alas,
Would God someone would break it.
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But it looks too magnificent.
No neighbour casts a stone
From where he dwells, in tenement
Or palace of glass, alone.
Words
Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
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As the winds use
A crack in a wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
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Choose me,
You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
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Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
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As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
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Strange and sweet
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
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That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, –
As our hills are, old, –
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Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
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As the earth which you prove
That we love.
Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
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Whose nightingales
Have no wings, –
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there, –
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From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb
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Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.
The Word
There are so many things I have forgot,
That once were much to me, or that were not,
All lost, as is a childless woman’s child
And its child’s children, in the undefiled
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Abyss of what can never be again.
I have forgot, too, names of the mighty men
That fought and lost or won in the old wars,
Of kings and fiends and gods, and most of the stars.
Some things I have forgot that I forget.
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But lesser things there are, remembered yet,
Than all the others. One name that I have not –
Though ’tis an empty thingless name – forgot
Never can die because Spring after Spring
Some thrushes learn to say it as they sing.
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There is always one at midday saying it clear
And tart – the name, only the name I hear.
While perhaps I am thinking of the elder scent
That is like food, or while I am content
With the wild rose scent that is like memory,
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This name suddenly is cried out to me
From somewhere in the bushes by a bird
Over and over again, a pure thrush word.
Under the Woods
When these old woods were young
The thrushes’ ancestors
As sweetly sung
In the old years.
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There was no garden here,
Apples nor mistletoe;
No children dear
Ran to and fro.
New then was this thatched cot,
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But the keeper was old,
And he had not
Much lead or gold.
Most silent beech and yew:
As he went round about
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The woods to view
Seldom he shot.
But now that he is gone
Out of most memories,
Still lingers on
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A stoat of his,
But one, shrivelled and green,
And with no scent at all,
And barely seen
On this shed wall.
Haymaking
After night’s thunder far away had rolled
The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,
And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,
Like the first gods before they made the world
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And misery, swimming the stormless sea
In beauty and in divine gaiety.
The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn
With leaves – the holly’s Autumn falls in June –
And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.
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The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit
With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd
Of children pouring out of school aloud.
And in the little thickets where a sleeper
For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper
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And garden warbler sang unceasingly;
While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee
The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow
As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.
Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown
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Travelled the road. In the field sloping down,
Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,
Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook
Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood
Without its team, it seemed it never would
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Move from the shadow of that single yew.
The team, as still, until their task was due,
Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade
That three squat oaks mid-field together made
Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,
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And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but
Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.
The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,
But still. And all were silent. All was old,
This morning time, with a great age untold,
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Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,
Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,
A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.
Under the heavens that know not what years be
The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
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Uttered even what they will in times far hence –
All of us gone out of the reach of change –
Immortal in a picture of an old grange.
A Dream
Over known fields with an old friend in dream
I walked, but came sudden to a strange stream.
Its dark waters were bursting out most bright
From a great mountain’s heart into the light.
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They ran a short course under the sun, then back
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sp; Into a pit they plunged, once more as black
As at their birth; and I stood thinking there
How white, had the day shone on them, they were,
Heaving and coiling. So by the roar and hiss
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And by the mighty motion of the abyss
I was bemused, that I forgot my friend
And neither saw nor sought him till the end,
When I awoke from waters unto men
Saying: ‘I shall be here some day again.’
The Brook
Seated once by a brook, watching a child
Chiefly that paddled, I was thus beguiled.
Mellow the blackbird sang and sharp the thrush
Not far off in the oak and hazel brush,
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Unseen. There was a scent like honeycomb
From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
A butterfly alighted. From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below.
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On the hot stone he perched contented so,
As if never a cart would pass again
That way; as if I were the last of men
And he the first of insects to have earth
And sun together and to know their worth.
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I was divided between him and the gleam,
The motion, and the voices, of the stream,
The waters running frizzled over gravel,
That never vanish and for ever travel.
A grey flycatcher silent on a fence
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And I sat as if we had been there since
The horseman and the horse lying beneath
The fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath,
The horseman and the horse with silver shoes,
Galloped the downs last. All that I could lose
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I lost. And then the child’s voice raised the dead.
‘No one’s been here before’ was what she said
And what I felt, yet never should have found
A word for, while I gathered sight and sound.
Aspens
All day and night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.
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Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing
Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –
The sounds that for these fifty years have been.
The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
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And over lightless pane and footless road,
Empty as sky, with every other sound
Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,
A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails
In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
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In tempest or the night of nightingales,
To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.
And it would be the same were no house near.
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
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But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.
Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.
The Mill-Water
Only the sound remains
Of the old mill;
Gone is the wheel;
On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns.
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Water that toils no more
Dangles white locks
And, falling, mocks
The music of the mill-wheel’s busy roar.
Pretty to see, by day
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Its sound is naught
Compared with thought
And talk and noise of labour and of play.
Night makes the difference.
In calm moonlight,
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Gloom infinite,
The sound comes surging in upon the sense:
Solitude, company, –
When it is night, –
Grief or delight
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By it must haunted or concluded be.
Often the silentness
Has but this one
Companion;
Wherever one creeps in the other is:
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Sometimes a thought is drowned
By it, sometimes
Out of it climbs;
All thoughts begin or end upon this sound,
Only the idle foam
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Of water falling
Changelessly calling,
Where once men had a work-place and a home.
For These
An acre of land between the shore and the hills,
Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,
The lovely visible earth and sky and sea,
Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills:
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A house that shall love me as I love it,
Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash-trees
That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches
Shall often visit and make love in and flit:
A garden I need never go beyond,
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Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one
Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:
A spring, a brook’s bend, or at least a pond:
For these I ask not, but, neither too late
Nor yet too early, for what men call content,
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And also that something may be sent
To be contented with, I ask of fate.
Digging
What matter makes my spade for tears or mirth,
Letting down two clay pipes into the earth?
The one I smoked, the other a soldier
Of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet
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Perhaps. The dead man’s immortality
Lies represented lightly with my own,
A yard or two nearer the living air
Than bones of ancients who, amazed to see
Almighty God erect the mastodon,
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Once laughed, or wept, in this same light of day.
Two Houses
Between a sunny bank and the sun
The farmhouse smiles
On the riverside plat:
No other one
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So pleasant to look at
And remember, for many miles,
So velvet-hushed and cool under the warm tiles.
Not far from the road it lies, yet caught
Far out of reach
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Of the road’s dust
And the dusty thought
Of passers-by, though each
Stops, and turns, and must
Look down at it like a wasp at the muslined peach.
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But another house stood there long before:
And as if above graves
Still the turf heaves
Above its stones:
Dark hangs the sycamore,
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Shadowing kennel and bones
And the black dog that shakes his chain and moans.
And when he barks, over the river
Flashing fast,
Dark echoes reply,
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And the hollow past
Half yields the dead that never
More than half hidden lie:
And out they creep and back again for ever.
Cock-Crow
Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, –
Out of the night, two cocks together crow,
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:
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And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand,
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,
Each facing each as in a coat of arms:
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.
October
The green elm with the one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, –
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
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That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,
Bow down to; and the wind travels too light
To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;
The gossamers wander at their own will.
At heavier steps than birds’ the squirrels scold.
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The rich scene has grown fresh again and new
As Spring and to the touch is not more cool
Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful,
Were I some other or with earth could turn
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In alternation of violet and rose,
Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,
And gorse that has no time not to be gay.
But if this be not happiness, – who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
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And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.
There’s nothing like the sun
There’s nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
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Whether on mountain side or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
