by Edna Longley
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning’s storm drop down
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Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March’s sun,
Like April’s, or July’s, or June’s, or May’s,
Or January’s, or February’s, great days:
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And August, September, October, and December
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said –
Or, if I could live long enough, should say –
‘There’s nothing like the sun that shines today.’
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There’s nothing like the sun till we are dead.
The Thrush
When Winter’s ahead,
What can you read in November
That you read in April
When Winter’s dead?
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I hear the thrush, and I see
Him alone at the end of the lane
Near the bare poplar’s tip,
Singing continuously.
Is it more that you know
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Than that, even as in April,
So in November,
Winter is gone that must go?
Or is all your lore
Not to call November November,
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And April April,
And Winter Winter – no more?
But I know the months all,
And their sweet names, April,
May and June and October,
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As you call and call
I must remember
What died in April
And consider what will be born
Of a fair November;
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And April I love for what
It was born of, and November
For what it will die in,
What they are and what they are not,
While you love what is kind,
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What you can sing in
And love and forget in
All that’s ahead and behind.
Liberty
The last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm’s shadow.
It is as if everything else had slept
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Many an age, unforgotten and lost
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live yet and here stand idle over the grave
Where all is buried. Both have liberty
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To dream what we could do if we were free
To do some thing we had desired long,
The moon and I. There’s none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
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And nothing is to his mind. If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
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And I could take and carry them away
I should be rich; or if I had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.
And yet I still am half in love with pain,
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With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,
With things that have an end, with life and earth,
And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.
This is no case of petty right or wrong
This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
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Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: –
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
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With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches’ cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
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And like her mother that died yesterday.
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
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But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from the dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
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She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.
Rain
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
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For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
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Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
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Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
The clouds that are so light
The clouds that are so light,
Beautiful, swift and bright,
Cast shadows on field and park
Of the earth that is so dark,
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And even so now, light one!
Beautiful, swift and bright one!
You let fall on a heart that was dark,
Unillumined, a deeper mark.
But clouds would have, without earth
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To shadow, far less worth:
Away from your shadow on me
Your beauty less would be,
And if it still be treasured
An age hence, it shall be measured
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By this small dark spot
Without which it were not.
Roads
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.
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Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
On this earth ’tis sure
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We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:
The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
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Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.
They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack
of the traveller
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Who is now a dream only.
From dawn’s twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.
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The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.
Often footsore, never
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Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary
As it winds on for ever.
Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
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And the Mabinogion tales,
Is one of the true gods,
Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
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That by the roadside be,
And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter
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At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer
Calls back to their own night
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Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
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Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:
Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
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With their pattering,
Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.
The Ash Grove
Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made
Little more than the dead ones made of shade.
If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:
But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.
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Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval –
Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles – but nothing at all,
Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,
Could climb down in to molest me over the wall
That I passed through at either end without noticing.
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And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring
The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost
With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing
The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,
And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,
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But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die
And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost.
February Afternoon
Men heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw,
A thousand years ago even as now,
Black rooks with white gulls following the plough
So that the first are last until a caw
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Commands that last are first again, – a law
Which was of old when one, like me, dreamed how
A thousand years might dust lie on his brow
Yet thus would birds do between hedge and shaw.
Time swims before me, making as a day
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A thousand years, while the broad ploughland oak
Roars mill-like and men strike and bear the stroke
Of war as ever, audacious or resigned,
And God still sits aloft in the array
That we have wrought him, stone-deaf and stone-blind.
I may come near loving you
I may come near loving you
When you are dead
And there is nothing to do
And much to be said.
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To repent that day will be
Impossible
For you and vain for me
The truth to tell.
I shall be sorry for
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Your impotence:
You can do and undo no more
When you go hence,
Cannot even forgive
The funeral.
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But not so long as you live
Can I love you at all.
Those things that poets said
Those things that poets said
Of love seemed true to me
When I loved and I fed
On love and poetry equally.
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But now I wish I knew
If theirs were love indeed,
Or if mine were the true
And theirs some other lovely weed:
For certainly not thus,
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Then or thereafter, I
Loved ever. Between us
Decide, good Love, before I die.
Only, that once I loved
By this one argument
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Is very plainly proved:
I, loving not, am different.
No one so much as you
No one so much as you
Loves this my clay,
Or would lament as you
Its dying day.
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You know me through and through
Though I have not told,
And though with what you know
You are not bold.
None ever was so fair
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As I thought you:
Not a word can I bear
Spoken against you.
All that I ever did
For you seemed coarse
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Compared with what I hid
Nor put in force.
My eyes scarce dare meet you
Lest they should prove
I but respond to you
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And do not love.
We look and understand,
We cannot speak
Except in trifles and
Words the most weak.
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For I at most accept
Your love, regretting
That is all: I have kept
Only a fretting
That I could not return
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All that you gave
And could not ever burn
With the love you have,
Till sometimes it did seem
Better it were
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Never to see you more
Than linger here
With only gratitude
Instead of love –
A pine in solitude
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Cradling a dove.
The Unknown
She is most fair,
And when they see her pass
The poets’ ladies
Look no more in the glass
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But after her.
On a bleak moor
Running under the moon
She lures a poet,
Once proud or happy, soon
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Far from his door.
Beside a train,
Because they saw her go,
Or failed to see her,
Travellers and watchers know
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Another pain.
The simple lack
Of her is more to me
Than others’ presence,
Whether life splendid be
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Or utter black.
I have not seen,
I have no news of her;
I can tell only
She is not here, but there
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She might have been.
She is to be kissed
Only perhaps by me;
She may be seeking
Me and no other: she
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May not exist.
Celandine
Thinking of her had saddened me at first,
Until I saw the sun on the celandines lie
Redoubled, and she stood up like a flame,
A living thing, not what before I nursed,
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The shadow I was growing to love almost,
The phantom, not the creature with bright eye
That I had thought never to see, once lost.
She found the celandines of February
Always before us all. Her nature and name
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Were like those flowers, and now immediately
For a short swift eternity back she came,
Beautiful, happy, simply as when she wore
Her brightest bloom among the winter hues
Of all the world; and I was happy too,
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Seeing the blossoms and the maiden who
Had seen them with me Februarys before,
Bending to them as in and out she trod
And laughed, with locks sweeping the mossy sod.
But this was a dream: the flowers were not true,
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Until I stooped to pluck from the grass there
One of five petals and I smelt its juice
Which made me sigh, remembering she was no more,
Gone like a never perfectly recalled air.
‘Home’
Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and
We had seen nothing fairer than that land,
Though strange, and the untrodden snow that made
Wild of the tame, casting out all that was
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Not wild and rustic and old; and we were glad.
