by Edna Longley
Something more wise,
More dark,
And far different.
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Even so the lark
Loves dust
And nestles in it
The minute
Before he must
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Soar in lone flight
So far,
Like a black star
He seems –
A mote
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Of singing dust
Afloat
Above,
That dreams
And sheds no light.
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I know your lust
Is love.
Bright Clouds
Bright clouds of may
Shade half the pond.
Beyond,
All but one bay
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Of emerald
Tall reeds
Like criss-cross bayonets
Where a bird once called,
Lies bright as the sun.
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No one heeds.
The light wind frets
And drifts the scum
Of may-blossom.
Till the moorhen calls
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Again
Naught’s to be done
By birds or men.
Still the may falls.
Early one morning
Early one morning in May I set out,
And nobody I knew was about.
I’m bound away for ever,
Away somewhere, away for ever.
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There was no wind to trouble the weathercocks.
I had burnt my letters and darned my socks.
No one knew I was going away,
I thought myself I should come back some day.
I heard the brook through the town gardens run.
10
O sweet was the mud turned to dust by the sun.
A gate banged in a fence and banged in my head.
‘A fine morning, sir,’ a shepherd said.
I could not return from my liberty,
To my youth and my love and my misery.
15
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,
The only sweet thing that is not also fleet.
I’m bound away for ever,
Away somewhere, away for ever.
It was upon
It was upon a July evening.
At a stile I stood, looking along a path
Over the country by a second Spring
Drenched perfect green again. ‘The lattermath
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Will be a fine one.’ So the stranger said,
A wandering man. Albeit I stood at rest,
Flushed with desire I was. The earth outspread,
Like meadows of the future, I possessed.
And as an unaccomplished prophecy
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The stranger’s words, after the interval
Of a score years, when those fields are by me
Never to be recrossed, now I recall,
This July eve, and question, wondering,
What of the lattermath to this hoar Spring?
Women he liked
Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob,
Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he
Loved horses. He himself was like a cob,
And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree.
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For the life in them he loved most living things,
But a tree chiefly. All along the lane
He planted elms where now the stormcock sings
That travellers hear from the slow-climbing train.
Till then the track had never had a name
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For all its thicket and the nightingales
That should have earned it. No one was to blame.
To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails.
Many years since, Bob Hayward died, and now
None passes there because the mist and the rain
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Out of the elms have turned the lane to slough
And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob’s Lane.
There was a time
There was a time when this poor frame was whole
And I had youth and never another care,
Or none that should have troubled a strong soul.
Yet, except sometimes in a frosty air
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When my heels hammered out a melody
From pavements of a city left behind,
I never would acknowledge my own glee
Because it was less mighty than my mind
Had dreamed of. Since I could not boast of strength
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Great as I wished, weakness was all my boast.
I sought yet hated pity till at length
I earned it. Oh, too heavy was the cost.
But now that there is something I could use
My youth and strength for, I deny the age,
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The care and weakness that I know – refuse
To admit I am unworthy of the wage
Paid to a man who gives up eyes and breath
For what would neither ask nor heed his death.
The Green Roads
The green roads that end in the forest
Are strewn with white goose feathers this June,
Like marks left behind by someone gone to the forest
To show his track. But he has never come back.
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Down each green road a cottage looks at the forest.
Round one the nettle towers; two are bathed in flowers.
An old man along the green road to the forest
Strays from one, from another a child alone.
In the thicket bordering the forest,
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All day long a thrush twiddles his song.
It is old, but the trees are young in the forest,
All but one like a castle keep, in the middle deep.
That oak saw the ages pass in the forest:
They were a host, but their memories are lost,
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For the tree is dead: all things forget the forest
Excepting perhaps me, when now I see
The old man, the child, the goose feathers at the edge of the forest,
And hear all day long the thrush repeat his song.
The Gallows
There was a weasel lived in the sun
With all his family,
Till a keeper shot him with his gun
And hung him up on a tree,
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Where he swings in the wind and rain,
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.
There was a crow who was no sleeper,
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But a thief and a murderer
Till a very late hour; and this keeper
Made him one of the things that were,
To hang and flap in rain and wind,
In the sun and in the snow.
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There are no more sins to be sinned
On the dead oak tree bough.
There was a magpie, too,
Had a long tongue and a long tail;
He could both talk and do –
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But what did that avail?
He, too, flaps in the wind and rain
Alongside weasel and crow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.
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And many other beasts
And birds, skin, bone and feather,
Have been taken from their feasts
And hung up there together,
To swing and have endless leisure
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In the sun and in the snow,
Without pain, without pleasure,
On the dead oak tree bough.
The Dark Forest
Dark is the forest and deep, and overhead
Hang stars like seeds of light
In vain, though not since they were sown was bred
Anything more bright.
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And evermore mighty multitudes ride
About, nor enter in;
Of the other multitudes that dwell inside
Never yet was one seen.
The forest foxglove is purple, the marguerite
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Outside is gold and white,
Nor can those that pluck either blossom greet
The others, day or night.
When he should laugh
When he should laugh the wise man knows full well:
For he knows what is truly laughable.
But wiser is the man who laughs also,
Or holds his laughter, when the foolish do.
How at once
How at once should I know,
When stretched in the harvest blue
I saw the swift’s black bow,
That I would not have that view
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Another day
Until next May
Again it is due?
The same year after year –
But with the swift alone.
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With other things I but fear
That they will be over and done
Suddenly
And I only see
Them to know them gone.
Gone, gone again
Gone, gone again,
May, June, July,
And August gone,
Again gone by,
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Not memorable
Save that I saw them go,
As past the empty quays
The rivers flow.
And now again,
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In the harvest rain,
The Blenheim oranges
Fall grubby from the trees,
As when I was young –
And when the lost one was here –
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And when the war began
To turn young men to dung.
Look at the old house,
Outmoded, dignified,
Dark and untenanted,
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With grass growing instead
Of the footsteps of life,
The friendliness, the strife;
In its beds have lain
Youth, love, age and pain:
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I am something like that;
Only I am not dead,
Still breathing and interested
In the house that is not dark: –
I am something like that:
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Not one pane to reflect the sun,
For the schoolboys to throw at –
They have broken every one.
That girl’s clear eyes
That girl’s clear eyes utterly concealed all
Except that there was something to reveal.
And what did mine say in the interval?
No more: no less. They are but as a seal
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Not to be broken till after I am dead;
And then vainly. Every one of us
This morning at our tasks left nothing said,
In spite of many words. We were sealed thus,
Like tombs. Nor until now could I admit
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That all I cared for was the pleasure and pain
I tasted in the stony square sunlit,
Or the dark cloisters, or shade of airy plane,
While music blazed and children, line after line,
Marched past, hiding the ‘Seventeen Thirty-Nine’.
What will they do?
What will they do when I am gone? It is plain
That they will do without me as the rain
Can do without the flowers and the grass
That profit by it and must perish without.
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I have but seen them in the loud street pass;
And I was naught to them. I turned about
To see them disappearing carelessly.
But what if I in them as they in me
Nourished what has great value and no price?
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Almost I thought that rain thirsts for a draught
Which only in the blossom’s chalice lies,
Until that one turned back and lightly laughed.
The Trumpet
Rise up, rise up,
And, as the trumpet blowing
Chases the dreams of men,
As the dawn glowing
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The stars that left unlit
The land and water,
Rise up and scatter
The dew that covers
The print of last night’s lovers –
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Scatter it, scatter it!
While you are listening
To the clear horn,
Forget, men, everything
On this earth newborn,
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Except that it is lovelier
Than any mysteries.
Open your eyes to the air
That has washed the eyes of the stars
Through all the dewy night:
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Up with the light,
To the old wars;
Arise, arise!
When first
When first I came here I had hope,
Hope for I knew not what. Fast beat
My heart at sight of the tall slope
Of grass and yews, as if my feet
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Only by scaling its steps of chalk
Would see something no other hill
Ever disclosed. And now I walk
Down it the last time. Never will
My heart beat so again at sight
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Of any hill although as fair
And loftier. For infinite
The change, late unperceived, this year,
The twelfth, suddenly, shows me plain.
Hope now, – not health, nor cheerfulness,
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Since they can come and go again,
As often one brief hour witnesses, –
Just hope has gone for ever. Perhaps
I may love other hills yet more
Than this: the future and the maps
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Hide something I was waiting for.
One thing I know, that love with chance
And use and time and necessity
Will grow, and louder the heart’s dance
At parting than at meeting be.
The Child in the Orchard
‘He rolls in the orchard: he is stained with moss
And with earth, the solitary old white horse.
Where is his father and where is his mother
Among all the brown horses? Has he a brother?
5
I know the swallow, the hawk, and the hern;
But there are two million things for me to learn.
‘Who was the lady that rode the white horse
With rings and bells to Banbury Cross?
Was there no other lady in England beside
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That a nursery rhyme could take for a ride?
The swift, the swallow, the hawk, and the hern.
There are two million things for me to learn.
‘Was there a man once who straddled across
The back of the Westbury White Horse
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Over there on Salisbury Plain’s green wall?
Was he bound for Westbury, or had he a fall?
The swift, the swallow, the hawk, and the hern.
There are two million things for me to learn.
‘Out of all the white horses I know three,
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At the age of six; and it seems to me
There is so much to learn, for men,
That I dare not go to bed again.
The swift, the swallo
w, the hawk, and the hern.
There are millions of things for me to learn.’
Lights Out
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
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Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
Many a road and track
That, since the dawn’s first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
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Deceived the travellers
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.
Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
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All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.
There is not any book
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Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone,
I know not how.
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The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
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And myself.
The long small room
The long small room that showed willows in the west
Narrowed up to the end the fireplace filled,
Although not wide. I liked it. No one guessed
What need or accident made them so build.
5
Only the moon, the mouse and the sparrow peeped
