Hangman’s Oak
Before the cock in the barnyard spoke,
Before it well was day,
Horror like a serpent from about the Hangman’s Oak
Uncoiled and slid away.
Pity and Peace were on the limb
That bore such bitter fruit.
Deep he lies, and the desperate blood of him
Befriends the innocent root.
Brother, I said to the air beneath the bough
Whence he had swung,
It will not be long for any of us now;
We do not grow young.
It will not be long for the knotter of ropes, not long
For the sheriff or for me,
Or for any of them that came five hundred strong
To see you swing from a tree.
Side by side together in the belly of Death
We sit without hope,
You, and I, and the mother that gave you breath,
And the tree, and the rope.
Wine from These Grapes
Wine from these grapes I shall be treacling surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
If you would speak with me on any matter,
At any time, come where these grapes are grown;
And you will find me treading them to must.
Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter
Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Three women come to wash me clean
Shall not erase this stain.
Nor leave me lying purely,
Awaiting the black lover.
Death, fumbling to uncover
My body in his bed,
Shall know
There has been one
Before him.
To Those Without Pity
Cruel of heart, lay down my song.
Your reading eyes have done me wrong.
Not for you was the pen bitten,
And the mind wrung, and the song written.
Dawn
All men are lonely now.
This is the hour when no man has a friend.
Memory and Faith suspend
From their spread wings above a cool abyss.
All friendships end.
He that lay awake
All night
For sweet love’s unregenerate sake,
Sleeps in the grey light.
The lover, if he dream at all,
Dreams not of her whose languid hand sleeps open at his side;
He is gone to another bride.
And she he leaves behind
Sighs not in sleep “Unkind . . . unkind . . .”;
She walks in a garden of yellow quinces;
Smiling, she gathers yellow quinces in a basket
Of willow and laurel combined.
Should I return to your door,
Fresh and haggard out of the morning air,
There would be darkness on the stair,
And a dead close odour painfully sad,
That was not there before.
There would be silence. There would be heavy steps across the floor.
And you would let me in, frowning with sleep
Under your rumpled hair.
Beautiful now upon the ear unshut by slumber
The rich and varied voices of the waking day!—
The mighty, mournful whistles without number
Of tugs and ferries, mingling, confounding, failing,
Thinning to separate notes of wailing,
Making stupendous music on the misty bay.
Now through the echoing street in the growing light,
Intent on errands that the sun approves,
Clatter unashamed the heavy wheels and hooves
Before the silent houses; briskly they say:
“Marshal not me among the enterprises of the night.
I am the beginning of the day.”
To a Young Girl
Shall I despise you that your colourless tears
Made rainbows in your lashes, and you forgot to weep?
Would we were half so wise, that eke a grief out
By sitting in the dark, until we fall asleep.
I only fear lest, being by nature sunny,
By and by you will weep no more at all,
And fall asleep in the light, having lost with the tears
The colour in the lashes that comes as the tears fall.
I would not have you darken your lids with weeping,
Beautiful eyes, but I would have you weep enough
To wet the fingers of the hand held over the eye-lids,
And stain a little the light frock’s delicate stuff.
For there came into my mind, as I watched you winking the tears down,
Laughing faces, blown from the west and the east,
Faces lovely and proud that I have prized and cherished;
Nor were the loveliest among them those that had wept the least.
Evening on Lesbos
Twice having seen your shingled heads adorable
Side by side, the onyx and the gold,
I know that I have had what I could not hold.
Twice have I entered the room, not knowing she was here.
Two agate eyes, two eyes of malachite,
Twice have been turned upon me, hard and bright.
Whereby I know my loss.
Oh, not restorable
Sweet incense, mounting in the windless night!
Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Memory of Cassis
Do you recall how we sat by the smokily-burning
Twisted odourous trunk of the olive-tree,
In the inn on the cliff, and skinned the ripe green figs,
And heard the white sirocco driving in the sea?
The thunder and the smother there where like a ship’s prow
The light-house breasted the wave? how wanly through the wild spray
Under our peering eyes the eye of the light looked out,
Disheveled, but without dismay?
Do you recall the sweet-alyssum over the ledges
Crawling and the tall heather and the mushrooms under the pines,
And the deep white dust of the broad road leading outward
To a world forgotten, between the dusty almonds and the dusty vines?
Portrait
Over and over I have heard,
As now I hear it,
Your voice harsh and light as the scratching of dry leaves over the hard ground,
Your voice forever assailed and shaken by the wind from the island
Of illustrious living and dead, that never dies down,
And bending at moment s under the terrible weight of the perfect word,
Here in this
room without fire, without comfort of any kind,
Reading aloud to me immortal page after page conceived in a mortal mind.
Beauty at such moments before me like a wild bright bird
Has been in the room, and eyed me, and let me come near it.
I could not ever nor can I to this day
Acquaint you with the triumph and the sweet rest
These hours have brought to me and always bring,—
Rapture, coloured like the wild bird’s neck and wing,
Comfort, softer than the feathers of its breast.
Always, and even now, when I rise to go,
Your eyes blaze out from a face gone wickedly pale;
I try to tell you what I would have you know,—
What peace it was; you cry me down; you scourge me with a salty flail;
You will not have it so.
Winter Night
Pile high the hickory and the light
Log of chestnut struck by the blight.
Welcome-in the winter night.
The day has gone in hewing and felling,
Sawing and drawing wood to the dwelling
For the night of talk and story-telling.
These are the hours that give the edge
To the blunted axe and the bent wedge,
Straighten the saw and lighten the sledge.
Here are question and reply,
And the fire reflected in the thinking eye.
So peace, and let the bob-cat cry.
The Cameo
Forever over now, forever, forever gone
That day. Clear and diminished like a scene
Carven in cameo, the lighthouse, and the cove between
The sandy cliffs, and the boat drawn up on the beach;
And the long skirt of a lady innocent and young,
Her hand resting on her bosom, her head hung;
And the figure of a man in earnest speech.
Clear and diminished like a scene cut in cameo
The lighthouse, and the boat on the beach, and the two shapes
Of the woman and the man; lost like the lost day
Are the words that passed, and the pain,—discarded, cut away
From the stone, as from the memory the heat of the tears escapes.
O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard,
Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure;
From the action of the waves and from the action of sorrow forever secure,
White against a ruddy cliff you stand, chalcedony on sard.
Counting-out Rhyme
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.
Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.
The Plum Gatherer
The angry nettle and the mild
Grew together under the blue-plum trees.
I could not tell as a child
Which was my friend of these.
Always the angry nettle in the skirt of his sister
Caught my wrist that reached over the ground,
Where alike I gathered,—for the one was sweet and the other wore a frosty dust—
The broken plum and the sound.
The plum-trees are barren now and the black knot is upon them,
That stood so white in the spring.
I would give, to recall the sweetness and the frost of the lost blue plums,
Anything, anything.
I thrust my arm among the grey ambiguous nettles, and wait.
But they do not sting.
West Country Song
Sun came up, bigger than all my sorrow;
Lark in air so high, and his song clean through me.
Now comes night, hushing the lark in’s furrow,
And the rain falls fine.
What have I done with what was dearest to me?
Thatch and wick, fagot, and tea on trivet,—
These and more it was; it was all my cheer.
Now comes night, smelling of box and privet,
And the rain falls fine.
Have I left it out in the rain?—It is not here.
Pueblo Pot
There as I bent above the broken pot from the mesa pueblo,
Mournfully many times its patterned shards piecing together and laying aside,
Appeared upon the house-top, two Navajos enchanted, the redshafted flicker and his bride,
And stepped with lovely stride
To the pergola, flashing the wonder of their underwings;
There stood, mysterious and harsh and sleek,
Wrenching the indigo berry from the shedding woodbine with strong ebony beak.
His head without a crest
Wore the red full moon for crown;
The black new moon was crescent on the breast of each;
From the bodies of both a visible heat beat down,
And from the motion of their necks a shadow would fly and fall,
Skimming the court and in the yellow adobe wall
Cleaving a blue breach.
Powerful was the beauty of these birds.
It boomed like a struck bell in the silence deep and hot.
I stooped above the shattered clay; passionately I cried to the beauty of these birds,
“Solace the broken pot!”
The beauty of these birds
Opened its lips to speak;
Colours were its words,
The scarlet shaft on the grey cheek,
The purple berry in the ebony beak.
It said, “I cannot console
The broken thing; I can only make it whole.”
Wisdom, heretic flower, I was ever afraid
Of your large, cool petals without scent!
Shocked, betrayed,
I turned to the comfort of grief, I bent
Above the lovely shards.
But their colours had faded in the fierce light of the birds.
And as for the birds, they were gone. As suddenly as they had come, they went.
When Caesar Fell
When Caesar fell, where yellow Tiber rolls
Its heavy waters muddy,
Life, that was ebbing from a hundred holes
In Caesar’s body,
Cried with a hundred voices to the common air,
The unimperial day,
“Gather me up, oh, pour me into the veins of even a gilder of hair!
Let me not vanish away!”
The teeth of Caesar at the ignoble word
Were ground together in pride;
No sound came from his lips: the world has heard
How Caesar died.
In the Roman dust the cry of Caesar’s blood
Was heard and heard without wonder
Only by the fly that swam in the red flood
Till his head went under.
Lethe
Ah, drink again
This river that is the taker-away of pain,
And the giver-back of beauty!
In these cool waves
What can be lost?—
Only the sorry cost
Of the lovely thing, ah, never the thing itself!
The level flood that laves
The hot brow
And the stiff shoulder
Is at our temples now.
Gone is the fever,
But not into the river;
Melted the frozen pride,
But the tranquil tide
Runs never the warmer for this,
Never the colder.
Immerse the dream.
Drench the kiss.
Dip the song in the stream.
On Fir
st Having Heard the Skylark
Not knowing he rose from earth, not having seen him rise,
Not knowing the fallow furrow was his home,
And that high wing, untouchable, untainted,
A wing of earth, with the warm loam
Closely acquainted,
I shuddered at his cry and caught my heart.
Relentless out of heaven his sweet crying like a crystal dart
Was launched against me. Scanning the empty sky
I stood with thrown-back head until the world reeled.
Still, still he sped his unappeasable shafts against my breast with-out a shield.
He cried forever from his unseen throat
Between me and the sun.
He would not end his singing, he would not have done.
“Serene and pitiless note, whence, whence are you?”
I cried. “Alas, these arrows, how fast they fall!
Ay, me, beset by angels in unequal fight,
Alone high on the shaven down surprised, and not a tree in sight!”
Even as I spoke he was revealed
Above me in the bright air,
A dark articulate atom in the mute enormous blue,
A mortal bird, flying and singing in the morning there.
Even as I spoke I spied him, and I knew,
And called him by his name;
“Blithe Spirit!” I cried. Transfixed by more than mortal spears
I fell; I lay among the foreign daisies pink and small,
And wept, staining their innocent faces with fast-flowing tears.
To a Musician
Who, now, when evening darkens the water and the stream is dull,
Slowly, in a delicate frock, with her leghorn hat in her hand,
At your side from under the golden osiers moves,
Faintly smiling, shattered by the charm of your voice?
There, today, as in the days when I knew you well,
The willow sheds upon the stream its narrow leaves,
And the quiet flowing of the water and its faint smell
Are balm to the heart that grieves.
Together with the sharp discomfort of loving you,
Ineffable you, so lovely and so aloof,
There is laid upon the spirit the calmness of the river view:
Together they fall, the pain and its reproof.
Who, now, under the yellow willows at the water’s edge
Closes defeated lips upon the trivial word unspoken,
Collected Poems Page 11
