“ENGLAND AND YESTERDAY”

“ENGLAND AND YESTERDAY”

“England and Yesterday”

A BOOK OF SHORT POEMS
BY
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS
1898

CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

CONTENTS.

LONDON:
SONNETS WRITTEN IN 1889.
TO HERBERT E. CLARKE.

I.
ON FIRST ENTERING WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

Holy of England! since my light is short

And faint, O rather by the sun anew

Of timeless passion set my dial true,

That with thy saints and thee I may consort;

And wafted in the cool enshadowed port

Of poets, seem a little sail long due,

And be as one the call of memory drew

Unto the saddle void since Agincourt!

Not now for secular love’s unquiet lease,

Receive my soul, who, rapt in thee erewhile,

Hath broken tryst with transitory things;

But seal with her a marriage and a peace

Eternal, on thine Edward’s altar-isle,

Above the stormless sea of ended kings.

II.
FOG.

Like bodiless water passing in a sigh,

Through palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,

And in their sharp disastrous undertow

Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.

The towery vista sinks upon the eye,

As if it heard the horns of Jericho,

Black and dissolved; nor could the founders know

How what was built so bright should daily die.

Thy mood with man’s is broken and blent in,

City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown

The generous light in which thy life began.

Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,

Greater and elder yet the love of man

Full in thy look, though the dark visor’s down.

III.
S. PETER-AD-VINCULA.

Too well I know, pacing the place of awe,

Three queens, young save in trouble, moulder by;

More in his halo, Monmouth’s mocking eye,

The eagle Essex in a harpy’s claw;

Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw

Sundown of Scotland: how with treasons lie

White martyrdoms; rank in a company

Breaker and builder of the eternal law.

Oft as I come, the bitter garden-row

Of ruined roses hanging from the stem,

Where winds of old defeat yet batter them,

Infects me: suddenly must I depart,

Ere thought of men’s injustice then, and now,

Add to these aisles one other broken heart.

IV.
STRIKERS IN HYDE PARK.

A woof reversed the fatal shuttles weave,

How slow! but never once they slip the thread.

Hither, upon the Georgian idlers’ tread,

Up spacious ways the lindens interleave,

Clouding the royal air since yester-eve,

Come men bereft of time, and scant of bread,

Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead,

Through the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.

What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange

Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so,

The clear Republic waits the general throe,

Along her noonday mountains’ open range.

God be with both! for one is young to know

Her mother’s rote of evil and of change.

V.
CHANGES IN THE TEMPLE.

The cry is at thy gates, thou darling ground,

Again; for oft ere now thy children went

Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent

Some red old alley with a dial crowned;

Some house of honour, in a glory bound

With lives and deaths of spirits excellent;

Some tree, rude-taken from his kingly tent,

Hard by a little fountain’s friendly sound.

O for Virginius’ hand, if only that

Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon!

Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas,

Her walled oasis, and where once it was,

All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat

Echo, and ivy, and the loitering moon.

VI.
THE LIGHTS OF LONDON.

The evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot

Far down into the valley’s cold extreme,

Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream

Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not.

The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot

Yet cloudless, lean to watch, as in a dream,

From chaos climb, with many a hasty gleam,

London, one moment fallen and forgot.

Her booths begin to flare; her gases bright

Prick door and window; street and lane obscure

Sparkle and swarm with nothing true nor sure,

Full as a marsh of mist and winking light:

Heaven thickens over, heaven that cannot cure

Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.

VII.
DOVES.

Ah, if man’s boast and man’s advance be vain!

And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,

And the lone Tree, foreknow it, and the Dome,

That monstrous island of the middle main;

If each inheritor must sink again

Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb

Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam?—

I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.

What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!

Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,

Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul’s

Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,

And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.

“God keeps,” I said, “our little flock of years.”

VIII.
IN THE READING-ROOM OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM.

Praised be the moon of books! that doth above

A world of men, the sunken Past behold,

And colour spaces else too void and cold,

To make a very heaven again thereof;

As when the sun is set behind a grove,

And faintly unto nether ether rolled,

All night, his whiter image and his mould

Grows beautiful with looking on her love.

Thou, therefore, moon of so divine a ray,

Lend to our steps both fortitude and light!

Feebly along a venerable way

They climb the infinite, or perish quite;

Nothing are days and deeds to such as they,

While in this liberal house thy face is bright.

IX.
SUNDAY CHIMES IN THE CITY.

Across the bridge, where in the morning blow

The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain

Homeward to drag the black sea-goer’s chain,

And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low;

Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow,

Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain:

From Wren’s forgotten belfries, in the rain,

Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go.

Forbid not these! Though no man heed, they shower

A subtle beauty on the empty hour,

From all their dark throats aching and outblown;

Aye in the prayerless places welcome most,

Like the last gull that up a naked coast

Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.

X.
A PORCH IN BELGRAVIA.

When, after dawn, the lordly houses hide

Till you fall foul of it, some piteous guest,

(Some girl the damp stones gather to their breast,

Her gold hair rough, her rebel garment wide,

Who sleeps, with all that luck and life denied

Camped round, and dreams how seaward and southwest

Blue over Devon farms the smoke-rings rest,

And sheep and lambs ascend the lit hillside,)

Dear, of your charity, speak low, step soft,

Pray for a sinner. Planet-like and still,

Best hearts of all are sometimes set aloft

Only to see and pass, nor yet deplore

Even Wrong itself, crowned Wrong inscrutable,

Which cannot but have been, for evermore.

XI.
YORK STAIRS.

Many a musing eye returns to thee,

Against the formal street disconsolate,

Who kept in green domains thy bridal state,

With young tide-waters leaping at thy knee;

And lest the ravening smoke, and enmity

Corrode thee quite, thy lover sighs, and straight

Desires thee safe afar, too graceful gate!

Throned on a terrace of the Boboli.

Nay, nay, thy use is here. Stand queenly thus

Till the next fury; teach the time and us

Leisure and will to draw a serious breath:

Not wholly where thou art the soul is cowed,

Nor the fooled capital proclaims aloud

Barter is god, while Beauty perisheth.

XII.
IN THE DOCKS.

Where the bales thunder till the day is done,

And the wild sounds with wilder odours cope;

Where over crouching sail and coiling rope,

Lascar and Moor along the gangway run;

Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun,

A hive of anarchy from slope to slope;

Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope,

I see thee at the masthead, joyous one!

O thou good guest! So oft as, young and warm,

To the home-wind thy hoisted colours bound,

Away, away from this too thoughtful ground,

Sodden with human trespass and despair,

Thee only, from the desert, from the storm,

A sick mind follows into Eden air.

OXFORD:
SONNETS WRITTEN THERE IN 1890 AND 1895.
TO LIONEL JOHNSON.

I.
THE TOW-PATH.

Furrow to furrow, oar to oar succeeds,

Each length away, more bright, more exquisite;

The sister shells that hither, thither flit,

Strew the long stream like dropping maple-seeds.

A comrade on the marge now lags, now leads,

Who with short calls his pace doth intermit:

An angry Pan, afoot; but if he sit,

Auspicious Pan among the river reeds.

West of the glowing hay-ricks, (tawny-black,

Where waters by their warm escarpments run),

Two lovers, slowly crossed from Kennington,

Print in the early dew a married track,

And drain the aroma’d eve, and spend the sun,

Ere, in laborious health, the crews come back.

II.
THE OLD DIAL OF CORPUS.

Warden of hours and ages, here I dwell,

Who saw young Keble pass, with sighing shook

For good unborn; and, towards a willow nook,

Pole, princely in the senate and the cell;

And doubting the near boom of Osney bell,

Turning on me that sweetly subtile look,

Erasmus, in his breast an Attic book:

Peacemakers all, their dreams to ashes fell.

Naught steadfast may I image nor attain

Save steadfast labour; futile must I grope

After my god, like him, inconstant bright.

But sun and shade must unto you remain

Alternately a symbol and a hope,

Men, spirits! of Emmanuel your Light.

III.
AD ANTIQUARIUM.

My gentle Aubrey, who in everything

Hadst of thy city’s youth so lovely lust,

Yet never lineal to her towers august

Thy spirit could fix, or perfectly upbring,

Sleep, sleep! I ope, not unremembering,

Thy comely manuscript, and, interthrust,

Find delicate hueless leaves more sad than dust,

Two centuries unkissed of any spring.

Filling a homesick page beneath a lime,

Thy mood beheld, as mine thy debtor’s now,

The endless terraces of ended Time,

Vague in green twilight. Goodly was release

Into that Past where these poor leaves, and thou,

Do freshen in the air of eldest peace.

IV.
ROOKS IN NEW COLLEGE GARDENS.

Through rosy cloud, and over thorny towers,

Their wings with darkling autumn distance filled,

From Isis’ valley border, hundred-hilled,

The rooks are crowding home as evening lowers:

Not for men only, and their musing hours,

By battled walls did gracious Wykeham build

These dewy spaces early sown and stilled,

These dearest inland melancholy bowers.

Blest birds! A book held open on the knee

Below, is all they guess of Adam’s blight:

With surer art the while, and simpler rite,

They follow Truth in some monastic tree,

Where breathe against their docile breasts, by night,

The scholar’s star, the star of sanctity.

V.
ON THE PRE-REFORMATION CHURCHES ABOUT OXFORD.

Imperial Iffley, Cumnor bowered in green,

And Templar Sandford in the boatman’s call,

And sweet-belled Appleton, and Marcham wall

That dost upon adoring ivies lean;