POEMS
FIRST SERIES
BY J. C. SQUIRE
LONDON
MARTIN SECKER
XVII BUCKINGHAM STREET
ADELPHI
LONDON: MARTIN SECKER (LTD) 1918
DEDICATION
Lord, I have seen at harvest festival
In a white lamp-lit fishing-village church,
How the poor folk, lacking fine decorations,
Offer the first-fruits of their various toils:
Not only fruit and blossom of the fields,
Ripe corn and poppies, scabious, marguerites,
Melons and marrows, carrots and potatoes,
And pale round turnips and sweet cottage flowers,
But gifts of other produce, heaped brown nets,
Fine pollack, silver fish with umber backs,
And handsome green-dark-blue-striped mackerel,
And uglier, hornier creatures from the sea,
Lobsters, long-clawed and eyed, and smooth flat crabs,
Ranged with the flowers upon the window-niches,
To lie in that symbolic contiguity
While lusty hymns of gratitude ascend.
So I
Here offer all I have found:
A few bright stainless flowers
And richer, earthlier blooms, and homely grain,
And roots that grew distorted in the dark,
And shapes of livid hue and sprawling form
Dragged from the deepest maters I have searched.
Most diverse gifts, yet all alike in this:
They are all the natural products of my mind
And heart and senses;
And all with labour grown, or plucked, or caught.
PREFACE
The title of this book was chosen for this reason. Had the volume been called —— and Other Poems it might have given a false impression that its contents were entirely new. Had it been called Collected Poems the equally false impression might have been given that there was something of finality about it. The title selected seemed best to convey both the fact that it was a collection and that, under Providence, other (and, let us hope, superior) collections will follow it.
The book contains all that I do not wish to destroy of the contents of four volumes of verse. A number of small corrections have been made. There are added, also, a few recent poems not previously published. The earliest of the poems now reprinted is dated 1905, in which year I was twenty-one. Some of the subsequent years, such as 1914 and 1915, contributed nothing to this book: the greater number of the poems were written in 1911-1912 and 1916-1917.
Some of the poems were not written as I should now write them; and many of them reflect transient, though mostly recurrent, moods which I do not necessarily think worthy of esteem.
J. C. S.
March 1918.
CONTENTS
YEAR
[Dedication] [Preface]
1905 [In a Chair] [A Day]
1907 [The Roof]
1910 [Town] [Friendship's Garland]
1911 [A Chant] [The Three Hills] [At Night] [Lines] [Florian's Song]
1912 [Antinomies on a Railway Station] [Tree-Tops] [Artemis Altera] [Epilogue] [Dialogue] [Starlight] [Song] [Crepuscular] [For Music] [The Fugitive] [Echoes]
1913 [The Mind Of Man] [A Reasonable Protestation] [In the Park] [In the Orchard] [The Ship] [Ode: In a Restaurant] [Faith] [A Fresh Morning] [Interior]
1913-14 [On a Friend Recently Dead]
1916 [The March] [Prologue: In Darkness] [The Lily of Malud]
1917 [A House] [Behind the Lines] [Arab Song] [The Stronghold] [To a Bull-Dog] [The Lake] [Paradise Lost] [Acacia Tree] [August Moon] [Sonnet] [Song] [A Generation] [Under] [Rivers] [I Shall make Beauty...] [Envoi]
IN A CHAIR
The room is full of the peace of night,
The small flames murmur and flicker and sway,
Within me is neither shadow, nor light,
Nor night, nor twilight, nor dawn, nor day.
For the brain strives not to the goal of thought,
And the limbs lie wearied, and all desire
Sleeps for a while, and I am naught
But a pair of eyes that gaze at a fire.
A DAY
I. MORNING
The village fades away
Where I last night came,
Where they housed me and fed me
And never asked my name.
The sun shines bright, my step is light,
I, who have no abode,
Jeer at the stuck, monotonous
Black posts along the road.
II. MIDDAY
The wood is still,
As here I sit
My heart drinks in
The peace of it.
A something stirs
I know not where,
Some quiet spirit
In the air.
O tall straight stems!
O cool deep green!
O hand unfelt!
O face unseen!
III. EVENING
The evening closes in,
As down this last long lane
I plod; there patter round
First heavy drops of rain.
Feet ache, legs ache, but now
Step quickens as I think
Of mounds of bread and cheese
And something hot to drink.
IV. NIGHT
Ah! sleep is sweet, but yet
I will not sleep awhile
Nor for a space forget
The toil of that last mile;
But lie awake and feel
The cool sheets' tremulous kisses
O'er all my body steal...
Is sleep as sweet as this is?
THE ROOF
I
When the clouds hide the sun away
The tall slate roof is dull and grey,
And when the rain adown it streams
'Tis polished lead with pale-blue gleams.
When the clouds vanish and the rain
Stops, and the sun comes out again,
It shimmers golden in the sun
Almost too bright to look upon.
But soon beneath the steady rays
The roof is dried and reft of blaze,
'Tis dusty yellow traversed through
By long thin lines of deepest blue.
Then at the last, as night draws near,
The lines grow faint and disappear,
The roof becomes a purple mist,
A great square darkening amethyst
Which sinks into the gathering shade
Till separate form and colour fade,
And it is but a patch which mars
The beauty of a field of stars.
II
It stands so lonely in the sky
The sparrows never come thereby,
The glossy starlings seldom stop
To preen and chatter on the top.
For a whole week sometimes up there
No wing-wave stirs the quiet air,
The roof lies silent and serene
As though no life had ever been;
Till some bright afternoon, athwart
The edge two sudden shadows dart,
And two white pigeons with pink feet
Flutter above and pitch on it.
Jerking their necks out as they walk
They talk awhile their pigeon-talk,
A low continuous murmur blent
Of mock reproaches and content.
Then cease, and sit there warm and white
An hour, till in the fading light
They wake, and know the close of day,
Flutter above, and fly away,
Leaving the roof whereon they sat
As 'twas before, a peaceful flat
Expanse, as silent and serene
As though no life had ever been.
TOWN
Mostly in a dull rotation
We bear our loads and eat and drink and sleep.
Feeling no tears, knowing no meditation—
Too tired to think, too clogged with earth to weep.
Dimly convinced, poor groping wretches,
Like eyeless insects in a murky pond
That out and out this city stretches,
Away, away, and there is no beyond.
No larger earth, no loftier heaven,
No cleaner, gentler airs to breathe. And yet,
Even to us sometimes is given
Visions of things we other times forget.
Some day is done, its labour ended,
And as we sit and brood at windows high,
A steady wind from far descended,
Blows off the filth that hid the deeper sky;
There are the empty waiting spaces,
We watch, we watch, unwinking, pale and dumb,
Till gliding up with noiseless paces,
Night covers all the wide arch: Night has come.
Not that sick false night of the city,
Lurid and low and yellow and obscene,
But mother Night, pure, full of pity,
The star-strewn Night, blue, potent and serene.
O, as we gaze the clamour ceases,
The turbid world around grows dim and small,
The soft-shed influence releases
Our shrouded spirits from their dusty pall.
No more we hear the turbulent traffic,
Not scorned but unremembered is the day;
The Night, all luminous and seraphic,
Has brushed its heavy memories away.
The great blue Night so clear and kindly,
The little stars so wide-eyed and so still,
Open a door for souls that blindly
Had wandered, tunnelling the endless hill;
They draw the long-untraversed portal,
Our souls slip out and tremble and expand,
The immortal feels for the immortal,
The eternal holds the eternal by the hand.
Impalpably we are led and lifted,
Softly we shake into the gulf of blue,
The last environing veil is rifted
And lost horizons float into our view.
Lost lands, lone seas, lands that afar gleam
With a miraculous beauty, faint yet clear,
Forgotten lands of night and star-gleam,
Seas that are somewhere but that are not here.
Borne without effort or endeavour,
Swifter and more ethereal than the wind,
In level track we stream, whilst ever
The fair pale panorama rolls behind.
Now fleets below a trancèd moorland,
A sweep of glimmering immobility;
Now craggy cliff and dented foreland
Pass back and there beyond unfolds the sea.
Now wastes of water heaving, drawing,
Great darkling tracts of patterned restlessness,
With whitened waves round rough rocks mawing
And licking islands in their fierce caress.
Now coasts with capes and ribboned beaches
Set silent 'neath the canopy sapphirine,
And estuaries and river reaches.
Phantasmal silver in the night's soft shine.
*****
Ah, these fair woods the spirit crosses,
These quiet lakes, these stretched dreaming fields,
These undulate downs with piny bosses
Pointing the ridges of their sloping shields.
These valleys and these heights that screen them,
These tawnier sands where grass and tree are not,
Ah, we have known them, we have seen them,
We saw them long ago and we forgot;
We know them all, these placid countries,
And what the pathway is and what the goal;
These are the gates and these the sentries
That guard that ancient fortress of the soul.
And we speed onward flying, flying,
Over the sundering waves of hill and plain
To where they rear their heads undying
The unnamed mountains of old days again.
The snows upon their calm still summits,
The chasms, the files of trees that foot the snow,
Curving like inky frozen comets,
Into the forest-ocean spread below.
The glisten where the peaks are hoarest,
The soundless darkness of the sunken vales,
The folding leagues of shadowy forest,
Edge beyond edge till all distinctness fails.
So invulnerable it is, so deathless,
So floods the air the loveliness of it,
That we stay dazzled, rapt and breathless,
Our beings ebbing to the infinite.
There as we pause, there as we hover,
Still-poised in ecstasy, a sudden light
Breaks in our eyes, and we discover
We sit at windows gazing to the night.
Wistful and tired, with eyes a-tingle
Where still the sting of Beauty faintly smarts;
But with our mute regrets there mingle
Thanks for the resurrection of our hearts.
O night so great that will not mock us!
O stars so wise that understand the weak!
O vast consoling hands that rock us!
O strong and perfect tongues that speak!
O night enrobed in azure splendour!
O whispering stars whose radiance falls like dew!
O mighty presences and tender,
You have given us back the dreams our childhood knew!
Lulled by your visions without number,
We seek our beds content and void of pain,
And dreaming drowse and dreaming slumber
And dreaming wake to see the day again.
FRIENDSHIP'S GARLAND
I
When I was a boy there was a friend of mine:
We thought ourselves warriors and grown folk swine,
Stupid old animals who never understood
And never had an impulse and said "you must be good."
We slank like stoats and fled like foxes,
We put cigarettes in the pillar-boxes,
Lighted cigarettes and letters all aflame—
O the surprise when the postman came!
We stole eggs and apples and made fine hay
In people's houses when people were away,
We broke street lamps and away we ran,
Then I was a boy but now I am a man.
Now I am a man and don't have any fun,
I hardly ever shout and I never, never run,
And I don't care if he's dead that friend of mine,
For then I was a boy and now I am a swine.
II
We met again the other night
With people; you were quite polite,
Shook my hand and spoke a while
Of common things with cautious smile;
Paid the usual debt men owe
To fellows whom they used to know.
But, when our eyes met full, yours dropped,
And sudden, resolute, you stopped,
Moving with hurried syllables
To make remarks to someone else.
I caught them not, to me they said:
"Let the dead past bury its dead,
Things were very different then,
Boys are fools and men are men."
Several times the other night
You did your best to be polite;
When in the conversation's round
You heard my tongue's familiar sound
You bent in eager pose my way
To hear what I had got to say;
Trying, you thought with some success,
To hide the chasm's nakedness.
But on your eyes hard films there lay;
No mock-interest, no pretence
Could veil your blank indifference;
And if thoughts came recalling things
Far-off, far-off, from those old springs
When underneath the moon and sun
Our separate pulses beat as one,
Vagrant tender thoughts that asked
Admittance found the portal masked;
You spurned them; when I'd said my say,
With laugh and nod you turned away
To toss your friends some easy jest
That smote my brow and stabbed my breast.
Foolish though it be and vain
I am not master of my pain,
And when I said good-night to you
I hoped we should not meet again,
And wondered how the soul I knew
Could change so much; have I changed too?
III
There was a man whom I knew well
Whose choice it was to live in hell;
Reason there was why that was so
But what it was I do not know.
He had a room high in a tower,
And sat there drinking hour by hour,
Drinking, drinking all alone
With candles and a wall of stone.
Now and then he sobered down,
And stayed a night with me in town.
If he found me with a crowd,
He shrank and did not speak aloud.
He sat in a corner silently,
And others of the company
Would note his curious face and eye,
His twitching face and timid eye.
When they saw the eye he had
They thought, perhaps, that he was mad:
I knew he was clear and sane
But had a horror in his brain.
He had much money and one friend
And drank quite grimly to the end.
Why he chose to die in hell
I did not ask, he did not tell.
A CHANT
Gently the petals fall as the tree gently sways
That has known many springs and many petals fall
Year after year to strew the green deserted ways
And the statue and the pond and the low, broken wall.
Faded is the memory of old things done,
Peace floats on the ruins of ancient festival;
They lie and forget in the warmth of the sun,
And a sky silver-blue arches over all.
O softly, O tenderly, the heart now stirs
With desires faint and formless; and, seeking not, I find
Quiet thoughts that flash like azure kingfishers
Across the luminous, tranquil mirror of the mind.
THE THREE HILLS
There were three hills that stood alone
With woods about their feet.
They dreamed quiet when the sun shone
And whispered when the rain beat.
They wore all three their coronals
Till men with houses came
And scored their heads with pits and walls
And thought the hills were tame.
Red and white when day shines bright
They hide the green for miles,
Where are the old hills gone? At night
The moon looks down and smiles.
She sees the captors small and weak,
She knows the prisoners strong,
She hears the patient hills that speak:
"Brothers, it is not long;
"Brothers, we stood when they were not
Ten thousand summers past.
Brothers, when they are clean forgot
We shall outlive the last;
"One shall die and one shall flee
With terror in his train,
And earth shall eat the stones, and we
Shall be alone again."
AT NIGHT
Dark fir-tops foot the moony sky,
Blue moonlight bars the drive;
Here at the open window I
Sit smoking and alive.
Wind in the branches swells and breaks
Like ocean on a beach;
Deep in the sky and my heart there wakes
A thought I cannot reach.
LINES
When London was a little town
Lean by the river's marge,
The poet paced it with a frown,
He thought it very large.
He loved bright ship and pointing steeple
And bridge with houses loaded
And priests and many-coloured people...
But ah, they were not woaded!
Not all the walls could shed the spell
Of meres and marshes green,
Nor any chaffering merchant tell
The beauty that had been:
The crying birds at fall of night,
The fisher in his coracle,
And, grim on Ludgate's windy height,
An oak-tree and an oracle.
Sick for the past his hair he rent
And dropt a tear in season;
If he had cause for his lament
We have much better reason.
For now the fields and paths he knew
Are coffined all with bricks,
The lucid silver stream he knew
Runs slimy as the Styx;
North and south and east and west,
Far as the eye can travel,
Earth with a sombre web is drest
That nothing can unravel.
And we must wear as black a frown,
Wail with as keen a woe
That London was a little town
Five hundred years ago.
*****
Yet even this place of steamy stir,
This pit of belch and swallow,
With chrism of gold and gossamer
The elements can hallow.
I have a room in Chancery Lane,
High in a world of wires,
Whence fall the roofs a ragged plain
Wooded with many spires.
There in the dawns of summer days
I stand, and there behold
A city veiled in rainbow haze
And spangled all with gold.
The breezes waft abroad the rays
Shot by the waking sun,
A myriad chimneys softly blaze,
A myriad shadows run.
Round the wide rim in radiant mist
The gentle suburbs quiver,
And nearer lies the shining twist
Of Thames, a holy river.
Left and right my vision drifts,
By yonder towers I linger,
Where Westminster's cathedral lifts
Its belled Byzantine finger,
And here against my perchèd home
Where hold wise converse daily
The loftier and the lesser dome,
St Paul's and the Old Bailey.
FLORIAN'S SONG
My soul, it shall not take us,
O we will escape
This world that strives to break us
And cast us to its shape;
Its chisel shall not enter,
Its fire shall not touch,
Hard from rim to centre,
We will not crack or smutch.
'Gainst words sweet and flowered
We have an amulet,
We will not play the coward
For any black threat;
If we but give endurance
To what is now within—
The single assurance
That it is good to win.
Slaves think it better
To be weak than strong,
Whose hate is a fetter
And their love a thong.
But we will view those others
With eyes like stone,
And if we have no brothers
We will walk alone.
ANTINOMIES ON A RAILWAY STATION
As I stand waiting in the rain
For the foggy hoot of the London train,
Gazing at silent wall and lamp
And post and rail and platform damp,
What is this power that comes to my sight
That I see a night without the night,
That I see them clear, yet look them through,
The silvery things and the darkly blue,
That the solid wall seems soft as death,
A wavering and unanchored wraith,
And rails that shine and stones that stream
Unsubstantial as a dream?
What sudden door has opened so,
What hand has passed, that I should know
This moving vision not a trance
That melts the globe of circumstance,
This sight that marks not least or most
And makes a stone a passing ghost?
Is it that a year ago
I stood upon this self-same spot;
Is it that since a year ago
The place and I have altered not;
Is it that I half forgot,
A year ago, and all despised
For a space the things that I had prized:
The race of life, the glittering show?
Is it that now a year has passed
In vain pursuit of glittering things,
In fruitless searching, shouting, running,
And greedy lies and candour cunning,
Here as I stand the year above
Sudden the heats and the strivings fail
And fall away, a fluctuant veil,
And the fixed familiar stones restore
The old appearance-buried core,
The unmoving and essential me,
The eternal personality
Alone enduring first and last?
No, this I have known in other ways,
In other places, other days.
Not only here, on this one peak,
Do fixity and beauty speak
Of the delusiveness of change,
Of the transparency of form,
The bootless stress of minds that range,
The awful calm behind the storm.
In many places, many days,
The invaded soul receives the rays
Of countries she was nurtured in,
Speaks in her silent language strange
To that beyond which is her kin.
Even in peopled streets at times
A metaphysic arm is thrust
Through the partitioning fabric thin,
And tears away the darkening pall
Cast by the bright phenomenal,
And clears the obscurèd spirit's mirror
From shadows of deceptive error,
And shows the bells and all their ringing,
And all the crowds and all their singing,
Carillons that are nothing's chimes
And dust that is not even dust....
But rarely hold I converse thus
Where shapes are bright and clamorous,
More often comes the word divine
In places motionless and far;
Beneath the white peculiar shine
Of sunless summer afternoons;
At eventide on pale lagoons
Where hangs reflected one pale star;
Or deep in the green solitudes
Of still erect entrancèd woods.
O, in the woods alone lying,
Scarce a bough in the wind sighing,
Gaze I long with fervid power
At leaf and branch and grass and flower,
Breathe I breaths of trembling sight
Shed from great urns of green delight,
Take I draughts and drink them up
Poured from many a stalk and cup.
Now do I burn for nothing more
Than thus to gaze, thus to adore
This exquisiteness of nature ever
In silence....
But with instant light
Rends the film; with joy I quiver
To see with new celestial sight
Flower and leaf and grass and tree,
Doomed barks on an eternal sea,
Flit phantom-like as transient smoke.
Beauty herself her spell has broke,
Beauty, the herald and the lure,
Her message told, may not endure;
Her portal opened, she has died,
Supreme immortal suicide.
Yes, sleepless nature soundless flings
Invisible grapples round the soul,
Drawing her through the web of things
To the primal end of her journeyings,
Her ultimate and constant pole.
For Beauty with her hands that beckon
Is but the Prophet of a Higher,
A flaming and ephemeral beacon,
A Phoenix perishing by fire.
Herself from us herself estranges,
Herself her mighty tale doth kill,
That all things change yet nothing changes.
That all things move yet all are still.
I cannot sink, I cannot climb,
Now that I see my ancient dwelling,
The central orb untouched of time,
And taste a peace all bliss excelling.
Now I have broken Beauty's wall,
Now that my kindred world I hold,
I care not though the cities fall
And the green earth go cold.
TREE-TOPS
There beyond my window ledge,
Heaped against the sky, a hedge
Of huge and waving tree-tops stands
With multitudes of fluttering hands.
Wave they, beat they, to and fro,
Never stillness may they know,
Plunged by the wind and hurled and torn
Anguished, purposeless, forlorn.
"O ferocious, O despairing,
In huddled isolation faring
Through a scattered universe,
Lost coins from the Almighty's purse!"
"No, below you do not see
The firm foundations of the tree;
Anchored to a rock beneath
We laugh in the hammering tempest's teeth.
"Boughs like men but burgeons are
On an adamantine star;
Men are myriad blossoms on
A staunch and cosmic skeleton."
ARTEMIS ALTERA
O full of candour and compassion,
Whom love and worship both would praise,
Love cannot frame nor worship fashion
The image of your fearless ways!
How show your noble brow's dark pallor,
Your chivalrous casque of ebon hair,
Your eyes' bright strength, your lips' soft valour,
Your supple shoulders and hands that dare?
Our souls when naïvely you examine,
Your sword of innocence, flaming, huge,
Sweeps over us, and there is famine
Within the ports of subterfuge.
You hate contempt and love not laughter;
With your sharp spear of virgin will
You harry the wicked strong; but after,
O huntress who could never kill,
Should they be trodden down or pierced,
Swift, swift, you fly with burning cheek
To place your beauty's shield reversed
Above the vile defenceless weak!
EPILOGUE
Than farthest stars more distant,
A mile more,
A mile more,
A voice cries on insistent:
"You may smile more if you will;
"You may sing too and spring too;
But numb at last
And dumb at last,
Whatever port you cling to,
You must come at last to a hill.
"And never a man you'll find there
To take your hand
And shake your hand;
But when you go behind there
You must make your hand a sword
"To fence with a foeman swarthy,
And swink there
Nor shrink there,
Though cowardly and worthy
Must drink there one reward."
DIALOGUE
THE ONE
The dead man's gone, the live man's sad, the dying leaf shakes on the tree,
The wind constrains the window-panes and moans like moaning of the sea,
And sour's the taste now culled in haste of lovely things I won too late,
And loud and loud above the crowd the Voice of One more strong than we.
THE OTHER
This Voice you hear, this call you fear, is it unprophesied or new?
Were you so insolent to think its rope would never circle you?
Did you then beastlike live and walk with ears and eyes that would not turn?
Who bade you hope your service 'scape in that eternal retinue?
THE ONE
No; for I swear now bare's the tree and loud the moaning of the wind,
I walked no rut with eyelids shut, my ears and eyes were never blind,
Only my eager thoughts I bent on many things that I desired
To make my greedy heart content ere flesh and blood I left behind.
THE OTHER
Ignorance, then, was all your fault and filmèd eyes that could not know,
That half discerned and never learned the temporal way that men must go;
You set the image of the world high for your heart's idolatry,
Though with your lips you called the world a toy, a ghost, a passing show.
THE ONE
No, no; this is not true; my lips spoke only what my heart believed.
Called I the world a toy; I spoke not echo-like or self-deceived.
But that I thought the toy was mine to play with, and the passing show
Would sate at least my passing lusts, and did not, therefore am I grieved.
What did I do that I must bear this lifelong tyranny of my fate,
That I must writhe in bonds unsought of accidental love and hate?
Had chance but joined different dice, but once or twice, but once or twice,
All lovely things that I desired I should have held before too late.
Surely I knew that flesh was grass nor valued overmuch the prize,
But all the powers of chance conspired to cheat a man both just and wise.
Happy I'd been had I but had my due reward, and not a sword
Flaming in diabolic hand between me and my Paradise.
THE OTHER
No hooded band of fates did stand your heart's ambitions to gainsay,
No flaming brand in evil hand was ever thrust across your way,
Only the things all men must meet, the common attributes of men,
That men may flinch to see or, seeing, deny, but avoid them no man may.
Fall the dice, not once or twice but always, to make the self-same sum;
Chance what may, a life's a life and to a single goal must come;
Though a man search far and wide, never is hunger satisfied;
Nature brings her natural fetters, man is meshed and the wise are dumb.
O vain all art to assuage a heart with accents of a mortal tongue,
All earthly words are incomplete and only sweet are the songs unsung,
Never yet was cause for regret, yet regret must afflict us all,
Better it were to grasp the world 'thwart which this world is a curtain flung.
STARLIGHT
Last night I lay in an open field
And looked at the stars with lips sealed;
No noise moved the windless air,
And I looked at the stars with steady stare.
There were some that glittered and some that shone
With a soft and equal glow, and one
That queened it over the sprinkled round,
Swaying the host with silent sound.
"Calm things," I thought, "in your cavern blue,
I will learn and hold and master you;
I will yoke and scorn you as I can,
For the pride of my heart is the pride of a man."
Grass to my cheek in the dewy field,
I lay quite still with lips sealed,
And the pride of a man and his rigid gaze
Stalked like swords on heaven's ways.
But through a sudden gate there stole
The Universe and spread in my soul;
Quick went my breath and quick my heart,
And I looked at the stars with lips apart.
SONG
There is a wood where the fairies dance
All night long in a ring of mushrooms daintily,
By each tree bole sits a squirrel or a mole,
And the moon through the branches darts.
Light on the grass their slim limbs glance,
Their shadows in the moonlight swing in quiet unison,
And the moon discovers that they all have lovers,
But they never break their hearts.
They never grieve at all for sands that run,
They never know regret for a deed that's done,
And they never think of going to a shed with a gun
At the rising of the sun.
CREPUSCULAR
No creature stirs in the wide fields.
The rifted western heaven yields
The dying sun's illumination.
This is the hour of tribulation
When, with clear sight of eve engendered,
Day's homage to delusion rendered,
Mute at her window sits the soul.
Clouds and skies and lakes and seas,
Valleys and hills and grass and trees,
Sun, moon, and stars, all stand to her
Limbs of one lordless challenger,
Who, without deigning taunt or frown.
Throws a perennial gauntlet down:
"Come conquer me and take thy toll."
No cowardice or fear she knows,
But, as once more she girds, there grows
An unresignèd hopelessness
From memory of former stress.
Head bent, she muses whilst he waits:
How with such weapons dint his plates?
How quell this vast and sleepless giant
Calmly, immortally defiant,
How fell him, bind him, and control
With a silver cord and a golden bowl?
FOR MUSIC
Death in the cold grey morning
Came to the man where he lay;
And the wind shivered, and the tree shuddered
And the dawn was grey.
And the face of the man was grey in the dawn,
And the watchers by the bed
Knew, as they heard the shaking of the leaves,
That the man was dead.
THE FUGITIVE
Flying his hair and his eyes averse,
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.
How could our song his charms rehearse?
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.
High on a down we found him last,
Shy as a hare, he fled as fast;
How could we clasp him or ever he passed?
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.
How could we cling to his limbs that shone,
Ravish his cheeks' red gonfalon,
Or the wild-skin cloak that he had on?
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.
For the wind of his feet still straightly shaping,
He loosed at our breasts from his eyes escaping
One crooked swift glance like a javelin leaping.
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.
And his feet passed over the sunset land
From the place forlorn where a forlorn band
Watching him flying we still did stand.
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.
Vanishing now who would not stay
To the blue hills on the verge of day.
O soft! soft! Music play,
Fading away,
(Fleet are his feet
And his heart apart)
Fading away.
ECHOES
There is a far unfading city
Where bright immortal people are;
Remote from hollow shame and pity,
Their portals frame no guiding star
But blightless pleasure's moteless rays
That follow their footsteps as they dance
Long lutanied measures through a maze
Of flower-like song and dalliance.
There always glows the vernal sun,
There happy birds for ever sing,
There faint perfumed breezes run
Through branches of eternal spring;
There faces browned and fruit and milk
And blue-winged words and rose-bloomed kisses
In galleys gowned with gold and silk
Shake on a lake of dainty blisses.
Coyness is not, nor bear they thought,
Save of a shining gracious flow;
All natural joys are temperate sought.
For calm desire there they know,
A fire promiscuous, languorous, kind;
They scorn all fiercer lusts and quarrels,
Nor blow about on anger's wind,
Nor burn with love, nor rust with morals.
Folk in the far unfading city,
Burning with lusts my senses are,
I am torn with love and shame and pity,
Be to my heart a guiding star:
Wise youths and maidens in the sun,
With eyes that charm and lips that sing,
And gentle arms that rippling run,
Shed on my heart your endless spring!
THE MIND OF MAN
I
Beneath my skull-bone and my hair,
Covered like a poisonous well,
There is a land: if you looked there
What you saw you'd quail to tell.
You that sit there smiling, you
Know that what I say is true.
My head is very small to touch,
I feel it all from front to back,
An earèd round that weighs not much,
Eyes, nose-holes, and a pulpy crack:
Oh, how small, how small it is!
How could countries be in this?
Yet, when I watch with eyelids shut,
It glimmers forth, now dark, now clear,
The city of Cis-Occiput,
The marshes and the writhing mere,
The land that every man I see
Knows in himself but not in me.
II
Upon the borders of the weald
(I walk there first when I step in)
Set in green wood and smiling field,
The city stands, unstained of sin;
White thoughts and wishes pure
Walk the streets with steps demure.
In its clean groves and spacious halls
The quiet-eyed inhabitants
Hold innocent sunny festivals
And mingle in decorous dance;
Things that destroy, distort, deface,
Come never to that lovely place.
Never could evil enter thither,
It could not live in that sweet air,
The shadow of an ill deed must wither
And fall away to nothing there.
You would say as there you stand
That all was beauty in the land.
*****
But go you out beyond the gateway,
Cleave you the woods and pass the plain,
Cross you the frontier down, and straightway
The trees will end, the grass will wane,
And you will come to a wilderness
Of sticks and parchèd barrenness.
The middle of the land is this,
A tawny desert midmost set,
Barren of living things it is,
Saving at night some vampires flit
That nest them in the farther marish
Where all save vilest things must perish.
Here in this reedy marsh of green
And oily pools, swarm insects fat
And birds of prey and beasts obscene,
Things that the traveller shudders at,
All cunning things that creep and fly
To suck men's blood until they die.
Rarely from hence does aught escape
Into the world of outer light,
But now and then some sable shape
Outward will dash in sudden flight;
And men stand stonied or distraught
To know the loathly deed or thought.
But, ah! beyond the marsh you reach
A purulent place more vile than all,
A festering lake too foul for speech,
Rotten and black, with coils acrawl,
Where writhe with lecherous squeakings shrill
Horrors that make the heart stand still.
There, 'neath a heaven diseased, it lies,
The mere alive with slimy worms,
With perverse terrible infamies,
And murders and repulsive forms
That have no name, but slide here deep,
Whilst I, their holder, silence keep.
A REASONABLE PROTESTATION
[To F., who complained of his vagueness and lack of
dogmatic statement]
Not, I suppose, since I deny
Appearance is reality,
And doubt the substance of the earth
Does your remonstrance come to birth;
Not that at once I both affirm
'Tis not the skin that makes the worm
And every tactile thing with mass
Must find its symbol in the grass
And with a cool conviction say
Even a critic's more than clay
And every dog outlives his day.
This kind of vagueness suits your view,
You would not carp at it; for you
Did never stand with those who take
Their pleasures in a world opaque.
For you a tree would never be
Lovely were it but a tree,
And earthly splendours never splendid
If by transience unattended.
Your eyes are on a farther shore
Than any of earth; nor do adore
As godhead God's dead hieroglyph.
Nor would you be perturbed if
Some prophet with a voice of thunder
And avalanche arm should blast and founder
The logical pillars that maintain
This visible world which loads the brain,
Loads the brain and withers the heart
And holds man from his God apart.
But still with you remains the craving
For some more solid substance, having
Surface to touch, colour to see,
And form compact in symmetry.
You are not satisfied with these
Vague throbbings, nameless ecstasies,
Nor can your spirit find delight
In an amorphic great white light.
Not with such sickles can you reap;
If a dense earth you cannot keep
You want a dense heaven as substitute
With trees of plump celestial fruit,
Red apples, golden pomegranates,
And a river flowing by tall gates
Of topaz and of chrysolite
And walls of twenty cubits height.
Frank, you cry out against the age!
Nor you nor I can disengage
Ourselves from that in which we live
Nor seize on things God does not give.
Thirsty as you, perhaps, I long
For courtyards of eternal song,
Even as yours my feet would stray
In a city where 'tis always day
And a green spontaneous leafy garden
With God in the middle for a warden;
But though I hope with strengthening faith
To taste when I have traversed death
The unimaginable sweetness
Of certitude of such concreteness,
How should I draw the hue and scope
Of substances I only hope
Or blaze upon a paper screen
The evidence of things not seen?
This art of ours but grows and stirs
Experience when it registers,
And you know well as I know well
This autumn of time in which we dwell
Is not an age of revelations
Solid as once, but intimations
That touch us with warm misty fingers
Leaving a nameless sense that lingers
That sight is blind and Time's a snare
And earth less solid than the air
And deep below all seeming things
There sits a steady king of kings
A radiant ageless permanence,
A quenchless fount of virtue whence
We draw our life; a sense that makes
A staunch conviction nothing shakes
Of our own immortality.
And though, being man, with certain glee
I eat and drink, though I suffer pain,
And love and hate and love again
Well or in mode contemptible,
Thus shackled by the body's spell
I see through pupils of the beast
Though it be faint and blurred with mist
A Star that travels in the East.
I see what I can, not what I will.
In things that move, things that are still;
Thin motion, even cloudier rest,
I see the symbols God hath drest.
The moveless trees, the trees that wave
The clouds that heavenly highways have,
Horses that run, rocks that are fixt,
Streams that have rest and motion mixt,
The main with its abiding flux,
The wind that up my chimney sucks
A mounting waterfall of flame,
Sticks, straws, dust, beetles and that same
Old blazing sun the Psalmist saw
A testifier to the law:
Divinely to the heart they speak
Saying how they are but weak,
Wan will-o'-the-wisps on the crystal sea;
But stays that sea still dark to me.
Did I now glibly insolent
Chart the ulterior firmament,
Would you not know my words were lies,
Where not my testimonial eyes
Mortal or spiritual lodge,
Mere uncorroborated fudge?
Praise me, though praise I do not want,
Rather, that I have cast much cant,
That what I see and feel I write,
Read what I can in this dim light
Granted to me in nether night.
And though I am vague and shrink to guess
God's everlasting purposes,
And never save in perplext dream
Have caught the least clear-shapen gleam
Of the great kingdom and the throne
In the world that lies behind our own,
I have not lacked my certainties,
I have not haggard moaned the skies,
Nor waged unnecessary strife
Nor scorned nor overvalued life.
And though you say my attitude
Is questioning, concede my mood
Does never bring to tongue or pen
Accents of gloomy modern men
Who wail or hail the death of God
And weigh and measure man the clod,
Or say they draw reluctant breath
And musically mourn that Death
Is a queen omnipotent of woe
And Life her lean cicisbeo,
Abject and pale, whom vampire-like
She playeth with ere she shall strike,
And pose sad riddles to the Sphinx
With raven quills in purple inks,
Then send the boy to fetch more drinks.
IN THE PARK
This dense hard ground I tread.
These iron bars that ripple past,
Will they unshaken stand when I am dead
And my deep thoughts outlast?
Is it my spirit slips,
Falls, like this leaf I kick aside;
This firmness that I feel about my lips,
Is it but empty pride?
Mute knowledge conquers me;
I contemplate them as they are,
Faint earth and shadowy bars that shake and flee,
Less hard, more transient far
Than those unbodied hues
The sunset flings on the calm river;
And, as I look, a swiftness thrills my shoes
And my hands with empire quiver.
Now light the ground I tread,
I walk not now but rather float;
Clear but unreal is the scene outspread,
Pitiful, thin, remote.
Poor vapour is the grass,
So frail the trees and railings seem,
That, did I sweep my hand around, 'twould pass
Through them, as in a dream.
Godlike I fear no changes;
Shatter the world with thunders loud,
Still would I ray-like flit about the ranges
Of dark and ruddy cloud.
IN AN ORCHARD
Airy and quick and wise
In the shed light of the sun,
You clasp with friendly eyes
The thoughts from mine that run.
But something breaks the link;
I solitary stand
By a giant gully's brink
In some vast gloomy land.
Sole central watcher, I
With steadfast sadness now
In that waste place descry
'Neath the awful heavens how
Your life doth dizzy drop
A little foam of flame
From a peak without a top
To a pit without a name.
THE SHIP
There was no song nor shout of joy
Nor beam of moon or sun,
When she came back from the voyage
Long ago begun;
But twilight on the waters
Was quiet and grey,
And she glided steady, steady and pensive,
Over the open bay.
Her sails were brown and ragged,
And her crew hollow-eyed,
But their silent lips spoke content
And their shoulders pride;
Though she had no captives on her deck,
And in her hold
There were no heaps of corn or timber
Or silks or gold.
ODE: IN A RESTAURANT
In this dense hall of green and gold,
Mirrors and lights and steam, there sit
Two hundred munching men;
While several score of others flit
Like scurrying beetles over a fen,
With plates in fanlike spread; or fold
Napkins, or jerk the corks from bottles,
Ministers to greedy throttles.
Some make noises while they eat,
Pick their teeth or shuffle their feet,
Wipe their noses 'neath eyes that range
Or frown whilst waiting for their change.
Gobble, gobble, toil and trouble.
Soul! this life is very strange,
And circumstances very foul
Attend the belly's stormy howl.
How horrible this noise! this air how thick!
It is disgusting ... I feel sick...
Loosely I prod the table with a fork,
My mind gapes, dizzies, ceases to work...
*****
The weak unsatisfied strain
Of a band in another room;
Through this dull complex din
Comes winding thin and sharp!
The gnat-like mourning of the violin,
The faint stings of the harp.
The sounds pierce in and die again,
Like keen-drawn threads of ink dropped into a glass
Of water, which curl and relax and soften and pass.
Briefly the music hovers in unstable poise,
Then melts away, drowned in the heavy sea of noise.
And I, I am now emasculate.
All my forces dissipate;
Conquered by matter utterly,
Moving not, willing not, I lie,
Like a man whom timbers pin
When the roof of a mine falls in.
Halt! ... as a cloud condenses
I press my mind, recover
Dominion of my senses.
With newly flowing blood
I lift, and now float over
The restaurant's expanses
Like a draggled sea-gull over dreary flats of mud.
An effort ... ah ... I urge and push,
And now with greater strength I flush,
The hall is full of my pinions' rush;
No drooping now, the place is mine,
Beating the walls with shattering wings,
Over the herd my spirit swings,
In triumph shouts "Aha, you swine!
Grovel before your lord divine!
I, only I, am real here! ..."
Through the uncertain firmament,
Still bestial in their dull content.
The despicable phantoms leer...
Hogs! even now in my right hand
I hold at my will the thunderbolts
Measured not in mortal volts,
Would crash you to annihilation!
Lit with a new illumination,
What need I of ears and eyes
Of flesh? Imperious I will rise,
Dominate you as a god
Who only does not trouble to wield the rod
Of death, or kick your weak spheroid
Like a football through the void!
*****
Ha! was it but a dream?
And did it merely seem?
Ha! not yet free of your cage,
Soul, spite of all your rage?
Come now, this foe engage!
With explosion of your might
Oh heave, oh leap and flash up, soul.
Like a stabbing scream in the night!
Hurl aside this useless bowl
Of a body...
But there comes a shock
A soft, tremendous shock
Of contact with the body; I lose all power,
And fall back, back, like a solitary rower
Whose prow that debonair the waves did ride
Is suddenly hurled back by an iron tide.
O sadness, sadness, feel the returning pain
Of touch with unescapable mortal things again!
The cloth is linen, the floor is wood,
My plate holds cheese, my tumbler toddy;
I cannot get free of the body,
And no man ever could.
*****
Self! do not lose your hold on life,
Nor coward seek to shrink the strife
Of body and spirit; even now
(Not for the first time), even now
Clear in your ears has rung the message
That tense abstraction is the passage
To nervelessness and living death.
Never forget while you draw breath
That all the hammers of will can never
Your chainèd soul from matter sever;
And though it be confused and mixed,
This is the world in which you're fixed.
Never despise the things that are.
Set your teeth upon the grit.
Though your heart like a motor beat,
Hold fast this earthly star,
The whole of it, the whole of it.
Look on this crowd now, calm now, look.
Remember now that each one drew
Woman's milk (which you partook)
And year by year in wonder grew.
Scorn not them, nor scorn not their feasts
(Which you partake) nor call them beasts.
These be children of one Power
With you, nor higher you nor lower.
They also hear the harp and fiddle,
And sometimes quail before the riddle.
They also have hot blood, quick thought,
And try to do the things they ought,
They also have hearts that ache when stung.
And sigh for days when they were young,
And curse their wills because they falter,
And know that they will never alter.
See these men in a world of men.
Material bodies?—yes, what then?
These coarse trunks that here you see
Judge them not, lest judged you be,
Bow not to the moment's curse,
Nor make four walls a universe.
Think of these bodies here assembled,
Whence they have come, where they have trembled
With the strange force that fills us all.
Men and beasts both great and small.
Here within this fleeting home
Two hundred men have this day come;
Here collected for one day,
Each shall go his separate way.
Self, you can imagine nought
Of all the battles they have fought,
All the labours they have done,
All the journeys they have run.
O, they have come from all the world,
Borne by invisible currents, swirled
Like leaves into this vortex here
Flying, or like the spirits drear
Windborne and frail, whom Dante saw,
Who yet obeyed some hidden law.
*****
Is it not miraculous
That they should here be gathered thus,
All to be spread before your view,
Who are strange to them as they to you?
Soul, how can you sustain without a sob,
The lightest thought of this titanic throb
Of earthly life, that swells and breaks
Into leaping scattering waves of fire,
Into tameless tempests of effort and storms of desire
That eternally makes
The confused glittering armies of humankind,
To their own heroism blind,
Swarm over the earth to build, to dig, and to till,
To mould and compel land and sea to their will...
Whence we are here eating...
Standing here as on a high hill,
Strain, my imagination, strain forth to embrace
The energies that labour for this place,
This place, this instant. Beyond your island's verge,
Listen, and hear the roaring impulsive surge,
The clamour of voices, the blasting of powder, the clanging of steel,
The thunder of hammers, the rattle of oars...
For this one meal
Ten thousand Indian hamlets stored their yields,
Manchurian peasants sweltered in their fields,
And Greeks drove carts to Patras, and lone men
Saw burning summer come and go again
And huddled from the winds of winter on
The fertile deserts of Saskatchewan.
To fabricate these things have been marchings and slaughters,
The sun has toiled and the moon has moved the waters,
Cities have laboured, and crowded plains, and deep in the earth
Men have plunged unafraid with ardour to wrench the worth
Of sweating dim-lit caverns, and paths have been hewn
Through forests where for uncounted years nor sun nor moon
Have penetrated, men have driven straight shining rails
Through the dense bowels of mountains, and climbed their frozen tops,
and wrinkled sailors have shouted at shouting gales
In the huge Pacific, and battled around the Horn
And gasping, coasted to Rio, and turning towards the morn,
Fought over the wastes to Spain, and battered and worn,
Sailed up the Channel, and on into the Nore
To the city of masts and the smoky familiar shore.
So, so of every substance you see around
Might a tale be unwound
Of perils passed, of adventurous journeys made
In man's undying and stupendous crusade.
This flower of man's energies Trade
Brought hither to hand and lip
By waggon, train or ship,
Each atom that we eat....
Stare at the wine, stare at the meat.
The mutton which these platters fills
Grazed upon a thousand hills;
This bread so square and white and dry
Once was corn that sang to the sky;
And all these spruce, obedient wines
Flowed from the vatted fruit of vines
That trailed, a bright maternal host,
The warm Mediterranean coast,
Or spread their Bacchic mantle on
That Iberian Helicon
Where the slopes of Portugal
Crown the Atlantic's eastern wall.
O mighty energy, never-failing flame!
O patient toils and journeys in the name
Of Trade! No journey ever was the same
As another, nor ever came again one task;
And each man's face is an ever-changing mask.
From the minutest cell to the lordliest star
All things are unique, though all of their kindred are.
And though all things exist for ever, all life is change,
And the oldest passions come to each heart in a garment strange.
Though life be as brief as a flower and the body but dust,
Man walks the earth holding both body and spirit in trust;
And the various glories of sense are spread for his delight,
New pageants glow in the sunset, new stars are born in the night,
And clouds come every day, and never a shape recurs,
And the grass grows every year, yet never the same blade stirs
Another spring, and no delving man breaks again the self-same clod
As he did last year though he stand once more where last year he trod.
O wonderful procession fore-ordained by God!
Wonderful in unity, wonderful in diversity.
Contemplate it, soul, and see
How the material universe moves and strives with anguish and glee!
*****
I was born for that reason,
With muscles, heart and eyes,
To watch each following season,
To work and to be wise;
Not body and mind to tether
To unseen things alone,
But to traverse together
The known and the unknown.
My muscles were not welded
To waste away in sleep,
My bones were never builded
To throw upon a heap.
"Man worships God in action,"
Senses and reason call,
"And thought is putrefaction,
If thought is all in all!"
Most of the guests are gone; look over there,
Against a pillar leans with absent air
A tall, dark, pallid waiter. There he stands
Limply, with vacant eyes and listless hands.
He dreams of some small Tyrolean town,
A church, a bridge, a stream that rushes down.
A frustrate, hankering man, this one short time
Unconscious he into my gaze did climb;
He sinks again, again he is but one
Of many myriads underneath the sun,
Now faint, now vivid.... How puzzling is it all!
For now again, in spite of all,
The lights, the chairs, the diners, and the hall
Lose their opacity.
Fool! exert your will,
Finish your whisky up, and pay your bill.
FAITH
When I see truth, do I seek truth
Only that I may things denote,
And, rich by striving, deck my youth
As with a vain unusual coat?
Or seek I truth for other ends:
That she in other hearts may stir,
That even my most familiar friends
May turn from me to look on her?
So I this day myself was asking;
Out of the window skies were blue
And Thames was in the sunlight basking;
My thoughts coiled inwards like a screw.
I watched them anxious for a while;
Then quietly, as I did watch,
Spread in my soul a sudden smile:
I knew that no firm thing they'd catch.
And I remembered if I leapt
Upon the bosom of the wind
It would sustain me; question slept;
I felt that I had almost sinned.
A FRESH MORNING
Now am I a tin whistle
Through which God blows,
And I wish to God I were a trumpet
—But why, God only knows.
INTERIOR
I and myself swore enmity. Alack,
Myself has tied my hands behind my back.
Yielding, I know there's no excuse in them—
I was accomplice to the stratagem.
ON A FRIEND RECENTLY DEAD
I
The stream goes fast.
When this that is the present is the past,
'Twill be as all the other pasts have been,
A failing hill, a daily dimming scene,
A far strange port with foreign life astir
The ship has left behind, the voyager
Will never return to; no, nor see again,
Though with a heart full of longing he may strain
Back to project himself, and once more count
The boats, the whitened walls that climbed the mount,
Mark the cathedral's roof, the gathered spires,
The vanes, the windows red with sunset's fires,
The gap of the market-place, and watch again
The coloured groups of women, and the men
Lounging at ease along the low stone wall
That fringed the harbour; and there beyond it all
High pastures morning and evening scattered with small
Specks that were grazing sheep.... It is all gone,
It is all blurred that once so brightly shone;
He cannot now with the old clearness see
The rust upon one ringbolt of the quay.
II
And yesterday is dead, and you are dead.
Your duplicate that hovered in my head
Thins like blown wreathing smoke, your features grow
To interrupted outlines, and all will go
Unless I fight dispersal with my will...
So I shall do it ... but too conscious still
That, when we walked together, had I known
How soon your journey was to end alone,
I should not, now that you have gone from view,
Be gathering derelict odds and ends of you;
But in the intense lucidity of pain
Your likeness would have burnt into my brain.
I did not know; lovable and unique,
As volatile as a bubble and as weak,
You sat with me, and my eyes registered
This thing and that, and sluggishly I heard
Your voice, remembering here and there a word.