автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу  The Poetry of Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox

The Poetry of Ford Maddox Ford

 

Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer on 17th December 1873 in Wimbledon, London, England.  

 

Today he is best known for one book, ‘The Good Soldier’, which is regularly held to be one of the 100 greatest novels of all time.  But, rather unfairly, the breadth of his career has been overshadowed.  He wrote novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism. Today he is well-regarded but known only for a few works rather than the grand arc of his career.

 

Ford collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels but would later complain that, as with all his collaborators, and those he so readily championed, his contribution was overshadowed by theirs.

 

He founded The English Review and The Transatlantic Review which were instrumental in publishing and promoting the works of so many authors and movements.

 

During WWI he initially worked on propaganda books before enlisting. Ford was invalided back to Britain in 1917, remaining in the army and giving lectures until the War’s end. After a spell recuperating in the Sussex countryside he lived mostly in France during the 1920s.

 

He published the series of four novels known as Parade’s End, between 1924 and 1928. These were particularly well-received in America, where Ford spent much of his time from the later 1920s to his death in 1939.

 

His last years were spent teaching at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan.

 

Ford Madox Ford died on 26th June 1939 at Deauville, France at the age of 65.

 

 

Index of Contents

Preface 

I. HIGH GERMANY

The Starling 

In the Little Old Market-Place (To the Memory of A,V.)

To all the Dead 

Rhyming 

Autumn Evening

In the Train

The Exile 

Moods on the Moselle

Canzone a la Sonata (To E. P.)

Süssmund's Address to an Unknown God (Adapted from the High German) 

The Feather

II. SONGS FROM LONDON

Views

Finchley Road 

The Three-ten 

Four in the Morning Courage

Modern Love

Spring on the Woodland Path

Consider

Club Night

To Christina and Katharine at Christmas 

The Dream Hunt

The Old Lament 

Mauresque (To V. M.) 

In the Stone Jug (Tom of Hounslow Heath sings on the night before his execution) 

How Strange a Thing

III. FROM INLAND

From Inland

The Portrait 

Song

The Unwritten Song

A Suabian Legend

Sea Jealousy

Enough

Tandaradei (Walter Von der Vogelweide)

Lullaby

IV. THE FACE OF THE NIGHT

A Sequence

On the Hills 

Sidera Cadentia (On the death of Queen Victoria) 

Night Piece

Thanks Whilst Unharnessing

Grey Matter

Old Man's Even Song

Children's Song

From the Soil (Two Monologues)

Wisdom

The Posy-ring (After Clement Marot)

The Great View

Wife to Husband

A Night Piece

To Christina at Nightfall

Two Frescoes

Voiksweise

And Afterwards (A savage sort of song on the road)

On a Marsh Road (Winter Nightfall)

An End Piece

V. POEMS FOR PICTURES

Love in Watchfulness (Upon the Sheepdowns) 

After All

The Old Faith to the Converts 

St Aethelburga (For a Picture) 

Gray (For a Picture) 

The Gipsy and the Cuckoo 

The Gipsy and the Townsman 

The Song of the Women (A Wealden Trio) 

The Peasant' s Apology

Auctioneer's Song

Aldington Knoll (The Old Smuggler Speaks) 

A Pagan

Old Winter 

The Pedlar leaves the Bar Parlour at Dym church 

An Anniversary

Beginnings (For Rossetti's First Painting) 

At the Bal Masque (Columbine to Pierrot) 

In Tenebris

Song of the Hebrew Seer 

An Imitation (To M. M.) 

Sonnet (Suggested by the "Phœbus with Admetus," by George Meredith) 

Song Dialogue 

Ford Madox Ford – A Short Biography

Ford Madox Ford – A Concise Bibliography

 

 

 

PREFACE

 

I do not wish to apologize for this publication, but I wish to propitiate beforehand those who may

object that I am putting out Collected Poems rather than a Selection, and I wish to make some

speculations as to the differences between prose and verse as they are written nowadays. I do the latter here because there is no periodical in this town that would print my musings—and quite rightly, because few living souls would wish to read them. Let me then become frankly biographic, a thing which may be permitted to the verse-writing mood.

 

The collection here presented is made up of reprints of five volumes of verse which have appeared at odd times during the last fifteen years. The last poem in the book was written when I was fifteen, the first, a year ago, so that, roughly speaking, this volume represents the work of twenty-five years.

 

But the writing of verse hardly appears to me to be a matter of work: it is a process, as far as I am concerned, too uncontrollable. From time to time words in verse form have come into my head

and I have written them down, quite powerlessly and without much interest, under the stress of certain emotions. And, as for knowing whether one or the other is good, bad or indifferent, I simply cannot begin to trust myself to make a selection. And, as for trusting any friend to make a selection, one cannot bring oneself to do it either. They have—one's friends—too many mental axes to grind. One will admire certain verses about a place because in that place they were once happy; one will find fault with a certain other paper of verses because it does not seem likely to form a piece of prentice work in a school that he is desirous of founding. I should say that most of the verses here printed are rather derivative, and too much governed by the passing emotions of the moment. But I simply cannot tell; is it not the function of verse to register passing emotions? Besides, one cherishes vague, pathetic hopes of having written masterpieces unaware, as if one's hackney mare should by accident be got with a winner of the Two Thousand.

 

With prose, that conscious and workable medium, it is a perfectly different matter. One finds a subject somewhere—in the course of gossip or in the Letters and State Papers of some sovereign deceased, published by the Record Office. Immediately the mind gets to work upon the "form," blocks out patches of matter, of dialogue, of description. If the subject is to grow into a short short-story, one knows that one will start with a short, sharp, definite sentence, so as to set the pace:

 

"Mr Lamotte," one will write, "returned from fishing. His eyes were red; the ends of his collar,

pressed open because he had hung down his head in the depths of his reflection. . . ."

 

Or, if it is to be a long short-story, we shall qualify the sharpness of the opening sentence and damp it down as thus:

 

"When, on a late afternoon of July, Mr Lamotte walked up from the river with his rod in his hand . . . ."

 

Or again, if the subject seems one for a novel, we begin:

 

"Mr Lamotte had resided at the White House for sixteen years. The property consisted of 627 acres,

of which one hundred and forty were park-land intersected by the river Torridge, of forty acres of

hop-land . . ." and so on. We shall proceed to "get in" Mr Lamotte and his property and his ancestry

and his landscape and his society. We shall think about these things for a long time and with an absolute certainty of aim; we shall know what we want to do, and—to the measure of the light vouchsafed—we shall do it.

 

But with verse I just do not know: I do not know anything at all. As far as I am concerned, it just

comes. I hear in my head a vague rhythm: and presently a line will present itself:

 

"Up here, where the air's very clear,"

Or else one will come from nowhere at all:

"When all the little hills are hid in snow,"

 

and the rest flows out.

 

And I confess myself to being as unable to judge the result as I am to influence the production.

 

And, as I have said, I have no outside "pointers" at all. Whence should I get it? From the public?

From the Press? From writers whom I revere? From my publisher?

 

As for the Press and the Public. My first book of verse was received with extraordinary enthusiasm

by the former. The Times praised it for a column; the Daily News for a column and a half; the Academy gave it a page. The Public bought fourteen copies. With the publication of my second volume the publisher failed. The Press devoted to it less space, but stated that I had not belied my earlier promise; the public bought no copies at all. That may have been because the publisher had disappeared. My third volume received nine notices from the Press; I never had any accounts from the publishers, and, since they are quite honest folk, I presume that, had there been any sales, they would have paid me the few shillings that would have been upon their books.

I paid for the publication of the fourth volume and purchased one hundred copies for use as Christmas cards. It received five notices in the Press. (There were no advertisements.) My fifth venture I also subsidized and used for a similar festive purpose.

 

ONE provincial newspaper devoted four lines to it; I believe that two people purchased copies.

 

It will thus be manifest that, from the Press and the Public I have received no sort of pointer at all,

except to suppress these faggots of irregular lines—which are all they are to me.

 

Is that a test? Or is anything any test? I do not know. I know that I would very willingly cut off my

right hand to have written the "Wahlfart nach Kevelaar" of Heine, or "Im Moos," by Annette von

Droste. I would give almost anything to have written almost any modern German lyric or some of the ballads of my friend Levin Schiicking. These fellows you know. They sit at their high windows in German lodgings; they lean out; it is raining steadily.

 

Opposite them is a shop where herring salad, onions and oranges are sold. A woman with a red petticoat and a black and grey check shawl goes into the shop and buys three onions, four oranges and half a kilo of herring salad. And there is a poem! Hang it all! There is a poem.

 

But this is England—this is Campden Hill, and we have a literary jargon in which we must write. We

must write in it or every word will "swear."

 

Denn nach Koln am Rheine

Geht die Procession.

 

"For the procession is going to Cologne on the Rhine." You could not use the word procession in

an English poem. It would not be literary. Yet when those lines are recited in Germany people

weep over them. I have seen fat Frankfort bankers—and Jews at that—weeping when the "Wahlfart" was recited in a red plush theatre with gilt cherubs all over the place.

 

That I think is why I know nothing about and take very little interest in English poetry. As to

my own—that here presented I can say this—there is no single poem in the whole number that

I have not been heartily advised by one person or another not to republish. Then comes the publisher—a real publisher, though I imagine a mad one, who offers me money—yes, real money—for the right to publish a Collected Edition! A Collected Edition with nothing left out this publisher commands. What then am I to do? Suppress all or publish all?

 

To suppress all would be too painful. I have worked at these things; some people will be pleased

to read some of them; others will be flattered. They represent emotions, fears, aspirations! And, for the life of me, I cannot tell which, if any, is good and which is the merest trifling.

 

 

II

 

With regard to more speculative matters. I may really say that for a quarter of a century I have

kept before me one unflinching aim—to register my own times in terms of my own time, and still more to urge those who are better poets and better prose-writers than myself to have the same aim. I suppose I have been pretty well ignored; I find no signs of my being taken seriously. It is certain that my conviction would gain immensely as soon as another soul could be found to share it. But for a man mad about writing this is a solitary world, and writing —you cannot write about writing without using foreign words—is a mitier de chten.

 

It is something a matter of diction. In France, upon the whole, a poet—and even a quite literary

poet—can write in a language that, roughly speaking, any hatter can use. In Germany, the poet

writes exactly as he speaks. And these facts do so much towards influencing the poet's mind. If we

cannot use the word "procession" we are apt to be precluded from thinking about processions. Now

processions (to use no other example) are very interesting and suggestive things, and things that

are very much part of the gnat-dance that modern life is. Because, if a people has sufficient interest

in public matters to join in huge processions it has reached a certain stage of folk-consciousness. If it

will not or cannot do these things it is in yet other stages. Heine's " Procession " was, for instance, not what we should call a procession at all. With us there are definite types—there is the King's Procession at Ascot. There are processions in support of Women's Suffrage and against it; those in support of Welsh Disestablishment or against it. But the procession at Koln was a pilgrimage.

 

Organized state functions, popular expressions of desire are one symptom; pilgrimages another.

But the poet who ignores them all three is to my thinking lost, since in one way or another they

embrace the whole of humanity and are mysterious, hazy and tangible. A poet of a sardonic turn of

mind will find sport in describing how, in a low pot-house, an emissary of a skilful Government will

bribe thirty ruffians at five shillings a head to break up and so discredit a procession in favour of votes for women; yet another poet may describe how a lady in an omnibus, with a certain turn for rhetoric, will persuade the greater number of the other passengers to promise to join the procession for the saving of a church; another will become emotionalized at the sight of the Sword of Mercy borne by a peer after the Cap of Maintenance borne by yet another. And believe me, to be perfectly sincere, when I say that a poetry whose day cannot find poets for all these things is a poetry that is lacking in some of its members.

 

So, at least, I see it. Modern life is so extraordinary, so hazy, so tenuous with, still, such definite

and concrete spots in it that I am for ever on the look out for some poet who shall render it with all

its values. I do not think that there was ever, as the saying is, such a chance for a poet; I am breathless, I am agitated at the thought of having it to begin upon. And yet I am aware that I can do nothing, since with me the writing of verse is not a conscious Art. It is the expression of an emotion, and I can so often not put my emotions into any verse.

 

I should say, to put a personal confession on record, that the very strongest emotion—at any

rate of this class—that I have ever had was when I first went to the Shepherd's Bush Exhibition and

came out on a great square of white buildings all outlined with lights. There was such a lot of light

—and I think that what I hope for in Heaven is an infinite clear radiance of pure light! There were

crowds and crowds of people—or no, there was, spread out beneath the lights, an infinite moving

mass of black, with white faces turned up to the light, moving slowly, quickly, not moving at all,

being obscured, reappearing.

 

I know that the immediate reflection will come to almost any reader that this is nonsense or an

affectation. "How," he will say, "is any emotion to be roused by the mere first night of a Shepherd's

Bush exhibition? Poetry is written about love, about country lanes, about the singing of birds." I think it is not—not nowadays. We are too far from these things. What we are in, that which is all

around us, is the Crowd—the Crowd blindly looking for joy or for that most pathetic of all things,

the good time. I think that that is why I felt so profound an emotion on that occasion. It must have

been the feeling—not the thought—of all these good, kind, nice people, this immense Crowd suddenly let loose upon a sort of Tom Tiddler's ground to pick up the glittering splinters of glass that are Romance, hesitant but certain of vistas of adventure, if no more than the adventures of their own souls—like cattle in a herd suddenly let into a very rich field and hesitant before the enamel of daisies, the long herbage, the rushes fringing the stream at the end.

 

I think pathos and poetry are to be found beneath those lights and in those sounds—in the larking of the anaemic girls, in the shoulders of the women in evening dress, in the idealism of a pickpocket slanting through a shadow and imagining himself a hero whose end will be wealth and permanent apartments in the Savoy Hotel. For such dreamers of dreams there are.

 

That indeed appears to me—and I am writing as seriously as I can—the real stuff of the poetry of our day. Love in country lanes, the song of birds, moonlight—these the poet, playing for safety, and

the critic trying to find something safe to praise, will deem the sure cards of the poetic pack. They

seem the safe things to sentimentalize over, and it is taken for granted that sentimentalizing is the

business of poetry. It is not, of course. Upon the face of it the comfrey under the hedge may seem a

safer card to play, for the purpose of poetry, than the portable zinc dustbin left at dawn for the dustman to take.

 

But it is not really; for the business of poetry is not sentimentalism so much as the putting of certain realities in certain aspects. The comfrey under the hedge, judged by these standards, is just a plant

—but the ash-bucket at dawn is a symbol of poor humanity, of its aspirations, its romance, its ageing

and its death. The ashes represent the sociable fires, the god of the hearth, of the slumbering, dawn

populations; the orange peels with their bright colours represent all that is left of a little party of

the night before, when an alliance between families may have failed to be cemented, or being accomplished may have proved a disillusionment or a temporary paradise. The empty tin of infant's food stands for birth; the torn up scrap of a doctor's prescription for death. Yes, even if you wish to

sentimentalize, the dustbin is a much safer card to play than the comfrey plant. And, similarly, the

anaemic shop-girl at the Exhibition, with her bad teeth and her cheap black frock, is safer than Isolde. She is more down to the ground and much more touching.

 

Or again, there are the symbols of the great fine things that remain to us. Many of us might confess

to being unable to pass Buckingham Palace when the Royal Standard is flying on the flagstaff without a very recognizable emotion that is equivalent to the journalist's phrase, a catching at the throat.

For there are symbols of aspiration everywhere.

 

The preposterous white papier m4che fountain is a symbol, so are the preposterous gilded gates, so are the geraniums and the purplish-grey pencil of Westminster Cathedral tower that overhangs the palace. There are, upon the standard, three leopards passant which are ancient and suggestive things; there is the lion rampant which is pretentious, and a harp which is a silly sort of thing to have upon a flag.

 

But it is a rich spot; a patch of colour that is left to us. As the ugly marquess said of the handsome footman:

 

"Mon dieu, comme nous les faisons—et comme ils nous font!"

 

For papier mache and passant leopards and all, these symbols are what the crowd desires and what

they stand for made the crowd what it is. And the absurd, beloved traditions continue. The excellent

father of a family in jack-boots, white breeches, sword, helmet strap, gauntlets, views the preparation of his accoutrements and the flag that he carries before his regiment as something as part of his sacred profession as, to a good butler, is the family plate. That is an odd, mysterious human thing, the stuff for poetry.

 

We might confess again to having had emotions at the time of the beginning of the South African

War—we were, say, in the gallery at Drury Lane and the audience were all on fire; we might confess

to having had emotions in the Tivoli Music Hall when, just after a low comedian had "taken off"

Henry VIII, it was announced that Edward VII was dying, and the whole audience stood up and

sang "God Save the King"—as a genuine hymn that time. We may have had similar emotions at

seeing the little Prince of Wales standing unsteadily on a blue foot-stool at the coronation, a young boy in his garter robes—or at a Secret Consistory at the Vatican, when the Holy Father ceremonially whispered to one Cardinal or another.

 

War-like emotions, tears at the passing of a sovereign, being touched at the sight of a young

prince or a sovereignly pontifical prisoner of the Vatican—this is perhaps the merest digging out of

fossils from a bed of soft clay that the crowd is.

 

God knows we may "just despise" democracy or the writing of laureate's odes, but the putting of

the one thing in juxtaposition with the other—that seems to me to be much more the business of the poet of to-day than setting down on paper what he thinks about the fate of Brangane, not because any particular " lesson " may be learned, but because such juxtapositions suggest emotions.

 

For myself, I have been unable to do it; I am too old, perhaps, or was born too late—anything you

like. But there it is—I would rather read a picture in verse of the emotions and environment of a

Goodge Street anarchist than recapture what songs the sirens sang. That after all was what Fran9ois

Villon was doing for the life of his day, and I should feel that our day was doing its duty by posterity

much more surely if it were doing something of the sort.

 

Can it then be done? In prose of course it can. But, in poetry? Is there something about the mere

framing of verse, the mere sound of it in the ear, that it must at once throw its practitioner or its

devotee into an artificial frame of mind? Verse presumably quickens the perceptions of its writer as do hashish or ether. But must it necessarily quicken them to the perception only of the sentimental, the false, the hackneyed aspects of life? Must it make us, because we live in cities, babble incessantly of green fields; or because we live in the twentieth century must we deem nothing poetically good that did not take place before the year 1603?

 

This is not saying that one should not soak oneself with the Greek traditions: study every fragment

of Sappho; delve ages long in the works of Bertran de Born; translate for years the minnelieder of Walther von der Vogelweide or that we should forget the bardic chants of Patric of the Seven Kingdoms. Let us do anything in the world that will widen our perceptions. We are the heirs of all the ages. But, in the end, I feel fairly assured that the purpose of all these pleasant travails is the right appreciation of such facets of our own day as God will let us perceive.

 

I remember seeing in a house in Hertford an American cartoon representing a dog pursuing a

cat out of the door of a particularly hideous tenement house, and beneath this picture was inscribed

the words: "This is life—one damn thing after another." Now I think it would be better to be able to

put that sentiment into lyric verse than to remake a ballad of the sorrows of Cuchullain or to paraphrase the Book of Job. I do not mean to say that Job is not picturesque; I do not mean to say that it is not a good thing to have the Book of the Seven Sorrows of whom you will in the background of your mind or even colouring your outlook. But it is better to see life in the terms of one damn thing after another, vulgar as is the phraseology or even the attitude, than to render it in terms of withering gourds and other poetic paraphernalia. It is, in fact, better to be vulgar than affected, at any rate if you practise poetry.

 

 

Ill

 

One of my friends, a really serious critic, has assured me that my poem called "To All the Dead"

was not worth publishing, because it is just Browning. Let me, to further this speculation, just confess that I have never read Browning, and that, roughly speaking, I cannot read poetry at all. I never really have been able to. And then let me analyse this case, because it is the plight of many decent, serious people, friends of mine.

 

As boys we—I and my friends—read Shakespeare with avidity, Virgil to the extent of getting at least

two Books of the ^neid by heart, Horace with pleasure and Ovid's Persephone Raptawith delight.

We liked very much the Bacchae of Euripides—I mean that we used to sit down and take a read in

these things sometimes apart from the mere exigencies of the school curriculum. A little later

Herrick moved us to ecstasy and some of Donne; we liked passages of Fletcher, of Marlowe, of Webster and of Kyd. At that time we really loved the Minnesingers, and fell flat in admiration before

anything of Heine. The Troubadors and even the Northern French Epics we could not read—French

poetry did not exist for us at all. If we read a French poem at all, we had always to read it twice, once to master the artificial rhythm, once for the sense.

 

Between seventeen and eighteen we read Rossetti, Catullus, Theocritus, Bion, Moschus and still

Shakespeare, Herrick, Heine, Elizabethan and Jacobean lyrics, Crashaw, Herbert and Donne.

Towards eighteen we tried Swinburne, Tennyson, Browning and Pope. We could not read any of

them—we simply and physically couldn't sit down with them in the hand for long enough to master

more than a few lines. We never read any Tennyson at all except for the fragment about the Eagle;

never read any Swinburne at all except for the poem that contains the words "I thank with faint

thanksgiving whatever Gods there be," and the one beginning "Ask nothing more of me. Sweet"; we

also read a German translation of the ballad whose stanzas end: " This is the end of every man's desire."

 

Of Browning we read sufficient to " get the hang of" Fijine at the Fair, the Blot on the Scutcheon for

the lyric There's a woman like a dewdrop and Meeting at Night and Parting in the Morning and Oh to be in England. I have a faint idea that we may have read The Bishop Orders his Tomb and parts of Asolando. So that, as things go, we may be said never to have read any Browning at all. (I do not mean to say that what I did read did not influence me, so that even at this late date that influence may be found on such a poem as "To all the Dead," or "The Starling."

 

I am not, I mean, trying to dodge the implication that I may derive from Browning. Influences are

queer things, and there is no knowing when or where they may take you. But, until the other day,

I should have said that Browning was the last of the poets that I should have taken consciously

as a model. The other day, however—about a month ago—some one insisted, sorely against my wishes, on reading to me the beginning of the Flight of the Duchess, as far as "And the whole is our Duke's country," that most triumphant expression of feudal loyalty. And my enthusiasm knew no bounds, so that, if ever the Muse should visit me again, it may well be Browningese that I shall write, for there is no passage in literature that I should more desire to have written.)

 

But at any rate, the attempt to read Tennyson, Swinburne and Browning and Pope—in our teens

—gave me and the friends I have mentioned, a settled dislike for poetry that we have never since

quite got over. We seemed to get from them the idea that all poets must of necessity write affectedly, at great length, with many superfluous words—that poetry, of necessity, was something boring and pretentious. And I fancy that it is because the greater part of humanity get that impression from those poets that few modern men or women read verse at all.

 

To such an extent did that feeling overmaster us that, although we subsequently discovered for ourselves Christina Rossetti—who strikes us still as far and away the greatest master of words and moods that any art has produced—I am conscious that we regarded her as being far more a prose writer than a poet at all. Poetry being something pretentious, "tol-lol" as the phrase then was, portentous, brow-beating, affected—this still, small, private voice gave the impression of not being verse at all. Such a phrase describing lizards amongst heath as: "like darted lightnings here and there perceived yet no- where dwelt upon," or such a sentence as: " Quoth one to-morrow shall be like to-day but much more sweet"—these things gave an exquisite pleasure, but it was a pleasure comparable rather to that to be had from reading Flaubert. It was comparable rather to that which came from reading the last sentences of Herodias. "Et tous trois ayant pris la tete de Jokanaan s'en allait vers Galillee. Comme elle etait tres lourde ils la portaient alternativement." I do not presume to say exactly whence the pleasure comes except in so far as that I believe that such exact, formal and austere phrases can to certain men give a pleasure beyond any other. And it was this emotion that we received from Christina Rossetti.

 

But still, sub-consciously, I am aware that we did not regard her as a poet.

 

And, from that day onwards I may say that we have read no poetry at all—at any rate we have

read none unprofessionally until just the other day. The poets of the nineties—Dowson, Johnson, Davidson and the rest—struck us as just nuisances, writing in derivative language uninteresting matters that might have been interesting had they been expressed in the much more exquisite medium of prose. We got, perhaps, some pleasure from reading the poems—not the novels—of George Meredith, and a great deal from those of Mr Hardy, whom we do regard as a great, queer, gloomy and splendid poet. We read also—by some odd impulse—the whole of Mr Doughty's Dawn in Britain, that atrocious and wonderful epic in twelve volumes which is, I think, the longest and most queerly impressive poem in modern English. We read it with avidity; we could not tear ourselves away from it, and we wrote six reviews of it because no professional reviewers could be found to give the time for reading it. It was a queer adventure.

 

That then is the history of twenty years of reading verse, and I think I may say that, for men

whose life-business is reading, we have read practically no poetry at all. And, during those twenty

years we should have said with assurance that poetry was an artificial, a boring, an unnecessary

thing.

 

 

IV

 

But, about five years ago, we—I and that group of friends—began to think of founding a periodical

—one is always thinking of founding periodicals!

 

We had then to think of what place verse must take in the scheme of things. With our foreign

ideas in which academic palms and precedence figure more strongly than they do in the minds of

most freeborn islanders, it did not take us long to arrive at the conclusion that poetry must have the

very first place in that journal—not because it was a living force, but just because it was dead and must be treated with deference. Moreover, if I may make a further confession, our express aim in founding the periodical in question, was to print a poem by Mr Hardy, a poem that other periodicals had found too —let us say—outspoken for them to print. Now it would have been ridiculous to found an immense paper for the express purpose of printing one particular poem and not to give that poem the utmost pride of place.

 

So we printed A Sunday Morning Tragedy first and the rest in a string after it. It seemed proper,

French and traditional to do so.

 

And then we began to worry our poor heads about poetry. We had, perforce, to read a great deal

of it, and much of what we read seemed to be better stuff than we had expected. We came, for instance, upon the poems of Mr Yeats. Now for ten or twenty years we had been making light of Mr Yeats; we used to sniff irritably at I will arise and go noio, and to be worried by The Countess Kathleen. Mr Yeats appeared to be a merely "literary" poet; an annoying dilettante. I do not now know whether Mr Yeats has changed or whether we have, but I am about in a moment to try to make an amende honorable.

 

At any rate we came upon the work of Mr Yeats, of Mr De la Mare, of Mr Flint, of Mr D. H. Lawrence, and upon suggestions of power in Mr Pound's derivations from the Romance writers. And gradually it has forced itself upon us that there is a new quality, a new power of impressionism that is open to poetry, and that is not so much open to prose. It it is a quality that attracted us years ago to the

poems of Mr Hardy and of Mr George Meredith. (I know that my younger friends will start ominously at this announcement, that they will come round to my house and remonstrate seriously for many weary hours. But I must make the best of that.)

 

For the fact is that, in Mr Yeats as in Mr Hardy, there are certain qualities that very singularly unite

them—qualities not so much of diction or of mind but qualities that can only be expressed in pictorial terms. For when I think of Mr Hardy's work I seem to see a cavernous darkness, a darkness filled with wood-smoke, touched here and there with the distant and brooding glow of smothered flame. When I think of Mr Yeats' work I seem to see a grey, thin mist over a green landscape, the mist here and there being pierced by a sparkle of dew, by the light shot from a gem in a green cap. (I

have tried to write this as carefully as I can, so as to express very precisely what is in the end a debt

of sheer gratitude. I mean that really and truly that is the sort of feeling that I have—as if I had discovered two new countries—the country of the hardly illumined and cavernous darkness, the country of the thin grey mist over the green fields, and as if those countries still remained for me to travel in.) It will at first sight appear that here is a contradicting of the words with which we set out—the statement that it is the duty of the poet to reflect his own day. But there is no contradiction. It is the duty of the poet to reflect his own day as it appears to him, as it has impressed itself upon him. Because I and my friends have, as the saying is, rolled our humps mostly in a landscape that is picked out with the red patches of motor-bus sides, it would be the merest provincialism to say that the author of Inntsfree should not have sat in the cabins of county Galway or of Connemara, or wherever it is, or that the author of the Dynasts should not have wandered about a country called Wessex reading works connected with Napoleon.

 

We should not wish to limit Mr Yeats' reading to the daily papers, nor indeed do we so limit our own, any more than we should wish to limit the author of that most beautiful impression, the Listeners, to the purlieus of Bedford Street where the publishers' offices are.

 

What worried and exasperated us in the poems of the late Lord Tennyson, the late Lewis Morris,

the late William Morris, the late—well, whom you like—is not their choice of subject, it is their imitative handling of matter, of words, it is their derivative attitude. . . .

 

Reading is an excellent thing; it is also experience, and both Mr Yeats and Mr De la Mare have read a great deal. But it is an experience that one should go through not in order to acquire imitative

faculties, but in order to find—oneself. Roughly speaking, the late Victorian writers imitated Malory

or the Laxdaela Saga and commented upon them; roughly speaking, again, the poets of to-day record their emotions at receiving the experience of the emotions of former writers. It is an attitude critical rather than imitative, and to the measure of its truth it is the truer poetical attitude.

 

The measure of the truth has to be found. It would be an obvious hypocrisy in men whose first

unashamed action of the day is to open the daily paper for the cricket scores and whose poetic bag

and baggage is as small as I have related—it would be an obvious hypocrisy in us to pretend to have

passed the greater part of our existences in romantic woods. But it would be a similar hypocrisy in Mr De la Mare, Mr Yeats, or Mr Hardy to attempt to render Life in the terms of the sort of Futurist

picture that life is to me and my likes.

 

To get a sort of truth, a sort of genuineness into your attitude towards the life that God makes

you lead, to follow up your real preferences, to like as some of us like the hard, bitter, ironical

German poets, the life of restaurants, of Crowds, of flashed impressions, to love, as we may love, in our own way, the Blessed Virgin, Saint Katharine or the sardonic figure of Christina of Milan—and to render it—that is one good thing. Or again, to be genuinely Irish, with all the historic background of death, swords, flames, mists, sorrows, wakes, and again mists—to love those things and the Irish sanctities and Paganisms—that is another good thing if it is truly rendered; the main thing is the genuine love and the faithful rendering of the received impression.

 

The actual language—the vernacular employed—is a secondary matter. I prefer personally the

language of my own day, a language clear enough for certain matters, employing slang where slang

is felicitous and vulgarity where it seems to me that vulgarity is the only weapon against dullness.

Mr Doughty, on the other hand—and Mr Doughty is a great poet—uses a barbarous idiom as if he

were chucking pieces of shale at you from the top of a rock. Mr Yeats makes literal translations from

the Irish; Mr Hardy does not appear to bother his head much about words, he drags them in as he

likes. Mr De la Mare and Mr Flint are rather literary; Mr Pound as often as not is so unacquainted with English idioms as to be nearly un-intelligible.

 

(God forbid, by the by, that I should seem to arrogate to myself a position as a poet side by side

with Mr De la Mare, or, for the matter of that, with Mr Pound. But in stating my preferences I am

merely, quite humbly, trying to voice what I imagine will be the views or the aspirations, the preferences or the prejudices, of the poet of my day and circumstances when he shall at last appear and voice the life of dust, toil, discouragement, excitement, and enervation that I and many millions lead to-day.)

 

When that poet does come it seems to me that his species will be much that of the gentlemen I have several times mentioned. His attitude towards life will be theirs; his circumstances only will be

different. An elephant is an elephant whether he pours, at an African water-hole, mud and water

over his free and scorched flanks, or whether, in the Zoological Gardens, he carries children about

upon his back.

 

 

 

I

 

"HIGH GERMANY"

 

The following poems were printed in the volume called "High Germany," published by Messrs Duckworth in 1911. "The Starling" also appeared in the Fortnightly Review.

 

 

THE STARLING

 

It’s an odd thing how one changes . . .

Walking along the upper ranges

Of this land of plains,

In this month of rains,

On a drying road where the poplars march along,

Suddenly,

With a rush of wings flew down a company,

A multitude, throng upon throng,

Of starlings.

Successive orchestras of song,

Flung, like the babble of surf,

On to the roadside turf—

 

And so, for a mile, for a mile and a half—a long way.

Flight follows flight

Thro' the still grey light

Of the steel-grey day.

Whirling beside the road in clamorous crowds,

Never near, never far, in the shade of the poplars and clouds.

 

It's an odd thing how one changes . . .

And what strikes me now as most strange is:

After the starlings had flown

Over the plain and were gone.

There was one of them stayed on alone

In the trees; it chattered on high,

Lifting its bill to the sky,

Distending its throat,

Crooning harsh note after note.

In soliloquy,

Sitting alone.

 

And after a hush

It gurgled as gurgled a well,

Warbled as warbles a thrush,

Had a try at the sound of a bell

And mimicked a jay

But I,

Whilst the starling mimicked on high

Pulsing its throat and its wings,

I went on my way

Thinking of things,

Onwards and over the range

And that's what is strange.

I went down 'twixt tobacco and grain.

Descending the chequer board plain

Where the apples and maize are;

Under the loopholed gate

In the village wall

Where the goats clatter over the cobbles

And the intricate, straw-littered ways are . . .

The ancient watchman hobbles

Cloaked, with his glasses of horn at the end of his nose.

Wearing velvet short hose

And a three-cornered hat on his pate.

And his pike-staff and all.

And he carries a proclamation.

An invitation.

To great and small,

Man and beast

To a wedding feast,

And he carries a bell and rings . . .

From the steeple looks down a saint,

From a doorway a queenly peasant

Looks out, in her bride-gown of lace

And her sister, a quaint little darling

Who twitters and chirps like a starling.

 

And this little old place,

It's so quaint,

It's so pleasant;

And the watch bell rings, and the church bell rings

And the wedding procession draws nigh,

Bullock carts, fiddlers and goods.

But I

Pass on my way to the woods

Thinking of things.

 

Years ago I'd have stayed by the starling,

Marking the iridescence of his throat.

Marvelling at the change of his note;

I'd have said to the peasant child: " Darling

Here's a groschen and give me a kiss" . . . I'd have stayed

To sit with the bridesmaids at table.

And have taken my chance

Of a dance

With the bride in her laces

Or the maids with the blonde, placid faces

And ribbons and crants in the stable . . .

 

But the church bell still rings

And I'm far away out on the plain.

In the grey weather amongst the tobacco and grain.

And village and gate and wall

Are a long grey line with the church over all

And miles and miles away in the sky

The starlings go wheeling round on high

Over the distant ranges.

The violin strings

Thrill away and the day grows more grey.

And I ... I stand thinking of things.

Yes, it's strange how one changes.

 

 

 

IN THE LITTLE OLD MARKET-PLACE

 

(To the Memory of A.V.)

 

It rains, it rains,

From gutters and drains

And gargoyles and gables:

It drips from the tables

That tell us the tolls upon grains,

Oxen, asses, sheep, turkeys and fowls

Set into the rain-soaked wall

Of the old Town Hall.

 

The mountains being so tall

And forcing the town on the river.

The market's so small

That, with the wet cobbles, dark arches and all.

The owls

(For in dark rainy weather the owls fly out

Well before four), so the owls

In the gloom

Have too little room

And brush by the saint on the fountain

In veering about.

 

The poor saint on the fountain!

Supported by plaques of the giver

To whom we're beholden;

His name was de Sales

And his wife's name von Mangel.

(Now is he a saint or archangel?)

He stands on a dragon

On a ball, on a column

Gazing up at the vines on the mountain;

And his falchion is golden,

 

And his wings are all golden.

He bears golden scales

And in spite of the coils of his dragon, without hint of alarm or invective

Looks up at the mists on the mountain.

 

(Now what saint or archangel

Stands winged on a dragon,

Bearing golden scales and a broad bladed sword all golden?

Alas, my knowledge

Of all the saints of the college.

Of all these glimmering, olden

Sacred and misty stories

Of angels and saints and old glories . . .

Is sadly defective.)

The poor saint on the fountain . . .

 

On top of his column

Gazes up sad and solemn.

But is it towards the top of the mountain

Where the spindrifty haze is

That he gazes?

Or is it into the casement

Where the girl sits sewing?

There's no knowing.

 

Hear it rain!

And from eight leaden pipes in the ball he stands on,

That has eight leaden and copper bands on.

There gurgle and drain

Eight driblets of water down into the basin.

And he stands on his dragon

And the girl sits sewing

High, very high in her casement

And before her are many geraniums in a parket

All growing and blowing

In box upon box

From the gables right down to the basement

With the frescoes and carvings and paint . . .

 

The poor saint!

It rains and it rains,

In the market there isn't an ox,

And in all the emplacement

For wagons there isn't a wagon.

Not a stall for a grape or a raisin,

Not a soul in the market

Save the saint on his dragon

With the rain dribbling down in the basin,

And the maiden that sews in the casement.

 

They are still and alone,

Mutterseelens alone.

And the rain dribbles down from his heels and his crown,

From wet stone to wet stone.

It's as grey as at dawn.

And the owls, grey and fawn.

Call from the little town hall

With its arch in the wall.

Where the fire-hooks are stored.

 

From behind the flowers of her casement

That's all gay with the carvings and paint.

The maiden gives a great yawn,

But the poor saint—

No doubt he's as bored!

Stands still on his column

Uplifting his sword

With never the ease of a yawn

From wet dawn to wet dawn . . .

 

 

 

TO ALL THE DEAD

 

I

 

A Chinese Queen on a lacquered throne

With a dragon as big as the side of a house,

All golden, and silent and sitting alone

In an empty house.

 

With the shadows above and the shadows behind,

And the Queen with a paper white, rice white face.

As still as a partridge, as still as a mouse.

With slanting eyes you would say were blind—

In a dead white face.

 

And what does she think, and what does she see,

With her face as still as a frozen pool is.

And her air as old as the oldest sea,

Where the oldest ice of the frozen Pole is?

 

She should have been dead nine thousand year . . .

But there come in three score and sixty coolies

With a veil of lawn as large as a lake,

And the veil blows here and shimmers there

In the unseen winds of the shadowy house.

And dragons flew in the shadowy air.

And there were chrysanthemums everywhere.

And butterflies and a coral snake

All round the margin of the lake.

 

For the Prince has come to court the Queen

Still sitting on high on her lacquered throne

With the golden dragon: and all the sheen

And shimmer and shine of a thousand wantons

In silken stuff's, with ivory lutes

And slanting eyes and furred blue boots

That moved in the light of a thousand Ian thorns . . . .

It all dies down, and the Queen sits there.

She should have been dead nine thousand year.

 

 

II

 

Now it happened that in the course of to-day

(The Queen was last night) in the rue de la Paix

In a room that was old and darkish and musty,

For most of the rooms are quaintly cranky

In the rue de la Paix,

For when it was new the Grande Arm6e

Tramped all its legions down this way.

 

But I sat there, and a friendly Yankee

Was lecturing me on the nature of things

(It's a way Americans have!) He was cranky.

Just as much as his rooms and his chairs and his tables.

But the window stood open and over the way

I saw that the house with the modernest facings

Had an old tiled roof with mansards and gables.

It housed a jeweller, two modistes,

A vendor of fans; and the topmost sign

Announced in a golden double line

A salon of Chinese chiropodists.

 

And that is Paris from heel to crown

Plate-glass in the street and jewels and lacings

And cranky rooms on the upper floors

With rusty locks and creaking doors

 

But of what my American friend was saying

I haven't a thought—there was too much noise

Through the open windows—the motors braying,

The clatter of hoofs in a steady stream,

And a scream

Unceasing from twenty paper boys,

With twenty versions to take your choice,

In styles courageous or gay or rococco,

Of clamorous news about Morocco . . .

 

 

III

 

And suddenly he said: "Sandusky!"

Now what was he talking of there in his musky,

Worm-eaten rooms of the rue de la Paix?

—Of his youth of jack rabbits and peanuts and snakes

When all was silent about the Lakes.

Now what is the name of them? Lake Ladoga?

No, no, that's in Russia. It's Ticonderoga,

Ontario, Champlin, each with their woods,

And never a house for miles and miles

And the boys in their boats floated on by the piles

Of old wigwams where shreds of blankets dangled.

And they caught their jack rabbits, lit bonfires and angled

In shallows for catfish. That's it, in Sandusky!

The Bay of Sandusky.

 

And then I remembered with grey, clear precision,

And I saw—yes I saw—looking over the way

Two Chinese chiropodists, villainous fellows.

With faces of sulphur—and lemon—yellows,

Gaze with that gaze that's half fanatic.

Part atrocious and partly sweet,

Each from a window of his own attic

At a mannequin on my side of the street,

And each grinned and girned in his Manchester blue,

And smirked with his eyes and his pig-tail too.

And somehow they made me feel sick; but I lost them

At the word " Sandusky." A landscape crossed them;

A scene no more nor less than a vision.

All clear and grey in the rue de la Paix.

 

It must have been seven years ago,

I was out on a river whose name I've forgotten;

The Hudson perhaps or the Kotohotten.

It doesn't much matter. Do you know the Hudson?

A sort of a Moselle with New York duds on,

There are crags and castles, a distance all grey,

Rocks, forests and elbows. But castles of Jay

And William H. Post and Mrs Poughkeepsie—

Imagine a Moselle that's thoroughly tipsy,

A nightmare of ninety American castles

With English servants trained up like vassals,

Of Hiram P. Ouese who's a fortune from pills for the liver.

 

Anyhow, I've forgotten the name of the river.

 

And the steamer steamed upwards between the hills

And passed through the rapids they called the

Narrows

'Twixt the high grey banks where the firs grow jagged.

And the castles ceased and the forest grew ragged.

And the steamer belched forth sparks and stayed

At a wooden village, then grunted and swayed

Out to midstream and round a reach

Where the river widened and swirled about.

And we slowed in the current where black snags stuck out.

And suddenly we saw a beach—

 

A grey old beach and some old grey mounds

That seemed to silence the steamer's sounds;

So still and old and grey and ragged.

For there they lay, the tumuli, barrows,

The Indian graves

 

 

IV

 

And it wasn't so much the wampumed Braves,

Eagle feathers, jade axes and totems and arrows

That I thought about, for ten minutes later

I was up and away from the Rue de la Paix

In a train for Treves.

But the word "Sandusky" still hung in my brain

As we went through greeny grey Lorraine

In a jolting train,

And then bargained for rooms with a German waiter.

Or it wasn't even in great concern

For the fate of "Sandusky Bay."—My friend

Pictured it thronged with American villas,

Dutch Porticos and Ionic pillars.

So that no boy's boat can land on the shores.

For the high-bred owners of dry goods stores

Forbid the practice. The villa lawns,

Pitch-pine canoes with America's daughters

In a sort of a daily Henley regatta

And the bright parasols of Japanese paper

Keep up a ceaseless, endless chatter.

In the endless, ceaseless girl graduate story

Where once there were silence, jack-rabbits and snakes.

And o'er all the gay clatter there floats old Glory—

The flag of the States, from a calico shop.

 

But stop!

I am not lamenting about the Lakes.

For, as grey dawns roll on to grey dawns,

Some things must surely come to an end.

Even old silences over old waters

Even here in Treves the Porta Nigra

That isn't so much a gaunt black ruin.

As a great black whole—a Roman gate-way.

As high as a mountain, as black as a jail—

Even here, even here, America's daughters.

Long toothed old maids with a camera

(For even they must know decay.

And the passage of time, hasting, hasting away!)

And the charm of the past grows meagre and meagrer.

Though through it all the Porta Nigra

Keeps its black, hard and grim completeness,

As if no fleet minutes with all their fleetness

Could rub down its surface.

But we've walled it in in a manner of speaking

With electric trams that go sparking and streaking

And filling the night with squeals and jangles

As iron wheels grind on iron angles. . . .

 

And nobody cares and nobody grieves

And all the spires and towers of Treves

Shade upwards into the sooty skies,

And you dig up here a sword or a chalice,

Some bones, some teeth and some golden bangles

And several bricks from the Caesar's Palace.

 

 

V

 

And so I come back to this funny old town

Where professors argue each other down

And every one is in seven movements

For every kind of Modern Improvements;

And there isn't a moment of real ease.

But students come from the seven seas

And we boast a professor of Neo-Chinese—

A thing to astonish the upland heather—

And more than the universities

Of all High Germany put together

Can show the like of.

The upland heather

It stretches for miles and miles and miles

Wine-purple and brooding and ancient and blasted,

An endless trackless, heather forest,

And so, between whiles.

When my mind's all reeling with Modern Movements

And my eyes are weary, my head at its sorest

And the best of beer has lost its zest,

I go up there to get a rest

And think of the dead . . . .

 

For it's nothing but dead and dead and dying

Dead faiths, dead loves, lost friends and the flying,

Fleet minutes that change and ruin our shows.

And the dead leaves flitter and autumn goes,

And the dead leaves flitter down thick to the ground,

And pomps go down and queens go down

And time flows on, and flows and flows.

 

But don't mistake me, the leaves are wet

And most of their copper splendour is rotten

Like most of the dead—and still and forgotten,

And I don't feel a spark of regret

Not a spark

 

I am sitting up here on a sort of a mound

And the dull red sun has just done sinking

And it's grown by this woodside fully dark

And I'm just thinking

And the valley lands and the forests and tillage

Are wrapped in mist. There's the lights of a village.

Of one—of three—of four!—

Four I can count from this high old mound . . .

In Tilly's time you could count eighteen . . .

You know of Tilly? A general

Who ravaged this land. There was Prince Eugene,

And Marshal Saxe and Wallenstein,

And God knows who . . . They are dead men all

With tombs in cathedrals here and there.

Just food for tourists. It's rather funny,

They ravaged these cornfields and burned the hamlets,

They drove off the cattle and took the honey.

And clocks and coin and chests and camlets:

Reduced the numbers to four from eighteen;

You can see four glimmers of light thro' the gloom.

But as for Marshal Wallenstein,

No doubt he's somewhere in some old tomb

With a marble pillow beneath his head.

He was shot. Or he wasn't. Anyhow he's dead!

And I'm sitting here on an old, smashed mound.

And the wood-leaves are flittering down to the ground.

And I'm sitting here and just thinking and wondering,

Clear thoughts and pictures, dull thoughts and blundering.

It's all one. But I wonder ... I wonder . . .

 

And under

The earth of the barrow there's something moving

Or no—not moving. Yes, shoving, shoving,

Through the thick, dark earth—a fox or a mole.

Phut! But it's dark! I can't grasp the whole

Of my argument—No. I'm not dropping to sleep!

(I can hear the leaves in the dark, cold wood!

That's a boar by his rustling!) “From good to good,

And good to letter you say we go."

(There's an owl overhead.) "You say that's so?"

My American friend of the rue de la Paix?

"Grow better and better from day to day."

Well, well I had a friend that's not a friend to-day;

Well, well, I had a love who's resting in the clay

Of a suburban cemetery. "Friend,

My Yankee friendr (He's mighty heavy and tusky.

Judged by his rustlings, that old boar in the wood)

“From good to good!

Have you found a better bay than old Sandusky?

Or la better friend than the one that's left me?"

"No Argument?—Well I’m not arguing

I came out here to think"—

Now what's that thing

That's coursing o'er dead leaves. It's not a boar!

Some sort of woman! A Geheimrath's cook

Come out to meet her lover of the Ninth—

An Uhlan Regiment! You know the Uhlans,

Who charged at Mars La Tour; that's on their colours.

 

But that little wretch.

Whoever heard such kissing! Sighs now! Groans!

In the copper darkness of these wet, high forests.

Well, well, that's no affair of mine to-night.

I came out here though, yes, I'd an engagement

With Major Hahn to give him his revenge—

What was it? At roulette? But I'd a headache!

I came out here to think about that Queen!

The Chinese one—the one I saw in Paris.

To-night's the thirtieth. . . the thirty-first.

Why, yes, it's All Souls' Eve. That's why I'm morbid

With thoughts of All the Dead. . . That Chinese Queen

She never kissed her lover. But a queer,

A queer, queer look came out on her rice white face!

I never knew such longing was in the world,

Though not a feature stirred in her! No kisses!

But there she wavered just behind his back

With her slanting eyes. No moth about a flame.

No seabird in the storm round a lighthouse glare

Was e'er so lured to the ruin and wreck of love.

And he knelt there with such a queer, queer face

A queer, queer smile, and his uplifted hands

He prayed as we pray to a Queen in dragon silk;

His hands rubbed palm on palm. And so she swayed

And swayed just like a purple butterfly

Above the open jaws of a coral snake.

 

But she

Should have been dead nine thousand years and more.

Says our Chinese professor. For such acting

Was proper to the days and time of TSuang:

It's hopelessly demoded, dead and gone!

To-day we have—Chinese chiropodists

Who smile like toads at Paris mannequins

In the sacred name of Progress. Well, well, well!

I'm not regretting it—No vain regrets!

What's that . . . .

 

Out of the loom of the Philosopher's wood

Two figures brushing on the frozen grass.

The Uhlan and the cook. So I cried out:

"So late at night and not yet in the barracks!

Aren't you afraid of ghosts?" . . . "Oh ghosts! oh ghosts,"

I got my answer: " Friend,

In our old home the air's so thick with ghosts

You couldn't breathe if they were an objection!"

And so I said: "Well, well!" to make them pass. . . .

 

Just a glimmer of light there was across the grass

And on my barrow mound. Upon his head

The gleam of a helmet, and some sort of pelt

About his shoulders and the loom of a spear.

You never know these German regiments,

The oddest uniforms they have; and as for her

Her hair was all across her shoulders and her face,

Woodland embraces bring the hairpins out . . .

"My friend," I said, "you'd better hurry home

Or else you'll lose your situation!" They

Bickered in laughter and the man just said:

"You're sitting on it!"

So I moved a little,

Apologetically, just as it

It was his table in a restaurant.

So he said calmly, looking down at me:

"They call these mounds the Hunnen Graber—

Graves

Of Huns—a modern, trifling folk!

 

We've slept in them well on nine thousand years

My wife and I. The dynasty TSuang

Then reigned in China—well, you know their ways

Of courting. But your specialty just now

I understand's not human life but death.

I died with a wolf at my throat, this woman here

With a sword in her stomach. Yes she fell on it

To keep me company in that tumulus.

Millions and millions of dead there lie round here

In the manoeuvre grounds of the Seventeenth.

Oh, yes, I'm up to date, why not, why not?

When they've the Sappers here in garrison

The silly chaps come digging in these mounds

For practice; but they've not got down to us.

The Seventeenth just scutter up and down

At scaling practice and that's rather fun.

There was a sergeant took a chap by the ear

Last year and threw him bodily down the mound;

Then the recruit up with his bayonet

And stuck him through the neck—no end of things

We find for gossip in nine thousand years!

A Mongol people? Yes of course we were

I knew her very well that Queen who loved.

With the rice white face—"Ta-why's" her proper name

And that adultery bred heaps of trouble!

You've heard of Troy? " Tra-hai's " the real name

As Ta-why's Helen. Well, you know all that?

That trouble sent us here, being burnt out

By the King called Ko-ha! And we wandered on

In just ten years of burning towns. This slave

My wife came from Irkutsk way to the east

Where the tundra is—You know the nightingales

Come there in spring, and so they buried us

Finger to finger as the ritual is.

Not know the ritual? Well, a mighty chief

Is buried in a chamber like a room

Walled round with slabs of stone. But mighty lovers

Lie on their backs at both arms' length, so far

That just each little finger touches. Well

That's how they buried us. A hundred years

It took to get accustomed to the change.

We lay just looking up—just as you might

Upwards through quiet water at the stars,

The roots of the grass, and other buryings,

Lying remembering and touching fingers.

Just still and quiet. Then I heard a whisper

Lasting a hundred years or so; "Your lips,"

It said, " Your lips! your lips! your lips! "And then

It might have been five more score years. I felt

Her fingers crawling, crawling, up my wrist.

And always the voice, call, calling; "Give your lips!"

 

It must have taken me a thousand years

—The Dead are patient—just to know that she

Was calling for my lips. What an embrace!

My God what an embrace was ours through the

Earth!

My friend, if you should chance to meet Old Death

That unprogressive tyrant, tell him this,

He execrates my name—but tell him this—

He calls me Radical! Red Socialist,

That sort of thing. But you just tell him this.

The revolutionary leader of his realms

Got his ambition from his dead girl's lips.

Tell him in future he should spare hot lovers.

Though that's too late! We're working through the earth.

By the score, by the million. Half his empire's lost.

How can he fight us? He has but one dart

For every lover of the sons of Ahva!

You call her Eve. This is a vulgar age". . .

And so beside the woodland in the sheen

And shimmer of the dewlight, crescent moon

And dew wet leaves I heard the cry "Your lips!

Your lips! Your lips." It shook me where I sat,

It shook me like a trembling, fearful reed.

The call of the dead. A multitudinous

And shadowy host glimmered and gleamed,

Face to face, eye to eye, heads thrown back, and lips

Drinking, drinking from lips, drinking from bosoms

The coldness of the dew—and all a gleam

Translucent, moonstruck as of moving glasses,

Gleams on dead hair, gleams on the white dead shoulders

Upon the backgrounds of black purple woods. . .

 

There came great rustlings from the copper leaves

And pushing outwards, shouldering, a boar

With seven wives—a monstrous tusky brute.

I rose and rubbed my eyes and all eight fled

Tore down the mountain through the thick of the leaves

Like a mighty wave of the sea that poured itself

Farther and farther down the listening night.

All round me was the clearing, and white mist

Shrouded the frosty tussocks of old grass.

And in the moonlight a wan fingerpost

(I could not read the lower row of words.)

Proclaimed: "Forbidden!" That's High Germany.

Take up your glasses. "Prosit!" to the past,

To all the Dead!

 

 

 

RHYMING

 

He bells go chiming

O'er Germany

I sit here rhyming . . .

 

If fun were funny,

And love lived long,

And always honey

Were sweet on the tongue,

Would life be better

Or freedom free?

 

If each love-letter

Spelt loyalty,

If we didn't go timing

The dance with a fetter?

 

If gold were true gold

For alchemists

—I sit here rhyming—

And all were new gold

In morning mists?

Would laughter measure

The step of life

If each took pleasure

In each's wife?

If much were undone

In what we see

And we built up London

In High Germany;

Without much pity

For crushed out grain

We'd fling the city

Across this plain—

A phantom city

Like old Cokayne—

Where old dead passions,

Come true again

And old time fashions

Be new again,

Where jests once witty

Would start again,

And long lost pity

Take heart again.

 

So I sit rhyming

Of fun to be,

And the bells all go chiming

O'er High Germany.

 

 

 

AUTUMN EVENING

 

The cold light dies, the candles glow,

The wind whirls down the bare allée

Outside my gleaming window-panes

The phantom populations go,

Blown, amid leaves, above, below.

 

Yet these are solid German folk

Outside, beneath the thinning planes

And the reflections that awoke

At candle time upon my panes

Are misty, unsubstantial gleams.

 

Only outside, obscurity.

The waning light, the cold blue beams

And rafts of shadow trick the eye;

So that the frozen passers-by

Look ghosts—and only real seems

My candle lighted, lonely place.

The gleaming windows and your face

Looking in likeness from the wall

Where the fantastic shadows fall

 

Now the ghosts pass, the cold wind cries.

The leaves sift downwards, the world dies,

But in the shadows, lo! your eyes.

 

 

 

IN THE TRAIN

 

Out of the window I see a dozen great stars, burning bright,

Flying in silence, engrossed in the uttermost depths of the night,

Star beyond star, growing clear, flying on as I pass through the night.

It's many days since last I saw the stars

Look through the night sky's bars,

Like mists and veils of shimmer and shining gauze—

So little time we have and so much cause

To stay beneath the roof; so much to do!

The life we lead! . . . Well, you

Get to your bed at ten, and you, away

I like my glass of wine to end the day.

 

Now as the train ambles on, slowly and I watch alone

Stars and black woods and the stream, dim in the light of the stars

Winding away to the past beneath Castor and Pollux and Mars;

It seems as long since last I held your hand

As since I saw the stars.

And ah! if we meet in this land.

And ah! if we meet oversea

In the dark where the traffic of London races

Or in these castled, woodland places—

And then—wherever it be

Shall not our thoughts go away into deeps

Where the mind sleeps and the brain too sleeps.

As when we take thought and we gaze

Past all the bee swarms of stars

Spread o'er the night and its bars,

Past mists and veils and shimmer and shine and haze

Into the deep and silent places,

The still, unfathomable spaces

Where the brain sleeps and the mind too sleeps

And all the deeps stretch out beyond the deeps

And thought dies down before infinity? ...

So, in an utter satisfaction

Beyond all thought and beyond all action

In a blindness more blind than the starless places

I shall stretch my face to where your face is.

And over head, over land and sea

Shall the white stars wheel in their reverie.

 

 

 

THE EXILE

 

My father had many oxen

Yet all are gone;

My father had many servants;

I sit alone.

He followed the Southern women,

He drank of the Southern wines,

He fought in the Southern quarrels—

My star declines.

 

I will go to the Southern houses, I will sit 'mid the maids at hire;

I will bear their meat to the tables and carry wood to their fire;

Where the cheep of the rat and mouse is all night long will I lie,

Awake in the byres and the stables. When the white moon looks from the sky,

And over the Southern waters, and the wind blows warm from the South,

With the bitter tears in my eyelids and the heavy sighs in my mouth,

I shall hear through the gaping gables how the Southern night bird sings

Of hirelings once Queen's daughters and slaves the seed of Kings.

 

 

 

MOODS ON THE MOSELLE

 

“Sweet! Sweet! Sweet!" sings the bird upon the bough.

But though he may call for sweetness

We have other things to witness,

Not all cherry-pie and neatness,

Now.

 

"Mourn! Mourn! Mourn!" cry the owls among the vines.

But it's neither death nor fleetness

That have any utter fitness,

Not a final joy or sorrow,

As we press out wines.

 

"Change! Slow change!" ticks the church clock through the snow.

And somehow 'twixt winter's dying

And spring apple-blossoms flying

And the summer hops a-tying . . .

It's now haughty and now humble

Change! Slow change! And rough-and-tumble.

Down to-day and up to-morrow

That our songs sing now.

 

 

 

CANZONE A LA SONATA

 

(To E.P.)

 

What do you find to boast of in our age,

To boast of now, my friendly sonneteer.

And not to blush for, later? By what line

Do you entrain from Mainz to Regions saner?

Count our achievements and uplift my heart;

Blazon our fineness, Optimist, I toil

Whilst you crow cocklike. But I cannot see

 

What's left behind us for a heritage

For our young children? What but nameless fear?

What creeds have we to teach, legends to twine

Saner than spun our dams? Or what's there saner

That we've devised to comfort those who part.

One for some years to walk the stone-clad soil,

One to his fathom-deep bed? What coin have we

 

For ransom when He grimly lays his siege

Whose dart is sharpened for our final hurt?

I think we do not think; we deem more fair

Earth with un thought on death; we deem him gainer

Whose brow unshadowed shows no wrinkled trail

Of the remembrance of the countless slain;

Who sets the world to fitful melody—

 

To fitful minstrelsy that's summer's liege

When all the summer's sun-kissed fountains spurt

Kisses of bubbling sound about our hair.

I think we think that singing soul the gainer

Who disremembers that spent youth must fail,

That after autumn comes, few leaves remain

And all the well-heads freeze, and melody

 

O'er frozen waters grows too hoarse with age

To keep us from extremity of fear.

When agèd poets pen another line

And agèd maidens coif their locks in saner

And staider snoods; when winter of the heart

Comes on and beds beneath the frozen soil

Gape open—where's your grinning melody?

 

 

 

SŰSSMUND'S ADDRESS TO AN UNKNOWN GOD*

 

(Adapted from the High German)

 

My God, they say I have no bitterness!

Dear Unknown God, I gasp, I fade, I pine!

No bitterness! Have firs no turpentine?

If so, it's true.

 

Because I do not go wandering round Piccadilly

Like an emasculated lily

In a low-necked flannel shirt beneath the rain.

(Is that what you'd do.

Oh God Unknown,

If you came down

To Piccadilly

And worried over London town?)

Wailing round Covent Garden's what I should do

Declaiming to the beefy market porters

Dramatic propaganda about social wrongs

Denouncing Edward Morters

Or saying that Mr William Pornett

Is eleven kinds of literary hornet,

Or that the death of Mr Arthur Mosse

Would be no sort of loss

But a distinct gain

—That sort of silly literary songs

About no one you know,

And no one else could ever want to know.

 

You owe

(You've heard a thousand thousand dat qui cito’s)

Some sort of poisonous dew

Shed on the flowers where these high-horned mosquitoes

Dance in a busy crew.

 

But they will go on setting up their schools,

Making their little rules,

Finding selected ana.

Collected in Montana:

Connected with Commedie Divine

Or maidens with names like Deiridrine . . .

Dear Lord, you know the stuff

You must have heard enough.

 

Find me a barrel into which to creep

Dear Unknown God, and get dead drunk and sleep.

But listen, this is for your ear alone

(God: where are you? Let me come close and whisper

What no one knows—I'm really deadly tired,

I cannot write a line, my hands are stiff.

Writing's a rotten job, my head goes round:

You have afflicted me with whip-cord nerves.

That hammering fool drives me distracted . . . God!

Strike him with colic, send him screaming home.

Strike, Dash and Dash and Dash with eye complaints;

That beast who choked his dog with a tight collar

(He gave his child the lead to hold) last night;

It made me sick; God strike him with the pip.

And send down one dark night and no one near

And one white throat within my fingers' grip!)

 

Dear God, you bade me be a gentleman,

And well you know I've been it. But their rot . . .

Sometimes it makes me angry. This last season

I've listened smiling to new Celtic bards.

To Anti-Vivisectionists and Friends of Peace,

To Neo-Psychics, Platonists and Poets

Who saved the Universe by chopping logs

In your own image . . . .

 

I've smiled at Whigs intoning Whiggery

To keep the Labour Market down; at Tories

Sickening for office. I have surely been

Plumb centre in the Movement. O my God

Is this a man's work. God I've backed up ―'s

With proper letters in the Daily Press:

I've smiled at Dowagers and Nonconformists;

At wriggling dancers; forty pianists;

Jew politicians; Front Rank Statesmen's ―'s

Yankee conductors of chaste magazines . . .

God, fill my purse and let me go away.

 

But God, dear God! I'll never get away

I know the you are!

That's off my chest. You'll never let me go.

I know I'll never drink myself dead drunk

Because to-morrow I shall have appointments

—You'll make them for me—with a Jail Reform

And Pure Milk Rotter—such a pleasant man!

One garden city builder, seven peers

Concerned with army remounts, and a girl

Mad to take dancing lessons! Such my morrow!

 

It's not so much I ask Great God of mine

(Fill up my little purse and let me go!)

These earnest, cold-in-the-heart and practised preachers

Have worked their will on me for long enough.

Some boring me to tears while I sat patient;

Some picked my purse and bit me in the back

The while I smiled as you have taught me to,

(Fill up my little purse and let me go!)

It's not my job to go denouncing jobs

You did not build me for it. Not my job!

Whilst they are on the make, snatching their bits

Beneath the wheels of ninety-nine reforms.

 

(Note.—I have been unable to follow the Freiherr at any interval at all on this page without leaving several words blank. F.M.H.)

 

But this is truth;

There's not one trick they've not brought off on me,

I guess they think I haven't noticed it

For I've no bitterness . . .

They've lied about me to my mistresses,

Stolen my brandy, plagiarized my books,

Lived on me month by month, broken agreements,

Perjured themselves in courts, and sworn false oaths

With all the skill of Protestant British tradesmen

Plundering a Papist and a foreigner

With God on their lips

But all that's private. . .

 

Oh, you sleeping God,

I hope you sit amongst the coloured tents

Of any other rotten age than this—

With great pavilions tinctured all with silks.

Where emerald lawns go stretching into space.

With mailed horses, simple drunken knights.

Punctilious heralds and high-breasted ladies

Beauteous beyond belief and not one better

Than you would have her be—in such a heaven

Where there's no feeling of the moral pulse,

I think I'd find some peace—with treachery

Of the sword and dagger kind to keep it sweet

—Adultery, foul murder, pleasant things,

A touch of incest, theft, but no Reformers.

 

Dear God of mine

Who've tortured me in many pleasant ways

I hope you've had some fun. And thank you, God!

No doubt you'll keep your bargain in the end.

No doubt I'll get my two penny-halfpenny pay

At the back door of some bright hued pavilion

From a whore of Heaven . . . .

But when it comes to "have no bitterness"...

(For bitter we read " earnest ") I've no stomach

For such impertinence; its subtlety

(You know it, God, but let me get it down)

Is too ingenious. It implies just this:

 

"Here is a man when times are out of joint

Who will not be enraged at Edward Morter,

Pornett or Mosse; who will not to the woes

Of a grey underworld lend passionate ears

Nor tear his hair to tatters in the cause

Of garden suburbs or of guinea pigs

Injected with bacilli . . . Such a man

(So say the friends that I have listened to

Whole wasted, aching desolate afternoons!)

Is morally castrated; pass him by;

Give him no management in this great world.

No share in fruity Progress or the wrongs

Of market porters, tram conductors, pimps,

Marriage-reforming divorcees, Whig statesmen

Or serious Drama."

 

Did I, dear God, ever attempt to shine

As such a friend of Progress? God, did I

Ever ambitiously raise up my voice

To outshout these eminent preachers?

Suck up importance from a pauper's wrongs

I never did!

But these mosquitoes must make precious sure

I do not take a hand in their achievements

Therefore they say, I have no bitterness

Being a eunuch amongst these proper men,

Who stand foursquare 'gainst evil (that's their phrase!)

 

God, you've been hard on me; I'm plagued with boils,

Little mosquito-stings, warts, poverty!

Yes, very hard. But when all's catalogued

You've been a gentleman in all your fun.

No doubt you'll keep your bargain. Unknown God.

This surely you will never do to me—

Say I'm not bitter. That you'll never do.

'Twould be to outpass the bounds of the Divine

And turn Reformer.

 

*Carl Eugen Freiherr von Süssmund, b. 1872, d. 1910. This is, of course, a quite free adaptation.

 

 

 

THE FEATHER

 

I wonder dost thou sleep at night,

False friend and falser enemy!

I wonder if thy hours are long and drag out wearily!

We've passed days and nights together

In our time . . . But that white feather

That the wind's blown past the roof ridge

It is gone. . . . So I from thee!

 

Aye, chase it o'er the courtyard stones.

Past friend of mine, my enemy!

Chase on beneath the chestnut boughs and out toward the sea,

If the fitful wind should fail it.

Thou may'st catch it, and may'st trail it

In midden's mud and garbage . . .

As thou hast my thoughts of thee.

 

So I wonder dost thou sleep at night?

Once friend of mine, my enemy?

Or whether dost thou toss and turn to plan new treachery?

As the feather thou hast trodden

So my thoughts of thee are sodden

When I think Yes, half forgotten,

A faint taste of something rotten

Comes at times, like worm-struck wood ash

Comes at times, the thought of thee.

 

But I would not have thy night thoughts

As the slow clock beats to dayward!

I'll be sleeping with my eyes shut,

Dreaming deep, or dreaming wayward.

And I hear thee turn and mutter

As thy dawn-ward candles gutter—

For thou fear'st the dark . . . Hark! "Judas!"

Says the dawn wind from the sea.

Round the house it whispers "Judas!"

Friend of mine, my enemy.

 

 

 

II

 

SONGS FROM LONDON

 

The following poems appeared in the volume of the above name published by Mr Elkin Mathews in

1910.

 

 

VIEWS

 

I

 

Being in Rome I wonder will you go

Up to the Hill. But I forget the name

Aventine? Pincio? No: I do not know.

I was there yesterday and watched. You came.

 

The seven Pillars of the Forum stand

High, stained and pale 'neath the Italian heavens,

Their capitals linked up form half a square;

A grove of silver poplars spears the sky.

You came. Do you remember? Yes, you came,

But yesterday. Your dress just brushed the herbs

That nearly hide the broken marble lion

And I was watching you against the sky.

Such light! Such air! Such prism hues! and Rome

So far below; I hardly knew the place.

The domed St Peter's; mass of the Capitol;

The arch of Trajan and St Angelo. . . .

Tiny and grey and level; tremulous

Beneath a haze amidst a sea of plains

But I forget the name, who never looked

On any Rome but this of unnamed hills.

 

 

II

 

Tho' you're in Rome you will not go, my You,

Up to that Hill but I forget the name,

Aventine? Pincio? No, I never knew

I was there yesterday. You never came.

 

I have that Rome; and you, you have a Me,

You have a Rome and I, I have my You;

My Rome is not your Rome: my you, not you

. . . For, if man knew woman

I should have plumbed your heart; if woman, man

Your me should be true I If in your day—

You who have mingled with my soul in dreams,

You who have given my life an aim and purpose,

A heart, an imaged form—if in your dreams

You have imagined unfamiliar cities

And me among them, I shall never stand

Beneath your pillars or your poplar groves, . . .

Images, simulacra, towns of dreams

That never march upon each other's borders

And bring no comfort to each other's hearts!

 

 

III

 

Nobly accompanied am I—Since you.

You—simulacrum, image, dream of dreams,

Amidst these images and simulacra

Of shadowy house fronts and these dim, thronged streets

Are my companion!

 

Where the pavements gleam

I have you alway with me: and grey dawns

In the far skies bring you more near—more near

Than City sounds can interpenetrate.

All vapours form a background for your face

In this unreal town of real things,

And my you stands beside me and makes glad

All my imagined cities and thence walks

Beside me towards yet unimagined hills

 

Being we two, full surely we shall go

Up to that Hill some synonym for Home.

Avalon? Grave? or Heaven? I do not know

But one day or to-day, the day may come.

When I may be your I, your Rome my Rome.

 

 

 

FINCHLEY ROAD

 

As we come up at Baker Street

Where tubes and trains and 'buses meet

There's a touch of fog and a touch of sleet;

And we go on up Hampstead way

Towards the closing in of day . . .

 

You should be a queen or a duchess rather,

Reigning in place of a warlike father

In peaceful times o'er a tiny town

Where all the roads wind up and down

From your little palace—a small, old place

Where every soul should know your face

And bless your coming. That's what I mean,

A small grand-duchess, no distant queen,

Lost in a great land, sitting alone

In a marble palace upon a throne.

 

And you'd say to your shipmen: " Now take your ease,

To-morrow is time enough for the seas."

And you'd set your bondmen a milder rule

And let the children loose from the school.

No wrongs to right and no sores to fester,

In your small, great hall 'neath a firelit dais.

You'd sit, with me at your feet, your jester.

Stroking your shoes where the seed pearls glisten

And talking my fancies. And you as your way is.

Would sometimes heed and at times not listen.

But sit at your sewing and look at the brands

And sometimes reach me one of your hands.

Or bid me write you a little ode,

Part quaint, part sad, part serious . . .

 

But here we are in the Finchley Road

With a drizzling rain and a skidding 'bus

And the twilight settling down on us.

 

 

 

THE THREE-TEN

 

When in the prime and May Day time dead lovers went a-walking,

How bright the grass in lads' eyes was, how easy poet's talking!

Here were green hills and daffodils, and copses to contain them:

Daisies for floors did front their doors agog for maids to chain them.

So when the ray of rising day did pierce the eastern heaven

Maids did arise to make the skies seem brighter far by seven.

Now here's a street where 'bus routes meet, and 'twixt the wheels and paving

Standeth a lout that doth hold out flowers not worth the having.

But see, but see! The clock marks three above the Kilburn Station,

Those maids, thank God! are 'neath the sod and all their generation.

What she shall wear who'll soon appear, it is not hood nor wimple,

But by the powers there are no flowers so stately or so simple,

And paper shops and full 'bus tops confront the sun so brightly.

That, come three-ten, no lovers then had hearts that beat so lightly

As ours, or loved more truly.

Or found green shades or flowered glades to fit their loves more duly.

And see, and see! 'Ts ten fast three above the Kilburn Station,

Those maids, thank God! are 'neath the sod and all their generation.

 

 

 

FOUR IN THE MORNING COURAGE

 

The birds this morning wakened me so early it was hardly day:

Ten sparrows in the lilac tree, a blackbird in the may,

A starling somewhere in the mews, a songthrush on a broken hat

Down in the yard the grocers use, all cried: "Beware;

Beware! The Cat!"

I've never had the heart to rhyme, this year: I've always wakened sad

And late, if might be, so the time would be more short—but I was glad

With a mad gladness in to-day that is the longest day in June.

{That blackbird' s nesting in the may.) For only yesterday at noon

In the long grass of Holland Park, I think—I think

—I heard a lark . . .

I heard your voice: I saw your face once more . . .

(Upon that packing case

The starling waked me ere the day aping the thrush's sober tune).

 

 

 

MODERN LOVE

 

I

 

Knee-deep among the buttercups, the sun

Gilding the scutcheons and the gilded mail,

Gilding the crowned helm and leopard crest,

Dear, see they pant and strike at your desire.

 

And one goes down among the emerald grass,

And one stands over him his dagger poised.

His visor raised, his blood-shot eyes a-travel

Over the steel that lies between his feet.

Crushing the buttercups . . . and so the point goes in

Between the gorget and the habergeon . . .

And blood floods out upon the buttercups.

Gules, or and vert beneath an azure sky.

 

And now the victor strides knee-deep in grass,

His surcoat brushing down the flower-heads

To where above the hedge a hennin peeps

Wide, white and waving like a wild swan's wings,

And a green dress, a mantlet all of vair

And such dear eyes Dear, you've the dearest eyes

In all the world—the most compassionate eyes.

 

 

II

 

... In your garden, here

The light streams down between the silvered leaves,

And we sit still and whisper . . . But our fight!

The gross Black Prince among the buttercups

Could grin and girn and pant and sweive and smite

And, in ten minutes it was win or lose:

A coffin board or ale, a coarse caress

Or just an end of it for Life or Death . . .

Is that a footfall on the gravel path?

Are your stretched nerves on edge? And do you see?

There, white and black, the other couple go.

And if some others knew! Oh, buttercups.

And blood upon the grass beneath the sun . . .

Give me your garden where the street lamp shines

Between the leaves: your garden seat, your hand.

Just touching mine—and all the long, long fight

That lies before us, you of the dear eyes.

 

 

 

SPRING ON THE WOODLAND PATH

 

So long a winter such an Arctic night!

I had forgot that ever spring was bright:

But hark! The blackbird's voice like a clear flame!

 

So long a winter, such an age of chill,

Made me forget this silver birch clad hill.

But see, the newborn sunbeams put to shame

Our long dead winter: bracken fronds like flame.

Pierce the new morning's saffron-watered light.

 

So long, so long the winter in our hearts.

We had forgotten that old grief departs

And had forgotten that our hands could meet.

 

So long, so long: Remember our last May

When there was sunshine still and every day

New swallows skimmed low down along the street.

Ay, spring shall come, but shall we ever meet

With the old hearts in this forgotten way?

 

 

 

CONSIDER

 

Now green comes springing o'er the heath,

And each small bird with lifted breath

Cries, "Brother, consider the joy there is in living!"

"Consider! consider!" the jolly throstle saith.

 

The golden gorse, the wild thyme, frail

And sweet, the butter cowslip pale,

Cry "Sisters, consider the peace that comes with giving!

And render, and render your sweet and scented breath!"

 

Now men, come walking o'er the heath

To mark this pretty world beneath.

Bethink them: "Consider what joy might lie in living.

None striving, constraining none, and thinking not on Death."

 

 

 

CLUB NIGHT

 

There was an old man had a broken hat,

He had a crooked leg, an old tame cat,

An old lame horse that cropped along the hedge.

And an old song that set your teeth on edge,

With words like:

 

"Club night's come; it's time the dance begins.

Up go the lamps, we've all got nimble shins.

One night a year man and wife may dance at ease

And we'll dance all the village to its knees."

 

This silly old man had a broken heart;

He went a-peddling onions from his cart.

Once years ago, when Club night fell in June,

His new- wed wife went off with a dragoon,

Whilst he sang:

 

"Club night's come; it's time the dance begins.

Up go the lamps, we've all got nimble shins.

One night a year man and wife may dance at ease

And we'll dance all the village to its knees."

 

 

 

TO CHRISTINA AND KATHARINE AT CHRISTMAS

 

Now Christmas is a porter's-rest whereon to set his load;

And Christmas was a blessed bed for One who loved her God.

And Christmas is a chiming bell to ships upon the sea

That decks the shrouds and lights the ports and tolls for Memory—

But Christmas is a meeting-place

For you and me.

 

God send your hearts may never grow so old

As to forget that this day Mary's lips

First touched Her young Child's brow: and may your eyes

Not ever grow too cold to recognize

How to poor men and women these days bear

A gift of rest. Pray that the gentle air

Give relaxation to a myriad ships

And, oh my little ones, may no December

See Christmas come and me no longer dear

To your dear hearts and voices. This remember:

 

How Christmas is the pardon day when Justice drops its load;

And is the lily-blossomed field where Jesus walks with God.

Now Saints set foot upon the waves to still the yeasty sea.

And other Saints to hurdled sheep give comfort patiently.

Now all good men beside their hearths call upon

Memory:

Now, now comes in the meeting-time

For you and me!

 

 

 

THE DREAM HUNT

 

My Lady rides a-hunting

Upon a dapple grey:

Six trumpeters they ride behind,

Six prickers clear the way.

 

And when she climbs the hillsides

The Hunt cries: "Ho! la! Lo!"

And when she trails along the dales

The merry horns do blow.

 

And so in summer weather,

Before the heat of day,

My darling takes all eyes and breaks

My heart and makes away.

 

 

 

THE OLD LAMENT

 

What maketh lads so cruel be?

Amid the spume and wrack.

They pass the door and put to sea,

And never more come back.

 

The grey, salt wind winds down the wave,

The galleon flouts the bay,

And cobles and coggers are raising their sails:

God keep 'ee down on the quay!

With a hoist at thy tackles, a haul at thy blocks,

And a hail to a hastening crew.

He'll take 'ee Who gave 'ee thy goldilocks

Ere I pardon thine eyes o' blue.

 

Not once to ha' looked within my hood!

Nor guessed I quailed on the strand

Wi' thee in the boats! Thro' my pent-up door

I ha' kissed to 'ee my hand.

They'll rive thy keel wi' their cannon shocks,

And sink 'ee and all thy crew;

And they'll leave to the raven and cliff-homed fox

Thy kindly eyes o' blue.

 

Why need 'ee pass my open door

Each breaking o' the day?

What made 'ee take that self-same path

 

And never another way?

I'll find 'ee stretched on the grinding rocks

With a Frenchman's shot shot through,

And the mermaid's weed from thy goldilocks

Across thine eyes o' blue.

 

What made 'ee lad, so cruel be?

Amid the spume and wrack,

To pass the door and put to sea

And never once look back!

 

 

 

MAURESQUE

 

(To V.M.)

 

To horse! To horse! the veil of night sinks softly down.

The hills are violet, the desert brown,

And thou asleep upon the silken pillows

Within the small white town.

 

We ride! We ride! and o'er the sand in billows

The crescent moon looks softly down.

 

 

 

IN THE STONE JUG

 

(Tom of Hounslow Heath sings on the night before his execution)

 

Old days are gone:

Lo! I go to find better;

Bright suns once shone.

Shall they never shine again?

Here's a queer inn for to-night, but the next one

I will contrive shall be freed from what's vext one

In this, and to-morrow, for all that's perplext one,

I shall arise with a head free of pain.

 

Here's luck, old friends.

Though to-night's proved the finish

And this tap now ends.

Shall we never brew again?

Aye, by my faith and the faith I have in you,

You who have kist and have laughed at the sin. You

Witch that I gambled and squandered to win, you

Too shall come in with me out of the rain.

 

 

 

HOW STRANGE A THING

 

How strange a thing to think upon:

Whilst we sit here with pipes and wine

This world of ours goes roving on

Where stars and planets shine.

And round and round and round and round

This brave old ball, still out and in—

Whilst we sit still on solid ground—

Doth spin and spin and spin.

 

And, whilst we're glad with pipes and wine,

We travel leagues and leagues of space:

Our arbour's trellised with the vine,

Our host's a jocund face.

Yet on and on and on

This brave old ball spins in and out:

Why, here's a thing to think upon

And make a song about.

 

Ho, landlord, bring new wine along

And fill us each another cup.

We're minded to give out a song.

My journey, mates; stand up.

For round and round and round and round

This noble ball doth spin and spin,

And 'twixt the firmament and ground

Doth bear us and our sin.

 

 

 

III

 

FROM INLAND

 

The following poems appeared in the volume of the above name published by Mr Alston Rivers in 1907.

 

 

FROM INLAND

 

I dreamed that you and I were young

Once more, and by our old grey sea

Raced in the wind; but matins, sung

High on these vineyards, wakened me:

I lay half-roused and seemed to hold

Once more, beside our old grey sea.

Your hand. I saw the primrose gold

Your hair had then, and seemed to see

Your eyes, so childlike and so wise,

Look down on me.

 

By the last fire we ever lit

You knelt, and bending down your head,

—If you could compass it, you said,

Not ever would you live again

Your vanished life; never again

Pass through those shadowy vales of pain.

"And now I'm old and here I sit!"

You said, and held your hands apart

To those old flames we've left behind

As far—as far as some dead wind

No doubt I fetched fi-om near my heart

Brave platitudes—for you were there;

The firelight lit your brooding face.

Shadowed your golden, glowing hair:

I could be brave for the short space

I had you by my chair. . . .

As thus: "Since with the ebb of Youth

Rises the flood of passionless

And calm enjoyment, rises Truth

And fades the painful earnestness

Of all young thought, We two," I said,

"Have still the best to come." But you

Bowed down your brooding, silent head,

Patient and sad and still. . . .

 

This view,

Steep vineyards rising parched and brown,

This weary stream, this cobbled town,

White convents on each hill-top—Dear!

What would I give to climb our down,

Where the wind hisses in each stalk

And, from the high brown crest to see,

Beyond the ancient, sea-grey town,

The sky-line of our foam-flecked sea;

And, looking out to sea, to hear.

Ah! Dear, once more your pleasant talk;

And to go home as twilight falls

Along the old sea-walls!

The best to come! The best! The best!

One says the wildest things at times.

Merely for comfort. But—The best!

Ah! well, at night, when the moon climbs

High o'er these misty inland capes.

And hears the river lisping rhymes,

And sees the roe-deer nibbling grapes

Beneath the evanescent gleams

Of shaken dewdrops, shall come dreams,

Gliding amid the mists beneath:

A dream, maybe, of you and me.

Young once again by our old sea.

But, ah! we two must travel wide

And far and far ere we shall find

That recollected, ancient tide

By which we walked, or that old wind

That fled so bravely to its death.

 

 

 

THE PORTRAIT

 

She sits upon a tombstone in the shade;

One flake of sunlight, falling thro' the veils

Of quivering poplars, lights upon her hair.

Shot golden, and across her candid brow.

Thus in the pleasant gloom she holds the eye,

Being life amid piled up remembrances

Of the tranquil dead.

 

One hand, dropped lightly down.

Rests on the words of a forgotten name:

Therefore the past makes glad to stay her up.

Closed in, walled off: here's an oblivious place,

Deep, planted in with trees, unvisited:

A still backwater in the tide of life.

Life flows all round: sounds from surrounding streets.

Laughter of unseen children, roll of wheels.

Cries of all vendors.—So she sits and waits.

And she rejoices us who pass her by,

And she rejoices those who here lie still.

And she makes glad the little wandering airs.

And doth make glad the shaken beams of light

That fall upon her forehead: all the world

Moves round her, sitting on forgotten tombs

And lighting in to-morrow. She is Life:

That makes us keep on moving, taking roads,

Hauling great burdens up the unending hills,

Pondering senseless problems, setting sail

For undiscovered anchorages. Here

She waits, she waits, sequestered among tombs.

The sunlight on her hair. She waits, she waits:

The secret music, the resolving note

That sets in tune all this discordant world

And solves the riddles of the Universe.

 

 

 

SONG

 

Oh! purer than the day new-born,

More candid than the pearled morn,

Come soon and set the day in tune

All through the sun-bathed afternoon;

Come soon!

 

Oh! sweeter than the roses be,

Subtler than balm or rosemary. 

Come now, and 'neath this orchard bough

Hark to the tranquil sea-wind's sough:

Come now!

 

More rhythmic when you step than tunes

Wafted o'er waves in summer moons,

Bide here, and in my longing ear

Murmur the words I crave to hear;

Bide here!

 

Here, in the shadowy sacred place,

Close up your eyes, hide, hide your face.

And, in the windless silence, rest.

Now the cool night falls; dear and blest.

Now sleep, a dim and dreamless sleep,

Whilst I watch over you and keep

Your soul from fears. Now sleep!

 

Oh! purer than the morning light,

And more beloved than dead of night.

Come soon to set the world in tune

From midnight till the dial marks noon:

From dawn till the world'' s end. Come soon!

Come soon!

 

 

 

THE UNWRITTEN SONG

 

Now where's a song for our small dear,

With her quaint voice and her quick ear,

To sing—for gnats and bats to hear—

At twilight in her bed?

A song of tiny elfin things

With shiny, silky, silvery wings.

Footing it in fairy rings.

And kissing overhead.

 

A song of starry glow-worms' lights

In the long grass of shadowy nights.

And flitting showers of firefly flights.

Where summer woods hang deep;

Of hovering, noiseless owls that find

Their way at dark; and of a kind

And drowsy, drowsy ocean wind

That puts the sea to sleep.

 

But where's the song for our small dear,

With her quaint voice and her quick ear.

To sing—for dreamland things to hear—

And hush herself to sleep?

 

 

 

A SUABIAN LEGEND

 

God made all things,

And, seeing they were good,

He set a limit to the springs.

And circumscribed the flood,

Stayed the aspiring mountain ranges.

And said: " Henceforth shall be no changes ";

On all the beasts he set that ban.

And drew his line 'twixt woman and 'twixt man.

 

God, leaning down

Over the world beneath.

Surveyed his changeless work:

No creature drew its breath.

No cloud approached with rain unto the hills.

No waves white on the ocean, and no breeze;

Still lay the cattle in the meads; the rills

Hung in the tufts of moss; the trees

Seemed carven out of metal; manhood stood

Drooping his silent head by womanhood.

Nor voice of beasts nor any song of bird

Nor sound of wind were from the woodlands heard.

 

God, leaning down

Over the world beneath.

Knitted his brows to a frown

And fashioned Death:

 

The clouds faded around the mountain heads,

The rills and streams sank in their stony beds.

The ocean shivered and lay still and dead.

And man fled and the beasts fled

Into the crevices of mountains round;

The grass withered on the sod;

Beetles and lizards faded into the ground:

And God

Looked on his last-made creature. Death, and frowned.

 

He paced in thought awhile

His darkened and resounding courts above:

They brightened at his smile:

He had imagined Love

(Oh! help us ere we die: we die too soon;

We, who are born at dawn, have hut one noon.

And fade e'er nightfall). . . .

 

Then the Lord made Love.

And, looking down to Earth, he saw

The green flame out across each shaw,

The worms came creeping o'er the lawns,

Sweet showers in the pleasant dawns.

The lapwings crying in the fens.

The young lambs leaping from their pens,

The waves run tracing lines of white

On the cerulean ocean. But at night

Man slept with woman in his arms.

 

Then thunder shook

At the awful frown of God. His way he took

Over the trembling hills to their embowered nook.

 

But standing there above those sleeping things

God was aware of one whose insubstantial wings

A-quiver formed a penthouse o'er the place:

Therefore God stayed his hand, and sighed

To see how lip matched lip, side mated side,

And the remembered joy on each sealed face:

Therefore God stayed his hand and smiled.

Shook his tremendous head and went his way;

Love being his best begotten child,

And having over Death and Sin God's sway.

 

(Oh! help us ere we die: we die too soon;

We, who are horn at dawn, have hut one noon.

And fade e'er nightfall. Oh! Eternal One,

Help us to know short joy whose course is run

So soon: so soon.)

 

 

 

SEA JEALOUSY

 

Cast not your looks upon the wan grey sea,

Waste not your voice upon the wind;

Let not your footsteps sink upon the sand,

Hold no sea-treasure in your hand,

And let no sea-shell in your ear

Nor any sea-thought in your mind

Murmur a mystery.

 

Turn your soft eyes upon mine eyes that long;

Let your sweet lips on mine be sealed;

Fold soft sweet hands between your sweet soft breasts,

And, as a weary sea-mew rests

Upon the sea

Utterly—utterly yield

Your being up to me.

And all around, grey seascape and the sound

Of droned sea song.

 

 

 

ENOUGH

 

"Enough for you," said he, "that ye from afar have viewed this goodly thing that all that many may never espy."—How They Quested, etc.

 

Long we'd sought for Avalon,

Avalon the rest place;

Long, long we'd laboured

The oars—yea, for years.

 

Late, late one eventide

Saw we o'er still waters

Turrets rise and roof-frets

Golden in a glory,

Heard for a heart-beat

Women choirs and harpings

Waft down the wave-ways.

 

Saw we long-sought Avalon

Sink thro' still waters:

Long, long we'd laboured

The oars—yea, and yearned.

 

 

 

TANDARADEI

 

(WALTER VON DER VOGELWEIDE)

 

Under the lindens on the heather,

There was our double resting-place,

Side by side and close together

Garnered blossoms, crushed, and grass

Nigh a shaw in such a vale:

Tandaradei,

Sweetly sang the nightingale.

 

I came a-walking through the grasses;

Lo! my dear was come before.

Ah! what befell then—listen, listen, lasses—

Makes me glad for evermore.

Kisses?—thousands in good sooth:

Tandaradei,

See how red they've left my mouth.

 

There had he made ready—featly, fairly—

All of fiow'ring herbs a yielding bed,

And that place in secret still smiles rarely.

If by chance your foot that path should tread.

You might see the roses pressed,

Tandaradei,

Where e'enow my head did rest.

 

How he lay beside me, did a soul discover

(Now may God forfend such shame from me):

Not a soul shall know it save my lover;

Not a soul could see save I and he,

And a certain small brown bird:

Tandaradei,

Trust him not to breathe a word.

 

 

 

LULLABY

 

We’ve wandered all about the upland fallows,

We've watched the rabbits at their play;

But now, good-night, good-bye to soaring swallows,

Now good-night, good-bye, dear day.

 

Poppy heads are closing fast, pigeons circle home at last;

Sleep, Liebchen, sleep, the bats are calling.

Pansies never miss the light, but sweet babes must sleep at night;

Sleep, Liebchen, sleep, the dew is falling.

 

Even the wind among the quiet willows

Rests, and the sea is silent too.

See soft white linen, cool, such cool white pillows.

Wait in the darkling room for you.

 

All the little lambs are still now the moon peeps down the hill;

Sleep, Liebchen, sleep, the owls are hooting.

Ships have hung their lanthorns out, little mice dare creep about;

Sleep, Liebchen, sleep, the stars are shooting.

 

 

 

IV

 

THE FACE OF THE NIGHT

 

The following poems appeared in the volume called as above and published by Mr Macqueen in

1904.

 

 

A SEQUENCE

 

I

 

You make me think of lavender,

And that is why I love you so:

Your sloping shoulders, heavy hair,

And long swan's neck like snow,

Befit those gracious girls of long ago,

Who in closed gardens took the quiet air;

Who lived the ordered life gently to pass

From earth as from rose petals perfumes go.

Or shadows from that dial in the grass;

Whose fingers from the painted spinet keys

Drew small heart-clutching melodies.

 

 

II

 

Do not ask so much,

—O, bright-hued; oh, tender-eyed—

As you should sometimes shimmer at my side,

Oh, Fair.

 

I do not crave a touch,

Nor, at your comings hither,

Sound of soft laughter, savour of your hair.

Sight of your face; oh fair, oh full of grace,

I ask not, I.

 

But that you do not die,

Nor fade, oh bright, nor wither.

That somewhere in the world your sweet, dim face

Be unattainable, unpaled by fears,

Unvisited by years.

Stained by no tears.

 

 

III

 

Come in the delicate stillness of dawn,

Your eyelids heavy with sleep;

When the faint moon slips to its line—dim-drawn,

Grey and a shadow, the sea. And deep, very deep.

The tremulous stillness ere day in the dawn.

 

Come, scarce stirring the dew on the lawn,

Your face still shadowed by dreams;

When the world's all shadow, and rabbit and fawn—

Those timorous creatures of shadows and gleams;

And twilight and dewlight, still people the lawn.

 

Come, more real than life is real.

Your form half seen in the dawn;

A warmth half felt, like the rays that steal

Hardly revealed from the East; oh warmth of my breast,

O life of my heart, oh intimate solace of me . . .

So, when the landward breeze winds up from the quickening sea,

And the leaves quiver of a sudden and life is here and the day,

You shall fade away and pass

As—when we breathed upon your mirror's glass—

Our faces died away.

 

 

IV

 

If we could have remembrance now

And see, as in the winter's snow

We shall, what's golden in these hours.

The flitting, swift, intangible desires of sea and strand!

 

Who sees what's golden where we stand?

The sky's too bright, the sapphire sea too green;

I, I am fevered, you cold-sweet, serene,

And . . . and . . .

 

Yet looking back in days of snow

Unto this olden day that's now,

We'll see all golden in these hours

This memory of ours.

 

 

V

 

It was the Autumn season of the year

When ev'ry little bird doth ask his mate:

"I wonder if the Spring will find us here,

It groweth late."

 

I saw two Lovers walking through the grass,

And the sad He unto his weeping Dear

Did say. "Alas!

When Spring comes round I shall no more be here,

For I must sail across the weary sea

And leave the waves a-churn 'twixt you and me.

 

"Oh, blessed Autumn! blest late Autumn-tide!

For ever with thy mists us Lovers hide.

Ignore Time's laws

And leave thy scarlet haws

For ever on the dewy-dripping shaws

Of this hillside.

Until the last, despite of Time and Tide,

Give leave that we may wander in thy mist,

With the last, dread

Word left for aye unsaid

And the last kiss unkisst."

 

It was the Autumn season of the year.

When ev'ry little bird doth ask his mate:

“I wonder if the Spring will find us here,

It groweth late."

 

 

VI

 

When all the little hills are hid in snow,

And all the small brown birds by frost are slain,

And sad and slow the silly sheep do go

All seeking shelter to and fro;

Come once again

To these familiar, silent, misty lands;

Unlatch the lockless door

And cross the drifted floor;

Ignite the waiting, ever- willing brands,

And warm thy frozen hands

By the old flame once more.

Ah, heart's desire, once more by the old fire stretch out thy hands.

 

 

 

ON THE HILLS

 

Keep your brooding sorrows for dewy-misty hollows.

Here's blue sky and lark song, drink the air. The joy that follows

Drafts of wine o' west wind, o' north wind, o' summer breeze.

Never grape's hath equalled from the wine hills by the summer seas.

Whilst the breezes live, joy shall contrive,

Still to tear asunder, and to scatter near and far

Those nets small and thin

That spider sorrows spin

In the brooding hollows where no breezes are.

 

 

 

SIDERA CADENTIA

 

(ON THE DEATH OF QUEEN VICTORIA)

 

When one of the old, little stars doth fall from its place,

The eye,

Glimpsing aloft must sadden to see that its space

In the sky

Is darker, lacking a spot of its ancient, shimmering grace,

And sadder, a little, for loss of the glimmer on high.

 

Very remote, a glitter, a mote far away, is your star,

But its glint being gone from the place where it shone

The night's somewhat grimmer and something is gone

Out of the comforting quiet of things as they are.

 

A shock,

A change in the beat of the clock;

And the ultimate change that we fear feels a little less far.

 

 

 

NIGHT PIECE

 

Ah, of those better tides of dark and melancholy—

When one's abroad, in a field—the night very deep, very holy;

The turf very sodden a-foot, walking heavy—the small ring of light,

O' the lanthorn one carries, a-swinging to left and to right.

Revealing a flicker of hedgerow, a flicker of rushes—and Night

Ev'rywhere; ev'rywhere sleep and a hushing to sleep—

I know that I never shall utter the uttermost secrets aright,

They lie so deep.

 

 

 

THANKS WHILST UNHARNESSING

 

I

 

(He gets down from the cart)

 

West'ring the last silver light doth gleam,

Whilst in the welling shimmer of the lamp

From the tired horse the blanketing of steam

Flickers and whirls aloft into the damp

Sharp winter darkness. In the deadened air

The long, still night doth settle everwhere.

And hark! there comes the rapt, sweet, crooning snatches

Of song from where the little robin watches

Close in the thorn, beyond the ring of light.

 

 

II

 

(He speaks towards the bushes)

 

Softest of all the birds that sing at night.

For the most mellowest sound.

That the long year brings round.

Sweet robin. I give thanks and love you best

Of birds that nest.

 

(He follows the horse in, humming.)

 

Sing! it is well, though the rest of life be bitter,

Sing! (I swill the oats in the trough and loose the girth.)

Warble! It is well. [There's a rustle in the litter:

Thats the old grey rat.) It is well upon the earth.

 

 

III

 

Clotht-up and snug and warm, a-munching oats

Old Tom doth make a comfortable sound,

A rhythmic symphony for your sweet notes.

 

(He speaks from the stable door.)

 

Small brother, flit in here, since all around

The frost hath gripped the ground;

And oh! I would not like to have you die.

We's help each other,

Little Brother Beady-eye.

 

(The Robin flits in.)

 

There—Sing! Warm and mellow the lanthorn lights the stable.

Little brother, sing! In-a-doors beside the hearth.

Slippers are a-toast, and the tea's upon the table.

Robin when you sing it is well upon the earth.

(He closes the stable door and enters the cottage.)

 

 

 

GREY MATTER

 

They leave us nothing.

 

He. Still, a little's left.

 

She. A crabbed, ancient, dried biologist,

Somewhere very far from the sea, closed up from the sky.

Shut in from the leaves, destroys our hopes and us.

 

He. Why, no, our hopes and . . .

 

She. In his "Erster Heft."

Page something, I forget the line, he says

That, hidden as deep in the brain as he himself from hope.

There's this grey matter.

 

He. Why, 'tis there, dear heart.

 

She. That, if that hidden matter cools, decays.

Dies—what you will—our souls die out as well;

Since, hidden in the millionth of a cell.

Is all we have to give us consciousness.

 

He. Suppose it true.

 

She. Ah, never; better die,

Better have never lived than face this mist,

Better have never toiled to such distress.

 

He. It matters little.

 

She. Little!—Where shall I,

The woman, where shall you take part.

My poet? Where has either of us scope

In this dead-dawning century that lacks all faith.

All hope, all aim, and all the mystery

That comforteth. Since he victorious

With his cold vapours chill out you and me.

The woman and the poet?

 

He. Never, dear.

For you and I remain.

The woman and the poet. And soft rain

Still falls and still the crocus flames,

The blackbird calls.

 

She. But half the sweet is gone.

The voices of our children at their games

Lack half their ring.

 

He. Why, never, dear. Out there,

The sea's a cord of silver, still to south

Beyond the marsh.

 

She. Ah, but beyond it all.

And all beneath and all above, half of the glory's done.

And I and you

 

He. Why, no. The ancient sun

Shines as it ever shone, and still your mouth

Is sweet as of old it was.

 

She. But what remains?

 

He. All the old pains.

And all the old sweet pleasures and the mystery

Of time, slow travel and unfathomed deep.

 

She. And then this cold extinction? . . .

 

He. Dreamless sleep.

 

She. And nothing matters?

 

He. All the old, old things.

Whether to Church or College rings

The clamorous bell of creeds,

We, in the lush, far meads.

Poet and woman, past the city walls,

Hear turn by turn the burden of their calls,

Believe what we believe, feel what we feel,

Like what we list of what they cry within

Cathedral or laborat'ry,

Since, by the revolution of the wheel.

The one swings under, let us wait content.

 

She. Yet it is hard.

 

He. Ah no. A sure intent,

For me and you.

The right, true, joyful word, the sweet, true phrase,

The calling of our children from the woods these garden days

Remain.—These drops of rain have laid the dust

And in our soft brown seed-beds formed the crust

We needed for our sowings. Bring your seed,

And you shall prick it in, I close the row.

Be sure the little grains your hands have pressed

Tenderly, lovingly, home, shall flourish best.

 

She. Aye you are still my poet.

 

He. Even so

Betwixt the rain and shine. Half true's still true

More truly than the thing that's proved and dead.

The sun lends flame to every crocus head

Once more, and we once more must sow and weed

Since in the earth the newly stirring seed

Begins the ancient mystery anew.

 

 

 

OLD MAN'S EVENSONG

 

'’Tis but a teeny mite

Hard, road side edge,

Ol missus' candle light

Shines through thet broken hedge.

 

Reach me my coat, lads,

Give me a lift into it,

Rowin' they tater-clads

Tasks me to do it

Terribly;

Time was when I weer mad

Diggin' by star's light.

Now I am mortial glad

T' reach my dure-ajar's light,

'N' eat my tea.

 

Reach me my tools, boys,

Ah mun quit this talk 'n' lurry;

Theer's my ol' missus' voice

Calls: " or meastur, hurry,

Y'r tea-time's come."

Smells from the chimney side

Sniff down this plaguy mist,

Wanst I'd wander far an' wide,

Now I'm terr'ble stiff an' whist

'N' stay at home.

 

'Tis but a yeard or two

Hard road, thank God.

Then off the hard an' goo

Home on the sod.

 

 

 

CHILDREN'S SONG

 

Sometimes wind and sometimes rain,

Then the sun comes back again;

Sometimes rain and sometimes snow,

Goodness, how we'd like to know

Why the weather alters so.

 

When the weather's really good

We go nutting in the wood;

When it rains we stay at home,

And then sometimes other some

Of the neighbours' children come.

 

Sometimes we have jam and meat,

All the things we like to eat;

Sometimes we make do with bread

And potatoes boiled instead.

Once when we were put to bed

We had nowt and mother cried,

But that was after father died.

 

So, sometimes wind and sometimes rain,

Then the sun comes back again;

Sometimes rain and sometimes snow,

Goodness, how we'd like to know

If things will always alter so.

 

 

 

FROM THE SOIL

 

(TWO MONOLOGUES)

 

I

 

The Field Labourer speaks.

 

Ah am a mighty simple man and only-

Good wi' my baggin' hook and sichlike and 'tis lonely

Wheer Ah do hedge on Farmer Finn his farm.

Often Ah gits to thinking

When it grows dark and the ol' sun's done sinking,

And Ah hev had my sheere

Of fear

And wanted to feel sure that God were near

And goodly warm—

As near as th'eldritch shave I were at wark about . . .

Plenty o' time for thinking

We hes between the getting up and sinking

Of that ol' sun—about the God we tark about . . .

 

In the beginning God made Heaven and

The 'Arth, 'n Sea we sometimes hear a-calling

When wind she bloweth from the rainy land

An' says ther'll soon be wet an' rain a-falling.

 

Ah'll give you, parson, God he made the sea,

An' made this 'Arth, ner yit Ah wo-an't scrimmage

But what He made the sky; what passes me

Is that what follows: " Then the Lord made we

In his own image."

 

For, let alone the difference in us creatures.

Some short o' words like me, and others preachers

With stores of them, like you; some fair, some middlin',

Some black-avis'd like you and good at fiddlin',

Some crabb'd, some mad, some mighty gay and pleasant,

No two that's more alike than jackdaw is to pheasant,

We're poorish stuff at best.

 

We doesn't last no time before we die,

Nor leave more truck behind than they poor thrushes.

You find, stiff feathers, laid aside the bushes

After a hard ol' frost in Janu-ry.

Ol’ crow he lives much longer,

Ol’ mare's a de-al stronger

'N the hare's faster . . .

If so be God's like we and we like He

The man's as good's his Master.

 

You are a civil, decent-spoken man. Muss Parson.

'N' I don't think ye'll say this kind o' tark is worse'n arson—

That's burning stacks, I think—surely it isn' meant so,

 

I tell you. Parson, no;

'N' us poor folk we doesn't want to blame

You parsons fer the things that's said and sung

Up there in church. My apple tree is crook'd because 'twere bent so

When it were young.

'N' them as had you preacher-folk to tame.

Taught you the tales that you are bound to tell

Us folk below

About three Gods that's one an' Heav'n an' Hell,

An' things us folk ain't meant to understand.

I tell you, sir, we men that's on the land

Needs summut we can chew when trouble's brewing,

When our ol' 'ooman's bad an' rent is due

'N' we no farden,

'N' when it's late to sow 'n' still too wet to dig the garden,

 

Something as we can chew like that ol' cow be chewing

Something told plain and something we gits holt on,

—You need a simple sort o' feed to raise a colt on—

We needs it, parson, life's a bitter scrimmage,

Livin' and stuggin' in the mud and things we do

Enow confound us;

We hain't no need for fear

Of God, to make the living hardly worth . . . .

 

You tell us, sir, that "God He made this Earth

In His own image,"

An' make the Lord seem near.

So's we could think that when we come to die

We'll lie

In this same goodly 'Arth, an' things goo on around us

Much as they used to goo.

 

 

II

 

The Small Farmer soliloquizes.

 

I wonder why we toiled upon the earth

From sunrise until sunset, dug and delved,

Crook-backed, cramp -fingered, making little marks

On the unmoving bosoms of the hills,

And nothing came of it. And other men

In the same places dug and delved and ended

As we have done; and other men just there

Shall do the self-same things until the end.

I wonder why we did it. . . . Underneath

The grass that fed my sheep, I often thought

Something lay hidden, some sinister thing

Lay looking up at us as if it looked

Upwards thro' quiet waters; that it saw

Us futile toilers scratching little lines

And doing nothing. And maybe it smiled

Because it knew that we must come to this. . . .

 

I lay and heard the rain upon the roof

AH night when rain spelt ruin, lay and heard

The east wind shake the windows when that wind

Meant parched up land, dried herbage, blighted wheat,

And ruin, always ruin creeping near

In the long droughts and bitter frosts and floods.

And when at dawning I went out-a-doors

I used to see the top of the tall shaft

O' the workhouse here, peep just above the downs.

It was as if the thing were spying, waiting,

Watching my movements, saying, "You will come.

Will come at last to me." And I am here . . .

And down below that Thing lay there and smiled;

Or no, it did not smile; it was as if

One might have caught it smiling, but one saw

The earth immovable, the unmoved sheep

And senseless hedges run like little strings

All over hill and dale. . . .

 

 

 

WISDOM

 

The young girl questions: "Whether were it better

To lie for ever, a warm slug-a-bed

Or to rise up and bide by Fate and Chance,

The rawness of the morning,

The gibing and the scorning

Of the stern Teacher of my ignorance?"

"I know not," Wisdom said.

 

The young girl questions: "Friend, shall I die calmer.

If I've lain for ever, sheets above the head,

Warm in a dream, or rise to take the worst

Of peril in the highways

Of straying in the by-ways.

Of hunger for the truth, of drought and thirst?"

"We do not know," he said,

"Nor may till we be dead."

 

 

 

THE POSY-RING

 

(AFTER CLEMENT MAROT)

 

This on thy posy-ring I've writ:

"True Love and Faith "

For, failing Love, Faith droops her head,

And lacking faith, why love is dead

 

And's but a wraith.

But Death is stingless where they've lit

And stayed, whose names hereon I've writ.

 

 

 

THE GREAT VIEW

 

Up here, where the air's very clear

And the hills slope away nigh down to the bay,

It is very like Heaven . . .

 

For the sea's wine-purple and lies half asleep

In the sickle of the shore and, serene in the west.

Lion-like purple and brooding in the even.

Low hills lure the sun to rest.

 

Very like Heaven For the vast marsh dozes,

And waving plough-lands and willowy closes

Creep and creep up the soft south steep;

In the pallid North the grey and ghostly downs do fold away.

And, spinning spider-threadlets down the sea, the sea-lights dance

And shake out a wavering radiance.

 

Very like Heaven . . . . For a shimmering of pink.

East, far east, past the sea-lights' distant blink,

Like a cloud shell-pink, like the ear of a girl.

Like Venice-glass mirroring mother-o'-pearl.

Like the small pink nails of my lovely lady's fingers,

Where the skies drink the sea and the last light lies and lingers,

There is France.

 

 

 

WIFE TO HUSBAND

 

If I went past you down this hill

And you had never seen my face before,

Would all your being feel the sudden thrill

You said it felt, once more?

 

If I went past you through this shaw.

Would be all a-quiver at the brush

Of my trailed garments; would the sudden hush

You said the black-birds' voices had in awe

Of my first coming, fall upon the place

Once more, if you had never seen my face

Nor ever heard my passing by before.

And nought had passed of all that was of yore?

 

 

 

A NIGHT PIECE

 

As I lay awake by my good wife's side,

And heard the clock tick through a night in June,

I thought of a song with a haunting tune;

But the songs that betide,

And the tunes that we hear in the ear when the June moon rides in the sky,

Fade and die away with the coming of the day.

And my haloed angels with golden wings,

And the small sweet bells that rang in tune.

And the strings that quivered above the quills.

And all my mellow imaginings

Faded and died away at the coming of the day

With the gradual growth and spread of grey

Above the hills.

 

 

 

TO CHRISTINA AT NIGHTFALL

 

Little thing, ah, little mouse,

Creeping through the twilit house,

To watch within the shadow of my chair

With large blue eyes; the firelight on your hair

Doth glimmer gold and faint.

And on your woollen gown

That folds a-down

From steadfast little face to square-set feet.

 

Ah, sweet! ah, little one! so like a carven saint,

With your unflinching eyes, unflinching face.

Like a small angel, carved in a high place,

Watching unmoved across a gabled town;

When I am weak and old,

And lose my grip, and crave my small reward

Of tolerance and tenderness and ruth.

The children of your dawning day shall hold

The reins we drop and wield the judge's sword

And your swift feet shall tread upon my heels.

And I be Ancient Error, you New Truth,

And I be crushed by your advancing wheels . . .

 

Good-night! The fire is burning low.

Put out the lamp;

Lay down the weary little head

Upon the small white bed.

Up from the sea the night winds blow

Across the hill across the marsh;

Chill and harsh, harsh and damp.

The night winds blow.

But, while the slow hours go,

I, who must fall before you, late shall wait and keep

Watch and ward,

Vigil and guard,

Where you sleep.

Ah, sweet! do you the like where I lie dead.

 

 

 

TWO FRESCOES

 

It occurred to me that a series of frescoes might arise dealing with the fortunes of Roderick the Goth. Having neither wall nor brushes I have tried to put two of them upon paper.

 

 

THE TOWER

 

Down there where Europe's arms

Stretch out to Africa,

Throughout the storms, throughout the calms

Of centuries it took the alms

Of sun and rain; the loud alarms

Of war left it unmoved; and grey

And brooding there it watched the strip of foam

And fret of ruffled waters, was the home

Of the blue rock-dove and the birds o' the main.

 

Coming from Africa

The swallows rested on it flying north

In spring-time; rested there again,

When the days shorten, speeding on the way

Homewards to Africa.

Back and forth

The tiny ships below sped; east and west

It was called blest

By mariners it guided. Mystery

Hung round it like a veil. The ancient Ones,

They said, had seen it rise

Upwards to the old suns.

Upwards to the old skies.

When Hercules

Did bid it guard those seas.

 

It was a thing of the Past;

Stood there untroubled; like a virgin, dreamed;

And not a man of all that land but deemed

The tower sacred.

 

It was a symbol of an ancient faith,

Some half-forgotten righteousness, some Truth,

Some virtue in the land whose tillers said:

"Whilst that stands unenforced, it is well."

Be sure the thing is even so to-day,

Our tower doth somewhere unenforced rise

Upwards to our old skies.

And if we suffer sacrilegious hands

To force its innocence, our knell shall ring

As it rang out for them on that old day

Knolling from Africa.

You say it was the King who did this thing.

Who sinned against this righteousness. But say:

If we stand by and with averted eyes.

Or, shrugging shoulders, let our rulers sin

Against the very virtue of the race.

Who is it then but us must bear the pains

Of Nemesis? Ah, yes, it was the King. . . .

 

 

II

 

GOTHS

 

"Let the stars flame by as the flaming earth falls down,

Ruined fall the earth as the clanging heavens fall.

Clasp me, love of mine; be the jewels in my crown

But the firelit tears of Gods, of the Ancient Ones of all."

 

The swart King paced his palace wall

And down below the maids at ball

Sang in choir at evenfall

As they played:

 

"Make our couch of Greece and the footstool for our throne

Of Rome, throw scented Spain for the incense of our fire,

Bring me all the East for the jewels in my zone,

Cast them all together for our leaping wedding pyre."

 

And he looked down

Into their cloistral shade

And saw, without the tongues of shadow thrown

By wall and tree of that sequestered place

One girl who had the sunlight on her face,

Who swayed and clapped her hands and sang alone.

 

"My father can but die," she sang,

"My mother can but weep,

This weary town fall blazing down

And be a smouldering heap

Beneath the flame

Where I was wont to keep

My weary vigil till my lover came."

 

Chanting in her pauses all the girls within the close

Sang to her singing, and their hidden chorus rose

Like a wave, fell like falling asleep.

And for the King, her voice like fiery wine

Set all his pulses throbbing and her face

Did dazzle more than did the blood-red sun.

 

"He who would win me, let him woo like this,

Flames on his face and the blood upon his hands,

Ravish me away when the blackening embers hiss

As the red flesh weeps to the brands."

 

That King was one who reignèd there alone

Upon those very confines of the world,

Where conquering races ebb to sloth and sink

As still great rivers sink into the sands.

And—for his fathers had been rav'ning wolves

Who coursed through ruin, pestilence and death

When all the world flamed red from end to end—

That ancient song of his destroying race

The girl sang stirred the fibres of his frame

Till all the earth was red before his face.

It had been so the women sang of old

To his forgotten sires, and still they sang

Within the shadow of his palace wall,

The cloister of his grimmest liege of all.

And as she sang the ferment worked in her

And shook her virgin's voice to jarring notes.

Stirring in her the ancient cry of throats

Torn with the passions of the ancient days.

 

"Pour me blood o' gods; bring me broken oaths for toys

Countless of the cost, of their ruin, of thine own;

Drunk with wine and passion, drink thy moment's fill of joys.

Godlike, beastlike, manlike, drink and cast thy cup a- down;

Lose thy life; give thy crown.

Lose thy soul, give thine all,

As we sink to death and ruin with the smoke o' worlds for pall."

 

And so she raised her eyes and saw the King

Stand frowning down, his face inspired with flame

Fro' the west'ring sun. And then the Angelus

Chimed out across the silent land of Spain.

Beyond the strip of foam the imaums called.

And Africa and Europe fell to prayer.

 

But those two gazing in each other's eyes

Looked back into the hollows of the years.

And as he stood above his brooding land

It was as if she saw her sires again.

Flames shone upon his face and on his hands

Incarnadined; whenas the sun sank down

He raised his eyes and seemed to see that Spain

Was all on fire with blood upon the roofs.

And down to South the inviolate, pallid tower

Rose silent, pointing to the crescent moon

And that great peering planet called Soheil,

That heralds, as Mahomet's doctors say,

His domination and his children's sway.

Rose over Africa.

 

 

 

VOLKSWEISE

 

A poor girl sat by a tower of the sea

All a-wringing of her hands; "Will he never show," says she,

"Just as a token, just a glimmer of his ship's lant . . . horn?"

 

"Oh, all ye little grains of sand

Twist into a rope shall draw his keel

Hither. Oh, ye little gulls and terns.

Join wings and bear me from this strand

To where I'll feel

His arms, and find where on the foam his ship is borne."

 

A poor girl sat, etc.

 

"Oh, all ye little stars o' the night

Come down and cluster in my hair;

Oh, bright night-flashes o' the waves

Shine round me till I'm all one flame of light.

So, far at sea.

He'll deem a beacon beckons him to me. ..."

 

A poor girl sat nigh a tower of the sea

All a-wringing her hands; " Will he never show" said she,

"Just a token, just a glimmer of his ship's lant . . . horn?”

 

 

 

AND AFTERWARDS

 

(A SAVAGE SORT OF SONG ON THE ROAD)

 

Once I was a gallant and bold I

And you so tender and true,

But I’ll never again be the old I

Nor you the old you.

 

I shall go lounging along on the edge

Of the grass You'll loiter along by the hedge.

I shall go dogged through dust and the dirt

Like an ass in my moods.

You with a new sweetheart at your skirt

Ev'ry few roods. . . .

 

"Once I was a gallant" etc.

 

We'll maybe jog along together

A long way;

Maybe put up with the weather together,

Better or worse

As it chances day by day,

Or maybe part with a kick and a curse

I and you,

After a turning or two

 

"But I'll never again," etc.

 

 

 

ON A MARSH ROAD

 

(WINTER NIGHTFALL)

 

A bluff of cliff, purple against the south,

And nigh one shoulder-top an orange pane.

This wet, clean road; clear twilight held in the pools,

And ragged thorns, ghost reeds and dim, dead willows.

 

Past all the windings of these grey, forgotten valleys.

To west, past clouds that close on one dim rift—

The golden plains; the infinite, glimpsing distances,

The eternal silences; dim lands of peace.

 

Infinite plains to know no wanderer's foot; infinite distances where alone is rest;

All-virgin downs where none shall pasture sheep;

inviolable peaks that none shall climb,

From whose summit nor you nor I shall gaze on ocean's infinite beyond.

Nor none look back upon this world folding to-night, to rain and to sleep.

 

 

 

AN END PIECE

 

Close the book and say good-bye to every-thing;

Pass up from the shore and pass by b5rre and stall,

—For the smacks shall sail home on the tail of the tides,

And the kine shall stand deep in the sweet water sides.

And they still shall go burying, still wedding brides,

But I must be gone in the morning.

 

One more look, and so farewell, sweet summering.

One moment more and then no more at all.

For the skipper shall summon his hands to the sea,

And the shepherd still shepherd his sheep on the lea,

But it's over and done with the man that was me,

As over the hill comes the morning.

 

 

 

 

V

 

"POEMS FOR PICTURES"

 

Note.—The following poems were printed in the volume of the same title published by Mr Macqueen in 1897.

 

 

LOVE IN WATCHFULNESS

 

UPON THE SHEEPDOWNS

 

Sail, oh sail away,

Oh sail, ye clouds, above my face,

Here where I lie;

Trail, oh trail away

Ye ling'ring minutes and give place

To hours that fly.

 

But when I hear an echo mutter,

Soft up the slope of golden gorse.

Oh, when I see a distant horse,

When I shall see, afar, a kerchief flutter

Among the shrouds

And driving veils of mist, you'll sail away you hours and clouds.

You'll sail away.

 

 

 

AFTER ALL

 

Yes, what's the use of striving on?

And what's to show when all is done?

The bells will toll as now they toil,

Here's an old lilt will summarize the whole:

 

"This fell about in summertide,

About the midmost of the year,

Our master did to covert ride

To drive the fallow deer.

Chanced we upon the Douglas men ere ever one of us was ware.

 

"Then sped a shaft from covert side

And pierced in behind his ear;

This fell about in summertide

At midmost of the year."

 

So down he fell and rested there

Among the sedge hard by the brook,

About the midmost of the year

His last and lasting rest he took.

 

And so, " This fell in winter late.

Or ever Candlemas drew near,

His bride had found another mate

Before the ending of the year.

 

"His goshawks decked another's wrists,

His hounds another's voice did fear.

His men another's errands ride

His steed another burden bear.

Him they forgot by Christraastide.

Ere Candlemas drew near."

 

Our hounds shall know another leash,

Our men another master know,

And we reck little of it all, so we but find good rest below.

 

So what's the use of striving on?

And what's to show when all is done?

The ring of bells will chime and chime.

And all the rest's just waste—just waste of time.

 

 

 

THE OLD FAITH TO THE CONVERTS

 

When the world is growing older,

And the road leads down and down and down,

And the wind is in the bare tree-tops

And the meadows sodden with much rain,

Seek me here in the old places.

And here, where I dwell, you shall find me,"

Says the old Faith we are leaving.

 

"When the muscles stiffen,

Eyes glaze, ears lose their keenness,

When the mind loses its familiar nimbleness,

And the tongue no longer voices it, speeds before it, follows it, find me,"

Seek me here in the old places,

And here, where I have always dwelt, you shall

Says the old Faith we are leaving.

 

"I shall not watch your going down the road.

Not even to the turning at the hill,

Not for me to hear you greet the strange women.

Not for me to see them greet you.

They shall be many and many the houses you shall enter, but never shall house be like to mine,"

Says the old Faith we are leaving.

 

"You shall hear strange new songs.

But never song like the one I sing by your pillow;

You shall breathe strange new scents, [the linen.

But never scent like that of the herbs I strew 'mid

Go! I give you time to make holiday.

Travel, travel, fare into far countries.

But you shall come back again to the old places.

And here, where I have always dwelt, you shall find me,"

Says the old Faith we are leaving.

 

But we—we shall never return.

 

 

 

ST AETHELBURGA

 

FOR A PICTURE

 

St Aethelburga, daughter of Athelbert, King of Kent, wedded Aedwin, King of Northumbria. Him and thereafter his whole folk she won for the worship of Christianity. But in the end he was slain by Penda, a heathen, who took the land. Then did St Aethelburga return into Kent and found the convent and church at Lyminge, where she died.

 

To purge our minds of haste, pass from an age outworn

And travel to the depths of tranquil times long past;

Sinking as sinks a stone through waters of a tarn,

Be fitting things and meet:

And, look you, on our walls hang treasures from such depths,

 

Oueen, saint, evangelist; sweet, patient, fain to wait

With crucifix in hand, broad brow and haloed crown

Half-hidden by the coif, she enters through that gate.

She enters through that door, where tapestry drawn back

Left seen, a moment since, an apple lawn; but moors

Spread far away beyond. That span of shorn green turf.

Won from the heather's grasp, will whisper of regret

For far-off swarded downs—

For far-off Kentish downs, soft sky and glint of sea.

Sweet chime of convent bells and flower scents of home.

 

Here, in a Northern land, where skies are grey and hearts

Are slow to gather warmth: where Truth is slow to spread.

And gibes spring swift to lips; home thoughts are bitter sweet.

Saint in a pagan court, Queen of a wav'ring King,

She murmurs inly, "Wait," clasps tight the crucifix.

Enters the narrow door and passes up the hall.

 

In those old homespun days, the voices of a court,

The whispers that are passed behind the dais-seats

By fearers of a frown, came to the war-lord's ear her.

In some shrewd jester's jape:

And some such licensed fool now voiced the folk for

These lovers of their mead, strong beef and rolling song.

Liked little her soft ways, her Friday fasts and chants

That rose and fell unmarked, unrhythmic and unrhymed—

Her sweet and silent ways and distant-gazing eyes.

 

"Mead and strong meats on earth and arrow flights on earth,

What boots the rest? " they said,

Questions their jester her:

 

"Oh, Queen, of fasting fain.

King's wife that scourge your flesh.

King's daughter sadly clad.

Sad shall be your estate, after sad faring here.

If you be laid i' the grave and find no future state."

To him the Queen: "True, son, but what shall be your fate.

If future state there be?" and crossed the rush-strewn floor.

Thanking the Lord that found shrewd answers for shrewd jests.

So fared she for awhile. In time her King was won,

Knelt in the font and sloughed, beneath Paulinus' hands

His scales of pagan sin. But when his time was come

Ill fared he 'fore his foes that sent his soul to God.

 

So turned the sad Queen back and sought her brother's land,

Just over those high downs, in a grey hollowed vale,

She built her nunnery and rested there awhile.

(Maybe her feet once trod this yielding sheep-cropped sward—

'Tis like her eyes once filled at sight of just that glint

Of distant sun-kissed sea, out where the hill drops down.)

So fared she for awhile, and when her time was come,

Down there in Lyminge Church, she laid her weary limbs.

And yet we see her stand: sad Queen, sweet, silent saint,

With crucifix clasped close, low brow and distant gaze

She enters through that gate.

 

 

 

GRAY

 

FOR A PICTURE

 

The firelight gilds the patterns on the walls,

The yellow flames fly upwards from the brands,

On fold and farm the sad grey twilight falls.

And shrouds the downs and hides the hollow lands.

 

And pensive is the hour and bids the brain

Weave morals from the peeping things of dusk,

Dwelling a moment on the darkling pane,

The tapping roses and the pot of musk.

 

That picture there—the one the firelight shows:

The poet by a grave, beneath the may,

With ready notebook and unruffled brows

And elegiac pose—you guess it's Gray.

 

Below, beneath his rounded, withied grave,

A ploughman sleeps, the tablet at his head

Tells the short tale of life that such men have—

The scarcely cold and half-forgotten dead

 

Who "five and fifty years the furrows trod,"

Such were the time and toil of William Mead

Who passed: "And now, he's resting 'neath this sod,"

"And there's an end," you say. 'Twere so indeed.

 

But William was a ploughman of the best,

Who ploughed his furrow straight from hedge to shaws

From sun in east to sun low down in west,

With following of rooks and gulls and daws.

 

He taught some score the honest trick of plough—

Crop-headed yokels, youths of clay and loam—

Who learnt his ways and gathered from him how

To drive good team and draw straight furrow home.

 

Thus when his work was done and done his days

He left a school of workers—to this day

We recognize their touch—and owe due praise

For bread and thought to such as he and Gray.

 

Who ploughed such furrows each in his own field,

Who sowed such seed and gathered in such grain,

That we still batten on their well-sown yield,

And wonder who shall do the like again.

 

 

 

THE GIPSY AND THE CUCKOO

 

"Brother, what's that bird tolling yonder?"

"Why, Jasper, that's a cuckoo."

"He's a roguish chaffing sort of bird, isn't he, brother?"

"He is, Jasper."

"But you rather like him, brother? . . . well, brother, and what's a gipsy?"

—The Romany Rye.

 

Tell me, brother, what's a cuckoo, but a roguish chaffing bird?

Not a nest's his own, no bough-rest's his own,

and he's never man's good word, ,

But his call is musical and rings pleasant on the ear.

And the spring would scarce be spring

If the cuckoo did not sing

In the leafy months o' the year.

 

Tell me, brother, what's a gipsy but a roguish chafiing chap?

Not a cot's his own, not a man would groan

For a gipsy's worst mishap,

But his tent looks quaint when bent

On the sidesward of a lane.

And you'd deem the rain more dreary

And the long white road more weary

If we never came again.

 

Would your May days seem more fair

Were we chals deep read in books,

Were we cuckoos cawing rooks.

All the world cathedral closes,

Where the very sunlight dozes

Were the sounds all organ pealing, psalm and song and prayer?

 

 

 

THE GIPSY AND THE TOWNSMAN

 

The Townsman

Pleasant enough in the seed time,

Pleasant enough in the hay time,

Pleasant enough in the grain time.

When oaks don golden gowns.

But the need time.

The grey time,

How bear ye them.

How fare ye then

When the rain clouds whip over the gorse on the downs,

How bear ye, them, how fare ye then?

 

Gipsy

We lie round the fire and we hark to the wind

As it wails in the gorse and it whips on the down.

And the wet- wood smoke drives us winking blind,

But there's smoke and wind and woe in the town

Harder to bear

There than here in the saddest month of the weariest year.

 

 

 

THE SONG OF THE WOMEN

 

A WEALDEN TRIO

 

1st Voice

When ye've got a child 'ats whist for want of food,

And a grate as grey's y'r 'air for want of wood,

And y'r man and you ain't nowise not much good;

 

Together

Oh―

it's hard work a-Christmassing,

Carolling,

Singin' songs about the "Babe what's born."

 

2nd Voice

When ye've 'eered the bailiffs 'and upon the latch,

And ye've feeled the rain a-trickling through the thatch,

An' y'r man can't git no stones to break ner yit no sheep to watch—

 

Together

Oh―

We've got to come a-Christmassing,

Carolling,

Singin' of the "Shepherds on that morn."

 

3rd Voice, more cheerfully

'E was a man's poor as us, very near.

An' 'E 'ad 'is trials and danger.

An' I think 'E'll think of us when 'E sees us singin' 'ere;

For 'is mother was poor, like us, poor dear,

An' she bore Him in a manger.

 

Together

Oh―

It's warm in the heavens, but it's cold upon the earth;

An' we ain't no food at table nor no fire upon the hearth;

And it's bitter hard a-Christmassing,

Carolling,

Singin' songs about our Saviour's birth;

Singin' songs about the Babe what's born;

Singin' of the shepherds on that morn.

 

 

 

THE PEASANT'S APOLOGY

 

Down near the earth

On the steaming furrows

Things are harsh and black enough

Dearth there is and lack enough,

And immemorial sorrows

Stultify sweet mirth

Till she borrows

Bitterness and blackness from the earth.

 

 

 

AUCTIONEER'S SONG

 

Come up from the field,

Come up from the fold,

For the farmer has broken,

His things must be sold.

 

Drive the flock from the fold,

And the stock from the field,

And the team from the furrow.

And see what they yield.

Coom up!

 

Come up from the marsh,

Come down from the hops,

Come down thro' the ventways,

Come cater the copse.

 

Come down from the hops,

Come up from the marsh,

Tho' selling be bitter

And creditors harsh,

Coom up!

 

Bring all you can find,

Take the clock from the wall.

The crocks from the dairy,

The arm-chair and all.

 

Tear the prints from the wall,

Bring all you can find,

Now turn up your collars,

To keep out the wind.

Bid up!

 

So come up from the field, come up from the fold.

For the poor old farmer his things must be sold;

Come up from the fold, come up from the field.

Now stand all together, let's see what they yield.

Bid up!

 

 

 

ALDINGTON KNOLL

 

THE OLD SMUGGLER SPEAKS

 

Al’ington Knoll it stands up high,

Guidin' the sailors sailin' by,

Stands up high fer all to see

Cater the marsh and crost the sea.

 

Al'ington Knoll's a mound a top,

With a dick all round and it's bound to stop,

For them as made it in them old days

Sees to it well that theer it stays,

 

For that ol' Knoll is watched so well

By drownded men let outen Hell;

They watches well and keeps it whole

For a sailor's mark—the goodly Knoll.

 

Farmer Finn as farms the ground

Tried to level that goodly mound.

But not a chap from Lydd to Lym'

Thought that job were meant for him.

 

Finn 'e fetched a chap fro' th' Sheeres,

One o' yer spunky devil-may-keeres,

Giv him a shovel and pick and spade,

Promised him double what we was paid.

 

He digged till ten, and he muddled on

Till he'd digged up a sword and askillington—

A grit old sword as long as me.

An' grit ol' bones as you could see.

 

He digged and digged the livelong day.

Till the sun went down in Fairhght Bay;

He digged and digged, and behind his back

The lamps shone out and the marsh went black,

 

And the sky in the west went black from red,

An' the wood went black—an' the man was dead.

But wheer he'd digged the chark shone white

Out to sea like Calais light.

 

Al'ington Knoll it stands up high,

Guidin' the sailors sailin' by.

Stands up high for all to see

Cater the marsh and crost the sea.

 

 

 

A PAGAN

 

Bright white clouds and April skies

May make your heart feel bonny,

But summer's sun and flower's growth

Will fill my hives with honey,

And mead is sweet to a pugging tooth

When it's dark at four and snow clouds rise.

 

Owl light's sweet if the moon be bright.

And trysting's no bad folly,

But give me mead and a warm hearthstone,

And a cosy pipe and Dolly

—And Dolly to devil a mutton bone

When it's dark at four of a winter's night.

 

 

 

OLD WINTER

 

Old Winter's hobbling down the road,

Dame Autumn's cloak looks frosty grey

With a furry edge.

We deemed it berry red in the ray

The sun vouchsafed the dying day

E'en now through the gap in the hedge.

 

Chorus

Spring's gone, Summer's past.

Autumn will never, never catch them,

But Winter hobbles along so fast

You'd almost think he'd match them.

 

Old Winter carries a heavy load.

Sticks and stakes to your heart's desire.

But as for me,

I'll not tramp in the Autumn mire.

But sit and blink at the merry fire

And hark to the kettle's minstrelsy.

 

Chorus

Spring's gone. Summer's past,

Autumn was mellow, mellow yellow.

But for all old Winter's hollow blast

He's not such a bad old fellow.

 

 

 

THE PEDLAR LEAVES THE BAR PARLOUR AT DYMCHURCH

 

Good night, we'd best be jogging on,

The moon's been up a while,

We've got to get to Bonnington,

Nigh seven mile.

 

But the marsh ain'd so lone if you've heered a good song.

And you hum it aloud as you cater along,

Nor the stiles half so high, nor the pack so like lead.

If you've heered a good tale an' it runs in your head.

 

So, come, we'd best be jogging on.

The moon will give us light,

We've got to get to Bonnington,

To sleep to-night.

 

 

 

AN ANNIVERSARY

 

Two decades and a minute,

And half a moon in the sky,

Like a broken willow pattern plate

And a jangling bell to din it.

Dingle—dong—twelve strokes—

Two decades and a minute.

 

 

 

BEGINNINGS

 

FOR ROSSETTI'S FIRST PAINTING

 

Whether the beginnings of things notable

Have in them anything worth noting.

Whether an acorn's worth the thinking of

Or eagle's egg suggests the sweep of wings in the clear blue,

Is just an idle question.

 

There's this:

If you should hold the acorn 'twixt your fingers,

You'll conjure up an oak maybe,

A great gnarled trunk, criss-crossed and twisting branches

And quivering of leaves.

Or if the egg lies in the hollow of your hand,

And the possessor says, "It is an eagle's."

You'll deem you're looking up into high heaven,

And see, far, far above you.

Leisurely circling, now amongst the clouds, now against the sun,

A careless span of pinions;

You'll see, maybe, in short, such oaks and eagle-flights

As never were, save in an idler's dream.

But then again:

An acorn's just an acorn, food for swine, and never

(The chances are so great, so very great against it),

Never will become a tempest-breasting oak.

 

And then this eagle's egg,

It's blown and empty of its contents,

And just reposes on its cotton wool

In a collector's box.

 

So with these sketches:

Maybe you'll let them trick you into dreaming

A hundred masterpieces:

Halls full of never-to-be-equalled brushwork:

Or let the music of a witching name beguile you

To the remembrance of a master's sonnets.

Or you may say, with just a tilting of the nose towards heaven:

 

"The thing's amiss—it's worthless,

We've seen a daub as good

Hang flapping unobserved in such a High Street,

Decked with the faded, weather-beaten effigy

Of so-and-so of noble memory—

The thing's amiss, it's worthless."

 

And yet—it's just a question.

 

 

 

AT THE BAL MASQUE

 

Columbine to Pierrot

 

[She hums her words)

 

Ah—Ah—Ah—if you ask for a love like that,

Qu'est c'-Qu'est c'-Qu'est c'que tu fais dans cette galfere?

Hark—Hark—Hark—Hear the twittering, rustling feet:

Alors, qu'est ce-e, qu'est ce-e qu'on peut faire.

 

She speaks

Tender and trusting and true

That they may be otherwhere:

Here one is just what one is—

And—as for pledges to you—

There—drink the scent of my hair:

There—snatch your moment of bliss.

 

She sings again

Tender—Tender—Tender, trusting and true

That, That, That they may be, they may be other-where:

Si tu veux autre chose, je n'ai rien de plus,

Qu'est c'-Qu'est c'-Qu'est c' que tu fais dans cette galore?

 

 

 

IN TENEBRIS

 

All within is warm,

Here without it's very cold,

Now the year is grown so old

And the dead leaves swarm.

 

In your heart is light,

Here without it 's very dark,

When shall I hear the lark?

When see aright?

 

Oh, for a moment's space!

Draw the clinging curtains wide

Whilst I wait and yearn outside

Let the light fall on my face.

 

 

 

SONG OF THE HEBREW SEER

 

Oh would that the darkness would cover the face of the land,

Oh would that a cloud would shroud the face of high heaven,

Would blot out the stars, and hush, hush, hush the winds of the west,

That the sons of men might sink into utter rest,

Forgetting the God in whose name their fathers had striven

Might strive no longer and slumber as slumbers the desert sand.

 

That then, oh, my God, should Thy lightnings flash forth.

That Thy voice, oh, Jehovah, should burst on mine ear

In the thunder that rolls from the east and the north

And thy laugh on the rushing of winds that bear

The myriad, myriad sounds of the sea.

 

 

 

AN IMITATION

 

(To M.M.)

 

Come, my Sylvia, let us rove

To that secret silent grove.

Where the painted birds agree

To tune their throats for you and me.

 

We will foot it in the shade

Of ev'ry dappled, dancing glade.

Till Ob'ron and his fairy train

Shall shout for joy and swear amain:

Such form as thine was never seen

Sporting o'er the velvet green.

 

 

 

SONNET

 

(Suggested by the "Phœbus with Admetus" by George Meredith)

 

After Apollo left Admetus' gate,

Did his late fellows feel a numb despair,

Did they cry " Comrade, comrade" everywhere

Thro' the abandoned byres, and curse the fate

That let them for awhile know him for mate

To mourn his going? Did his vacant chair

Before the fire, when winter drove them there

Make the sad silence more disconsolate?

 

Did yearning ears all vainly, vainly strain

To half recall the voice that now was mute?

Did yearning eyes strive all in vain, in vain,

To half recall the glory of his face.

To half recall the God that for a space

Had quickened their dead world? and, ah, his lute . . .

 

 

 

SONG DIALOGUE

 

"Is it so, my dear?"

"Even so!"

''Too much woe to bear?"

"Too much woe! "

"Wait a little while,

We must bear the whole.

Do not weep, but smile,

We are near the goal."

 

"Is it dark—the night?"

"Very dark!"

"Not a spark of light?"

"Not a spark!"

"Yet a little way

We must journey on;

Night will turn to day

And the goal be won."

 

"Will the dawn come soon?"

"In an hour;

See! the sinking moon

Loses power.

Saffron grey the west

Wakes before the sun.

Very soon we 'll rest

Now that day's begun."

 

 

 

Ford Madox Ford – A Short Biography

 

Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer on 17th December 1873 in Wimbledon, London, England, to Catherine Madox Brown and Francis Hueffer.   He was the eldest of three.  His father, who became the music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. He was named after his maternal grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown.

 

In 1889, after the death of his father, Ford and his brother, Oliver, went to live with their grandfather in London.

 

Ford later graduated from the University College School in London, but never went on to attend university.

 

In 1894, Ford eloped with his girlfriend from school Elsie Martindale. The couple were married in Gloucester and moved to Bonnington. By 1901, they had moved on to Winchelsea with their two daughters, Christina (1897) and Katharine (1900). Ford's neighbors in Winchelsea included the authors Henry James and H.G. Wells.

 

Ford collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels; The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (published in 1924 but written much earlier). Ford would later complain that with Conrad, and indeed all his collaborators, his contribution was overshadowed by theirs.

 

In 1904, Ford suffered an agoraphobic breakdown due to increasing financial and marital problems. He travelled to Germany to spend time with family there and undergo treatment.

 

Among Ford's classic works are The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908). These were historical novels based on the life of Catherine Howard, which Conrad, at the time, called ‘the swan song of historical romance.’

 

In 1908, Ford founded The English Review. Within its pages he published works by and promoted the careers of Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, May Sinclair, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats; and debuted works by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas.

 

Ford also wrote some outstanding poetry during his career. In the early decades of the century Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets in London valued his poetry for its treatment of modern subjects in contemporary diction as they sought to gain traction for their ideas.

 

Perhaps his most well-known work is The Good Soldier which was published in 1915. The story is set just before the carnage of WWI and narrates the tragic expatriate lives of both a British and an American couple using intricate flashbacks.

 

Ford was involved in British war propaganda as World War I ferociously unfolded across Europe. Among his colleagues were Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. In his time there he wrote two propaganda books; When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915).

 

Shortly after finishing the books he decided to enlist for the front line.  He was 41 but accepted into the Welch Regiment on 30th July 1915. 

 

Ford's poem Antwerp (1915) was praised by T.S. Eliot as "the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war".

 

Ford's experiences both on the front line in France and his previous propaganda activities provided rich seams of experience for his later four volume work Parade's End, set before, during and after World War I in England and the Front line.

 

Ford had used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer, but, after World War I, thinking it sounded too Germanic and a probable hinderance to his career, changed it to Ford Madox Ford in 1919.

 

Romantic complications for Ford were something of a speciality and during his life he embarked on several affairs. Between 1918 and 1927 he lived with Stella Bowen, an Australian artist twenty years his junior. In 1920 they had a daughter together, Julia Madox Ford.

 

In 1924, he founded The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, Ford befriended James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish.

 

Jean Rhys was initially of interest to Ford because, as she was born in the West Indies, she had, he declared, 'a terrifying insight and ... passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World'. It was also Ford who said she should change her name from Ella Williams to Jean Rhys.

 

At the time her husband was in jail for what Rhys described as ‘currency irregularities’ and so it seemed perfectly reasonable that she move in with Ford and Stella. In such close proximity they began an affair which would later end acrimoniously.

 

In Hemingway’s Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast he describes a meeting with Ford at a café in the early 1920s. His description of Ford; ‘as upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead.’

 

In reviewing his collaboration with Joseph Conrad, Ford said ‘he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am. I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway.’ At this Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.

 

In the summer of 1927, Ford had moved to Avignon in France to convert a mill into both a home and a workshop.  He called it ‘Le Vieux Moulin’.

 

In 1929, he published The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, a brisk and accessible overview of the history of English novels.

 

Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan.

 

During his career Ford wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism.  But as he himself said his works were overshadowed by those who found fame an easier friend.  Today he is well-regarded but known only for a few works rather than the grand arc of his career.

 

Ford Madox Ford died on 26th June 1939 at Deauville, France at the age of 65.

 

 

 

Ford Madox Ford – A Concise Bibliography

 

The Shifting of the Fire, as H. Ford Hueffer (1892)

The Brown Owl, as H. Ford Hueffer (1892)

The Queen Who Flew: A Fairy Tale (1894)

The Cinque Ports (1900)

The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer (1901)

Rossetti (1902)

Romance, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. (1903)

The Benefactor (1905)

The Soul of London (1905)

The Heart of the Country (1906)

The Fifth Queen (Part One of The Fifth Queen trilogy) (1906)

Privy Seal (Part Two of The Fifth Queen trilogy) (1907)

An English Girl (1907)

The Fifth Queen Crowned (Part Three of The Fifth Queen trilogy) (1908)

Mr Apollo (1908)

The Half Moon (1909)

A Call (1910)

The Portrait (1910)

The Critical Attitude, as Ford Madox Hueffer (1911)

The Simple Life Limited, as Daniel Chaucer (1911)

Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911) (extensively revised in 1935)

The Panel (1912)

The New Humpty Dumpty, as Daniel Chaucer (1912)

Henry James (1913)

Mr Fleight (1913)

The Young Lovell (1913)

Antwerp (eight-page poem) (1915)

Henry James, A Critical Study (1915).

Between St Dennis and St George (1915)

The Good Soldier (1915)

Zeppelin Nights, with Violet Hunt (1915)

The Marsden Case (1923)

Women and Men (1923)

Mr Bosphorous (1923)

The Nature of a Crime, with Joseph Conrad (1924)

Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance (1924)

Some Do Not . . . (1924)

No More Parades (1925)

A Man Could Stand Up (1926)

A Mirror To France (1926)

New York is Not America (1927)

New York Essays, Rudge (1927)

New Poems (1927)

Last Post (1928)

A Little Less Than Gods (1928)

No Enemy (1929)

The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (One Hour Series) (1929)

The English Novel (1930)

Return to Yesterday (1932)

When the Wicked Man (1932)

The Rash Act (1933)

It Was the Nightingale (1933)

Henry for Hugh (1934)

Provence, Unwin, 1935.

Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (revised version) (1935)

Portraits from Life: Memories and Criticism of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, D.H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, Ivan Turgenev, W.H. Hudson, Theodore Dreiser, A.C. Swinburne (1937)

Great Trade Route (1937)

Vive Le Roy (1937)

The March of Lit