And when we walk along
Green valleys and wide fields of reddening wheat,
Grey phantoms dog our feet
And their sere joys, voiced in a tongue outworn,
Turn all our joy to scorn.
An unsubstantial shadow dulls our light,
And when we sit to write
A ghost stands by the chair to guide the pen
Lest we should write for men
Some vivid truth, some song with potency
To set the whole world free.
And when we think, ghosts in our spirits cast
Dust of a ruined past,
Lest we should see and feel and, knowing our strength,
Rise in revolt at length
Against the iniquitous tyranny of the dead.
But still we bow the head,
And still the blind obstruction of the past
Builds over us a vast
Cold sepulchre, an incubus of stone.
IV
Heard in a Lane
When the wet earth dreamed of spring
In early February
And the first gnats danced on fragile wing,
I stood where the air was warm and still
In a deep lane under a hill
Gazing at a copse of birches
That ran uphill to meet blue sky.
From slim white trunks the tapering branches spread
To a web of rosy twigs. But from their perches
In the high hawthorn-fence
Two robins chuckled loudly, and one said
In his clear, dewy speech: “look how he stares
Like a daft owl in the sun!” The other broke
To trills of scornful laughter and then spoke:—
“These huge unfeathered creatures are so dense
That their slow vision sees
Nothing but rooted wooden trees
In those white, living flames that leap from the hill
And the crown of rosy smoke that hangs so still.”
Rain in Spring
Cloud-films that hardly stain
The sky’s blue hall
Gather, dissolve, and fall
In sudden visitations of bright rain.
Then the soft voice of seas
Is heard in the green precincts of the trees—
A long, still hushing; then the subtler hiss
Of thousand-bladed grass: then, over this,
Out of the trees’ high tops
The ticking of larger drops
That small leaf-tricklings fill
Till, one by one, whenever the wet leaves stir,
From leaf to overweighted leaf they spill,
Heavy as quicksilver.
These are the showers of spring,
Pilgrims that pass
And scatter crystal seed among the grass;
That make the still ponds sing
Delicate tunes and leave the hedgerows filled
With moist and odorous warmth, brim with blue haze
Hollows of hills and glaze
Each leaf with lacquer cunningly distilled
From sunlight; they that fling
A brightness along the edge of everything,
And the frail splendour of the rainbow build
To span six miles of meadowland, as though
Each rain-dipped flower below
Had breathed its colour up through the bright air
To hang in beauty there.
Blue Night
Blue waves of Night
Brim the warm hollows of the hills
And wrap from sight
Fields of our earth and the high fields of air.
Slowly the great bowl of the evening fills
With heavy darkness, till the fading sense
Of sight falls from us, and beneath a dense
And denser gloom all visible things are thinned
To empty shades,—to nothing. But we hear,
Mysteriously swayed, now far, now near,
The long hush of hidden rivers,
This hiss of a hidden bough that shivers
Beneath an unfelt wind.
On the Salt Marsh
Here where the lark sings overhead
And the grey sheep nibble the short salt herb
And the bugloss lifts a sky-blue head
And only the sea’s long sighs disturb
The silence spread
Like a great arch overhead;
Here where the very air is peace
And our footfalls stir not the smallest sound
On a turf as soft as the ewes’ soft fleece,
Passion has walked, till the very ground
Pulsed like a monstrous heart, and fear
And struggle and hate roared down the breeze
Till even the hill-perched farms could hear.
For see, in a spiny whin-bush bleached,
This seaweed that was flung to parch
A mile inland, when the sea thrice breached
The long sea-wall and the whins were whirled
Breast-high in a tumbling tide, wind-hurled
On a stormy night in March.
Frost in Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Lifeless, still, in the frosty air
The old stone houses round the square
Look out upon grey lawns whose grass
Is frozen to brittle blades of steel or glass;
And on black beds through whose ice-welded crust,
Hollow and hard, no gardener’s spade can thrust;
And on black branches that forget to grow
And hang benumbed and hypnotized as though
The sap stood still. The very air seems dead,
All sound dried out of it. No ringing tread
Warms the numbed silence. Even the sun himself,
An orange disk in a grey frost-laden sky,
Hangs lightless, like a plate upon a shelf.
This is not life. Some ghost of otherwhere
Takes shadowy substance from the frozen air
To hover briefly till the spell is broken,—
A dream, a passing thought, a faint word spoken.
But suddenly from a corner of the square
A shimmering fount of sound leaps clear and rare,
A small, thin, frosty cheer like tinkling glass.
Is it shouts of boys that pass
Running in file to slide on the icy kerb,
Or Dryad, sick for spring,
Wailing forlornly under the frozen herb?
O light of youth, O flower of life in death!
We listen with bated breath;
So sad, so clear the delicate, wistful spell;
Till frost lays hold on the sound and all is still.
The Naiad
Frost-bound the garden stands.
The claws of the frost are sharp upon my hands.
On the harsh lawn each blade of grass
Is tempered to a brittle spear of glass.
The fountain is crystal-hung; its waters fail.
Wilted to colourless, frail
Paper the tender flesh of the flowers.
The Dryads are gone from the tree,
For the leaves are gone, the delicate leafy towers
Dismantled, bared to the iron anatomy
Not even a bird could hide in. But hid within
In the hollow trunk, the knees drawn up to the chin,
Hugging herself each shivering Dryad sleeps,
And frozen Echo leaps
From her dream when my footfalls knock
In a motionless, soundless world
On a pathway hard as rock.
No flutter, no song of bird
Nor bubbling flute is heard,
Nor laughter of green-eyed Satyr. The Satyr, curled
In his ice-hung cave, is shaken with torpid fear;
For the days of lust are over
And cold are the loved and the lover
And the birthday of Christ draws near.
Smooth flows the stream, its shallow banks ice-coated,
And the pool where the lilies floated
Is glazed with a polished pane as black as flint
And fringed with a delicate wreath
Of crystal leaves. But a hint
Of water moving beneath
Draws my eyes. Pale, pale through the polished glass,
Sweet naked body and wavering hair pass
Pallid as death, fluid as water.
O ghost of Arethusa, Spring’s first daughter,
Beating vain hands against your crystal ceiling!
O hands imploring, O white lips appealing
Stirred and parted by syllables unheard!
See, with a sharp-edged stone I crack the pane.
The pale lips part again
And the leafless garden thrills to the delicate ring
Of a small, clear call from Naiad or hidden bird,
From water or air, crying, “The Spring! The Spring!”
Christmas Eve
Still falls the snow. White-thatched are all the groves.
Lost field, sunk roadway, and the buried heather
Lie in unbroken whiteness all together.
This is not snow of any worldly weather,
For now the Queen of Loves
Drops to our earth feather on crystal feather
Plucked from her team of doves.
Cold in the moonlight cold the hoar-frost shines
On forests lost in snow, a desolation
Like seas of foam in frozen fluctuation.
Those moon-lit fires of frosty scintillation
On boughs of frozen pines
Are jewels from the days before Creation
Dug from no mortal mines.
Row upon glassy row, from cornice white
Of boughs and thatches, hang the slim and even
Long icicles, like daggers frost-engraven.
Seven on the eaves and on the pine-bough seven
These are the swords shall smite
The heart of Mary Mother, Queen of Heaven;
For on this winter’s night
The hidden Flower of Love wakes from its dreaming,
Breaks the green sheath, uncurls each petal folded;
And silently as dew on green leaves gleaming
The world is shattered and a new world moulded
In Love’s own likeness, ere world-weary men
Have taken breath and breathed it out again.
V
The Fisherman’s Rest
Under the shining helms
Of piled white cloud
A sombre screen of elms
Is set to shroud
The little red-roofed inn
From the midday glare.
Its smoke climbs straight and thin
Through windless air,
And breaks on the sombre boughs
To an azure bloom.
But we, who know the house
And the clean-swept room,
Enter and loudly ask
Huge Mrs. Reece
To draw from the new-tapped cask
A pint apiece
Topped with a creamy crown
And clear and cool
As the trout-stream lagging brown
In its rock-carved pool.
Then, after talk and drink,
We’ll rise and go
To the brown stream’s trembling brink,
To crouch and throw
A tinselled fly, till the trout
That sulks alone
Is artfully wheedled out
From his shadowy stone.
Mrs. Reece Laughs
Laughter, with us, is no great undertaking;
A sudden wave that breaks and dies in breaking.
Laughter, with Mrs. Reece, is much less simple:
It germinates, it spreads, dimple by dimple,
From small beginnings, things of modest girth,
To formidable redundancies of mirth.
Clusters of subterranean chuckles rise,
And presently the circles of her eyes
Close into slits, and all the woman heaves,
As a great elm with all its mounds of leaves
Wallows before the storm. From hidden sources
A mustering of blind volcanic forces
Takes her and shakes her till she sobs and gapes.
Then all that load of bottled mirth escapes
In one wild crow, a lifting of huge hands
And creaking stays, a visage that expands
In scarlet ridge and furrow. Thence collapse,
A hanging head, a feeble hand that flaps
An apron-end to stir an air and waft
A steaming face … and Mrs. Reece has laughed.
VI
Expostulation to Helen
Helen, I’d be, if I could have my wish,
A pool among the rocks where small, shy fish
Gleam to and fro, and green and rosy weed
Sways its long fringes. So I should not heed
Your comings and your goings nor each whim
So skilfully contrived to torture him,
Your chosen fool. And still, as now, each day
To kneel and on my crystal face below
Gaze self-entranced, as now; and I should grow
Beautiful with your beauty, and you would be
More beautiful for the crystal lights in me.
But when, self-surfeited, you went away
I should not care, nor could the blown sea-spray,
Blurring your image all the winter through,
Vex the pure, passionless water, strictly true
To its own being. Only the weeds would swing
Rosy and green, and the ripples, ring on ring,
Tremble and wink above the gleaming fish.
So would I be, if I could have my wish.
To Helen With a Bottle of Scent
Sage titillator of a thousand noses,
Old Hafiz the Perfumer, years ago
Boiled down two gardensful of yellow roses
And skimmed the gold froth from the sumptuous brew;
Then strained it out into a crystal vat
To work and settle during certain moons
As ordered in the thirteenth Caliphate;
Then boiled again and stirred with silver spoons
Till shrunk to half; and so, by slow degrees,
Boiled and laid up and boiled again, till fined
To pure quintessence purged of subtlest lees.
Then, death at hand, he chose with artist’s mind
This curious flask embossed with bees and flowers,
And, drop by drop, with trembling hand distilled
The priceless attar, whose insidious powers,
Helen, I place at your command, though chilled
With aching doubts lest you, while up in town,
Shedding its sunny fragrance on the air,
Should trap the dashing Captain Archie Brown
Or twang the heartstrings of some millionaire.
Serenade
I am the voice in the night, the voice of darkness;
Listen, O shy one, listen, my voice shall find you.
As the rose springs from the earth,
So love blooms from the dark unknown.
Hark to the voice of love that springs in the darkness.
O timid, O craven.
Though you have barred your doors against earth and heaven
You shall not escape me.
See, like a thin blue flame
My voice burns up to your window,
Steals through the fast-closed casement, stirs in the curtains,
Flushes to rose the pale and delicate lamplight.
O fear, O wonder, the bright flame circles about you,
Flashes above you, burns deep down to your heart.
You struggle, you cry, cry out of a heart tormented:
“Ah Te
rror, ah Death, have mercy!”
O timid and craven heart, it is love that takes you:
Give yourself up to the flame. I am life, not death.
O slim moon veiled in the cloud, shy fawn in the thicket,
Lily hid in the water, come from your hiding.
Why is your hair like silk and your flesh like a flower?
Not for your own delight nor the cold delight of your mirror:
Not for the kisses of death.
I am a cry in the night, a song in the darkness.
O timid, O craven,
Vain, how vain is your hiding.
For the night brims up with my singing, my voice enfolds you,
And how shall you flee when the whole night turns to music?
The House of Love
As a bird’s wing,
Against the soft warm body gathering
Its folded feathers, closes and is still
When the wind-wandering bird has dropped to rest
On the green bough beside her hidden nest;
So my blind will
Wanders no more, nor beats the empty air,
Nor follows hot-foot to their phantom lair
Beguilement of the ear, lust of the eye
And all such pageantry
As lures men from fulfilment of desire;
Wanders no more, but entering that small house
Which Love has made his palace, lights the fire,
Bars door and shutter, sets the wine and bread
Where the tall candles shed
Soft lustre, and stands ready to carouse
With her who is the mistress of the house.
Autumn
All day the plane-trees have shaken from shadow to sun
Their long depending boughs, and one by one
From early-falling limes the yellow leaves
Have eddied to earth. But still warm noon deceives
Old fears of death. But when with the twilight came