Ken’s is the gabled house facing the Castle wall.
When first I came upon him there
Suddenly, on the half-lit stair,
I think I hardly found a trace
Of likeness to a human face
In his. And I said then
If in His image God made men
Some other must have made poor Ken –
But for his eyes which looked at you
As two red, wounded stars might do.
He scarcely spoke, you scarcely heard,
His voice broke off in little jars
To tears sometimes. An uncouth bird
He seemed as he ploughed up the street,
Groping, with knarred, high-lifted feet
And arms thrust out as if to beat
Always against a threat of bars.
And oftener than not there’d be
A child just higher than his knee
Trotting beside him. Through his dim
Long twilight this, at least, shone clear,
That all the children and the deer,
Whom every day he went to see
Out in the park, belonged to him.
‘God help the folk that next him sits
He fidgets so, with his poor wits,’
The neighbours said on Sunday nights
When he would go to Church to ‘see the lights!’
Although for these he used to fix
His eyes upon a crucifix
In a dark corner, staring on
Till everybody else had gone.
And sometimes, in his evil fits,
You could not move him from his chair –
You did not look at him as he sat there,
Biting his rosary to bits.
While pointing to the Christ he tried to say,
‘Take it away.’
Nothing was dead:
He said ‘a bird’ if he picked up a broken wing,
A perished leaf or any such thing
Was just ‘a rose’; and once when I had said
He must not stand and knock there any more,
He left a twig on the mat outside my door.
Not long ago
The last thrush stiffened in the snow,
While black against a sullen sky
The sighing pines stood by.
But now the wind has left our rattled pane
To flutter the hedge-sparrow’s wing,
The birches in the wood are red again
And only yesterday
The larks went up a little way to sing
What lovers say
Who loiter in the lanes to-day;
The buds begin to talk of May
With learned rooks on city trees,
And if God please
With all of these
We, too, shall see another Spring.
But in that red brick barn upon the hill
I wonder – can one own the deer,
And does one walk with children still
As one did here –
Do roses grow
Beneath those twenty windows in a row –
And if some night
When you have not seen any light
They cannot move you from your chair
What happens there?
I do not know.
So, when they took
Ken to that place, I did not look
After he called and turned on me
His eyes. These I shall see –
A Quoi Bon Dire
Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead
But I.
So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that say Good-bye too;
And everybody sees that I am old
But you.
And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
That nobody can love their way again
While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.
The Quiet House
When we were children Old Nurse used to say
The house was like an auction or a fair
Until the lot of us were safe in bed.
It has been quiet as the country-side
Since Ted and Janey and then Mother died
And Tom crossed Father and was sent away.
After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head,
Poor Father, and he does not care
For people here, or to go anywhere.
To get away to Aunt’s for that week-end
Was hard enough; (since then, a year ago,
He scarcely lets me slip out of his sight –)
At first I did not like my cousin’s friend,
I did not think I should remember him:
His voice has gone, his face is growing dim
And if I like him now I do not know.
He frightened me before he smiled –
He did not ask me if he might –
He said that he would come one Sunday night,
He spoke to me as if I were a child.
No year has been like this that has just gone by;
It may be that what Father says is true,
If things are so it does not matter why;
But everything has burned and not quite through.
The colours of the world have turned
To flame, the blue, the gold has burned
In what used to be such a leaden sky.
When you are burned quite through you die.
Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet;
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife:
And the crimson haunts you everywhere –
Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have
struck our stair
As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.
I think that my soul is red
Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower:
But when these are dead
They have had their hour.
I shall have had mine, too,
For from head to feet,
I am burned and stabbed half through,
And the pain is deadly sweet.
The things that kill us seem
Blind to the death they give:
It is only in our dream
The things that kill us live.
The room is shut where Mother died,
The other rooms are as they were,
The world goes on the same outside,
The sparrows fly across the Square,
The children play as we four did there,
The trees grow green and brown and bare,
The sun shines on the dead Church spire,
And nothing lives here but the fire,
While Father watches from his chair
Day follows day
The same, or now and then, a different grey,
Till, like his hair,
Which Mother said was wavy once and bright,
They will all turn white.
To-night I heard a bell again –
Outside it was the same mist of fine rain,
The lamps just lighted down the long, dim street,
No one for me –
I think it is myself I go there to meet:
I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be!
Madeleine in Church
Here, in the darkness, where his plaster saint
Stands nearer than God stands to our distress,
And one small candle shines, but not so faint
As the far lights of everlastingness,
I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day,
Where Christ is hanging, rather pray
To something more like my own clay,
Not too divine;
For once, perhaps, my little saint
Before he got his niche and crown
Had one short stroll about the town;
It brings him closer, just that taint –
And anyone can wash the paint
Off our poor faces, his and mine!
Is that why I see Monty now? equal to any saint, poor boy, as good as
gold,
But still, with just the proper trace
Of earthliness on his shining wedding face;
And then gone suddenly blank and old
Stuart got his, hands down, of course
Crowning like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse:
But Monty took it hard. All said and done I liked him best, –
He was the first, he stands out clearer than the rest.
It seems so funny all we other rips
Should have immortal souls; Monty and Redge quite damnably
Keep theirs afloat while we go down like scuttled ships. –
It’s funny too, how easily we sink,
One might put up a monument, I think,
To half the world and cut across it ‘Lost at Sea!’
I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him to-night –
No, it’s no use this penny light –
Or my poor saint with his tin-pot crown –
The trees of Calvary are where they were,
When we are sure that we can spare
The tallest, let us go and strike it down
And leave the other two still standing there.
I, too, would ask Him to remember me
If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see.
Oh! quiet Christ who never knew
The poisonous fangs that bite us through
And make us do the things we do,
See how we suffer and fight and die,
How helpless and how low we lie,
God holds You, and You hang so high,
Though no one looking long at You,
Can think You do not suffer too,
But up there, from Your still, star-lighted tree
What can You know, what can You really see
Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!
We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit
Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning
in the sun,
Without paying so heavily for it
That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were
almost one.
I could hardly bear
The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the
dusk,
The thick, close voice of musk,
The jessamine music on the thin night air,
Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere –
The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of
my own hair,
Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the
high seat
Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat
My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the
street.
I think my body was my soul,
And when we are made thus
Who shall control
Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet,
Who shall teach us
To thrust the world out of our heart; to say, till perhaps in death,
When the race is run,
And it is forced from us with our last breath
‘Thy will be done’?
If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless
things,
As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings,
Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings!
The temperate, well-worn smile
The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own:
And afterwards the child’s, for a little while,
With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes
So soon to change, and make you feel how quick
The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick –
(How does one though?) quite early on,
Of long green pastures under placid skies,
One might be walking now with patient truth.
What did we ever care for it, who have asked for youth,
When, oh! my God! this is going or has gone?
There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen,
With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat,
The dainty head held high against the painted green
And throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half
sweet.
Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply Spring
To me to-day: a radiance on the wall,
So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing
Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small,
Sapless and lined like a dead leaf,
All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief!
And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair –
Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay –?
Or could – with any one of the old crew,
But oh! these boys! the solemn way
They take you, and the things they say –
When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two –
Although at heart perhaps – God! if it were
Only the face, only the hair!
If Jim had written to me as he did to-day
A year ago – and now it leaves me cold –
I know what this means, old, old old!
Et avec ça – mais on a vécu, tout se paie.
That is not always true: there was my Mother – (well at least the dead
are free!)
Yoked to the man that Father was; yoked to the woman I am,
Monty, too;
The little portress at the Convent School, stewing in hell so
patiently;
The poor, fair boy who shot himself at Aix. And what of me – and
what of me?
But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No, one cannot
see
How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity.
If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who
went or never came;
Here, on our little patch of this great earth, the sun of any
darkened day,
Not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees of last
year’s May,
No shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday;
For every hour they slant across the hedge a different way,
The shadows are never the same.
‘Find rest in Him!’ One knows the parsons’ tags –
Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of
baa-ing sheep:
Yes, it may be, when He was shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the
bleating soul in us to rags,
For so He giveth His beloved sleep.
Oh! He will take us stripped and done,
Driven into His heart. So we are won:
Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting
wings –
I do not envy Him his victories. His arms are full of broken
things.
But I shall not be in them. Let Him take
The finer ones, the easier to break.
And they are not gone, yet, for me, the lights, the colours, the
perfumes,
Though now they speak rather in sumptuous rooms,
In silks and in gem-like wines;
Here,
even, in this corner where my little candle shines
And overhead the lancet-window glows
With golds and crimsons you could almost drink
To know how jewels taste, just as I used to think
There was the scent in every red and yellow rose
Of all the sunsets. But this place is grey,
And much too quiet. No one here,
Why, this is awful, this is fear!
Nothing to see, no face,
Nothing to hear except your heart beating in space
As if the world was ended! Dead at last!
Dead soul, dead body, tied together fast.
These to go on with and alone, to the slow end:
No one to sit with, really, or speak to, friend to friend:
Out of the long procession, black or white or red,
No one left now to say ‘Still I am here, then see you, dear, lay here
your head.’
Only the doll’s house looking on the Park
To-night, all nights, I know, when the man puts the lights out,
very dark.
With upstairs, in the blue and gold box of a room, just the maids’
footsteps overhead,
Then utter silence and the empty world – the room – the bed –
The corpse! No, not quite dead, while this cries out in
me,
But nearly: very soon to be
A handful of forgotten dust –
There must be someone. Christ! there must,
Tell me there will be someone. Who?
If there were no one else, could it be You?
How old was Mary out of whom You cast
So many devils? Was she young or perhaps for years
She had sat staring, with dry eyes, at this and that man going past
Till suddenly she saw You on the steps of Simon’s house
And stood and looked at You through tears.
I think she must have known by those
The thing, for what it was that had come to her.
For some of us there is a passion, I suppose,
So far from earthly cares and earthly fears
That in its stillness you can hardly stir
Or in its nearness, lift your hand,
So great that you have simply got to stand