He spoke, and the ghost, who knew not
How he plagued that man,
Ceased, and the lamp was lit again,
And the dumb clock ticked again,
And the reign of peace began.
DEATH OF THE FARMER
‘What ails the Master, do I think?
Undoubtedly,’ the Ox cried, ‘drink,
That stupefies the spirit, dims
The reason, dulls the limbs.’
‘He’s done no good about the farm
These fifteen years, but only harm.
As well you know,’ the old Ass said,
‘We often wish him dead.
‘How hopefully at his Son’s birth
We preached the reign of Heaven on Earth
And sang him praises high and low.
Ay, that was long ago!
‘Still, to ensure domestic peace,
We tell the turkeys, ducks and geese:
“He rules, omniscient and great,
Proof-armoured against fate.”
‘“Granted,” we say, “he’s no more seen
Tending fat sheep in pastures green,
Or scattering at the break of morn
Largesse, profuse, of corn.
‘“Yet, from some glorious inner room,
He guides the cowman, steward or groom,
And posts his ledger, page by page,
In joy or solemn rage.
‘“Our feeding and our water-time,
Our breeding and our slaughter-time,
The dyke, the hedge, the plough, the cart –
These thoughts lie next his heart.”
‘The simple birds believe it true,
What now, poor poultry, will they do,
Dazed to confusion, when the glum
Gloved undertakers come,
‘Tilting the coffin past the pond,
The ricks, the clamps, the yard beyond,
Skirting the midden-heap with care,
Then out, we know not where?’
OVID IN DEFEAT
The grammar of Love’s Art
Ovid still teaches,
Grotesque in Pontic snows
And bearskin breeches.*
‘Let man be ploughshare,
Woman his field;
Flatter, beguile, assault,
And she must yield.
‘Snatch the morning rose
Fresh from the wayside,
Deflower it in haste
Ere the dew be dried.’
Ovid instructs you how
Neighbours’ lands to plough;
‘Love smacks the sweeter
For a broken vow.’
Follows his conclusion
Of which the gist is
The cold ‘post coitum
Homo tristis’.
Thereat despairing,
Other Ovids hallow
Ploughshare in rust
And field left fallow,
Or, since in Logic books
Proposed they find,
‘Where two ride together,
One rides behind’,
This newer vision
Of love’s revealed,
Woman as the ploughshare,
Man, her field.
Man as the plucked flower
Trampled in mire,
When his unfair fair
Has eased desire.
One sort of error
Being no worse than other,
O, hug this news awhile,
My amorous brother,
That the wheel of Fortune
May be turned complete,
Conflict, domination,
Due defeat.
Afterwards, when you weary
Of false analogy,
Offending both philosophy
And physiology,
You shall see in woman
Neither more nor less
Than you yourself demand
As your soul’s dress.
Thought, though not man’s thought,
Deeds, but her own,
Art, by no comparisons
Shaken or thrown.
Plough then salutes plough
And rose greets rose:
While Ovid in toothache goes
Stamping through old snows.
DIVERSIONS
TO AN EDITOR
(A Satiric Complaint in the Old Style)
John Cole, Esquire,
It is my desire,
If it be your pleasure,
To be paid full measure*
For the poetic fire
And the fantastic treasure
Which the Muses inspire:
So much of it as I
Committed last July
To your mercurial eye.
You accepted those verses
Neither with sneers nor curses,
But with hearty laudations,
Jolly recommendations
Of all my late creations.
And I thought this strange, for you
Never publish a review,
Even with faint damnations,
Of the work I now do.
Was this a changed view?
I would have you remember
That poem grave and sober
Which you printed in October
(No, indeed, in September),
About a Glass Palace,
And the curious rambles
Of a girl named Alice;
Also Burrs and Brambles,
How the venomous snakes
Slide in the prickly brakes
With cunning and malice.
It was then my desire,
Had it been your pleasure,
To be paid full measure.
I was worthy of my hire,
John Cole, Esquire!
But, indeed, you must remember
How, when November
To its close had run,
I sent you a dun.
(For the butcher and baker
And candlestick-maker
Had me on the run.)
You sent me back fair phrases,
Like roses and daisies,
But of guineas not one.
Out went November,
In came December,
And you printed my verse
Of the ghostly curse,
Blown lamp and cold ember,
In phrase simple and terse.
John Cole, Esquire,
It was then my desire,
Had it been your pleasure,
To be paid in just measure:
I swear I am no liar.
Now the old year is gone,
Spring is drawing on,
And what season is worse
For a poet’s purse?
I tell you, none.
The milkmen, the coalman,
And the oilman, a droll man,
Are knocking at my door
Louder and worse and more;
And had I the courage
I would charge you demurrage
On the poems yet sleeping
In your close keeping:
That one of the farm ditches,
Of the straw and the fitches,
Where the elder beasts, unweeping,
Scorn on their god are heaping,
And that of Ovid’s Breeches,
With the strife that vexes
The embattled sexes
When arrogance itches –
John Cole, Esquire,
I no longer desire
To await your pleasure,
With ‘At your leisure!’
Pay me now my hire!
I hear on every part
That you have a kind heart
And a lofty soul,
And passions in control;
But though your heart be kind,
Though your soul be wed to Art,
Though your honour be whole,
Does that help me to find
My bread, meat, and coal,
My coffee and my
roll,
My candlesticks and oil?
No one can call me lazy,
For I toil when I toil:
I keep from any broil,
I am merry and easy,
A Johnny-pluck-the-daisy;
But even good tempers spoil.
Sir, though it may appear
An easy thing to rear
Four children on a clear
Two hundred pounds a year,
I think this is no reason
Why at the present season
You should praise my verse,
But draw tight your purse.
For your private commendations
Or secret approbations
Are scant fare to live at ease on:
They make the case worse.
Then John Cole, Esquire,
If it be your pleasure,
It is now my desire
To be paid in full measure,
According to my hire.
Addressed to John Lynn Cole, Esquire, From The World’s End, Islip, Oxfordshire.
Mr. ‘John Cole’ took the above in good part, and after a time replied with a cheque and acceptable explanations of the delays of which the poem complains.
THE KINGFISHER’S RETURN
A song for the children at Field Place, where Shelley was born; made to celebrate the Kingfisher’s return from being stuffed. This is a variation on a simpler version by my friend, Molly Adams.
Long had our Kingfisher been
Barred from his meadows green,
From green waters running deep
Where the dumb fish glide and sleep;
Reeds in their ranks keep
The banks on either side,
Weeds divide and surge wide
As the miller’s boat goes by;
Kingfishers, when they die,
To far Cloud-Cuckoo pastures fly,
But this Kingfisher makes a home
Where little children go and come,
With nosegays welcoming
The advent of their King,
This ancient regent
Of an excellent
Rainbow Land.
Join we hand in hand
By the river strand,
To dance for our playmate
Till the day grows late,
Greeting him with this song
A long while planned.
LOVE WITHOUT HOPE
Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.
TRAVELLER’S CURSE AFTER MISDIRECTION
(from the Welsh)
May they stumble, stage by stage
On an endless pilgrimage,
Dawn and dusk, mile after mile,
At each and every step, a stile;
At each and every stile, withal,
May they catch their feet and fall;
At each and every fall they take
May a bone within them break;
And may the bone that breaks within
Not be, for variation’s sake,
Now rib, now thigh, now arm, now shin,
But always, without fail, THE NECK.
TILLY KETTLE
His name was Tilly Kettle,
A painter of Joshua Reynolds’ school.
It was he consolidated Plassey,
It was he consolidated Plassey
And enlarged the English Rule.
He despised the Mughal painters.
Their work, he avowed, was incorrect;
Thus he consolidated Plassey,
Thus he consolidated Plassey
And won Lord Clive’s respect.
He painted Rajahs and Begums,
He asked and obtained a huge commission.
It was he consolidated Plassey,
It was he consolidated Plassey
And killed a great tradition.
Full-length Rajahs in their robes,
He measured them both with rule and eye
As he consolidated Plassey,
As he consolidated Plassey
And worked his palette dry.
‘Hand on hip,’ said Tilly Kettle,
‘And drapery in the Italian style,
For you learned a lesson at Plassey,
For you learned a lesson at Plassey,
Must last you a little while.’
He was not a Reynolds nor a Gainsborough,
His art, he confessed, was of baser metal,
But he consolidated Plassey,
But he consolidated Plassey,
And his name was Tilly Kettle.
The conclusion of this ballad,
Indian wit, not mine, should settle;
But the moral, if any, of Plassey,
But the moral, if any, of Plassey,
Is the moral of Tilly Kettle.
THE COLLEGE DEBATE
‘That this House approves the Trend of Modern Poetry.’
(From a Letter addressed to Edith Sitwell)
So, as I say, the Dean of Saul Hall, shuffling
His centenarian slippered feet and snuffling
Spoke somewhat heatedly against the motion.
With the same working of his Adam’s apple
That spells ‘You sir, why were you not in Chapel?’
He gibed at modern poets, ‘Show me one
Knee-high in stature to a Tennyson,
Shoe-high to a Wordsworth. No, for decadence
Restless and mean rots the whole present tense.
What has there been written worth a reader’s while
These thirty years? Young coxcombs, dare you smile,
Neglectful of those grandlier looming shapes?
Yours is an age of pigmies, dwarfs and apes.’
With condemnatory gesture his speech ran,
A dangerous outburst for so frail a man.
With snowy beard half thawed in streaks of yellow,
The Head Librarian rose; I like the old fellow.
He sympathized with much the Dean had said,
Yet doubted Albion’s glory was quite dead.
True, Hardy was no poet: to his mind,
‘A clumsier craftsman you could scarcely find,’
And Housman’s gift was slight and his thought weak,
And Doughty’s metric sense was far to seek,
‘Yet two grand singers,’ he said, ‘still survive:
Watson still writes, Bridges is yet alive –
Two perfect lyrists; but, sir, I’ll agree,
These two removed, farewell to Poesie.’
A junior don takes up the argument;
He ventures, quite politely, to dissent.
Hardy and Housman he defends, aware
Further of Brooke, Squire, Flecker, De la Mare,
Masefield: thus far most cordially, but then
He has no patience with the younger men,
This post-war group. Sassoon is crude and queer,
And Eliot’s mad or wholly insincere,
And Free Verse isn’t Poetry, that’s clear,
Blunden shows promise, but he’s quite small beer,
There’s D. H. Lawrence doesn’t write a bit well,
While as for that fantastic…
When they reached you, Edith, I couldn’t wait
To hear the accustomed end of such debate,
But I saw champions bouncing from their seats
Prepared to justify your wickedest feats:
First to dispose of Tennyson and his peers,
Then pressing their attack through recent years
To point where Watson failed, where Bridges failed,
Hardy and Housman, one by one detailed,
Sniping at Brooke and Masefield like as not,
Sadly backnumbered, hardly worth their shot,
With patronage for doti
ng De la Mare,
Since newer Genius dawns. Lo here! Lo there!
On calm days, Edith, I don’t give a curse
For this poetic better, equal, worse,
Not quick to side with don or head-librarian
Or undergraduate or centenarian
In their fixed laws of Taste (which disagree).
I only know what poetry sorts with me
From mood to mood, and sometimes know the reason:
But poems alter by the clock and season
As men do, with the same caprice as they
Towards hate or concord. Tennyson, did they say?
I admit he gratified his age, but blame
The pseudo-Tennyson who outlives the same
With greed of incense and prolonged restriction
Of metrics, matter, ethical outlook, diction,
And critics who compare rotten with ripe,
The modern Alfred with his prototype,
Holding I don’t know which in pained abhorrence
Because he never wrote like D. H. Lawrence;
Cursing the ’sixties for not eulogizing
The mournful star of Hardy, then first rising.
(Engrossed with what emasculate revision
Of open bawdry, bold manslaughter, Vision?)
Now Hardy’s honoured? Though I’ve not forgotten
The Elizabethan tag, ‘Medlars when rotten
Most fit for eating’, that’s not true of peaches
Like Tennyson was, and though old Hardy reaches
A hand back to his boyhood, who can claim
That this young Hardy lives and moves, the same,
Unshaken both in purpose and technique,
When Swinburne droops and Browning’s phantom-weak
And ‘Gentlemen, the bower we shrined to Tennyson
Lies roof-wracked’ and ‘the spider is sole denizen’;*
Who knows, this dour old Hardy whom we preach
May rot, with us, like the most juicy peach!
Well, that’s my calmer mood, and where’s the man
Will not abstain from curses while he can?
But once I start in anger to defend
The reputation of a poet-friend,
Yours for example, I forget all that.
Often, indeed quite recently, I have sat
Sceptered and orbed the absolutist throne,
Have upped this favourite, downed that other one,
This absolutely good, that utterly bad.
Playing the god, what merry times I have had!
But afterwards paid for each proud excess
With change of heart, fatigue, mere foolishness.
SERGEANT-MAJOR MONEY
(1917)
It wasn’t our battalion, but we lay alongside it,
So the story is as true as the telling is frank.
They hadn’t one Line-officer left, after Arras,
Except a batty major and the Colonel, who drank.