I am that fantasy which race has wrought

Of mundane chance-material. I am time

Paeaned by the senses five like bells that chime.

 

I am that cramped and crumbling house of clay

Where mansoul weaves the secret webs of thought.

Venturer—automaton—I cannot tell

What powers and instincts animate and betray

And do their dreamwork in me. Seed and star,

Sown by the wind, in spirit I am far

From self, the dull control with whom I dwell.

 

Also I am ancestral. Aeons ahead

And ages back, both son and sire I live

Mote-like between the unquickened and the dead—

From whom I take, and unto whom I give.

The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes

Till beauty shines in all that we can see.

War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,

And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.

 

Horror of wounds and anger at the foe,

And loss of things desired; all these must pass.

We are the happy legion, for we know

Time’s but a golden wind that shakes the grass.

 

There was an hour when we were loth to part

From life we longed to share no less than others.

Now, having claimed this heritage of heart,

What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?

Give me your hand, my brother, search my face;

Look in these eyes lest I should think of shame;

For we have made an end of all things base.

We are returning by the road we came.

 

Your lot is with the ghosts of soldiers dead,

And I am in the field where men must fight.

But in the gloom I see your laurell’d head

And through your victory I shall win the light.

All night the flares go up; the Dragon sings

And beats upon the dark with furious wings;

And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,

Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;

He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,

And hurls their martyred music toppling down.

 

Yet, though the slain are homeless as the breeze,

Vocal are they, like storm-bewilder’d seas.

Their faces are the fair, unshrouded night,

And planets are their eyes, their ageless dreams.

Tenderly stooping earthward from their height,

They wander in the dusk with chanting streams,

And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms up-flung,

To hail the burning heavens they left unsung.

She triumphs, in the vivid green

Where sun and quivering foliage meet;

And in each soldier’s heart serene;

When death stood near them they have seen

The radiant forests where her feet

Move on a breeze of silver sheen.

 

And they are fortunate, who fight

For gleaming landscapes swept and shafted

And crowned by cloud pavilions white;

Hearing such harmonies as might

Only from Heaven be downward wafted—

Voices of victory and delight.

Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,

Not in the woeful crimson of men slain,

But shining as a garden; come with the streaming

Banners of dawn and sundown after rain.

 

I want to fill my gaze with blue and silver,

Radiance through living roses, spires of green

Rising in young-limbed copse and lovely wood

Where the hueless wind passes and cries unseen.

 

I am not sad; only I long for lustre.

I am tired of the greys and browns and the leafless ash.

I would have hours that move like a glitter of dancers

Far from the angry guns that boom and flash.

 

Return, musical, gay with blossom and fleetness,

Days when my sight shall be clear and my heart rejoice;

 

Come from the sea with breadth of approaching brightness,

When the blithe wind laughs on the hills with uplifted voice.

When I’m among a blaze of lights,

With tawdry music and cigars

And women dawdling through delights,

And officers in cocktail bars,

Sometimes I think of garden nights

And elm trees nodding at the stars.

 

I dream of a small firelit room

With yellow candles burning straight,

And glowing pictures in the gloom,

And kindly books that hold me late.

Of things like these I choose to think

When I can never be alone:

Then someone says ‘Another drink?’

And turns my living heart to stone.

Through darkness curves a spume of falling flares

That flood the field with shallow, blanching light.

  The huddled sentry stares

  On gloom at war with white,

  And white receding slow, submerged in gloom.

  Guns into mimic thunder burst and boom,

  And mirthless laughter rakes the whistling night.

The sentry keeps his watch where no one stirs

But the brown rats, the nimble scavengers.

I lived my days apart,

Dreaming fair songs for God;

By the glory in my heart

Covered and crowned and shod.

 

Now God is in the strife,

And I must seek Him there,

Where death outnumbers life,

And fury smites the air.

 

I walk the secret way

With anger in my brain.

O music through my clay,

When will you sound again?

To these I turn, in these I trust—

Brother Lead and Sister Steel.

To his blind power I make appeal,

I guard her beauty clean from rust.

 

He spins and burns and loves the air,

And splits a skull to win my praise;

But up the nobly marching days

She glitters naked, cold and fair.

 

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:

That in good fury he may feel

The body where he sets his heel

Quail from your downward darting kiss.

Darkness: the rain sluiced down; the mire was deep;

It was past twelve on a mid-winter night,

When peaceful folk in beds lay snug asleep;

There, with much work to do before the light,

We lugged our clay-sucked boots as best we might

Along the trench; sometimes a bullet sang,

And droning shells burst with a hollow bang;

We were soaked, chilled and wretched, every one;

Darkness; the distant wink of a huge gun.

 

I turned in the black ditch, loathing the storm;

A rocket fizzed and burned with blanching flare,

And lit the face of what had been a form

Floundering in mirk. He stood before me there;

I say that He was Christ; stiff in the glare,

And leaning forward from His burdening task,

Both arms supporting it; His eyes on mine

Stared from the woeful head that seemed a mask

Of mortal pain in Hell’s unholy shine.

No thorny crown, only a woollen cap

He wore—an English soldier, white and strong,

Who loved his time like any simple chap,

Good days of work and sport and homely song;

Now he has learned that nights are very long,

And dawn a watching of the windowed sky.

But to the end, unjudging, he’ll endure

Horror and pain, not uncontent to die

That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.

 

He faced me, reeling in his weariness,

Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.

I say that He was Christ, who wrought to bless

All groping things with freedom bright as air,

And with His mercy washed and made them fair.

Then the flame sank, and all grew black as pitch,

While we began to struggle along the ditch;

And someone flung his burden in the muck,

Mumbling: ‘O Christ Almighty, now I’m stuck!’

He turned to me with his kind, sleepy gaze

And fresh face slowly brightening to the grin

That sets my memory back to summer days,

With twenty runs to make, and last man in.

He told me he’d been having a bloody time

In trenches, crouching for the crumps to burst,

While squeaking rats scampered across the slime

And the grey palsied weather did its worst.

But as he stamped and shivered in the rain,

My stale philosophies had served him well;

Dreaming about his girl had sent his brain

Blanker than ever—she’d no place in Hell. . . .

‘Good God!’ he laughed, and slowly filled his pipe,

Wondering ‘why he always talked such tripe’.

So Davies wrote: ‘This leaves me in the pink’.

Then scrawled his name: ‘Your loving sweetheart, Willie’.

With crosses for a hug. He’d had a drink

Of rum and tea; and, though the barn was chilly,

For once his blood ran warm; he had pay to spend.

Winter was passing; soon the year would mend.

 

But he couldn’t sleep that night; stiff in the dark

He groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm,

And how he’d go as cheerful as a lark

In his best suit, to wander arm in arm

With brown-eyed Gwen, and whisper in her ear

The simple, silly things she liked to hear.

 

And then he thought: to-morrow night we trudge

Up to the trenches, and my boots are rotten.

Five miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge,

And everything but wretchedness forgotten.

To-night he’s in the pink; but soon he’ll die.

And still the war goes on—he don’t know why.

Three hours ago he blundered up the trench,

Sliding and poising, groping with his boots;

Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls

With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk.

He couldn’t see the man who walked in front;

Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet

Stepping along barred trench boards, often splashing

Wretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.

 

Voices would grunt ‘Keep to your right—make way!’

When squeezing past some men from the front-line:

White faces peered, puffing a point of red;

Candles and braziers glinted through the chinks

And curtain-flaps of dug-outs; then the gloom

Swallowed his sense of sight; he stooped and swore

Because a sagging wire had caught his neck.

 

A flare went up; the shining whiteness spread

And flickered upward, showing nimble rats

And mounds of glimmering sand-bags, bleached with rain;

Then the slow silver moment died in dark.

The wind came posting by with chilly gusts

And buffeting at corners, piping thin.

And dreary through the crannies; rifle-shots

Would split and crack and sing along the night,

And shells came calmly through the drizzling air

To burst with hollow bang below the hill.

Three hours ago he stumbled up the trench;

Now he will never walk that road again:

He must be carried back, a jolting lump

Beyond all need of tenderness and care.

 

He was a young man with a meagre wife

And two small children in a Midland town;

He showed their photographs to all his mates,

And they considered him a decent chap

Who did his work and hadn’t much to say,

And always laughed at other people’s jokes

Because he hadn’t any of his own.

 

That night when he was busy at his job

Of piling bags along the parapet,

He thought how slow time went, stamping his feet

And blowing on his fingers, pinched with cold.

He thought of getting back by half-past twelve,

And tot of rum to send him warm to sleep

In draughty dug-out frowsty with the fumes

Of coke, and full of snoring weary men.

 

He pushed another bag along the top,

Craning his body outward; then a flare

Gave one white glimpse of No Man’s Land and wire;

And as he dropped his head the instant split

His startled life with lead, and all went out.

I’d heard fool-heroes brag of where they’d been,

With stories of the glories that they’d seen.

But you, good simple soldier, seasoned well

In woods and posts and crater-lines of hell,

Who dodge remembered ‘crumps’ with wry grimace,

Endured experience in your queer, kind face,

Fatigues and vigils haunting nerve-strained eyes,

And both your brothers killed to make you wise;

You had no babbling phrases; what you said

Was like a message from the maimed and dead.

But memory brought the voice I knew, whose note

Was muted when they shot you in the throat;

And still you whisper of the war, and find

Sour jokes for all those horrors left behind.

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin

And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks

Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;

‘We’re sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!’

 

I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, sweet Home’,

And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

Down in the hollow there’s the whole Brigade

Camped in four groups: through twilight falling slow

I hear a sound of mouth-organs, ill-played,

And murmur of voices, gruff, confused, and low.

Crouched among thistle-tufts I’ve watched the glow

Of a blurred orange sunset flare and fade;

And I’m content. To-morrow we must go

To take some cursèd Wood . . . O world God made!

 

July 3rd, 1916.

When roaring gloom surged inward and you cried,

Groping for friendly hands, and clutched, and died,

Like racing smoke, swift from your lolling head

Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

 

Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair

Can bring me no report of how you fare,

Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way

Up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day,

Slow-rising, saintless, confident and kind—

Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.

Trudging by Corbie Ridge one winter’s night,

(Unless old hearsay memories tricked his sight)

Along the pallid edge of the quiet sky

He watched a nosing lorry grinding on,

And straggling files of men; when these were gone,

A double limber and six mules went by,

Hauling the rations up through ruts and mud

To trench-lines digged two hundred years ago.

Then darkness hid them with a rainy scud,

And soon he saw the village lights below.

 

But when he’d told his tale, an old man said

That he’d seen soldiers pass along that hill;

‘Poor silent things, they were the English dead

Who came to fight in France and got their fill.’

The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back

They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought

In a just cause: they lead the last attack

On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought

New right to breed an honourable race,

They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.’

 

‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply.

For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;

Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find

A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.’

And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’

I’d been on duty from two till four.

I went and stared at the dug-out door.

Down in the frowst I heard them snore.

‘Stand to!’ Somebody grunted and swore.

  Dawn was misty; the skies were still;

  Larks were singing, discordant, shrill;

  They seemed happy; but I felt ill.

Deep in water I splashed my way

Up the trench to our bogged front line.

Rain had fallen the whole damned night.

O Jesus, send me a wound to-day,

And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine,

And get my bloody old sins washed white!

He staggered in from night and frost and fog

And lampless streets: he’d guzzled like a hog

And drunk till he was dazed. And now he came

To hear—he couldn’t call to mind the name—

But he’d been given a ticket for the show,

And thought he’d (hiccup) chance his luck and go.

 

The hall swam in his eyes, and soaring light

Was dazzling splendid after the dank night.

He sat and blinked, safe in his cushioned seat,

And licked his lips; he’d like a brandy, neat.

 

‘Who is the King of Glory?’ they were saying,

He pricked his ears; what was it? Were they praying? . . .

By God, it might be Heaven! For singers stood

Ranked in pure white; and everyone seemed good;

And clergymen were sitting meekly round

With joyful faces, drinking in the sound;

And holy women, and plump whiskered men.

Could this be Heaven? And was he dead? And then

They all stood up; the mighty chorus broke

In storms of song above those blameless folk;

And ‘Hallelujah, Hallelujah!’ rang

The burden of the triumph that they sang.

 

He gasped; it must be true; he’d got to Heaven

With all his sins that seventy times were seven;

And whispering ‘Hallelujah’ mid their shout,

He wondered when Lord God would turn him out.

Propped on a stick he viewed the August weald;

Squat orchard trees and oasts with painted cowls;

A homely, tangled hedge, a corn-stalked field,

And sound of barking dogs and farmyard fowls.

 

And he’d come home again to find it more

Desirable than ever it was before.

How right it seemed that he should reach the span

Of comfortable years allowed to man!

Splendid to eat and sleep and choose a wife,

Safe with his wound, a citizen of life.

He hobbled blithely through the garden gate,

And thought: ‘Thank God they had to amputate!’

He stood alone in some queer sunless place

Where Armageddon ends. Perhaps he longed

For days he might have lived; but his young face

Gazed forth untroubled; and suddenly there thronged

Round him the hulking Germans that I shot

When for his death my brooding rage was hot.

 

He stared at them, half-wondering; and then

They told him how I’d killed them for his sake—

Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men;

And still there seemed no answer he could make.

At last he turned and smiled. One took his hand

Because his face could make them understand.

He primmed his loose red mouth and leaned his head

Against a sorrowing angel’s breast, and said:

‘You’d think so much bereavement would have made

Unusual big demands upon my trade.

The War comes cruel hard on some poor folk;

Unless the fighting stops I’ll soon be broke.’

 

He eyed the Cemetery across the road.

‘There’s scores of bodies out abroad, this while,

That should be here by rights. They little know’d

How they’d get buried in such wretched style.’

 

I told him with a sympathetic grin,

That Germans boil dead soldiers down for fat;

And he was horrified. ‘What shameful sin!

O sir, that Christian souls should come to that!’

Young Croesus went to pay his call

On Colonel Sawbones, Caxton Hall:

And, though his wound was healed and mended,

He hoped he’d get his leave extended.

 

The waiting-room was dark and bare.

He eyed a neat-framed notice there

Above the fireplace hung to show

Disabled heroes where to go

For arms and legs; with scale of price,

And words of dignified advice

How officers could get them free.

 

Elbow or shoulder, hip or knee,

Two arms, two legs, though all were lost,

They’d be restored him free of cost.

Then a Girl Guide looked to say,

‘Will Captain Croesus come this way?’

His wet white face and miserable eyes

Brought nurses to him more than groans and sighs:

But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fell

His troubled voice: he did the business well.

 

The ward grew dark; but he was still complaining

And calling out for ‘Dickie’. ‘Curse the Wood!

It’s time to go. O Christ, and what’s the good?

We’ll never take it, and it’s always raining.’

 

I wondered where he’d been; then heard him shout,

‘They snipe like hell! O Dickie, don’t go out’ . . .

I fell asleep . . . Next morning he was dead;

And some Slight Wound lay smiling on the bed.

‘Jack fell as he’d have wished,’ the Mother said,

And folded up the letter that she’d read.

‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke

In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.

She half looked up. ‘We mothers are so proud

Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face was bowed.

 

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.

He’d told the poor old dear some gallant lies

That she would nourish all her days, no doubt.

For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes

Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,

Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.

 

He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine,

Had panicked down the trench that night the mine

Went up at Wicked Corner; how he’d tried

To get sent home, and how, at last, he died,

Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care

Except that lonely woman with white hair.

Exhausted ego back from glooms and quags

And blasting tumult, terror, hurtling glare,

To calm and brightness, havens of sweet air.

He sighed, confused; then drew a cautious breath;

This level journeying was no ride through death.

‘If I were dead,’ he mused, ‘there’d be no thinking—

Only some plunging underworld of sinking,

And hueless, shifting welter where I’d drown.’

Then he remembered that his name was Brown.

 

But was he back in Blighty? Slow he turned,

Till in his heart thanksgiving leapt and burned.

There shone the blue serene, the prosperous land,

Trees, cows and hedges; skipping these, he scanned

Large, friendly names, that change not with the year,

Lung Tonic, Mustard, Liver Pills and Beer.

‘Fall in, that awkward squad, and strike no more

Attractive attitudes! Dress by the right!

The luminous rich colours that you wore

Have changed to hueless khaki in the night.

Magic? What’s magic got to do with you?

There’s no such thing! Blood’s red, and skies are blue.’

 

They gasped and sweated, marching up and down.

I drilled them till they cursed my raucous shout.

Love chucked his lute away and dropped his crown.

Rhyme got sore heels and wanted to fall out.

‘Left, right! Press on your butts!’ They looked at me

Reproachful; how I longed to set them free!

 

I gave them lectures on Defence, Attack;

They fidgeted and shuffled, yawned and sighed,

And boggled at my questions. Joy was slack,

And Wisdom gnawed his fingers, gloomy-eyed.

Young Fancy—how I loved him all the while—

Stared at his note-book with a rueful smile.

 

Their training done, I shipped them all to France,

Where most of those I’d loved too well got killed.

Rapture and pale Enchantment and Romance,

And many a sickly, slender lord who’d filled

My soul long since with lutanies of sin,

Went home, because they couldn’t stand the din.

 

But the kind, common ones that I despised

(Hardly a man of them I’d count as friend),

What stubborn-hearted virtues they disguised!

They stood and played the hero to the end,

Won gold and silver medals bright with bars,

And marched resplendent home with crowns and stars.

The road is thronged with women; soldiers pass

And halt, but never see them; yet they’re here—

A patient crowd along the sodden grass,

Silent, worn out with waiting, sick with fear.

The road goes crawling up a long hillside,

All ruts and stones and sludge, and the emptied dregs

Of battle thrown in heaps. Here where they died

Are stretched big-bellied horses with stiff legs,

And dead men, bloody-fingered from the fight,

Stare up at caverned darkness winking white.

 

You in the bomb-scorched kilt, poor sprawling Jock,

You tottered here and fell, and stumbled on,

Half dazed for want of sleep. No dream would mock

Your reeling brain with comforts lost and gone.

You did not feel her arms about your knees,

Her blind caress, her lips upon your head.

Too tired for thoughts of home and love and ease,

The road would serve you well enough for bed.

I keep such music in my brain

No din this side of death can quell;

Glory exulting over pain,

And beauty, garlanded in hell.

 

My dreaming spirit will not heed

The roar of guns that would destroy

My life that on the gloom can read

Proud-surging melodies of joy.

 

To the world’s end I went, and found

Death in his carnival of glare;

But in my torment I was crowned,

And music dawned above despair.

Music of whispering trees

Hushed by a broad-winged breeze

Where shaken water gleams;

And evening radiance falling

With reedy bird-notes calling.

O bear me safe through dark, you low-voiced streams.

 

I have no need to pray

That fear may pass away;

I scorn the growl and rumble of the fight

That summons me from cool

Silence of marsh and pool

And yellow lilies islanded in light.

O river of stars and shadows, lead me through the night.

 

June 25th, 1916.

He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped

Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;

Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,

Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.

Silence and safety; and his mortal shore

Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.

 

Someone was holding water to his mouth.

He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped

Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot

The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.

  Water—calm, sliding green above the weir.

  Water—a sky-lit alley for his boat,

  Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers

  And shaken hues of summer; drifting down,

  He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.

 

Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,

Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.

Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars

Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;

Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,

Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.

 

He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain

Leapt like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore

His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.

  But someone was beside him; soon he lay

  Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.

  And death, who’d stepped toward him, paused and stared.

 

Light many lamps and gather round his bed.

Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.

Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.

He’s young; he hated War; how should he die

When cruel old campaigners win safe through?

 

But death replied: ‘I choose him.’ So he went,

And there was silence in the summer night;

Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.

Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.

Because the night was falling warm and still

Upon a golden day at April’s end,

I thought; I will go up the hill once more

To find the face of him that I have lost,

And speak with him before his ghost has flown

Far from the earth that might not keep him long.

So down the road I went, pausing to see

How slow the dusk drew on, and how the folk

Loitered about their doorways, well-content

With the fine weather and the waxing year.

The miller’s house, that glimmered with grey walls,

Turned me aside; and for a while I leaned

Along the tottering rail beside the bridge

To watch the dripping mill-wheel green with damp.

The miller peered at me with shadowed eyes

And pallid face: I could not hear his voice

For sound of the weir’s plunging. He was old.

His days went round with the unhurrying wheel.

 

Moving along the street, each side I saw

The humble, kindly folk in lamp-lit rooms;

Children at table; simple, homely wives;

Strong, grizzled men; and soldiers back from war,

Scaring the gaping elders with loud talk.

 

Soon all the jumbled roofs were down the hill,

And I was turning up the grassy lane

That goes to the big, empty house that stands

Above the town, half-hid by towering trees.

I looked below and saw the glinting lights:

I heard the treble cries of bustling life,

And mirth, and scolding; and the grind of wheels.

An engine whistled, piercing-shrill, and called

High echoes from the sombre slopes afar;

Then a long line of trucks began to move.

 

It was quite still; the columned chestnuts stood

Dark in their noble canopies of leaves.

I thought: ‘A little longer I’ll delay,

And then he’ll be more glad to hear my feet,

And with low laughter ask me why I’m late.

The place will be too dim to show his eyes,

But he will loom above me like a tree,

With lifted arms and body tall and strong.’

 

There stood the empty house; a ghostly hulk

Becalmed and huge, massed in the mantling dark,

As builders left it when quick-shattering war

Leapt upon France and called her men to fight.

Lightly along the terraces I trod,

Crunching the rubble till I found the door

That gaped in twilight, framing inward gloom.

An owl flew out from under the high eaves

To vanish secretly among the firs,

Where lofty boughs netted the gleam of stars.

I stumbled in; the dusty floors were strewn

With cumbering piles of planks and props and beams;

Tall windows gapped the walls; the place was free

To every searching gust and jousting gale;

But now they slept; I was afraid to speak,

And heavily the shadows crowded in.

 

I called him, once; then listened: nothing moved:

Only my thumping heart beat out the time.

Whispering his name, I groped from room to room.

 

Quite empty was that house; it could not hold

His human ghost, remembered in the love

That strove in vain to be companioned still.

Blindly I sought the woods that I had known

So beautiful with morning when I came

Amazed with spring that wove the hazel twigs

With misty raiment of awakening green.

I found a holy dimness, and the peace

Of sanctuary, austerely built of trees,

And wonder stooping from the tranquil sky.

 

Ah! but there was no need to call his name.

He was beside me now, as swift as light.

I knew him crushed to earth in scentless flowers,

And lifted in the rapture of dark pines.

‘For now,’ he said, ‘my spirit has more eyes

Than heaven has stars; and they are lit by love.

My body is the magic of the world,

And dawn and sunset flame with my spilt blood.

My breath is the great wind, and I am filled

With molten power and surge of the bright waves

That chant my doom along the ocean’s edge.

 

‘Look in the faces of the flowers and find

The innocence that shrives me; stoop to the stream

That you may share the wisdom of my peace.

For talking water travels undismayed.

The luminous willows lean to it with tales

Of the young earth; and swallows dip their wings

Where showering hawthorn strews the lanes of light.

 

‘I can remember summer in one thought

Of wind-swept green, and deeps of melting blue,

And scent of limes in bloom; and I can hear

Distinct the early mower in the grass,

Whetting his blade along some morn of June.

 

‘For I was born to the round world’s delight,

And knowledge of enfolding motherhood,

Whose tenderness, that shines through constant toil,

Gathers the naked children to her knees.

In death I can remember how she came

To kiss me while I slept; still I can share

The glee of childhood; and the fleeting gloom

When all my flowers were washed with rain of tears.

 

‘I triumph in the choruses of birds,

Bursting like April buds in gyres of song.

My meditations are the blaze of noon

On silent woods, where glory burns the leaves.

I have shared breathless vigils; I have slaked

The thirst of my desires in bounteous rain

Pouring and splashing downward through the dark.

Loud storm has roused me with its winking glare,

And voice of doom that crackles overhead.

I have been tired and watchful, craving rest;

Till the slow-footed hours have touched my brows

And laid me on the breast of sundering sleep.’

I know that he is lost among the stars,

And may return no more but in their light.

Though his hushed voice may call me in the stir

Of whispering trees, I shall not understand.

Men may not speak with stillness; and the joy

Of brooks that leap and tumble down green hills

Is faster than their feet; and all their thoughts

Can win no meaning from the talk of birds.

 

My heart is fooled with fancies, being wise;

For fancy is the gleaming of wet flowers

When the hid sun looks forth with golden stare.

Thus, when I find new loveliness to praise,

And things long-known shine out in sudden grace,

Then will I think: ‘He moves before me now.’

So he will never come but in delight,

And, as it was in life, his name shall be

Wonder awaking in a summer dawn,

And youth, that dying, touched my lips to song.

 

Flixécourt. May 1916.

Here I’m sitting in the gloom

Of my quiet attic room.

France goes rolling all around,

Fledged with forest May has crowned.

And I puff my pipe, calm-hearted,

Thinking how the fighting started,

Wondering when we’ll ever end it,

Back to Hell with Kaiser send it,

Gag the noise, pack up and go,

Clockwork soldiers in a row.

I’ve got better things to do

Than to waste my time on you.

Robert, when I drowse to-night,

Skirting lawns of sleep to chase

Shifting dreams in mazy light,

Somewhere then I’ll see your face

Turning back to bid me follow

Where I wag my arms and hollo,

Over hedges hasting after

Crooked smile and baffling laughter.

  Running tireless, floating, leaping,

  Down your web-hung woods and valleys,

  Garden glooms and hornbeam alleys,

  Where the glowworm stars are peeping,

  Till I find you, quiet as stone

  On a hill-top all alone,

  Staring outward, gravely pondering

  Jumbled leagues of hillock-wandering.

You and I have walked together

In the starving winter weather.

We’ve been glad because we knew

Time’s too short and friends are few.

We’ve been sad because we missed

One whose yellow head was kissed

By the gods, who thought about him

Till they couldn’t do without him.

Now he’s here again; I’ve seen

Soldier David dressed in green,

Standing in a wood that swings

To the madrigal he sings.

He’s come back, all mirth and glory,

Like the prince in fairy story.

Winter called him far away;

Blossoms bring him home with May.

Well, I know you’ll swear it’s true

That you found him decked in blue

Striding up through morning-land

With a cloud on either hand.

Out in Wales, you’ll say, he marches,

Arm in arm with oaks and larches;

Glides all night in hilly nooks,

Laughs at dawn in tumbling brooks.

  Yet, it’s certain, here he teaches

  Outpost-schemes to groups of beeches.

  And I’m sure, as here I stand,

  That he shines through every land,

  That he sings in every place

  Where we’re thinking of his face.

Robert, there’s a war in France;

Everywhere men bang and blunder,

Sweat and swear and worship Chance,

Creep and blink through cannon thunder.

Rifles crack and bullets flick,

Sing and hum like hornet-swarms.

Bones are smashed and buried quick.

  Yet, through stunning battle storms,

  All the while I watch the spark

  Lit to guide me; for I know

  Dreams will triumph, though the dark

  Scowls above me where I go.

You can hear me; you can mingle

Radiant folly with my jingle.

War’s a joke for me and you

While we know such dreams are true!

 

S.S. Flixécourt. May 1916.

When half the drowsy world’s a-bed

And misty morning rises red,

With jollity of horn and lusty cheer,

Young Nimrod urges on his dwindling rout;

Along the yellowing coverts we can hear

His horse’s hoofs thud hither and about:

In mulberry coat he rides and makes

Huge clamour in the sultry brakes.

Along the wind-swept platform, pinched and white,

The travellers stand in pools of wintry light,

Offering themselves to morn’s long, slanting arrows.

The train’s due; porters trundle laden barrows.

The train steams in, volleying resplendent clouds

Of sun-blown vapour. Hither and about,

Scared people hurry, storming the doors in crowds.

The officials seem to waken with a shout,

Resolved to hoist and plunder; some to the vans

Leap; others rumble the milk in gleaming cans.

Boys, indolent-eyed, from baskets leaning back,

Question each face; a man with a hammer steals

Stooping from coach to coach; with clang and clack

Touches and tests, and listens to the wheels.

Guard sounds a warning whistle, points to the clock

With brandished flag, and on his folded flock

Claps the last door: the monster grunts: ‘Enough!’

Tightening his load of links with pant and puff.

Under the arch, then forth into blue day,

Glide the processional windows on their way,

And glimpse the stately folk who sit at ease

To view the world like kings taking the seas

In prosperous weather: drifting banners tell

Their progress to the counties; with them goes

The clamour of their journeying; while those

Who sped them stand to wave a last farewell.

When old Noah stared across the floods,

Sky and water melted into one

Looking-glass of shifting tides and sun.

 

Mountain-tops were few: the ship was foul:

All the morn old Noah marvelled greatly

At this weltering world that shone so stately,

Drowning deep the rivers and the plains.

Through the stillness came a rippling breeze;

Noah sighed, remembering the green trees.

Clear along the morning stooped a bird,—

Lit beside him with a blossomed sprig.

Earth was saved; and Noah danced a jig.

I cannot think that Death will press his claim

To snuff you out or put you off your game:

You’ll still contrive to play your steady round,

Though hurricanes may sweep the dismal ground,

And darkness blur the sandy-skirted green

Where silence gulfs the shot you strike so clean.

 

Saint Andrew guard your ghost, old David Cleek,

And send you home to Fifeshire once a week!

Good fortune speed your ball upon its way

When Heaven decrees its mightiest Medal Day;

Till saints and angels hymn for evermore

The miracle of your astounding score;

And He who keeps all players in His sight,

Walking the royal and ancient hills of light

Standing benignant at the eighteenth hole,

To everlasting Golf consigns your soul.

Behold these jewelled, merchant Ancestors,

Foregathered in some chancellery of death;

Calm, provident, discreet, they stroke their beards

And move their faces slowly in the gloom,

And barter monstrous wealth with speech subdued,

Lustreless eyes and acquiescent lids.

  And oft in pauses of their conference,

  They listen to the measured breath of night’s

  Hushed sweep of wind aloft the swaying trees

  In dimly gesturing gardens; then a voice

  Climbs with clear mortal song half-sad for heaven.

 

A silent-footed message flits and brings

The ghostly Sultan from his glimmering halls;

A shadow at the window, turbaned, vast,

He leans; and, pondering the sweet influence

That steals around him in remembered flowers,

Hears the frail music wind along the slopes,

Put forth, and fade across the whispering sea.

Evening was in the wood, louring with storm.

A time of drought had sucked the weedy pool

And baked the channels; birds had done with song.

Thirst was a dream of fountains in the moon,

Or willow-music blown across the water

Leisurely sliding on by weir and mill.

 

Uneasy was the man who wandered, brooding,

His face a little whiter than the dusk.

A drone of sultry wings flicker’d in his head.

The end of sunset burning thro’ the boughs

Died in a smear of red; exhausted hours

Cumber’d, and ugly sorrows hemmed him in.

 

He thought: ‘Somewhere there’s thunder,’ as he strove

To shake off dread; he dared not look behind him,

But stood, the sweat of horror on his face.

 

He blunder’d down a path, trampling on thistles,

In sudden race to leave the ghostly trees.

And: ‘Soon I’ll be in open fields,’ he thought,

And half remembered starlight on the meadows,

Scent of mown grass and voices of tired men,

Fading along the field-paths; home and sleep

And cool-swept upland spaces, whispering leaves,

And far off the long churring night-jar’s note.

 

But something in the wood, trying to daunt him,

Led him confused in circles through the thicket.

He was forgetting his old wretched folly,

And freedom was his need; his throat was choking.

Barbed brambles gripped and clawed him round his legs,

And he floundered over snags and hidden stumps.

Mumbling: ‘I will get out! I must get out!’

Butting and thrusting up the baffling gloom,

Pausing to listen in a space ’twixt thorns,

He peers around with peering, frantic eyes.

 

An evil creature in the twilight looping,

Flapped blindly in his face. Beating it off,

He screeched in terror, and straightway something clambered

Heavily from an oak, and dropped, bent double,

To shamble at him zigzag, squat and bestial.

 

Headlong he charges down the wood, and falls

With roaring brain—agony—the snap’t spark—

And blots of green and purple in his eyes.

Then the slow fingers groping on his neck,

And at his heart the strangling clasp of death.

His headstrong thoughts that once in eager strife

Leapt sure from eye to brain and back to eye,

Weaving unconscious tapestries of life,

Are now thrust inward, dungeoned from the sky.

  And he who has watched his world and loved it all,

  Starless and old and blind, a sight for pity,

  With feeble steps and fingers on the wall,

  Gropes with his staff along the rumbling city.

Who laid a cloak on me and brought me in

Tenderly to an hostel quiet and clean;

Used me with healing hands for all my needs.

The mortal stain of my reputed sin,

My state despised, and my defilèd weeds,

He hath put by as though they had not been.

In gold and grey, with fleering looks of sin,

I watch them come; by two, by three, by four,

Advancing slow, with loutings they begin

Their woven measure, widening from the door;

While music-men behind are straddling in

With flutes to brisk their feet across the floor,—

And jangled dulcimers, and fiddles thin

That taunt the twirling antic through once more.

 

They pause, and hushed to whispers, steal away.

With cunning glances; silent go their shoon

On creakless stairs; but far away the dogs

Bark at some lonely farm: and haply they

Have clambered back into the dusky moon

That sinks beyond the marshes loud with frogs.

Ye hooded witches, baleful shapes that moan,

Quench your fantastic lanterns and be still;

For now the moon through heaven sails alone,

Shedding her peaceful rays from hill to hill.

The faun from out his dim and secret place

Draws nigh the darkling pool and from his dream

Half-wakens, seeing there his sylvan face

Reflected, and the wistful eyes that gleam.

 

To his cold lips he sets the pipe to blow

Some drowsy note that charms the listening air:

The dryads from their trees come down and creep

Near to his side; monotonous and low,

He plays and plays till at the woodside there

Stirs to the voice of everlasting sleep.

When Watkin shifts the burden of his cares

And all that irked him in his bound employ,

Once more become a vagrom-hearted boy,

He moves to roundelays and jocund airs;

Loitering with dusty harvestmen, he shares

Old ale and sunshine; or, with maids half-coy,

Pays court to shadows; fools himself with joy,

Shaking a leg at junketings and fairs.

 

Sometimes, returning down his breezy miles,

A snatch of wayward April he will bring,

Piping the daffodilly that beguiles

Foolhardy lovers in the surge of spring.

And then once more by lanes and field-path stiles

Up the green world he wanders like a king.

Across the land a faint blue veil of mist

Seems hung; the woods wear yet arrayment sober

Till frost shall make them flame; silent and whist

The drooping cherry orchards of October

Like mournful pennons hang their shrivelling leaves

Russet and orange: all things now decay;

Long since ye garnered in your autumn sheaves,

And sad the robins pipe at set of day.

 

Now do ye dream of Spring when greening shaws

Confer with the shrewd breezes, and of slopes

Flower-kirtled, and of April, virgin guest;

Days that ye love, despite their windy flaws,

Since they are woven with all joys and hopes

Whereof ye nevermore shall be possessed.

Cry out on Time that he may take away

Your cold philosophies that give no hint

Of spirit-quickened flesh; fall down and pray

That Death come never with a face of flint:

Death is our heritage; with Life we share

The sunlight that must own his darkening hour:

Within his very presence yet we dare

To gather gladness like a fading flower.

 

For even as this, our joy not long may live

Perfect; and most in change the heart can trace

The miracle of life and human things:

All we have held to destiny we give;

Dawn glimmers on the soul-forsaken face;

Not we, but others, hear the bird that sings.

When in your sober mood my body have ye laid

In sight and sound of things beloved, woodland and stream,

And the green turf has hidden the poor bones ye deem

No more a close companion with those rhymes we made;

 

Then, if some bird should pipe, or breezes stir the glade,

Thinking them for the while my voice, so let them seem

A fading message from the misty shores of dream,

Or wheresoever, following Death, my feet have strayed.

When meadows are grey with the morn

  In the dusk of the woods it is night:

The oak and the birch and the pine

  War with the glimmer of light.

 

Dryads brown as the leaf

  Move in the gloom of the glade;

When meadows are grey with the morn

  Dim night in the wood has delayed.

 

The cocks that crow to the land

  Are faint and hollow and shrill:

Dryads brown as the leaf

  Whisper, and hide, and are still.

Old English songs, you bring to me

A simple sweetness somewhat kin

To birds that through the mystery

Of earliest morn make tuneful din,

While hamlet steeples sleepily

At cock-crow chime out three and four,

Till maids get up betime and go

With faces like the red sun low

Clattering about the dairy floor.

Shepherds go whistling on their way

In the spring season of the year;

One watches weather-signs of day;

One of his maid most dear

Dreams; and they do not hear

The birds that sing and sing; they do not see

Wide wealds of blue beyond their windy lea,

Nor blossoms red and white on every tree.

I listen for him through the rain,

And in the dusk of starless hours

I know that he will come again;

Loth was he ever to forsake me:

He comes with glimmering of flowers

And stir of music to awake me.

 

Spirit of purity, he stands

As once he lived in charm and grace:

I may not hold him with my hands,

Nor bid him stay to heal my sorrow;

Only his fair, unshadowed face

Abides with me until to-morrow.

Where sunshine flecks the green,

Through towering woods my way

Goes winding all the day.

 

Scant are the flowers that bloom

Beneath the bosky screen

And cage of golden gloom.

Few are the birds that call,

Shrill-voiced and seldom seen.

 

Where silence masters all,

And light my footsteps fall,

The whispering runnels only

With blazing noon confer;

And comes no breeze to stir

The tangled thickets lonely.

For Morn, my dome of blue,

For Meadows, green and gay,

And Birds who love the twilight of the leaves,

Let Jesus keep me joyful when I pray.

 

For the big Bees that hum

And hide in bells of flowers;

For the winding roads that come

To Evening’s holy door,

May Jesus bring me grateful to his arms,

And guard my innocence for evermore.

In this meadow starred with spring

Shepherds kneel before their king.

Mary throned, with dreaming eyes,

Gowned in blue like rain-washed skies,

Lifts her tiny son that he

May behold their courtesy.

And green-smocked children, awed and good,

Bring him blossoms from the wood.

 

Clear the sunlit steeples chime

Mary’s coronation-time.

Loud the happy children quire

To the golden-windowed morn;

While the lord of their desire

Sleeps below the crimson thorn.

This is To-day, a child in white and blue

Running to meet me out of Night who stilled

The ghost of Yester-eve; this is fair Morn

The mother of To-morrow. And these clouds

That chase the sunshine over gleaming hills

Are thoughts, delighting in the golden change

And the ceremony of their drifting state.

 

This is To-day. To-morrow might bring death,—

And Life, the gleeful madrigal of birds,

Be drowned in glimmer of sleep. To-day I know

How sweet it is to spend these eyes, and boast

This bubble of vistaed memory and sense

Blown by my joy aloft the glittering airs

Of heavenly peace. Oh take me to yourselves,

Earth, sky, and spirit! Let me stand within

The circle of your transience, that my voice

May thrill the lonely silences with song.

Then a wind blew;

And he who had forgot he moved

Lonely amid the green and silver morning weather,

Suddenly grew

Aware of clouds and trees

Gleaming and white and shafted, shaken together

And blown to music by the ruffling breeze.

 

Like flush of wings

The moment passed: he stood

Dazzled with blossom in the swaying wood;

Then he remembered how, through all swift things,

This mortal scene stands built of memories,—

Shaped by the wise

Who gazed in breathing wonderment,

And left us their brave eyes

To light the ways they went.

I heard the farm cocks crowing, loud, and faint, and thin,

When hooded night was going and one clear planet winked:

I heard shrill notes begin down the spired wood distinct,

When cloudy shoals were chinked and gilt with fires of day.

  White-misted was the weald; the lawns were silver-grey;

  The lark his lonely field for heaven had forsaken;

  And the wind upon its way whispered the boughs of may,

  And touched the nodding peony-flowers to bid them waken.

Leave not your bough, my slender song-bird sweet,

But pipe me now your roundelay complete.

 

Come, gentle breeze, and tarrying on your way,

Whisper my trees what you have seen to-day.

 

Stand, golden cloud, until my song be done,

(For he’s too proud) before the face of the sun.

 

So one did sing, and the other breathed a story;

Then both took wing, and the sun stepped forth in glory.

There stood a Poplar, tall and straight;

The fair, round Moon, uprisen late,

Made the long shadow on the grass

A ghostly bridge ’twixt heaven and me.

  But May, with slumbrous nights, must pass;

  And blustering winds will strip the tree.

And I’ve no magic to express

The moment of that loveliness;

So from these words you’ll never guess

The stars and lilies I could see.

Where have you been, South Wind, this May-day morning,—

With larks aloft, or skimming with the swallow,

Or with blackbirds in a green, sun-glinted thicket?

 

Oh, I heard you like a tyrant in the valley;

Your ruffian haste shook the young, blossoming orchards;

You clapped rude hands, hallooing round the chimney,

And white your pennons streamed along the river.

 

You have robbed the bee, South Wind, in your adventure,

Blustering with gentle flowers; but I forgave you

When you stole to me shyly with scent of hawthorn.

Let my soul, a shining tree,

Silver branches lift towards thee,

Where on a hallowed winter’s night

The clear-eyed angels may alight.

 

And if there should be tempests in

My spirit, let them surge like din

Of noble melodies at war;

With fervour of such blades of triumph as are

Flashed in white orisons of saints who go

On shafts of glory to the ecstasies they know.

I’ve listened: and all the sounds I heard

Were music,—wind, and stream, and bird.

With youth who sang from hill to hill

I’ve listened: my heart is hungry still.

 

I’ve looked: the morning world was green;

Bright roofs and towers of town I’ve seen;

And stars, wheeling through wingless night.

I’ve looked: and my soul yet longs for light.

 

I’ve thought: but in my sense survives

Only the impulse of those lives

That were my making. Hear me say

‘I’ve thought!’—and darkness hides my day.

In barns we crouch, and under stacks of straw,

Harking the storm that rides a hurtling legion

Up the arched sky, and speeds quick heels of panic

With growling thunder loosed in fork and clap

That echoes crashing thro’ the slumbrous vault.

  The whispering woodlands darken: vulture Gloom

  Stoops, menacing the skeltering flocks of Light,

  Where the gaunt shepherd shakes his gleaming staff

  And foots with angry tidings down the slope.

Drip, drip; the rain steals in through soaking thatch

By cob-webbed rafters to the dusty floor.

Drums shatter in the tumult; wrathful Chaos

Points pealing din to the zenith, then resolves

Terror in wonderment with rich collapse.

Now from drenched eaves a swallow darts to skim

The crystal stillness of an air unveiled

To tremulous blue. Raise your bowed heads, and let

Your horns adore the sky, ye patient kine!

Haste, flashing brooks! Small, chuckling rills, rejoice!

Be open-eyed for Heaven, ye pools of peace!

Shine, rain-bow hills! Dream on, fair glimpsèd vale

In haze of drifting gold! And all sweet birds,

Sing out your raptures to the radiant leaves!

And ye, close huddling Men, come forth to stand

A moment simple in the gaze of God

That sweeps along your pastures! Breathe his might!

Lift your blind faces to be filled with day,

And share his benediction with the flowers.

The glorying forest shakes and swings with glancing

Of boughs that dip and strain; young, slanting sprays

Beckon and shift like lissom creatures dancing,

While the blown beech wood streams with drifting rays.

  Rooted in steadfast calm, grey stems are seen

  Like weather-beaten masts; the wood, unfurled,

  Seems as a ship with crowding sails of green

  That sweeps across the lonely billowing world.

 

O luminous and lovely! Let your flowers,

Your ageless-squadroned wings, your surge and gleam,

Drown me in quivering brightness: let me fade

  In the warm, rustling music of the hours

  That guard your ancient wisdom, till my dream

  Moves with the chant and whisper of the glade.

When Wisdom tells me that the world’s a speck

Lost on the shoreless blue of God’s To-Day . . .

I smile, and think, ‘For every man his way:

The world’s my ship, and I’m alone on deck!’

And when he tells me that the world’s a spark

Lit in the whistling gloom of God’s To-Night . . .

I look within me to the edge of dark,

And dream, ‘The world’s my field, and I’m the lark,

Alone with upward song, alone with light!’

Come in this hour to set my spirit free

When earth is no more mine though night goes out,

And stretching forth these arms I cannot be

Lord of winged sunrise and dim Arcady:

When fieldward boys far off with clack and shout

From orchards scare the birds in sudden rout,

Come, ere my heart grows cold and full of doubt,

In the still summer dawns that waken me.

 

When the first lark goes up to look for day

And morning glimmers out of dreams, come then

Out of the songless valleys, over grey

Wide misty lands to bring me on my way:

For I am lone, a dweller among men

Hungered for what my heart shall never say.

Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom

Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals

Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots

And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky

Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down

The stale despair of night, must now renew

Their desolation in the truce of dawn,

Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.

 

Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,

Can grin through storms of death and find a gap

In the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.

They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy

Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all

Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky

That hastens over them where they endure

Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,

And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.

 

O my brave brown companions, when your souls

Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead

Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,

Death will stand grieving in that field of war

Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.

And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass

Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;

The unreturning army that was youth;

The legions who have suffered and are dust.

We’d gained our first objective hours before

While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,

Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.

Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,

With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,

And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.

  The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs

  High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps

  And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,

  Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;

  And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,

  Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.

  And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain!

 

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,

Staring across the morning blear with fog;

He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;

And then, of course, they started with five-nines

Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.

Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst

Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,

While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.

He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,

Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror

And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

 

An officer came blundering down the trench:

‘Stand-to and man the fire-step!’ On he went . . .

Gasping and bawling, ‘Fire-step . . . counter-attack!’

  Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right

  Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;

  And stumbling figures looming out in front.

  ‘O Christ, they’re coming at us!’ Bullets spat,

And he remembered his rifle . . . rapid fire . . .

And started blazing wildly . . . then a bang

Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out

To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked

And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,

Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans . . .

Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,

Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

Groping along the tunnel, step by step,

He winked his prying torch with patching glare

From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

 

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know;

A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;

And he, exploring fifty feet below

The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

 

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw some one lie

Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,

And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.

‘I’m looking for headquarters.’ No reply.

‘God blast your neck!’ (For days he’d had no sleep,)

‘Get up and guide me through this stinking place.’

Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,

And flashed his beam across the livid face

Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore

Agony dying hard ten days before;

And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

 

Alone he staggered on until he found

Dawn’s ghost that filtered down a shafted stair

To the dazed, muttering creatures underground

Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.

At last, with sweat of horror in his hair,

He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,

Unloading hell behind him step by step.

‘Pass it along, the wiring party’s going out’—

And yawning sentries mumble, ‘Wirers going out.’

Unravelling; twisting; hammering stakes with muffled thud,

They toil with stealthy haste and anger in their blood.

 

Gleams desolate along the sky, night’s misery ended.

Young Hughes was badly hit; I heard him carried away,

Moaning at every lurch; no doubt he’ll die to-day.

But we can say the front-line wire’s been safely mended.

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun

In the wild purple of the glow’ring sun,

Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud

The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,

Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.

The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed

With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,

Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,

  Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.

In the great hour of destiny they stand,

  Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.

Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win

  Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin

  They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

 

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

  And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,

  And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

  And going to the office in the train.

Dark clouds are smouldering into red

  While down the craters morning burns.

The dying soldier shifts his head

  To watch the glory that returns;

He lifts his fingers toward the skies

  Where holy brightness breaks in flame;

Radiance reflected in his eyes,

  And on his lips a whispered name.

 

You’d think, to hear some people talk,

  That lads go West with sobs and curses,

And sullen faces white as chalk,

  Hankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses.

But they’ve been taught the way to do it

  Like Christian soldiers; not with haste

And shuddering groans; but passing through it

  With due regard for decent taste.

‘He’d never seen so many dead before.’

They sprawled in yellow daylight while he swore

And gasped and lugged his everlasting load

Of bombs along what once had been a road.

‘How peaceful are the dead.’

Who put that silly gag in some one’s head?

 

‘He’d never seen so many dead before.’

The lilting words danced up and down his brain,

While corpses jumped and capered in the rain.

No, no; he wouldn’t count them any more . . .

The dead have done with pain:

They’ve choked; they can’t come back to life again.

 

When Dick was killed last week he looked like that,

Flapping along the fire-step like a fish,

After the blazing crump had knocked him flat . . .

‘How many dead? As many as ever you wish.

Don’t count ’em; they’re too many.

Who’ll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?’

‘Old soldiers never die; they simply fide a-why!’

That’s what they used to sing along the roads last spring;

That’s what they used to say before the push began;

That’s where they are to-day, knocked over to a man.

  Snug at the club two fathers sat,

  Gross, goggle-eyed, and full of chat.

  One of them said: ‘My eldest lad

  Writes cheery letters from Bagdad.

  But Arthur’s getting all the fun

  At Arras with his nine-inch gun.’

 

‘Yes,’ wheezed the other, ‘that’s the luck!

My boy’s quite broken-hearted, stuck

In England training all this year.

Still, if there’s truth in what we hear,

The Huns intend to ask for more

  Before they bolt across the Rhine.’

I watched them toddle through the door—

  These impotent old friends of mine.

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,

  I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,

And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

  You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,

Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,

  Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘Poor young chap,’

I’d say—‘I used to know his father well;

  Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.’

And when the war is done and youth stone dead,

I’d toddle safely home and die—in bed.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

I found him in the guard-room at the Base.

From the blind darkness I had heard his crying

And blundered in. With puzzled, patient face

A sergeant watched him; it was no good trying

To stop it; for he howled and beat his chest.

And, all because his brother had gone west,

Raved at the bleeding war; his rampant grief

Moaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling

Half-naked on the floor. In my belief

Such men have lost all patriotic feeling.

Does it matter?—losing your legs? . . .

For people will always be kind,

And you need not show that you mind

When the others come in after hunting

To gobble their muffins and eggs.

 

Does it matter?—losing your sight? . . .

There’s such splendid work for the blind;

And people will always be kind,

As you sit on the terrace remembering

And turning your face to the light.

 

Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit? . . .

You can drink and forget and be glad,

And people won’t say that you’re mad;

For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country

And no one will worry a bit.

The boys came back. Bands played and flags were flying,

  And Yellow-Pressmen thronged the sunlit street

To cheer the soldiers who’d refrained from dying,

  And hear the music of returning feet.

‘Of all the thrills and ardours War has brought,

This moment is the finest.’ (So they thought.)

 

  I heard the Yellow-Pressmen grunt and squeal;

And with my trusty bombers turned and went

To clear those Junkers out of Parliament.

‘Ah, yes, but it’s the Press that leads the way!’

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

 

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,

Or wounded in a mentionable place.

You worship decorations; you believe

That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.

You make us shells. You listen with delight,

By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.

You crown our distant ardours while we fight,

And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.

You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’

When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,

Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.

  O German mother dreaming by the fire,

  While you are knitting socks to send your son

  His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

He’s got a Blighty wound. He’s safe; and then

  War’s fine and bold and bright.

She can forget the doomed and prisoned men

  Who agonize and fight.

 

He’s back in France. She loathes the listless strain

  And peril of his plight,

Beseeching Heaven to send him home again,

  She prays for peace each night.

 

Husbands and sons and lovers; everywhere

  They die; War bleeds us white

Mothers and wives and sweethearts,—they don’t care

  So long as He’s all right.

Not much to me is yonder lane

  Where he so longs to tread:

But when there’s been a shower of rain

I think I’ll never weep again

  Until I’ve heard he’s dead.

God with a Roll of Honour in His hand

Sits welcoming the heroes who have died,

While sorrowless angels ranked on either side

Stand easy in Elysium’s meadow-land.

 

Then you come shyly through the garden gate,

Wearing a blood-soaked bandage on your head;

And God says something kind because you’re dead,

And homesick, discontented with your fate.

 

If I were there we’d snowball Death with skulls;

Or ride away to hunt in Devil’s Wood

With ghosts of puppies that we walked of old.

But you’re alone; and solitude annuls

Our earthly jokes; and strangely wise and good

You roam forlorn along the streets of gold.

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,

Out in the trench with three hours’ watch to take,

I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then

Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men

Crouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.

Hark! There’s the big bombardment on our right

Rumbling and bumping; and the dark’s a glare

Of flickering horror in the sectors where

We raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,

Or crawling on their bellies through the wire.

‘What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?’

Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:

Why did he do it? . . . Starlight overhead—

Blank stars. I’m wide-awake; and some chap’s dead.

There seemed a smell of autumn in the air

At the bleak end of night; he shivered there

In a dank, musty dug-out where he lay,

Legs wrapped in sand-bags,—lumps of chalk and clay

Spattering his face. Dry-mouthed, he thought, ‘To-day

We start the damned attack; and, Lord knows why,

Zero’s at nine; how bloody if I’m done in

Under the freedom of that morning sky!’

And then he coughed and dozed, cursing the din.

 

Was it the ghost of autumn in that smell

Of underground, or God’s blank heart grown kind,

That sent a happy dream to him in hell?—

Where men are crushed like clods, and crawl to find

Some crater for their wretchedness; who lie

In outcast immolation, doomed to die

Far from clean things or any hope of cheer,

Cowed anger in their eyes, till darkness brims

And roars into their heads, and they can hear

Old childish talk, and tags of foolish hymns.

 

He sniffs the chilly air; (his dreaming starts),

He’s riding in a dusty Sussex lane

In quiet September; slowly night departs;

And he’s a living soul, absolved from pain.

Beyond the brambled fences where he goes

Are glimmering fields with harvest piled in sheaves,

And tree-tops dark against the stars grown pale;

Then, clear and shrill, a distant farm-cock crows;

And there’s a wall of mist along the vale

Where willows shake their watery-sounding leaves,

He gazes on it all, and scarce believes

That earth is telling its old peaceful tale;

He thanks the blessed world that he was born . . .

Then, far away, a lonely note of the horn.

 

They’re drawing the Big Wood! Unlatch the gate,

And set Golumpus going on the grass;

He knows the corner where it’s best to wait

And hear the crashing woodland chorus pass;

The corner where old foxes make their track

To the Long Spinney; that’s the place to be.

The bracken shakes below an ivied tree,

And then a cub looks out; and ‘Tally-o-back!’

He bawls, and swings his thong with volleying crack,—

All the clean thrill of autumn in his blood,

And hunting surging through him like a flood

In joyous welcome from the untroubled past;

While the war drifts away, forgotten at last.

 

Hark! there’s the horn: they’re drawing the Big Wood.

Well, how are things in Heaven? I wish you’d say,

  Because I’d like to know that you’re all right.

Tell me, have you found everlasting day,

  Or been sucked in by everlasting night?

For when I shut my eyes your face shows plain;

  I hear you make some cheery old remark—

I can rebuild you in my brain,

  Though you’ve gone out patrolling in the dark.

 

You hated tours of trenches; you were proud

  Of nothing more than having good years to spend;

Longed to get home and join the careless crowd

  Of chaps who work in peace with Time for friend.

That’s all washed out now. You’re beyond the wire:

  No earthly chance can send you crawling back;

You’ve finished with machine-gun fire—

  Knocked over in a hopeless dud-attack.

 

Somehow I always thought you’d get done in,

  Because you were so desperate keen to live:

You were all out to try and save your skin,

  Well knowing how much the world had got to give.

You joked at shells and talked the usual ‘shop,’

  Stuck to your dirty job and did it fine:

With ‘Jesus Christ! when will it stop?

  Three years . . . It’s hell unless we break their line.’

 

Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,

  And tell Him that our Politicians swear

They won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod

  Under the Heel of England . . . Are you there? . . .

Yes . . . and the War won’t end for at least two years;

But we’ve got stacks of men . . . I’m blind with tears,

  Staring into the dark. Cheero!

I wish they’d killed you in a decent show.

When I’m asleep, dreaming and lulled and warm,—

They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.

While the dim charging breakers of the storm

Bellow and drone and rumble overhead,

Out of the gloom they gather about my bed.

  They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.

  ‘Why are you here with all your watches ended?

  From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the Line.’

In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;

And while the dawn begins with slashing rain

I think of the Battalion in the mud.

‘When are you going out to them again?

Are they not still your brothers through our blood?’

I am banished from the patient men who fight

They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.

Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,

They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light.

Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight

They went arrayed in honour. But they died,—

Not one by one: and mutinous I cried

To those who sent them out into the night.

 

The darkness tells how vainly I have striven

To free them from the pit where they must dwell

In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven

By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.

Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;

And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.

In fifty years, when peace outshines

Remembrance of the battle lines,

Adventurous lads will sigh and cast

Proud looks upon the plundered past.

On summer morn or winter’s night,

Their hearts will kindle for the fight,

Reading a snatch of soldier-song,

Savage and jaunty, fierce and strong;

And through the angry marching rhymes

Of blind regret and haggard mirth,

They’ll envy us the dazzling times

When sacrifice absolved our earth.

 

Some ancient man with silver locks

Will lift his weary face to say:

‘War was a fiend who stopped our clocks

Although we met him grim and gay.’

And then he’ll speak of Haig’s last drive,

Marvelling that any came alive

Out of the shambles that men built

And smashed, to cleanse the world of guilt.

But the boys, with grin and sidelong glance,

Will think, ‘Poor grandad’s day is done.’

And dream of lads who fought in France

And lived in time to share the fun.

Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,

Whose voices make the emptiness of light

A windy palace. Quavering from the brim

Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night,

They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing

Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof

Whose heart’s a haunted woodland whispering;

Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;

Who hears the cry of God in everything,

And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

October’s bellowing anger breaks and cleaves

The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood

In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves

For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud

Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves

Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown

Along the westering furnace flaring red.

O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,

The burden of your wrongs is on my head.

Come down from heaven to meet me when my breath

Chokes, and through drumming shafts of stifling death

I stumble toward escape, to find the door

Opening on morn where I may breathe once more

Clear cock-crow airs across some valley dim

With whispering trees. While dawn along the rim

Of night’s horizon flows in lakes of fire,

Come down from heaven’s bright hill, my song’s desire.

 

Belov’d and faithful, teach my soul to wake

In glades deep-ranked with flowers that gleam and shake

And flock your paths with wonder. In your gaze

Show me the vanquished vigil of my days.

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,

Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes

Remembrance of all beauty that has been,

And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

Now light the candles; one; two; there’s a moth;

What silly beggars they are to blunder in

And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame—

No, no, not that,—it’s bad to think of war,

When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;

And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad

Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts

That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

 

You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;

You’d never think there was a bloody war on! . . .

O yes, you would . . . why, you can hear the guns.

Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft . . . they never cease—

Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out

And screech at them to stop—I’m going crazy;

I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain

  Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.

Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’—

  These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.

They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

  Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud

  Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride . . .

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

 

Craiglockart. October, 1917.

Ring your sweet bells; but let them be farewells

  To the green-vista’d gladness of the past

That changed us into soldiers; swing your bells

  To a joyful chime; but let it be the last.

 

What means this metal in windy belfries hung

  When guns are all our need? Dissolve these bells

Whose tones are tuned for peace: with martial tongue

  Let them cry doom and storm the sun with shells.

 

Bells are like fierce-browed prelates who proclaim

  That ‘if our Lord returned He’d fight for us.’

So let our bells and bishops do the same,

  Shoulder to shoulder with the motor-bus.

Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit,

He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knows

Each flash and spouting crash,—each instant lit

When gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goes

Heavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders,

‘Could anything be worse than this?’—he wonders,

Remembering how he saw those Germans run,

Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees:

Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was one

Livid with terror, clutching at his knees . . .

Our chaps were sticking ’em like pigs . . . ‘O hell!’

He thought—‘there’s things in war one dare not tell

Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads

Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds.’

From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart,

  The substance of my dreams took fire.

You built cathedrals in my heart,

  And lit my pinnacled desire.

You were the ardour and the bright

  Procession of my thoughts toward prayer.

You were the wrath of storm, the light

  On distant citadels aflare.

Great names, I cannot find you now

  In these loud years of youth that strives

Through doom toward peace: upon my brow

  I wear a wreath of banished lives.

You have no part with lads who fought

  And laughed and suffered at my side.

Your fugues and symphonies have brought

  No memory of my friends who died.

For when my brain is on their track,

In slangy speech I call them back.

With fox-trot tunes their ghosts I charm.

‘Another little drink won’t do us any harm.’

  I think of rag-time; a bit of rag-time;

And see their faces crowding round

To the sound of the syncopated beat.

They’ve got such jolly things to tell,

Home from hell with a Blighty wound so neat . . .

 

And so the song breaks off; and I’m alone.

They’re dead . . . For God’s sake stop that gramophone.

Moonlight and dew-drenched blossom, and the scent

Of summer gardens; these can bring you all

Those dreams that in the starlit silence fall:

Sweet songs are full of odours.

                            While I went

Last night in drizzling dusk along a lane,

I passed a squalid farm; from byre and midden

Came the rank smell that brought me once again

A dream of war that in the past was hidden.

Up a disconsolate straggling village street

I saw the tired troops trudge: I heard their feet.

The cheery Q.M.S. was there to meet

And guide our Company in . . .

              I watched them stumble

Into some crazy hovel, too beat to grumble;

Saw them file inward, slipping from their backs

Rifles, equipment, packs.

On filthy straw they sit in the gloom, each face

Bowed to patched, sodden boots they must unlace,

While the wind chills their sweat through chinks and cracks.

I’m looking at their blistered feet; young Jones

Stares up at me, mud-splashed and white and jaded;

Out of his eyes the morning light has faded.

Old soldiers with three winters in their bones

Puff their damp Woodbines, whistle, stretch their toes:

They can still grin at me, for each of ’em knows

That I’m as tired as they are . . .

                            Can they guess

The secret burden that is always mine?—

Pride in their courage; pity for their distress;

And burning bitterness

That I must take them to the accursed Line.

I cannot hear their voices, but I see

Dim candles in the barn: they gulp their tea,

And soon they’ll sleep like logs. Ten miles away

The battle winks and thuds in blundering strife.

And I must lead them nearer, day by day,

To the foul beast of war that bludgeons life.

The barrack-square, washed clean with rain,

Shines wet and wintry-grey and cold.

Young Fusiliers, strong-legged and bold,

March and wheel and march again.

The sun looks over the barrack gate,

Warm and white with glaring shine,

To watch the soldiers of the Line

That life has hired to fight with fate.

 

Fall out: the long parades are done.

Up comes the dark; down goes the sun.

The square is walled with windowed light.

Sleep well, you lusty Fusiliers;

Shut your brave eyes on sense and sight,

And banish from your dreamless ears

The bugle’s dying notes that say,

‘Another night; another day.’

Splashing along the boggy woods all day,

And over brambled hedge and holding clay,

I shall not think of him:

But when the watery fields grow brown and dim,

And hounds have lost their fox, and horses tire,

I know that he’ll be with me on my way

Home through the darkness to the evening fire.

He’s jumped each stile along the glistening lanes;

His hand will be upon the mud-soaked reins;

Hearing the saddle creak,

He’ll wonder if the frost will come next week.

I shall forget him in the morning light;

And while we gallop on he will not speak:

But at the stable-door he’ll say good-night.

And still they come and go: and this is all I know—

That from the gloom I watch an endless picture-show,

Where wild or listless faces flicker on their way,

With glad or grievous hearts I’ll never understand

Because Time spins so fast, and they’ve no time to stay

Beyond the moment’s gesture of a lifted hand.

 

And still, between the shadow and the blinding flame,

The brave despair of men flings onward, ever the same

As in those doom-lit years that wait them, and have been . . .

And life is just the picture dancing on a screen.

When you are standing at your hero’s grave,

Or near some homeless village where he died,

Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,

The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.

 

Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;

And you have nourished hatred, harsh and blind.

But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find

The mothers of the men who killed your son.

 

November 1918.

They are gathering round . . . .

Out of the twilight; over the grey-blue sand,

Shoals of low-jargoning men drift inward to the sound—

The jangle and throb of a piano . . . tum-ti-tum . . .

Drawn by a lamp, they come

Out of the glimmering lines of their tents, over the shuffling sand.

 

O sing us the songs, the songs of our own land,

You warbling ladies in white.

Dimness conceals the hunger in our faces,

This wall of faces risen out of the night,

These eyes that keep their memories of the places

So long beyond their sight.

 

Jaded and gay, the ladies sing; and the chap in brown

Tilts his grey hat; jaunty and lean and pale,

He rattles the keys . . . some actor-bloke from town . . .

God send you home; and then A long, long trail;

I hear you calling me; and Dixieland . . . .

Sing slowly . . . now the chorus . . . one by one

We hear them, drink them; till the concert’s done.

Silent, I watch the shadowy mass of soldiers stand.

Silent, they drift away, over the glimmering sand.

 

Kantara, April 1918.

Out in the blustering darkness, on the deck

A gleam of stars looks down. Long blurs of black,

The lean Destroyers, level with our track,

Plunging and stealing, watch the perilous way

Through backward racing seas and caverns of chill spray.

One sentry by the davits, in the gloom

Stands mute: the boat heaves onward through the night.

Shrouded is every chink of cabined light:

And sluiced by floundering waves that hiss and boom

And crash like guns, the troopship shudders . . . doom.

 

Now something at my feet stirs with a sigh;

And slowly growing used to groping dark,

I know that the hurricane-deck, down all its length,

Is heaped and spread with lads in sprawling strength—

Blanketed soldiers sleeping. In the stark

Danger of life at war, they lie so still,

All prostrate and defenceless, head by head . . .

And I remember Arras, and that hill

Where dumb with pain I stumbled among the dead.

 

We are going home. The troop-ship, in a thrill

Of fiery-chamber’d anguish, throbs and rolls.

We are going home . . . victims . . . three thousand souls.

 

May 1918.

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,

And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,

Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,

Deep-shadow’d from the candle’s guttering gold;

And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;

Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head . . .

You are too young to fall asleep for ever;

And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

 

St Venant, July 1918.

‘Fall in! Now get a move on.’ (Curse the rain.)

We splash away along the straggling village,

Out to the flat rich country, green with June . . .

And sunset flares across wet crops and tillage,

Blazing with splendour-patches. (Harvest soon,

Up in the Line.) ‘Perhaps the War’ll be done

‘By Christmas-Day. Keep smiling then, old son.’

 

Here’s the Canal: it’s dusk; we cross the bridge.

‘Lead on there, by platoons.’ (The Line’s a-glare

With shell-fire through the poplars; distant rattle

Of rifles and machine-guns.) ‘Fritz is there!

Christ, ain’t it lively, Sergeant? Is’t a battle?’

More rain: the lightning blinks, and thunder rumbles.

There’s over-head artillery!’ some chap grumbles.

What’s all this mob at the cross-roads? Where are the guides? . . .

‘Lead on with number One.’ And off they go.

‘Three minute intervals.’ (Poor blundering files,

Sweating and blindly burdened; who’s to know

If death will catch them in those two dark miles?)

More rain. ‘Lead on, Head-quarters.’ (That’s the lot.)

‘Who’s that? . . . Oh, Sergeant-Major, don’t get shot!

And tell me, have we won this war or not?’

I stood with the Dead, so forsaken and still:

When dawn was grey I stood with the Dead.

And my slow heart said, ‘You must kill, you must kill:

‘Soldier, soldier, morning is red’.

 

On the shapes of the slain in their crumpled disgrace

I stared for a while through the thin cold rain . . .

‘O lad that I loved, there is rain on your face,

And your eyes are blurred and sick like the plain.’

 

I stood with the Dead . . . They were dead; they were dead;

My heart and my head beat a march of dismay:

And gusts of the wind came dulled by the guns.

‘Fall in!’ I shouted; ‘Fall in for your pay!’

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,

(Under Lord Derby’s Scheme). I died in hell—

(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,

And I was hobbling back; and then a shell

Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell

Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.

 

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,

He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;

For, though low down upon the list, I’m there;

‘In proud and glorious memory’ . . . that’s my due.

Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:

I suffered anguish that he’s never guessed.

Once I came home on leave: and then went west . . .

What greater glory could a man desire?

O beauty doomed and perfect for an hour,

Leaping along the verge of death and night,

You show me dauntless Youth that went to fight

Four long years past, discovering pride and power.

 

Be still; you have drained the cup; you have played your part.

When I was young my heart and head were light,

And I was gay and feckless as a colt

Out in the fields, with morning in the may,

Wind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom.

  O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free

  And all the paths led on from hawthorn-time

  Across the carolling meadows into June.

 

But now my heart is heavy-laden. I sit

Burning my dreams away beside the fire:

For death has made me wise and bitter and strong;

And I am rich in all that I have lost.

  O starshine on the fields of long-ago,

  Bring me the darkness and the nightingale;

  Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home,

  And silence; and the faces of my friends.

Fires in the dark you build; tall quivering flames

In the huge midnight forest of the unknown.

Your soul is full of cities with dead names,

And blind-faced, earth-bound gods of bronze and stone

Whose priests and kings and lust-begotten lords

Watch the procession of their thundering hosts,

Or guard relentless fanes with flickering swords

And wizardry of ghosts.

In a strange house I woke; heard overhead

Hastily-thudding feet and a muffled scream . . .

(Is death like that?) . . . I quaked uncomforted,

Striving to frame to-morrow in a dream

Of woods and sliding pools and cloudless day.

(You know how bees come into a twilight room

From dazzling afternoon, then sail away

Out of the curtained gloom.)

You understand my thoughts; though, when you think,

You’re out beyond the boundaries of my brain.

I’m but a bird at dawn that cries ‘chink, chink’—

A garden-bird that warbles in the rain.

And you’re the flying-man, the speck that steers

A careful course far down the verge of day,

Half-way across the world. Above the years

You soar . . . Is death so bad? . . . I wish you’d say.

Your dextrous wit will haunt us long

Wounding our grief with yesterday.

Your laughter is a broken song;

And death has found you, kind and gay.

 

We may forget those transient things

That made your charm and our delight:

But loyal love has deathless wings

That rise and triumph out of night.

 

So, in the days to come, your name

Shall be as music that ascends

When honour turns a heart from shame . . .

O heart of hearts! . . . O friend of friends!

I dreamt I saw a huge grey boat in silence steaming

Down a canal; it drew the dizzy landscape after;

The solemn world was sucked along with it—a streaming

Land-slide of loveliness. O, but I rocked with laughter,

Staring, and clinging to my tree-top. For a lake

Of gleaming peace swept on behind. (I mustn’t wake.)

 

And then great clouds gathered and burst in spumes of green

That plunged into the water; and the sun came out

On glittering islands thronged with orchards scarlet-bloomed;

And rosy-plumed flamingoes flashed across the scene . . .

O, but the beauty of their freedom made me shout . . .

And when I woke I wondered where on earth I’d been.

‘This job’s the best I’ve done.’ He bent his head

Over the golden vessel that he’d wrought.

A bird was singing. But the craftsman’s thought

Is a forgotten language, lost and dead.

 

He sighed and stretch’d brown arms. His friend came in

And stood beside him in the morning sun.

The goldwork glitter’d. . . . ‘That’s the best I’ve done.

And now I’ve got a necklace to begin.’

 

This was at Gnossos, in the isle of Crete . . .

A girl was selling flowers along the street.

I was near the King that day. I saw him snatch

And briskly scan the G.H.Q. dispatch.

Thick-voiced, he read it out. (His face was grave.)

‘This officer advanced with the first wave,

And when our first objective had been gained,

(Though wounded twice), reorganized the line:

The spirit of the troops was by his fine

Example most effectively sustained.’

 

He gripped his beard; then closed his eyes and said,

‘Bathsheba must be warned that he is dead.

Send for her. I will be the first to tell

This wife how her heroic husband fell.’

Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain,

Shivered below his wind-whipped olive-trees;

Huddling sharp chin on scarred and scraggy knees,

He moaned and mumbled to his darkening brain;

‘He was the grandest of them all—was Cain!

A lion laired in the hills, that none could tire;

Swift as a stag; a stallion of the plain,

Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire.’

 

Grimly he thought of Abel, soft and fair—

A lover with disaster in his face,

And scarlet blossom twisted in bright hair.

‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace? . . .

God always hated Cain’ . . . He bowed his head—

The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.

I’ve had a good bump round; my little horse

Refused the brook first time,

Then jumped it prime;

And ran out at the double,

But of course

There’s always trouble at a double:

And then—I don’t know how

It was—he turned it up

At that big, hairy fence before the plough;

And some young silly pup

(I don’t know which),

Near as a toucher knocked me into the ditch;

But we finished full of running, and quite sound:

And anyhow I’ve had a good bump round.

Some Brave, awake in you to-night,

Knocked at your heart: an eagle’s flight

Stirred in the feather on your head.

Your wide-set Indian eyes, alight

Above high cheek-bones smeared with red,

Unveiled cragg’d centuries, and led

You, the snared wraith of bygone things—

Wild ancestries of trackless Kings—

Out of the past . . . So men have felt

Strange anger move them as they knelt

Praying to gods serenely starred

In heavens where tomahawks are barred.

I heard a clash, and a cry,

And a horseman fleeing the wood.

The moon hid in a cloud.

Deep in shadow I stood.

  ‘Ugly work!’ thought I,

Holding my breath.

  ‘Men must be cruel and proud,

  Jousting for death’.

 

With gusty glimmering shone

The moon; and the wind blew colder.

A man went over the hill,

Bent to his horse’s shoulder.

  ‘Time for me to be gone’ . . .

Darkly I fled.

Owls in the wood were shrill,

And the moon sank red.

Frail Travellers, deftly flickering over the flowers;

O living flowers against the heedless blue

Of summer days, what sends them dancing through

This fiery-blossom’d revel of the hours?

 

Theirs are the musing silences between

The enraptured crying of shrill birds that make

Heaven in the wood while summer dawns awake;

And theirs the faintest winds that hush the green.

 

And they are as my soul that wings its way

Out of the starlit dimness into morn:

And they are as my tremulous being—born

To know but this, the phantom glare of day.

They know not the green leaves;

In whose earth-haunting dream

Dimly the forest heaves,

And voiceless goes the stream.

  Strangely they seek a place

  In love’s night-memoried hall;

  Peering from face to face,

  Until some heart shall call

  And keep them, for a breath,

  Half-mortal . . . (Hark to the rain!) . . .

  They are dead . . . (O hear how death

  Gropes on the shutter’d pane!)

Dusk in the rain-soaked garden,

And dark the house within.

A door creaked: someone was early

To watch the dawn begin.

  But he stole away like a thief

  In the chilly, star-bright air:

  Though the house was shuttered for slumber,

  He had left one wakeful there.

 

Nothing moved in the garden.

Never a bird would sing,

Nor shake and scatter the dew from the boughs

With shy and startled wing.

  But when that lover had passed the gate

  A quavering thrush began . . .

  ‘Come back; come back!’ he shrilled to the heart

  Of the passion-plighted man.

In the grey summer garden I shall find you

With day-break and the morning hills behind you.

There will be rain-wet roses; stir of wings;

And down the wood a thrush that wakes and sings.

Not from the past you’ll come, but from that deep

Where beauty murmurs to the soul asleep:

And I shall know the sense of life re-born

From dreams into the mystery of morn

Where gloom and brightness meet. And standing there

Till that calm song is done, at last we’ll share

The league-spread, quiring symphonies that are

Joy in the world, and peace, and dawn’s one star.

Sleepless I listen to the surge and drone

And drifting roar of the town’s undertone;

Till through quiet falling rain I hear the bells

Tolling and chiming their brief tune that tells

Day’s midnight end. And from the day that’s over

No flashes of delight I can recover;

But only dreary winter streets, and faces

Of people moving in loud clanging places:

And I in my loneliness, longing for you . . .

 

Only that I may find you at the end

Of these slow-striking hours I toil to spend,

Putting each one behind me, knowing but this—

That all my days are turning toward your kiss;

That all expectancy awaits the deep

Consoling passion of your eyes, that keep

Their radiance for my coming, and their peace

For when I find in you my love’s release.

You were glad to-night: and now you’ve gone away.

Flushed in the dark, you put your dreams to bed;

But as you fall asleep I hear you say

Those tired sweet drowsy words we left unsaid.

 

Sleep well: for I can follow you, to bless

And lull your distant beauty where you roam;

And with wild songs of hoarded loveliness

Recall you to these arms that were your home.

Sleep; and my song shall build about your bed

A paradise of dimness. You shall feel

The folding of tired wings; and peace will dwell

Throned in your silence: and one hour shall hold

Summer, and midnight, and immensity

Lulled to forgetfulness. For, where you dream,

The stately gloom of foliage shall embower

Your slumbering thought with tapestries of blue.

And there shall be no memory of the sky,

Nor sunlight with its cruelty of swords.

But, to your soul that sinks from deep to deep

Through drowned and glimmering colour, Time shall be

Only slow rhythmic swaying; and your breath;

And roses in the darkness; and my love.

I never asked you to be perfect—did I?—

Though often I’ve called you sweet, in the invasion

Of mastering love. I never prayed that you

Might stand, unsoiled, angelic and inhuman,

Pointing the way toward Sainthood like a sign-post.

 

Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy.

We found the little kingdom of our passion

That all can share who walk the road of lovers.

In wild and secret happiness we stumbled;

And gods and demons clamoured in our senses.

 

But I’ve grown thoughtful now. And you have lost

Your early-morning freshness of surprise

At being so utterly mine: you’ve learned to fear

The gloomy, stricken places in my soul,

And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.

 

You made me glad; and I can still return

To you, the haven of my lonely pride:

But I am sworn to murder those illusions

That blossom from desire with desperate beauty:

And there shall be no falsehood in our failure;

Since, if we loved like beasts, the thing is done,

And I’ll not hide it, though our heaven be hell.

 

You dream long liturgies of our devotion.

Yet, in my heart, I dread our love’s destruction.

But, should you grow to hate me, I would ask

No mercy of your mood: I’d have you stand

And look me in the eyes, and laugh, and smite me.

 

Then I should know, at least, that truth endured,

Though love had died of wounds. And you could leave me

Unvanquished in my atmosphere of devils.

I love all things that pass: their briefness is

Music that fades on transient silences.

Winds, birds, and glittering leaves that flare and fall—

They fling delight across the world; they call

To rhythmic-flashing limbs that rove and race . . .

  A moment in the dawn for Youth’s lit face;

  A moment’s passion, closing on the cry—

  ‘O Beauty, born of lovely things that die!’

You think I cannot understand. Ah, but I do . . .

I have been wrung with anger and compassion for you.

I wonder if you’d loathe my pity, if you knew.

 

But you shall know. I’ve carried in my heart too long

This secret burden. Has not silence wrought your wrong—

Brought you to dumb and wintry middle-age, with grey

Unfruitful withering?—Ah, the pitiless things I say . . .

 

What do you ask your God for, at the end of day,

Kneeling beside your bed with bowed and hopeless head?

What mercy can He give you?—Dreams of the unborn

Children that haunt your soul like loving words unsaid—

Dreams, as a song half-heard through sleep in early morn?

 

I see you in the chapel, where you bend before

The enhaloed calm of everlasting Motherhood

That wounds your life; I see you humbled to adore

The painted miracle you’ve never understood.

 

Tender, and bitter-sweet, and shy, I’ve watched you holding

Another’s child. O childless woman, was it then

That, with an instant’s cry, your heart, made young again,

Was crucified for ever—those poor arms enfolding

The life, the consummation that had been denied you?

I too have longed for children. Ah, but you must not weep.

Something I have to whisper as I kneel beside you . . .

And you must pray for me before you fall asleep.

Have you forgotten yet? . . .

For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,

Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:

And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow

Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,

Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.

But the past is just the same—and War’s a bloody game . . .

Have you forgotten yet? . . .

Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

 

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz—

The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?

Do you remember the rats; and the stench

Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—

And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?

Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

 

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack—

And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then

As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?

Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back

With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-grey

Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

 

Have you forgotten yet? . . .

Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

 

March 1919.

You like my bird-sung gardens: wings and flowers;

Calm landscapes for emotion; star-lit lawns;

And Youth against the sun-rise . . . ‘Not profound;

But such a haunting music in the sound:

Do it once more; it helps us to forget’.

 

Last night I dreamt an old recurring scene—

Some complex out of childhood; (sex, of course!)

I can’t remember how the trouble starts;

And then I’m running blindly in the sun

Down the old orchard, and there’s something cruel

Chasing me; someone roused to a grim pursuit

Of clumsy anger . . . Crash! I’m through the fence

And thrusting wildly down the wood that’s dense

With woven green of safety; paths that wind

Moss-grown from glade to glade; and far behind,

One thwarted yell; then silence. I’ve escaped.

 

That’s where it used to stop. Last night I went

Onward until the trees were dark and huge,

And I was lost, cut off from all return

By swamps and birdless jungles. I’d no chance

Of getting home for tea. I woke with shivers,

And thought of crocodiles in crawling rivers.

 

Some day I’ll build (more ruggedly than Doughty)

A dark tremendous song you’ll never hear.

My beard will be a snow-storm, drifting whiter

On bowed, prophetic shoulders, year by year.

 

And some will say, ‘His work has grown so dreary.’

Others, ‘He used to be a charming writer’.

And you, my friend, will query—

‘Why can’t you cut it short, you pompous blighter?’

Begin: your mind’s the room where you have slept,

(Don’t pause for rhymes), till twilight woke you early.

The window stands wide-open, as it stood

When tree-tops loomed enchanted for a child

Hearing the dawn’s first thrushes through the wood

Warbling (you know the words) serene and wild.

 

You’ve said it all before: you dreamed of Death,

A dim Apollo in the bird-voiced breeze

That drifts across the morning veiled with showers,

While golden weather shines among dark trees.

 

You’ve got your limitations; let them sing,

And all your life will waken with a cry:

Why should you halt when rapture’s on the wing

And you’ve no limit but the cloud-flocked sky? . . .

 

But some chap shouts, ‘Here, stop it; that’s been done!’—

As God might holloa to the rising sun,

And then relent, because the glorying rays

Remind Him of green-glinting Eden days,

And Adam’s trustful eyes as he looks up

From carving eagles on his beechwood cup.

 

I told you it was easy! . . . Words are fools

Who follow blindly, once they get a lead.

But thoughts are kingfishers that haunt the pools

Of quiet; seldom-seen: and all you need

Is just that flash of joy above your dream.

So, when those forty platitudes are done,

You’ll hear a bird-note calling from the stream

That wandered through your childhood; and the sun

Will strike the old flaming wonder from the waters. . . .

And there’ll be forty lines not yet begun.

Voices moving about in the quiet house:

Thud of feet and a muffled shutting of doors:

Everyone yawning. Only the clocks are alert.

 

Out in the night there’s autumn-smelling gloom

Crowded with whispering trees; across the park

A hollow cry of hounds like lonely bells:

And I know that the clouds are moving across the moon;

The low, red, rising moon. Now herons call

And wrangle by their pool; and hooting owls

Sail from the wood above pale stooks of oats.

 

Waiting for sleep, I drift from thoughts like these;

And where to-day was dream-like, build my dreams.

Music . . . there was a bright white room below,

And someone singing a song about a soldier,

One hour, two hours ago: and soon the song

Will be ‘last night’: but now the beauty swings

Across my brain, ghost of remembered chords

Which still can make such radiance in my dream

That I can watch the marching of my soldiers,

And count their faces; faces; sunlit faces.

 

Falling asleep . . . the herons, and the hounds. . . .

September in the darkness; and the world

I’ve known; all fading past me into peace.

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.

 

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away . . . O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Some say the Phœnix dwells in Aethiopia,

In Turkey, Syria, Tartary, or Utopia:

Others assume the continuance of the creature

In unexplored cosmographies of Nature:

One styles it Bird of Paradise; and one

Swears that its nest is built of cinnamon:

While sceptic Eastern Travellers would arraign

The existence of this paragon; and feign

That, since it seems so rare and unprolific,

The bird’s a Pseudomorphous Hieroglyphic.

I have sat in the Stadium, one face in a stabilized flock,

While the busbies and bayonets wheeled and took root on the green.

At the golden drum-majors I gazed; of the stands I took stock,

Till a roar rolled around the arena, from block after block,

Keeping pace with the carriage containing the King and the Queen.

 

Ebullitions of Empire exulted. I listened and stared.

Patriotic paradings with pygmy preciseness went by.

The band bashed out bandmaster music; the trumpeters blared.

The Press was collecting its clichés. (The cloud-covered sky

Struck a note of neutrality, extra-terrestrial and shy.)

 

The megaphone-microphone-magnified voice of the King

Spoke hollow and careful from vacant remoteness of air.

I heard. There was no doubt at all that the Sovereign was there;

He was there to be grave and august and to say the right thing;

To utter the aims of Dominion. He came to declare

An inaugurate Wembley. He did. Then a prelate, with prayer

To the God of Commercial Resources and Arts that are bland,

Was broadcasted likewise, his crozier of office in hand.

‘For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,’ he said.

 

But when Elgar conducts the massed choirs something inward aspires;

For the words that they sing are by Blake; they are simple and grand,

And their rapture makes everything dim when the music has fled

And the guns boom salutes and the flags are unfurled overhead . . .

And the Names, the anonymous crowds, do they all understand?

Do they ask that their minds may be fierce for the lordship of light

Till in freedom and faith they have builded Jerusalem bright

For Empires and Ages remote from their war-memoried land?

So that’s your Diary—that’s your private mind

Translated into shirt-sleeved History. That

Is what diplomacy has left behind

For after-ages to peruse, and find

What passed beneath your elegant silk-hat.

 

You were a fine old gentleman; compact

Of shrewdness, charm, refinement and finesse.

Impeccable in breeding, taste and dress,

No diplomatic quality you lacked—

No tittle of ambassadorial tact.

 

I can imagine you among ‘the guns’,

Urbanely peppering partridge, grouse, or pheasant—

Guest of those infinitely privileged ones

Whose lives are padded, petrified, and pleasant.

I visualize you feeding off gold plate

And gossiping on grave affairs of State.

 

Now you’re defunct; your gossip’s gravely printed;

The world discovers where you lunched and dined

On such and such a day; and what was hinted

By ministers and generals far behind

The all-important conflict, carnage-tinted.

 

The world can read the rumours that you gleaned

From various Fronts; the well-known Names you met;

Each conference you attended and convened;

And (at appropriate moments) what you ate.

Thus (if the world’s acute) it can derive

Your self, exact, uncensored and alive.

 

The world will find no pity in your pages;

No exercise of spirit worthy of mention;

Only a public-funeral grief-convention;

And all the circumspection of the ages.

But I, for one, am grateful, overjoyed,

And unindignant that your punctual pen

Should have been so constructively employed

In manifesting to unprivileged men

The visionless officialized fatuity

That once kept Europe safe for Perpetuity.

Strolling one afternoon along a street

Whose valuable vastness can compare

With anything on earth in the complete

Efficiency of its mammoniac air—

Strolling (to put it plainly) through those bits

Of Londonment adjacent to the Ritz,

(While musing on the social gap between

Myself, whose arrogance is mostly brainy,

And those whose pride, on sunlit days and rainy,

Must loll and glide in yacht and limousine),

Something I saw, beyond a boarded barrier,

Which manifested well that Time’s no tarrier.

 

Where stood the low-built mansion, once so great,

Ducal, demure, secure in its estate—

Where Byron rang the bell and limped upstairs,

And Lord knows what political affairs

Got muddled and remodelled while Their Graces

Manned unperturbed Elizabethan faces—

There, blankly overlooked by wintry strange

Frontage of houses rawly-lit by change,

Industrious workmen reconstructed quite

The lumbered, pegged, and excavated site;

And not one nook survived to screen a mouse

In what was Devonshire (God rest it) House.

So you have touched ten million! Well, I’ve noted

The annual increase of your circulation

From big to vast, from corpulent to bloated,

With, I confess, fastidious consternation.

But, as the saying goes, success succeeds;

And I’m now moved, as one who writes and reads,

To offer you my column of full-throated

(Though marketably dud) congratulation.

 

Ten million years at least this country lacked you.

Studying your antecedents I have tracked you

To someone Pleistocene whose cranium crudely

Began the upward biologic struggle,—

Some Harmsworth ancestor whose Public nudely

Conversed in jargon of guffaw and guggle.

(Who knows what yarns he told of his demeanour

When menaced by a mammoth cave-hyæna?)

 

(Allowing for the slackness of the Jews

In the promotion of athletic sport)—

What a real smart News Editor’d have done

With Mrs. Adam’s anti-social slips?

Excogitate the head-lines he’d have run . . .

‘The Fall. Exclusive Story from Eve’s Lips.’

Then ‘Public Barred from Eden.’ ‘Cain Sheds Blood.’

And ‘Startling New Development of Flood.’

And then the Gospels. . . . But why count the cost

Of unreported copy lived and lost?

The Past is an edition torn to tatters;

And only one thing now supremely matters;

Your enviable Journal’s circulation

Exceeds our census’d London population.

 

But, while I write, doubt surges in my breast,

‘To whom exactly are these words addressed?’

Do I so copiously congratulate

A lonely Earldom or a Syndicate?

Or am I speaking to familiar friends

Who hold your Shares and draw fat Dividends?

Were it not wiser, were it not more candid,

More courteous, more consistent with good sense,

If I were to include all, all who are banded

Together in achievement so immense?

For such inclusion is to have augmented

My audience to an almost national size.

I must congratulate those well-contented

And public-spirited Firms who advertise

Their functions, their ideals, their whole existence,

Across the current acreage of your sheets

With privileged and opulent persistence.

I must congratulate the London streets

Which you adorn with posters that reveal

From day to day, from hour to hour, those many

Events which most concern the public-weal,

And catch most easily the public-penny.

I must congratulate the winning Horse;

The Coin that lost the Test Match; the huge Fist

Of the sub-human Champion-Pugilist;

The simpering Siren in the Bart.’s Divorce;

The well-connected Poisoner, tensely tried;

And the world-famed Bassoonist who has died.

 

Finally, O best and worst of rumour-breeders,

I damn your Circulation as a whole,

And leave you to your twice-ten-million readers

With deep condolence from my lenient soul.

Superbly situated on a Lake

World-famed beyond the costliest Prima Donna

Who ever gargled a Puccini shake,—

The Grand Hotel (superimposed upon a

Villa evolved in vanished centuries

And denizened, long since, by real grandees)

While publishing on poster and prospectus

Its quite unique attractions which await us,

Refrains from offering to resurrect us

To an austere degree of social status.

 

Resolved to satirize Hotels-de-Luxe,

Shyly I sift the noodles from the crooks

Beneath whose bristly craniums a cigar

Juts and transmutes crude affluence to ash.

The Grand Hotel asks nothing but their cash;

The Grand Hotel contains a cock-tail bar

Where they can demonstrate by their behaviour

Hotel-de-Luxe aloofness from their Saviour.

  (The English visitors have motored off

  Into the mountains for a game of golf.)

 

The band concedes them Tosca with their tea.

Bored and expensive babble clogs the air.

Between two smooth white columns I can see

Gold and vermilion tulips. . . . Ambushed there

I criticize the ambulant outer-covers

That, costume-conscious, enter and withdraw

And in them all my satirist-self discovers

Prosperity that lives below the law. . . .

  (You ask what law I mean. . . . Well, my impression

  Is that these folk are poisoned by possession.)

I have seen a man at Lady Lucre’s table

Who stuck to serious subjects; spoke of Art

As if he were in earnest and unable

To ascertain its function in the smart

World where it shares a recreational part

With Bridge, best-selling Fiction, and the Stable.

 

I have heard that man (so destitute of nous

That he’d neglected even to be ‘well-known;’

‘Whatever made her ask him to her house?’)

Talking to Lady Lucre in a tone

Of keen conviction that her social passion,

Purged of the volatilities of fashion,

Toiled after truth and spiritual perfection

Without regard for costume or complexion.

 

I have seen her fail, with petulant replies,

To localize him in his social senses:

I have observed her evening-party eyes

Evicted from their savoir-faire defences.

And while his intellectual gloom encroached

Upon the scintillance of champagne chatter,

In impotent embarrassment she broached

Golf, Goodwood Races, and the Cowes Regatta.

 

The luncheon over, Lady Lucre’s set

Lolled on her lawn and lacked an epithet

Sufficiently severe for such a creature. . . .

‘Such dreadful taste!’ ‘A positive blasphemer!’

‘He actually referred to our Redeemer

As the world’s greatest Socialistic teacher!’

Something goes wrong with my synthetic brain

When I defend the Strikers and explain

My reasons for not blackguarding the Miners.

‘What do you know?’ exclaim my fellow-diners

(Peeling their plovers’ eggs or lifting glasses

Of mellowed Château Rentier from the table),

‘What do you know about the working classes?’

 

I strive to hold my own; but I’m unable

To state the case succinctly. Indistinctly

I mumble about World-Emancipation,

Standards of Living, Nationalization

Of Industry; until they get me tangled

In superficial details; goad me on

To unconvincing vagueness. When we’ve wrangled

From soup to savoury, my temper’s gone.

 

‘Why should a miner earn six pounds a week?

Leisure! They’d only spend it in a bar!

Standard of life! You’ll never teach them Greek,

Or make them more contented than they are!’

That’s how my port-flushed friends discuss the Strike.

And that’s the reason why I shout and splutter.

And that’s the reason why I’d almost like

To see them hawking matches in the gutter.

Near-neighboured by a blandly boisterous Dean

Who ‘hasn’t missed the Match since ’92,’

Proposing to perpetuate the scene

I concentrate my eyesight on the cricket.

The game proceeds, as it is bound to do

Till tea-time or the fall of the next wicket.

 

Agreeable sunshine fosters greensward greener

Than College lawns in June. Tradition-true,

The stalwart teams, capped with contrasted blue,

Exert their skill; adorning the arena

With modest, manly, muscular demeanour,—

Reviving memories in ex-athletes who

Are superannuated from agility,—

And (while the five-ounce fetish they pursue)

Admired by gloved and virginal gentility.

 

My intellectual feet approach this function

With tolerance and Public-School compunction;

Aware that, whichsoever side bats best,

Their partisans are equally well-dressed.

For, though the Government has gone vermilion

And, as a whole, is weak in Greek and Latin,

The fogies harboured by the august Pavilion

Sit strangely similar to those who sat in

That edifice when first the Dean went pious,—

For possible preferment sacrificed

His hedonistic and patrician bias,

And offered his complacency to Christ.

 

Meanwhile some Cantab slogs a fast half-volley

Against the ropes. ‘Good shot, sir! O good shot!’

Ejaculates the Dean in accents jolly . . .

Will Oxford win? Perhaps. Perhaps they’ll not.

Can Cambridge lose? Who knows? One fact seems sure;

That, while the Church approves, Lord’s will endure.

Refortified by exercise and air,

I, jogging home astride my chestnut mare,

Grow half-humane, and question the propriety

Of Foxes Torn to Bits in Smart Society.

 

Spurts past me Fernie-Goldflake in his car . . .

I wonder if these Nimrods really are

Crassly unconscious that their Reynardism

Is (dare I say it?) an anachronism.

Can they rebut my heterodox defiance

Of Hoick and Holloa as a Social Science?

Or do they inwardly prognosticate

The Last (blank) Day; green shires degenerate

With unmolested poultry; drag-hound packs

Racing a bloodless aniseed aroma,

While cockney Gilpins gallop in their tracks;

And British Foxes, mythical as Homer,

Centuries-extinct, their odysseys forgotten.

 

My friends the Fernie-Goldflakes think me mad.

‘Extinct! The idea’s preposterous! It’s rotten

With every sort of Socialistic fad!’

 

Shelley was called ‘an atheistic worm’

By Goldflake’s grandpapa . . .

                Stands Shelley firm?

I watched old squatting Chimpanzee: he traced

His painful patterns in the dirt: I saw

Red-haired Ourang-Utang, whimsical-faced,

Chewing a sportsman’s meditative straw.

I’d known them years ago, and half-forgotten

They’d come to grief. (But how, I’d never heard,

Poor beggars!) Still, it seemed so rude and rotten

To stand and gape at them with never a word.

I ventured ‘Ages since we met,’ and tried

My candid smile of friendship. No success.

One scratched his hairy thigh, while t’other sighed

And glanced away. I saw they liked me less

Than when, on Epsom Downs, in cloudless weather

We backed The Tetrarch and got drunk together.

July proceeds. In ante-prandial strollings

I note the Season’s climax. Cabbage-green,

Lush from humidity of cloud cajolings,

Predominates the vegetative scene.

Soaked, too, with blandishments of golden glare

(For, after all, the sun’s a millionaire

Supremacied from super-tax), Hyde Park

Inhales its sunset swarms of biped forms

Prosperously promenading toward the dark.

 

But who are these that round the central road

Patrol superb in yellow-wheeled barouches?

What social magic keeps each carriage-load

Exempt from Lenin’s Communistic Douches?

Observe the intrepid bonnets, how they flout

(From all that constitutes correct turn-out)

Darwin (who dared suggest arboreal monkey

As ancestor of all, from Queen to flunkey).

 

Meanwhile the scarlet band begins to render

A Mendelssohn Selection; and the throng

Of vesperal perisaunterers, touched by tender

Drum-bourdoned brass, discards stop-press for song.

The crested carriage halts; gem-dangled ears

Hearken in pensive frumpdom to the chords

That thrilled flounced-muslin maidenhood to tears;

The horses snort; she sighs for vanished lords.

 

Down Rotten Row the riders canter slow,

Keeping the old equestrian game alive.

Along warm asphalt paths foot-farers flow,

Pausing to watch pink pelargoniums thrive.

Pink pelargoniums thrive. Demure Democracy

Respects that commonwealth of sward-set bloom;

And no one signals the cockaded groom

To pluck bouquets for obsolete Aristocracy.

A sallow waiter brings me six huge oysters . . .

Gloom shutters up the sunset with a plague

Of unpropitious twilight jagged asunder

By flashlight demonstrations. Gee, what a peach

Of a climate! (Pardon slang: these sultry storms

Afflict me with neurosis: rumbling thunder

Shakes my belief in academic forms.)

 

An oyster-coloured atmospheric rumpus

Beats up to blot the sunken daylight’s gildings.

Against the looming cloud-bank, ivory-pale,

Stand twenty-storied blocks of office-buildings.

Snatched upward on a gust, lost news-sheets sail

Forlorn in lone arena of mid-air;

Flapping like melancholy kites, they scare

My gaze, a note of wildness in the scene.

 

Out on the pattering side-walk, people hurry

For shelter, while the tempest swoops to scurry

Across to Brooklyn. Bellying figures clutch

At wide-brimmed hats and bend to meet the weather,

Alarmed for fresh-worn silks and flurried feather.

Then hissing deluge splashes down to beat

The darkly glistening flatness of the street.

Only the cars nose on through rain-lashed twilight:

Only the Sherman Statue, angel-guided,

Maintains its mock-heroic martial gesture.

 

A sallow waiter brings me beans and pork . . .

Outside there’s fury in the firmament.

Ice-cream, of course, will follow; and I’m content.

O Babylon! O Carthage! O New York!

‘Of course you saw the Villa d’Este Gardens,’

Writes one of my Italianistic friends.

Of course; of course; I saw them in October,

Spired with pinaceous ornamental gloom

Of that arboreal elegy the cypress.

 

Those fountains, too, ‘like ghosts of cypresses’;—

(The phrase occurred to me while I was leaning

On an old balustrade; imbibing sunset;

Wrapped in my verse vocation)—how they linked me

With Byron, Landor, Liszt, and Robert Browning! . . .

A Liebestraum of Liszt cajoled my senses.

 

My language favoured Landor, chaste and formal.

My intellect (though slightly in abeyance)

Functioned against a Byronistic background.

Then Browning jogged my elbow; bade me hob-nob

With some forgotten painter of dim frescoes

That haunt the Villa’s intramural twilight.

 

While roaming in the Villa d’Este Gardens

I felt like that. . . and fumbled for my note-book.

Drab drugget paths protect these polished floors

From tourist-soled attrition. Guide-book phrases

Co-ordinate fatigued and baffled brains

With mute ex-regal affluence. Simpering faces

Exposed in state-saloons and corridors

Survive the modes of soporific reigns.

 

A baton, and a battle (was it Blenheim?)

Respectfully remote; the steed curvetting

Beneath his flushed Elector: what’s the betting

He failed?. . . No gouty poet lives to pen him

Campaign-concluding odes. Mark, too, the mien

(Obese in ermine, sceptred and serene),

Of goggling Max Augustus! Where’s the Court

That equerried his jinks down aisles of green

To chevy stags in sycophantic sport?

 

Nevertheless, while strolling past such glories

(Van Dyck to Winterhalter; stiff brocade

And powder, to frock-coats and whiskered smiles),

My spirit shares with monarchismal Tories

The fairy-tale of Flunkeydom, displayed

In feudal relicry of centuried styles.

  My sympathy for Soviets notwithstanding—

(Dare one deplore the dullness of Democracy?)

I am touched, I am enticed, by super-lavish

Expense; half-cultured coxcomb Kings commanding

In palacefuls the trappings of Autocracy,

With all their country’s coffers ripe to ravish.

 

Outside, sham Renaissance facades evade

Modernity; a melancholic air

Half-masks them, while the sun-warmed windows stare

Affronted on the purposeless parade

Of pygmy visitors. In postures glum,

Like exiled Counts the statues mope aloof.

No vultured banner flaps above the roof:

And loyal gardens, drowsing in the hum

And slant of lapsing afternoon, seem sad.

  Fountains upheave pale plumes against the sky,

Murmuring, ‘Their Majesties came sauntering by—

Was it but yesterday?’ . . . Proud fountains sigh

Toward the long glades in golden foliage clad,

‘Kurfürsts could do no wrong.’ . . . And the woods reply,

Take them for what they were, they weren’t so bad!’

Entering the strawberry-foliate demesne,

I pause (a tourist in the present tense),

Spectator of an architectural scene

Of Doric and Corinthian opulence.

 

In wars which burst before the South Sea Bubble

Muskets explode, hussars and pike-men plunder,

While Churchill, stimulating martial trouble,

Perturbs Palatinates with smoke and thunder.

Events unfold. The George Quartet contrives

William, Victoria, Edward; and at last

George Windsor’s ermined; ruled by whom, arrives

Myself, obscurely pondering on the past—

Sententious thus . . . ‘From halted History comes

The gusty bugling of Malbroukian fame;

And what was once imperious in a name

Recedes with desolate drub of death-led drums.

 

Meanwhile the sun reburnishes the vanes

And orbs of Blenheim Palace; and the clock

Clangs out a modern hour, as if to mock

The mustiness of Marlborough’s campaigns.

The tenant absent (Scutcheon Hall is let

To Transatlantic opulence by a lord

Whose peerage pedigree adorns Debrett

With ancestries armorial and historic),

Discreetly I arrive to pace the sward

And ruminate, in unperturbed accord,

With mind appropriately metaphoric.

 

First let me praise the augustly planned approach

Whose vista, narrowing from wide walls of yew,

Needs nothing but a Queen Anne Period coach

(Plus absence of humanities like dew)

To give the prospect semblance of a print

In elegant autumnal aquatint.

Next let my gaze communicate its paean

Brainward and glorify the Jacobean

Rose-brickwork backed by dense arboreal green,—

The faded pink facade, that nectarine

Of pre-taxation Rent-roll style-stability

Planned for an impermutable nobility.

 

So far, so good. But wherefore its existence

In these dispalaced days? What mortals dare

House their domestic problems in so fair

A setting? . . . Silence . . . Then from foliaged distance

Some Tennysonian ring-dove calmly coos;

A gardener clicks quick shears beyond the yews;

Red Admirals and Painted Ladies bask

And float along the dahlia-brightened border;

Sunshine performs its horticultural task;

And ripened figs harbour the wasp-marauder.

While blue-eyed children, goggle-faced and giggling,

Stare, swollen-cheeked (bad-mannered little wretches),

Two Nature-loving ladies dip their brushes,

Glance up, gaze down; with touches broad or niggling,

Remain absorbed in half-completed sketches

Where embryonic apple-blossom flushes

Round a decrepit cottage whence they catch

The ultimate rusticity of thatch.

 

You ask me why these artists have selected

An unhygienic dwelling as their theme . . .

‘Have they no palate for the unexpected,—

No easel for the Cubist housing-scheme?’

 

A sapless unprolific Past they paint,

Who ramble through the guide-book toward the Quaint.

Meanwhile a blackbird pipes from the vicinity

His free fantasia against virginity.

Faces irresolute and unperplexed,—

Unspeculative faces, bored and weak,

Cruise past each patient victory of technique

Dimly desiring to enjoy the next

Yet never finding what they seem to seek.

 

Here blooms, recedes, and glows before their eyes

A quintessential world preserved in paint,

Calm vistas of long-vanished Paradise,

And ripe remembrances of sage and saint;

The immortality of changeless skies,

And all bright legendries of Time’s creation . . .

  Yet I observe no gestures of surprise

  From those who straggle in to patronize

  The Art Collection of the English Nation.

Antiquarians, filling their noses

With the aromatic dust of some episode in History;

How I pity them their aversion from the flowing vistas of the Future!

For they organize an epoch as if it were a hall for obsolete utensils;

And the blunt broad sword must be catalogued according to its postulated Period.

 

But to me that am no antiquary, and a most indifferent historiographer,

This Museum is a mortuary for departed passions:

And I’d barter all the brocaded farthingales in Conservation

For a single scolding word from great Eliza’s lips.

 

In holograph documents of the Commonwealth

Are memories and ghosts from yellow-candled councils;

Yet what are these, and even the death-mask of the Protector,

Compared with the gruff murmur that came to some nodding secretary,

When in politic debate the voices of Cromwell and Milton mingled?

 

I have learnt this afternoon, from a case of headless costumes,

That the Queen, when she bustled into the Great Exhibition,

Was wearing a sprigged silk dress and a bonnet with ostrich feathers.

From these we may deduce the inches of a once-imperial waist-line:

But who shall recover those heart-beats of Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix,

When she sailed into her Crystal Palace on the climacteric of a European culture?

 

It is four o’clock; and the London Museum is closing.

Outside, in the courtyard, a group of patriots lingers

To watch the young Heir to the Throne step into his hushed Rolls-Royce.

And I wonder, are they wiser than the Antiquarians?

Into warm regions of Romance I stared:

Sat down; produced my note-book, and prepared

To fabricate iambics: something rich,

Serene, perpetual; tuned to concert-pitch:

Carthage without the climax; autumn-gold;

Red sunrise on a crag-set-castle . . . Bold

With pursuance of the encharioted Sublime,

I set my brains to work till closing-time.

 

Words failed me. Dido’s harbour was a gleam

That vanished in white vapours: and the Garden

Of the Hesperides was but a dream

Shut in by storm-clad summits. On my toes

A mild enthusiast trod; and begged my pardon.

I bit my pencil; blinked; and blew my nose.

 

In canvases like these one ought to find

Imaginative moments; yet my mind

Jibs from their glory. Mellow rhymes with yellow;

And Turner was a wonder-working fellow:

But he forbids creation; fails to start

Co-ordinated memories . . . Now my heart

Leaps toward Romance and knows it, standing there

In that calm student with the red-brown hair,

Copying The Death of Chatterton with care

And missing all the magic. That young head

Is life, the unending challenge . . . Turner’s dead.

If Sargent could have called his soul his own

And had not been the hireling of the Rich,

There’d not be many portraits now re-shown

Of ladies lovelified to ball-room pitch;

Nor would these multiplied admirers crush

To crane their necks at sempiternal hostesses

Whom by the brilliant boredom of his brush

He silenced into fashion-dated ghostesses . . .

  Nor would my soul feel quite so mocked and chilly

  When I rejoin plebeian Piccadilly.

Out of the pattering flame-reflective street

Into the Abbey move my adagio feet,

Out of the lofty lamp-lit London dusk

Ferrying through vaulted sanctuaries a head

Calm, vesper-tolling, and subdued to shed

Gross thoughts and sabbatize the intemperate husk.

 

Gazing around, I glimpse the illustrious Dead:

Assembled ancestries of England loom.

Here, on this Second Sunday after Epiphany,

Milton and Purcell triumph from the tomb;

Spirits aspire on solemn-tongued antiphony,

And from their urns immortal garlands bloom.

 

Poets, musicians, orators, and Abstractions

Sponsorial, guard the suppliant congregation.

Fame with mum trumpet, posturing ripe attractions,

Sustains her simpering Eighteenth-Century station;

While Shakespeare, shy ’mid History’s checked polemic,

Muses incognizant of his translation

Into a lingual culture-epidemic.

Charles Wesley; Isaac Watts; each now enjoys

Hymnistic perpetuity from boys

Chanting like scarlet-cassocked seraphim:

Here saintly Keble waits his Evening Hymn,

And hearkens, quiet, confident and humble.

 

John Gay looks glum . . . A clergyman ascends

The pulpit steps; smooths with one hand his hair,

And with the other hand begins to fumble

At manuscript of sermon. We prepare

Patience to listen. But Disraeli bends

Forward a little with his sceptic stare.

Time homilizes on. Grave ghosts are gone.

Diction has turned their monuments to stone:

Dogma has sent Antiquity to sleep

With sacrosanct stultiloquential drone.

But cryptical convulsions of the Past

Pervade the benediction’s truce and sweep

Out on the organ’s fugue-triumphal tone

When hosannatic Handel liberates us at last.

Assassin with the murder-musing smile,

The horrible hunch-back, slim, and garbed in guile

And bulgy-dingy metal, seeks and wins

Unmasked soliloquies, superbly staged.

Slow fades each historied scene; but each begins

In similar pomp. He stabs King Henry caged,

(And wears a scarlet cloak). Next, gets engaged,

Vermilion-clad, black-legged, and sallow with sins.

Another King goes sick. He sneers (in brown).

The King dies, off. Astride his calm white steed

He broods and plots and lours on London town,

And gives two piping nephews all they need.

Then (crafty in a crimson velvet gown)

Limps towards the golden madness of a crown.

 

The casualties were numerous: and at last

He died (in clashing brass-ware), tired but tense;

Lord of his own undoing, crazed, aghast,

And propertied regardless of expense.

And the whole proud production paled and passed,

Self-conscious, like its brilliant audience.

 

New York, March 1920.

’Tis a pity She’s a Whore; last acted—Lord

Knows when! Revived (and played to-night before ’em)

By the Phœnician Stage Association;

Whose staunch subscribers, eager to applaud

Examples of archaic indecorum,

Combine with this their chaste discrimination.

 

Though Lamb extolled it, highbrows here allude

(Rapt in a Freudian future) to its ‘crude

And obsolete psychology’ . . . Detractors

Shatter my estimates. I’m disposed to think

(Wandering between the Acts in search of drink)

That the Audience gets between me and the Actors.

 

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore . . . The curtain falls

On a composed but corpse-encumbered stage

Of expiated incest. Curtain-calls

Re-animate the agonists of passion.

And I’m aware, half-hostile and confused,

That, much though the Phœnicians were amused,

Old Mermaid Dramatists are out of fashion.

If Someone, Something, somehow (as Man dreams)—

Some architectonic spirit-strength omniscient,—

Has wrought the clouded stars and all that seems

World, Universe, and Life (poor, blind, deficient)—

  If this be thus, and Music thrills the spheres,

  And I go thither when my feet have trod

  Past Death,—what chords might ecstasize my ears!

  What oratorios of Almighty God! . . .

 

Yet, seeing that all goes not too well on earth

In this harmonic venture known as Time,

I’m not too optimistic of the worth

Of problematic symphonies sublime:

  And, though I listen aureoled and meek

  To compositions by the Holy Trinity,

  Who knows but I may write (in my critique)—

  ‘The music was devoid of all divinity!’

Play me the languishing Prelude in A flat;

And muse, while sentiment pervades the strings,

Of Love’s macassar-oiled Magnificat

Wafting the world on Mendelssohnian wings.

  Scorn not mild mid-Victorian hearts unloaded

  Of universal yearnings; thus they sighed . . .

  Think, too, how we ourselves may be outmoded,—

  Shorn of our psycho-analytic pride.

 

Those sinking chords can charm us and assuage

With amiable concinnity of style;

So let us welcome them for what they’re worth.

(Still gazing steadfast toward that epic age

When boudoir beauty shall no more beguile

And sentiment is elbowed off the earth.)

The audience pricks an intellectual Ear . . .

Stravinsky . . . Quite the Concert of the Year!

 

Forgetting now that none-so-distant date

When they (or folk facsimilar in state

Of mind) first heard with hisses—hoots—guffaws—

This abstract Symphony (they booed because

Stravinsky jumped their Wagner palisade

With modes that seemed cacophonous and queer),

Forgetting now the hullabaloo they made,

The Audience pricks an intellectual ear.

 

Bassoons begin . . . Sonority envelops

Our auditory innocence; and brings

To Me, I must admit, some drift of things

Omnific, seminal, and adolescent.

Polyphony through dissonance develops

A serpent-conscious Eden, crude but pleasant;

While vibro-atmospheric copulations

With mezzo-forte mysteries of noise

Prelude Stravinsky’s statement of the joys

That unify the monkeydom of nations.

 

This matter is most indelicate indeed!

Yet one perceives no symptom of stampede.

The Stalls remain unruffled: craniums gleam:

Swept by a storm of pizzicato chords,

Elaborate ladies re-assure their lords

With lifting brows that signify ‘Supreme!’

While orchestrated gallantry of goats

Impugns the astigmatic programme-notes.

 

In the Grand Circle one observes no sign

Of riot: peace prevails along the line.

And in the Gallery, cargoed to capacity,

No tremor bodes eruptions and alarms.

They are listening to this not-quite-new audacity

As though it were by someone dead,—like Brahms.

 

But savagery pervades Me; I am frantic

With corybantic rupturing of laws.

Come, dance, and seize this clamorous chance to function

Creatively,—abandoning compunction

In anti-social rhapsodic applause!

Lynch the conductor! Jugulate the drums!

Butcher the brass! Ensanguinate the strings!

Throttle the flutes! . . . Stravinsky’s April comes

With pitiless pomp and pain of sacred springs . . .

Incendiarize the Hall with resinous fires

Of sacrificial fiddles scorched and snapping! . . .

 

Meanwhile the music blazes and expires;

And the delighted Audience is clapping.

Old as a toothless Regius Professor

Ebbed the Madeira wine. Loquacious graduates

Sipped it with sublimation. They’d been drinking

The health of . . . was it Edward the Confessor?

A solemn banquet glowed in every cheek,

While nicotinean fumes befogged the roof

And the carved gallery where prim choristers

Sang like Pre-Raphaelite angels through the reek.

 

Gowns, rose and scarlet in flamingo ranks,

Adorned the dais that shone with ancient silver;

And guests of honour gazed far down the Hall

With precognition of returning thanks.

There beamed the urbanest Law-lord on the Bench,

Debating with the Provost (ceremonious

In flushed degrees of vintage scholarship),

The politics of Plato,—and the French.

 

But on the Provost’s left, in gold and blue,

Sat . . . O my God! . . . great Major-General Bluff . . .

Enough enough enough enough enough!

My music-loving Self this afternoon

(Clothed in the gilded surname of Sassoon)

Squats in the packed Sheldonian and observes

An intellectual bee-hive perched and seated

In achromatic and expectant curves

Of buzzing, sunbeam-flecked, and overheated

Accommodation. Skins perspire . . . But hark! . . .

Begins the great B minor Mass of Bach.

 

The choir sings Gloria in excelsis Deo

With confident and well-conducted brio.

Outside, a motor-bike makes impious clatter,

Impinging on our Eighteenth-Century trammels.

God’s periwigged: He takes a pinch of snuff.

The music’s half-rococo. . . . Does it matter

While those intense musicians shout the stuff

In Catholic Latin to the cultured mammals

Who agitate the pages of their scores? . . .

 

Meanwhile, in Oxford sunshine out of doors,

Birds in collegiate gardens rhapsodize

Antediluvian airs of worm-thanksgiving.

To them the austere and buried Bach replies

With song that from ecclesiasmus cries

Eternal Resurrexit to the living.

 

Hosanna in excelsis chants the choir

In pious contrapuntal jubilee.

Hosanna shrill the birds in sunset fire.

And Benedictus sings my heart to Me.

Slowly the daylight left our listening faces.

 

He guided us through scientific spaces

Of excavated History; till his lone

Roads of research grew blurred; and in our ears

Time was the rumoured tongues of vanished races,

And Thought a chartless Age of Ice and Stone.

 

An archæologist began to make

Assumptions about aqueducts (he quoted

Professor Sandstorm’s book); and soon they floated

Through desiccated forests; mangled myths;

And argued easily round megaliths.

 

Beyond the college garden something glinted;

A copper moon climbed clear above black trees.

Some Lydian coin? . . . Professor Brown agrees

That copper coins were in that Culture minted.

But, as her whitening way aloft she took,

I thought she had a pre-dynastic look.

Observe these blue solemnities of sky

Offering for the academes of after-ages

A mythologic welkin freaked with white!

  Listen: one tiny tinkling rivulet

Accentuates the super-sultry stillness

That drones on ripening landscapes which imply

Serene Parnassus plagued with amorous goats.

 

At the wood’s edge in bronze and olive gloom:

Sickness assails the sun, whose blazing disc

Dwindles: the Eden of those auburn slopes

Lours in the tarnished copper of eclipse.

 

Yet virgin, in her god-impelled approach

To Græco-Roman ravishment, she waits

While the unsated python slides to crush

Her lust-eluding fleetness. Envious Jove

Rumbles Olympus. All the classic world

Leans breathless toward the legend she creates.

 

From thunderous vapour smites the immortal beam . . .

Then, crowned with fangs of foliage, flames the god.

Apollo! . . . Up the autumn valley echoes

A hollow shout from nowhere. Daphne’s limbs

Lapse into laureldom: green-shadowed flesh

Writhes arborescent: glamour obscures her gaze

With blind and bossed distortion. She escapes.

Old Caspar (that’s myself) all doings done,

Sits at his creeper-covered cottage door,

Warmed by the rural radiance of the sun.

 

He watches for the postman to appear,

Knowing that he brings the ‘newspaper’ once more,

And thanks him when he comes. For the austere

Utopian Times arrives but once a year,

(Published on Shakespeare’s Birthday) and is, indeed,

The last surviving ‘newspaper’ men read

On our contented island, once the core

Of an inconvenient ‘Empire,’ now ‘no more.’

 

Old Caspar’s cheerful. The Utopian Times

Announces that ‘no credible report

Has reached us, in twelve months, of any ‘crimes’

Of the once-prevalent, punishable sort.

The antiquated labyrinths of the Law

Have now become entirely obsolete.

Quite lately, for its final ‘Session,’ we saw

The last of the old ‘Courts of Justice’ meet.

A few ‘financiers’ plotted and acquired

Public opprobrium by their quaint adventure.

 

(They were condemned to spade-work, it transpired,

By the Vegetable Growers’ Board of Censure.)’

 

  Old Caspar’s paper tells him that ‘although

  Passion for Literature pervades the Nation,

  Books are infrequent. Authors wisely know

  That Literature needs lengthy incubation.’

  ‘Except for individual recreation,

  Interest in “Sport” continues to decrease.’

  ‘Scientists report a healthy population . . .

  The Seventieth Anniversary of Peace.’

  ‘Longevity is prevalent . . .’ (‘That’s quite true,’

  Thinks Caspar, who himself is a hundred and two.)

 

  ‘Hum-drum,’ he mutters; and turns the page to find

  (Headed ‘A Curious Relic of the Past’)

  A paragraph which ‘takes him back,’ in mind,

  To the Imperfect Age which changed so fast.

 

  ‘ “Lord” Bags, who died last March, despised and old,

  Had influence once. Employer of no less

  Than fourteen hundred editors, he controlled

  A vast proportion of “the Public Press”.

  His catchpenny career was quickly ended

  By the “Statute for Prevention of False News”.

  In later life he stubbornly defended

  His methods by asserting that “the Jews

  Were a World Menace”; adding that he had “done

  More for the World than almost anyone.” ’

  Thus Caspar read, before he went to rest,

  News from the ‘Social State’ where he was guest.

  And if you doubt the ingredients of these rhymes,

  Buy your own copy of The Utopian Times.

 

1924.

Hark, hark, the Mark in the Money Market sings!

And sweet Swiss francs in Bernese Banks

Yodel to Mammon a million thanks

For swift and profitable flight on funded wings.

To Mammon’s face of many facets,

‘Firm in tone’ they raise their song;

‘Fluctuant Bonds and Frozen Assets

Unto us no more belong.’

Toll for the brave

Gold Standard sunk below the European wave.

For Britain’s Gold Redemption Policy suspended,

And the Parity of the Pound (Alas, poor Yorick!) ended,

Lament from fiscal throats,

O patriot Five-Pound Notes;

And let your dirge with Wage Reductions be well blended.

O Franco-franc, O Dollar, and O Florin,

Exceed your rights, ferocious-fanged and foreign!

Pengo, Peseta, and Colonial Pound,

Abjure your mineral ancestry, and be

More glorious than mere gold from underground;

Soar, sag; and move portentously unsound;

Cause all the trouble you can; but O—be free!

Finally, O English Dictionary, this conundrum settle,

And aid me to be poet-laureate of the aureate . . .

‘Non-rusting yellow malleable ductile metal

Of high specific gravity’; (as good as gold).

‘Gold can be foil or dust or leaf; beaten or rolled.

Coins made of this. Money in specie. Bullion. Wealth.’

Gold this; gold that. Pure gold. Gold cannot buy good health.

Gold plate. Resources. Interest. Incomes. Power of purchase.

Pays Unemployment. Buys Champagne, and builds new churches . . .

The finest Sport on earth is job-stock Speculation . . .

Deliver us, O Lord, from Currency Inflation.

 

September 30, 1931.

Memorial Service. Mid-day. The Police

Are there in Palace Yard to keep the peace

Among phlegmatic lookers-on. Half-mast,

The flag, heraldic-emblemed, flaps and bulges.

Watching this Abbey function, one indulges

A taste for public figures of the past.

 

An incorruptible persistent man

Who ended as Field-Marshal and began

As private soldier, in our thoughts to-day

Takes, when his mortal manliness is mute,

The Nation’s last invisible salute,

And from Officialdom receives his pay.

 

‘Fight the good fight with all your might,’ they sing.

The Abbey looks its best; pale sunshine falls

Through glowing glass on monumental walls

And vainly carven virtues,—busts that bring

Null names to lifeless life. . . . Sunlight and sound

Seem to be streaming on their way together

Like Time idealized, as though they’d found

Some antidote for earth’s contentious weather.

 

The congregation gets itself arranged,

With murmurous rustle, for the benediction.

Now for a miracle! Let hearts be changed

And truth emerge from fraudulence and fiction.

 

Now let the Cross of Christ convert the crook,

And self-convict the subtly scheming knave,

Make Mammon merciful, and from their grave

Raise up the unperjured spirits that forsook

Long since the blasphemous hearts they could not save.

 

The choir precedes, in listless prim procession,

The cross-bearer, exalting Faith; and then

The gold-coped Abbey clergy, whose profession

Has made them, outwardly, world-weary men.

Officials follow. Law in wig and gown,

Clean-shaved and circumspective. And the type

Of immemorial diplomat comes down

The centuries, elegant and over-ripe,

And representing France. Then, face by face,

Those persons, long familiar through the Press,

Who’ve governed Albion’s muddles by some guess

Of God,—not always running the straight race.

 

Thus, with a formal and unfeeling show,

Contemporaneous life performs its part.

History records careers; and does not know

The secret memoirs of the human heart.

But while I watch prestige step slowly out

Like actors in a mediæval play

I can’t repress ironic thoughts about

The ‘representatives’ who’re here to-day.

The man they wear silk hats for has meanwhile

Entered his unmolestable immunity;

And can afford, as dead men do, to smile

Serenely at this G.H.Q. community.

 

1933.

That problem which concerns me most—about

Which I have entertained the gravest doubt—

Is, bluntly stated, ‘Have I got a soul?’

And, soulhood granted, while millenniums roll,

Will it inhabit some congenial clime,

Detached from thoughts indigenous to Time,—

Anonymous in what we name ‘the Whole’?

 

Souls have their Sunday morning, belled and bright;

And in the night they move in landless light.

(Skulls thus affirm their legend.) Souls arise

Through flames of martyrdom, absolved and wise,

And those who moved in gloom regain their sight.

 

‘The starry heavens above me,’ someone said,

‘And the moral law within me, these are things

Which fill my mind with admiration.’ . . . Head

And heart, thus prompted, feel aware of wings

And soaring Gothic-aisled imaginings . . .

Soul, will you feel like that when I am dead?

 

1933.

Can a man face the facts of life and laugh? . . .

Swift faced them and died mad, deaf and diseased.

Shakespeare spoke out, went home, and wrote no more.

Oblivion was the only epitaph

They asked, as private persons, having eased

Their spirits of the burden that they bore.

 

The facts of life are fierce. One feels a wraith

When facing them with luminous lyric faith.

Daring to look within us, we discern

The jungle. To the jungle we return

More easily than most of us admit.

In this thought-riddled twentieth-century day

I cannot read—say ‘Gulliver’—and feel gay,

Or share—in ‘Lear’—the pleasure of the Pit.

 

1932.

Song, be my soul; set forth the fairest part

Of all that moved harmonious through my heart;

And gather me to your arms; for we must go

To childhood’s garden when the moon is low

And over the leaf-shadow-latticed grass

The whispering wraiths of my dead selves repass.

 

Soul, be my song; return arrayed in white;

Lead home the loves that I have wronged and slain:

Bring back the summer dawns that banished night

With distant-warbling bird-notes after rain. . . .

Time’s way-worn traveller I. And you, O song,

O soul, my Paradise laid waste so long.

Sing bravely in my heart, you patient birds

Who all this weary winter wait for spring;

Sing, till such wonder wakens in my words

As I have known long since, beyond all voicing,—

Strong with the beat of blood, wild on the wing,

Rebellious and rejoicing.

 

Watch with me, inward solemn influence,

Invisible, intangible, unkenned;

Wind of the darkness that shall bear me hence;

O life within my life, flame within flame,

Who mak’st me one with song that has no end,

And with that stillness whence my spirit came.

As I was walking in the gardens where

Spring touched the glooms with green, stole over me

A sense of wakening leaves that filled the air

With boding of Elysian days to be.

 

Cold Was the music of the birds; and cold

The sunlight, shadowless with misty gold:

It seemed I stood with Youth on the calm verge

Of some annunciation that should bring

With flocks of silver angels, ultimate Spring

Whence all that life had longed for might emerge.

What you are I cannot say;

Only this I know full well—

When I touched your face to-day

Drifts of blossom flushed and fell.

 

Whence you came I cannot tell;

Only—with your joy you start

Chime on chime from bell on bell

In the cloisters of my heart.

While I seek you, far away,

(Yesterday, yesterday,)

Wakeful since we laughed and parted,

How can I recover

Joy that made Elysian-hearted,

Loved and lover?

 

Can my night-long thoughts regain

Time-locked loveliness and laughter?

Can your presence in my brain

Be rebuilt such æons after?

Can it be so far away—

Yesterday, yesterday?

Now when we two have been apart so long

And you draw near, I make you mine in song.

Waiting you in my thought’s high lonely tower

That looks on starlit hushed Elysian gloom,

I know your advent certain as the flower

Of daybreak that on breathless vales shall bloom.

 

Oh, never hasten now; for time’s all sweet,

And you are clad in the garment of my dreams:

Led by my heart’s enchanted cry, your feet

Move with the murmur of forest-wandering streams

Through earth’s adoring darkness to discover

The Paradise of your imperfect lover.

In me, past, present, future meet

To hold long chiding conference.

My lusts usurp the present tense

And strangle Reason in his seat.

My loves leap through the future’s fence

To dance with dream-enfranchised feet.

 

In me the cave-man clasps the seer,

And garlanded Apollo goes

Chanting to Abraham’s deaf ear.

In me the tiger sniffs the rose.

  Look in my heart, kind friends, and tremble,

  Since there your elements assemble.

Since thought is life, God’s martyrdoms were good,

And saints are trumps, no matter what they did.

Therefore I celebrate Sebastian’s blood,

And glory with Lorenzo on his grid,

And likewise with all victims, bruised by boulders,

Stabbed by sadistic swords, on pikes impaled,

Who propped their Paradise on bleeding shoulders

And bred tumultuous pomps when princes failed.

 

Thus for their murdered Master,—thus for his dreamed

Utopia,—from a crookèd Roman cross,

Heavenward on crimson clouds their conquest streamed

To touch His lips in life-redeeming loss.

What is Stonehenge? It is the roofless past;

Man’s ruinous myth; his uninterred adoring

Of the unknown in sunrise cold and red;

His quest of stars that arch his doomed exploring.

 

And what is Time but shadows that were cast

By these storm-sculptured stones while centuries fled?

The stones remain; their stillness can outlast

The skies of history hurrying overhead.

Room, while I stand outside you in the gloom,

Your tranquil-toned interior, void of me,

Seems part of my own self which I can see. . . .

 

Light, while I stand outside you in the night,

Shutting the door on what has housed so much,

Nor hand, nor eye, nor intellect could touch,—

Cell, to whose firelit walls I say farewell,

Could I condense five winters in one thought,

Then might I know my unknown self and tell

What our confederate silences have wrought.

‘When I’m alone’—the words tripped off his tongue

As though to be alone were nothing strange.

‘When I was young,’ he said; ‘when I was young. . .’

 

I thought of age, and loneliness, and change.

I thought how strange we grow when we’re alone,

And how unlike the selves that meet, and talk,

And blow the candles out, and say good-night.

Alone . . . The word is life endured and known.

It is the stillness where our spirits walk

And all but inmost faith is overthrown.

In the stars we have seen the strangeness of our state;

Wisdomless men, we have lifted up our eyes:

From the stars we have asked an augury of our fate,

And our speech has made them symbols of the wise.

 

O star that youth’s awakening eyes have seen,

Sustain us in our nearness to the night:

And you, O storm-hid Hesperus, make serene

Our loss of this loved heritage of light.

When I have lost the power to feel the pang

Which first I felt in childhood when I woke

And heard the unheeding garden bird who sang

Strangeness of heart for me while morning broke;

Or when in latening twilight sure with spring,

Pausing on homeward paths along the wood,

No sadness thrills my thought while thrushes sing,

And I’m no more the listening child who stood

So many sunsets past and could not say

What wandering voices called from far away:

  When I have lost those simple spells that stirred

  My being with an untranslated song,

  Let me go home for ever; I shall have heard

  Death; I shall know that I have lived too long.

When Selfhood can discern no comfort for its cares,

Whither may I turn but to you whose strength my spirit shares?

  Where may I find but in you,

  Beethoven, Bach, Mozart,

  Timeless, eternally true,

  Heavens that may hold my heart?

  Rivers of peace that run beyond the setting sun,

  And where all names are one, green Paradise apart.

When I have heard small talk about great men

I climb to bed; light my two candles; then

Consider what was said; and put aside

What Such-a-one remarked and Someone-else replied.

 

They have spoken lightly of my deathless friends,

(Lamps for my gloom, hands guiding where I stumble,)

Quoting, for shallow conversational ends,

What Shelley shrilled, what Blake once wildly muttered. . . .

 

How can they use such names and be not humble?

I have sat silent; angry at what they uttered.

The dead bequeathed them life; the dead have said

What these can only memorize and mumble.

Alone, I hear the wind about my walls . . .

Wind of the city night, south-west and warm,—

Rain-burdened wind, your homely sound recalls

Youth; and a distant country-side takes form,

Comforting with memory-sight my town-taxed brain . . .

Wind from familiar fields and star-tossed trees,

You send me walking lonely through dark and rain

Before I’d lost my earliest ecstasies.

Wind of the city-lamps, you speak of home

And how into this homelessness I’ve come

Where all’s uncertain but my will for power

To ask of life no more than life can earn . . .

Wind from the past, you bring me the last flower

From gardens where I’ll nevermore return.

Old friend (for such you have lately grown to be

Since your tranquillities have tuned with mine),

Sitting alone, your poems on my knee,

In hours of contemplative candleshine,

I sometimes think your ghost revisits me

And lives upon my lips from line to line.

 

Dead though you are, the quiet-toned persistence

Of what you tell me with your sober skill

Reminds me how terrestrial existence

Plays tricks with death, and, unextinguished still,

Turns home in loveliest hauntings from the distance

Of antiquated years and works its will.

 

This is the power, the privilege, the pride

And rich morality of those who write

That hearts may be their highway. They shall ride

Conquering uncharted countries with the bright

Rewards of what they wrought in living light . . .

Who then shall dare to say that they have died?

Old lady, when last year I sipped your tea

And wooed you with my deference to discuss

The elegance of your embroidery,

I felt no forethought of our meeting thus.

  Last week your age was ‘almost eighty-three.’

  To-day you own the eternal over-plus.

  These moments are ‘experience’ for me;

  But not for you; not for a mutual ‘us’.

 

I visit you unwelcomed; you’ve no time

Left to employ in afternoon politeness.

You’ve only Heaven’s great stairway now to climb,

And your long load of years has changed to lightness.

  When Oxford belfries chime you do not hear,

  Nor in this mellow-toned autumnal brightness

  Observe an English-School-like atmosphere . . .

  You have inherited everlasting whiteness.

 

You lived your life in grove and garden shady

Of social Academe, good talk and taste:

But now you are a very quiet old lady,

Stiff, sacrosanct, and alabaster-faced.

  And, while I tip-toe awe-struck from your room,

  I fail to synthesize your earth-success

  With this, your semblance to a sculptured tomb

  That clasps a rosary of nothingness.

To-day we have remembered sacrifice and glory

And the Cenotaph with flowers is overstocked:

A single gun to soundlessness has clocked

And unified King, Communist, and Tory. . . .

I have listened to your broken stumbling story,

And trespassed in your mind, slum-built and shoddy.

You too have shared the Silence; you have knelt

In the cheerless Prison chapel; you have felt

Armistice Day emotion brim your body.

 

Six years, you say, you’ve worked at baking bread

(A none-too-wholesome task that must be done

By those whom God appoints). You are twenty-one

(Though I’d have guessed you less). Your father’s dead

(Run over by a lorry, I think you said,

In the Great War, while coming home on leave).

Your brother got in trouble and spent three years

In Borstal (all these facts I can believe

Without the reinforcement of your tears).

 

Your brother failed completely to ‘make good’;

Your brother died; committed suicide

By turning on the gas, a twelve-month since.

Now you’re in prison for stealing what you could:

Mother’s in prison for the same offence:

And I’ve no reason to suspect you lied

When you informed me that you ‘only tried

To stick to mother.’ I was touched. You stood

So young, so friendless, so remorseful-eyed.

 

Therefore I find myself compelled to add

A footnote on your candour and humility.

You seem to me a not insensitive lad

Of average emotional ability.

You’ve ‘been upset to-day.’ ‘By what?’ I query.

‘By the two-minute silence.’ Then your weeping . . .

And then your face, so woebegone and weary.

And now—what use, the pity that I am heaping

Upon your head? What use—to wish you well

And slam the door? Who knows? . . . My heart, not yours, can tell.

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,

The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?

Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,—

Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

  Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.

  Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;

  Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,

  The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

 

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride

‘Their name liveth for ever,’ the Gateway claims.

Was ever an immolation so belied

As these intolerably nameless names?

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

Musing my way through a sombre and favourite fugue

By Bach who disburdens my soul but perplexes my fingers,

I heard, as it were in the past of my being that listened,

Echoes of antiphones chanted remotely: I visioned

Martyrs in Glory who stood upon clouds while the singers

Lifted their hearts into heaven, by music unprisoned.

If this in itself were enough, I am crowned with the best.

But the vision in silence has vanished: I know but my need

To be clearing my lofts of their lumber, to build with my breath

The litany leading me onward, the intimate creed

That must hold me enhumbled, barred out from abodes of the blest:

For my prayer must be laden with life and the patience that saith,

‘In our bodies we bide, and the end of the body is death.’

 

Praying I know not to whom in this musicless room

Where my soul like the flame of a candle in ecstasy stood,

I gaze at my life in a mirror, desirous of good.

And my solitude girds me with ghosts, with invisible words:

In the mirror I see but the face that is me, that is mine;

And the notes of the fugue that were voices from vastness divine.

Above the voiceful windings of a river

An old green slab of simply graven stone

Shuns notice, overshadowed by a yew.

Here Vaughan lies dead, whose name flows on for ever

Through pastures of the spirit washed with dew

And starlit with eternities unknown.

Here sleeps the Silurist; the loved physician;

The face that left no portraiture behind;

The skull that housed white angels and had vision

Of daybreak through the gateways of the mind.

  Here faith and mercy, wisdom and humility

  (Whose influence shall prevail for evermore)

  Shine. And this lowly grave tells Heaven’s tranquillity.

  And here stand I, a suppliant at the door.

To-night while I was pondering in my chair

I saw for the first time a circle of brightness

Made by my patient lamp up on the ceiling.

It shone like a strange flower; and then my stare

Discovered an arctic snowstorm in that whiteness;

And then some pastoral vale of rayed revealing.

 

White flowers were in a bowl beside my book;

In midnight’s miracle of light they glowed,

And every petal there in silence showed

My life the way to wonder with a look.

 

O inwardness of trust,—intelligence,—

Release my soul through every door of sense:

Give me new sight; O grant me strength to find

From lamp and flower simplicity of mind.

We are all near to death. But in my friends

I am forewarned too closely of that nearness.

Death haunts their days that are; in him descends

The darkness that shall change their living dearness

  To something different, made within my mind

  By memories and recordings and convenings

  Of voices heard through veils and faces blind

  To the kind light of my autumnal gleanings.

 

  Not so much for myself I feel that fear

  As for all those in whom my loves must die;

  Thus, like some hooded death, I stand apart

  And in their happiest moments I can hear

  Silence unending, when those lives must lie

  Hoarded like happy summers in my heart.

It has been told and shall be told again

How Night and Day visit the souls of men;

How lissom fiends out of their lusts arise

Till hopeless hell emerges in their eyes;

And how in those dominions of despair

World-ravening ghosts make masques of gloom and glare.

But O, more strange,—and who shall say how strong?—

Those imageries of peace which men behold

Through inmost prayer in world-encircling white . . .

And who shall say to which we most belong,

In whom the incongruous elements unfold

Legions of darkness lost and found in light?

I cannot pray with my head,

Nor aspire from bended knees;

But I saw in a dream the dead

Moving among green trees.

I saw the living green

Uprising from the rock.

This have I surely seen,

Though the morning mind may mock.

Close-wrapped in living thought I stand

Where death and daybreak divide the land,—

Death and daybreak on either hand

For exit and for entry;

While shapes like wind-blown shadows pass,

Lost and lamenting, ‘Alas, alas,

This body is only shrivelling grass,

And the soul a starlit sentry

Who guards, and as he comes and goes,

Points now to daybreak’s burning rose,

And now toward worldhood’s charnel close

Leans with regretless warning’ . . .

  I hear them thus—O thus I hear

  My doomed companions crowding near,

  Until my faith, absolved from fear,

  Sings out into the morning,

  And tells them how we travel far,

  From life to life, from star to star;

  Exult, unknowing what we are;

  And quell the obscene derision

  Of demon-haunters in our heart

  Who work for worms and have no part

  In Thee, O ultimate power, who art

  Our victory and our vision.

Let there be life, said God. And what He wrought

Went past in myriad marching lives, and brought

This hour, this quiet room, and my small thought

Holding invisible vastness in its hands.

 

Let there be God, say I. And what I’ve done

Goes onward like the splendour of the sun

And rises up in rapture and is one

With the white power of conscience that commands.

Let life be God. . . . What wail of fiend or wraith

Dare mock my glorious angel where he stands

To fill my dark with fire, my heart with faith?

The wisdom of the world is this. To say, There is

No other wisdom but to gulp what time can give.

  To guard no inward vision winged with mysteries;

  To hear no voices haunt the hurrying hours we live;

  To keep no faith with ghostly friends; never to know

  Vigils of sorrow crowned when loveless passions fade. . .

From wisdom such as this to find my gloom I go,

Companioned by those powers who keep me unafraid.

An image dance of change

Throngs my dim-sighted flesh,

To music’s air-built mesh

Move thoughts for ever strange.

I am so woven of sense

And subtlety uncharted

That I must vanish hence

Blind-souled and twilight-hearted.

Soon death the hooded lover

Shall touch my house of clay,

And life-lit eyes discover

That in the warbling grey

I have been early waking,

And while the dawn was breaking

Have stolen afield to find

That secrecy which quivers

Beyond the skies and rivers

And cities of the mind.

 

Till then, my thought shall strive

That living I may not lose

The wonder of being alive,

Nor time’s least gift refuse.

 

For, though the end be night,

This wonder and this white

Astonishment of sight

Make hours of magic shine;

And heaven’s a blaze and bloom

Of transience and divine

Inheritance of doom.

A flower has opened in my heart . . .

What flower is this, what flower of spring,

What simple, secret thing?

It is the peace that shines apart,

The peace of daybreak skies that bring

Clear song and wild swift wing.

 

Heart’s miracle of inward light,

What powers unknown have sown your seed

And your perfection freed? . . .

O flower within me wondrous white,

I know you only as my need

And my unsealed sight.

He woke; the sceptre broke; and cast away the crown;

Fought blindly with the strangling of the scarlet gown;

Cried out on hell and heaven, and saw the burning-bright

Angel with eyes inexorable and wings, once white

For mercy, now by storming judgment backward blown;

Saw absolution changed to unrelenting stone;

Shrieked; and aghast his ghost from flesh was whirled away

On roaring gales of gloom. . . . He heard an angel say . . .

My hopes, my messengers I sent

Across the ten years continent

Of Time. In dream I saw them go,—

And thought, ‘When thy come back I’ll know

To what far place I lead my friends

Where this disastrous decade ends’.

 

Like one in purgatory, I learned

The loss of hope. For none returned,

And long in darkening dream I lay.

Then came a ghost whose warning breath

Gasped from an agony of death,

‘No, not that way; no, not that way’.

 

1933.

I saw the Prince of Darkness, with his Staff,

Standing bare-headed by the Cenotaph:

Unostentatious and respectful, there

He stood, and offered up the following prayer.

  ‘Make them forget, O Lord, what this Memorial

    Means; their discredited ideas revive;

  Breed new belief that War is purgatorial

    Proof of the pride and power of being alive;

  Men’s biologic urge to readjust

    The Map of Europe, Lord of Hosts, increase;

  Lift up their hearts in large destructive lust;

    And crown their heads with blind vindictive Peace.’

The Prince of Darkness to the Cenotaph

Bowed. As he walked away I heard him laugh.

Troops on manoeuvres, mechanized and masked,

Solve tactical conundrums for the Tanks—

Plodding the Plain in patriotic pranks.

 

‘What means this mimic warfare?’ I have asked,

Halting my horse on a green ridge whose rings

Remind mankind of unenlightened Kings.

My query’s abstract . . . Genial tanks go grinding

Along the tarmac. Joining in the fun,

An armoured lorry hauls an aircraft gun.

Meanwhile in summer sunlight no one’s finding

Cause to disparage these unconscious provers

Of nations pledged to war’s traditional crimes.

No casualties occur in such manoeuvres

(Blandly reported in to-morrow’s Times).

A gas-proof ghost, I climbed the stair

To find how priceless paintings fare

When corpses, chemically killed,

Lie hunched and twisted in the stilled

Disaster of Trafalgar Square.

 

To time’s eternities I came;

And found the Virgin of the Rocks

Dreaming with downward eyes the same

Apocalypse of peace . . . The claim

Of Art was disallowed. Past locks

And walls crass war had groped, and gas

Was tarnishing each gilded frame.

When the first man who wasn’t quite an ape

Felt magnanimity and prayed for more,

The world’s redemption stood, in human shape,

With darkness done and betterment before.

 

From then till now such men have multiplied;

From then till now their task has been the same,

In whom the world’s redemption dreamed and died—

To whom the vision of perfection came.

 

I hear an aeroplane—what years ahead

Who knows?—but if from that machine should fall

The first bacterial bomb, this world might find

That all the aspirations of the dead

Had been betrayed and blotted out, and all

Their deeds denied who hoped for Humankind.

The self-appointed Representative

Of Anti-Christ in Europe having been chosen

As War Dictator, we are pledged to live

With Violence, Greed, and Ignorance as those in

Controllership of Life . . . The microphone

Transmits the creed of Anti-Christ alone.

 

The last Idealist was lynched this morning

By the Beelzebub’s Cathedral congregation—

A most impressive and appropriate warning

To all who would debrutalize the Nation.

 

Our dago enemies having tried to kill us

By every method hitherto perfected,

We launch to-morrow our great new Bacillus,

And an overwhelming victory is expected.

  Thus, Moloch willing, we inaugurate

  A super-savage Mammonistic State.

The President’s oration ended thus:

‘Not vainly London’s War-gassed victims perished.

We are a part of them, and they of us:

As such they will perpetually be cherished.

Not many of them did much; but all did what

They could, who stood like warriors at their post

(Even when too young to walk). This hallowed spot

Commemorates a proud, though poisoned host.

  We honour here’ (he paused) ‘our Million Dead;

  Who, as a living poet has nobly said,

  ‘Are now forever London’. Our bequest

  Is to rebuild, for What-they-died-for’s sake,

  A bomb-proof roofed Metropolis, and to make

  Gas-drill compulsory. Dulce et decorum est . . .’

Lord God whose mercy guards the virgin jungle;

Lord God whose fields with dragon’s teeth are farmed;

Lord God of blockheads, bombing-planes, and bungle,

Assist us to be adequately armed.

 

Lord God of cruelties incomprehensible

And randomized damnations indefensible,

Perfect in us thy tyrannous technique

For torturing the innocent and weak.

 

God of the dear old Mastodon’s morasses

Whose love pervaded pre-diluvial mud,

Grant us the power to prove, by poison gases,

The needlessness of shedding human blood.

In breaking of belief in human good;

In slavedom of mankind to the machine;

In havoc of hideous tyranny withstood,

And terror of atomic doom foreseen;

Deliver us from ourselves.

 

Chained to the wheel of progress uncontrolled;

World masterers with a foolish frightened face;

Loud speakers, leaderless and sceptic-souled;

Aeroplane angels, crashed from glory and grace;

Deliver us from ourselves.

 

In blood and bone contentiousness of nations,

And commerce’s competitive re-start,

Armed with our marvellous monkey innovations,

And unregenerate still in head and heart;

Deliver us from ourselves.

 

1945.

Poet, plant your tree

On the upward way;

Aromatic bay

Plant, that men may see

Beauty greenly growing

There in storm or shine,

And through boughs divine

Freedom bravely blowing.