The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  Nor a thread of her hair,

  No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby

  I may picture her there.

  1900THOMAS HARDY The Darkling Thrush

  I leant upon a coppice gate

  When Frost was spectre-gray,

  And Winter’s dregs made desolate

  The weakening eye of day.

  The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

  Like strings of broken lyres,

  And all mankind that haunted nigh

  Had sought their household fires.

  The land’s sharp features seemed to be

  The Century’s corpse outleant,

  His crypt the cloudy canopy,

  The wind his death-lament.

  The ancient pulse of germ and birth

  Was shrunken hard and dry,

  And every spirit upon earth

  Seemed fervourless as I.

  At once a voice arose among

  The bleak twigs overhead

  In a full-hearted evensong

  Of joy illimited;

  An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

  In blast-beruffled plume,

  Had chosen thus to fling his soul

  Upon the growing gloom.

  So little cause for carolings

  Of such ecstatic sound

  Was written on terrestrial things

  Afar or nigh around,

  That I could think there trembled through

  His happy good-night air

  Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

  And I was unaware.

  WALTER DE LA MARE The Birthnight 1906

  Dearest, it was a night

  That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;

  A sighing wind ran faintly white

  Along the willows, and the cedar boughs

  Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across

  The starry silence of their antique moss:

  No sound save rushing air

  Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,

  And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,

  Thou, lovely thing.

  WALTER DE LA MARE Autumn

  There is a wind where the rose was;

  Cold rain where sweet grass was;

  And clouds like sheep

  Stream o’er the steep

  Grey skies where the lark was.

  Nought gold where your hair was;

  Nought warm where your hand was;

  But phantom, forlorn,

  Beneath the thorn,

  Your ghost where your face was.

  Sad winds where your voice was;

  Tears, tears where my heart was;

  And ever with me,

  Child, ever with me,

  Silence where hope was.

  WALTER DE LA MARE Napoleon

  ‘What is the world, O soldiers?

  It is I:

  I, this incessant snow,

  This northern sky;

  Soldiers, this solitude

  Through which we go

  Is I.’

  1908MARY E. COLERIDGE No Newspapers

  Where, to me, is the loss

  Of the scenes they saw – of the sounds they heard;

  A butterfly flits across,

  Or a bird;

  The moss is growing on the wall,

  I heard the leaf of the poppy fall.

  MICHAEL FIELD (KATHERINE BRADLEY and EDITH COOPER) The Mummy Invokes His Soul

  Down to me quickly, down! I am such dust,

  Baked, pressed together; let my flesh be fanned

  With thy fresh breath; come from thy reedy land

  Voiceful with birds; divert me, for I lust

  To break, to crumble – prick with pores this crust! –

  And fall apart, delicious, loosening sand.

  Oh, joy, I feel thy breath, I feel thy hand

  That searches for my heart, and trembles just

  Where once it beat. How light thy touch, thy frame!

  Surely thou perchest on the summer trees…

  And the garden that we loved? Soul, take thine ease,

  I am content, so thou enjoy the same

  Sweet terraces and founts, content, for thee,

  To burn in this immense torpidity.

  JOHN DAVIDSON Snow 1909

  I

  ‘Who affirms that crystals are alive?’

  I affirm it, let who will deny:–

  Crystals are engendered, wax and thrive,

  Wane and wither: I have seen them die.

  Trust me, masters, crystals have their day

  Eager to attain the perfect norm,

  Lit with purpose, potent to display

  Facet, angle, colour, beauty, form.

  II

  Water-crystals need for flower and root

  Sixty clear degrees, no less, no more;

  Snow, so fickle, still in this acute

  Angle thinks, and learns no other lore:

  Such its life, and such its pleasure is,

  Such its art and traffic, such its gain,

  Evermore in new conjunctions this

  Admirable angle to maintain.

  Crystalcraft in every flower and flake

  Snow exhibits, of the welkin free:

  Crystalline are crystals for the sake,

  All and singular, of crystalry.

  Yet does every crystal of the snow

  Individualise, a seedling sown

  Broadcast, but instinct with power to grow

  Beautiful in beauty of its own.

  Every flake with all its prongs and dints

  Burns ecstatic as a new-lit star:

  Men are not more diverse, finger-prints

  More dissimilar than snow-flakes are.

  Worlds of men and snow endure, increase,

  Woven of power and passion to defy

  Time and travail: only races cease,

  Individual men and crystals die.

  III

  Jewelled shapes of snow whose feathery showers,

  Fallen or falling wither at a breath,

  All afraid are they, and loth as flowers

  Beasts and men to tread the way to death.

  Once I saw upon an object-glass,

  Martyred underneath a microscope,

  One elaborate snow-flake slowly pass,

  Dying hard, beyond the reach of hope.

  Still from shape to shape the crystal changed,

  Writhing in its agony; and still,

  Less and less elaborate, arranged

  Potently the angle of its will.

  Tortured to a simple final form,

  Angles six and six divergent beams,

  Lo, in death it touched the perfect norm

  Verifying all its crystal dreams!

  IV

  Such the noble tragedy of one

  Martyred snow-flake. Who can tell the fate

  Heinous and uncouth of showers undone,

  Fallen in cities! – showers that expiate

  Errant lives from polar worlds adrift

  Where the great millennial snows abide;

  Castaways from mountain-chains that lift

  Snowy summits in perennial pride;

  Nomad snows, or snows in evil day

  Born to urban ruin, to be tossed,

  Trampled, shovelled, ploughed, and swept away

  Down the seething sewers: all the frost

  Flowers of heaven melted up with lees,

  Offal, recrement, but every flake

  Showing to the last in fixed degrees

  Perfect crystals for the crystal’s sake.

  V

  Usefulness of snow is but a chance

  Here in temperate climes with winter sent,

  Sheltering earth’s prolonged hibernal trance:

  All utility is accident.

  Sixty clear degrees the joyful snow,

  Practising economy of means,

  Fashions endless beauty in, and so

  Glorifie
s the universe with scenes

  Arctic and antarctic: stainless shrouds,

  Ermine woven in silvery frost, attire

  Peaks in every land among the clouds

  Crowned with snows to catch the morning’s fire.

  J. M. SYNGE On an Island

  You’ve plucked a curlew, drawn a hen,

  Washed the shirts of seven men,

  You’ve stuffed my pillow, stretched the sheet,

  And filled the pan to wash your feet,

  You’ve cooped the pullets, wound the clock,

  And rinsed the young men’s drinking crock;

  And now we’ll dance to jigs and reels,

  Nailed boots chasing girls’ naked heels,

  Until your father’ll start to snore,

  And Jude, now you’re married, will stretch on the floor.

  1910J. M. SYNGE The ’Mergency Man

  He was lodging above in Coom,

  And he’d the half of the bailiff’s room.

  Till a black night came in Coomasaharn

  A night of rains you’d swamp a star in.

  ‘To-night,’ says he, ‘with the devil’s weather

  The hares itself will quit the heather,

  I’ll catch my boys with a latch on the door,

  And serve my process on near a score.’

  The night was black at the fording place

  And the flood was up in a whitened race

  But devil a bit he’d turn his face,

  Then the peelers said, ‘Now mind your lepping,

  How can you see the stones for stepping?

  We’ll wash our hands of your bloody job.’

  ‘Wash and welcome,’ says he, ‘begob.’

  He made two leps with a run and dash,

  Then the peelers heard a yell and splash.

  And the ’Mergency man in two days and a bit

  Was found in the ebb tide stuck in a net.

  1911W. H. DAVIES Sheep

  When I was once in Baltimore,

  A man came up to me and cried,

  ‘Come, I have eighteen hundred sheep,

  And we will sail on Tuesday’s tide.

  ‘If you will sail with me, young man,

  I’ll pay you fifty shillings down;

  These eighteen hundred sheep I take

  From Baltimore to Glasgow town.’

  He paid me fifty shillings down,

  I sailed with eighteen hundred sheep;

  We soon had cleared the harbour’s mouth,

  We soon were in the salt sea deep.

  The first night we were out at sea

  Those sheep were quiet in their mind;

  The second night they cried with fear –

  They smelt no pastures in the wind.

  They sniffed, poor things, for their green fields,

  They cried so loud I could not sleep:

  For fifty thousand shillings down

  I would not sail again with sheep.

  THOMAS HARDY The Convergence of the Twain 1912

  (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)

  In a solitude of the sea

  Deep from human vanity,

  And the pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

  Steel chambers, late the pyres

  Of her salamandrine fires,

  Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

  Over the mirrors meant

  To glass the opulent

  The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

  Jewels in joy designed

  To ravish the sensuous mind

  Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

  Dim moon-eyed fishes near

  Gaze at the gilded gear

  And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’…

  Well: while was fashioning

  This creature of cleaving wing,

  The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

  Prepared a sinister mate

  For her – so gaily great –

  A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

  And as the smart ship grew

  In stature, grace, and hue,

  In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

  Alien they seemed to be:

  No mortal eye could see

  The intimate welding of their later history,

  Or sign that they were bent

  By paths coincident

  On being anon twin halves of one august event,

  Till the Spinner of the Years

  Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

  And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

  T. E. HULME Autumn

  A touch of cold in the Autumn night –

  I walked abroad,

  And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

  Like a red-faced farmer.

  I did not stop to speak, but nodded,

  And round about were the wistful stars

  With white faces like town children.

  T. E. HULME Image

  Old houses were scaffolding once

  and workmen whistling.

  (1960)

  EZRA POUND The Return

  See, they return; ah, see the tentative

  Movements, and the slow feet,

  The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

  Wavering!

  See, they return, one, and by one,

  With fear, as half-awakened;

  As if the snow should hesitate

  And murmur in the wind,

  and half turn back;

  These were the ‘Wing’d-with-Awe,’

  Inviolable.

  Gods of the wingèd shoe!

  With them the silver hounds,

  sniffing the trace of air!

  Haie! Haie!

  These were the swift to harry;