The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

  And under that Almighty Fin,

  The littlest fish may enter in.

  Oh! never fly conceals a hook,

  Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,

  But more than mundane weeds are there,

  And mud, celestially fair;

  Fat caterpillars drift around,

  And Paradisal grubs are found;

  Unfading moths, immortal flies,

  And the worm that never dies.

  And in that Heaven of all their wish,

  There shall be no more land, say fish.

  1916D. H. LAWRENCE Sorrow

  Why does the thin grey strand

  Floating up from the forgotten

  Cigarette between my fingers,

  Why does it trouble me?

  Ah, you will understand;

  When I carried my mother downstairs,

  A few times only, at the beginning

  Of her soft-foot malady,

  I should find, for a reprimand

  To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs

  On the breast of my coat; and one by one

  I watched them float up the dark chimney.

  CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY

  When you see millions of the mouthless dead

  Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

  Say not soft things as other men have said,

  That you’ll remember. For you need not so.

  Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know

  It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?

  Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.

  Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

  Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,

  ‘Yet many a better one has died before.’

  Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you

  Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

  It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.

  Great death has made all his for evermore.

  EDWARD THOMAS Cock-Crow

  Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night

  To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, –

  Out of the night, two cocks together crow,

  Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:

  And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand,

  Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,

  Each facing each as in a coat of arms:

  The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.

  EDWARD THOMAS Aspens

  All day and night, save winter, every weather,

  Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,

  The aspens at the cross-roads talk together

  Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

  Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing

  Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn

  The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –

  The sounds that for these fifty years have been.

  The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,

  And over lightless pane and footless road,

  Empty as sky, with every other sound

  Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,

  A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails

  In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,

  In tempest or the night of nightingales,

  To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.

  And it would be the same were no house near.

  Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,

  Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear

  But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

  Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves

  We cannot other than an aspen be

  That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,

  Or so men think who like a different tree.

  ANNA WICKHAM The Fired Pot

  In our town, people live in rows.

  The only irregular thing in a street is the steeple;

  And where that points to, God only knows,

  And not the poor disciplined people!

  And I have watched the women growing old,

  Passionate about pins, and pence, and soap,

  Till the heart within my wedded breast grew cold,

  And I lost hope.

  But a young soldier came to our town,

  He spoke his mind most candidly.

  He asked me quickly to lie down,

  And that was very good for me.

  For though I gave him no embrace –

  Remembering my duty –

  He altered the expression of my face,

  And gave me back my beauty.

  CHARLOTTE MEW À quoi bon dire

  Seventeen years ago you said

  Something that sounded like Good-bye;

  And everybody thinks that you are dead,

  But I.

  So I, as I grow stiff and cold

  To this and that say Good-bye too;

  And everybody sees that I am old

  But you.

  And one fine morning in a sunny lane

  Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear

  That nobody can love their way again

  While over there

  You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.

  CHARLOTTE MEW The Quiet House

  When we were children old Nurse used to say

  The house was like an auction or a fair

  Until the lot of us were safe in bed.

  It has been quiet as the country-side

  Since Ted and Janey and then Mother died

  And Tom crossed Father and was sent away.

  After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head,

  Poor Father, and he does not care

  For people here, or to go anywhere.

  To get away to Aunt’s for that week-end

  Was hard enough; (since then, a year ago,

  He scarcely lets me slip out of his sight –)

  At first I did not like my cousin’s friend,

  I did not think I should remember him:

  His voice has gone, his face is growing dim

  And if I like him now I do not know.

  He frightened me before he smiled –

  He did not ask me if he might –

  He said that he would come one Sunday night,

  He spoke to me as if I were a child.

  No year has been like this that has just gone by;

  It may be that what Father says is true,

  If things are so it does not matter why:

  But everything has burned, and not quite through.

  The colours of the world have turned

  To flame, the blue, the gold has burned

  In what used to be such a leaden sky.

  When you are burned quite through you die.

  Red is the strangest pain to bear;

  In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;

  In Summer the roses are worse than these,

  More terrible than they are sweet:

  A rose can stab you across the street

  Deeper than any knife:

  And the crimson haunts you everywhere –

  Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair

  As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.

  I think that my soul is red

  Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower:

  But when these are dead

  They have had their hour.

  I shall have had mine, too,

  For from head to feet,

  I am burned and stabbed half through,

  And the pain is deadly sweet.

  The things that kill us seem

  Blind to the death they give:

  It is only in our dream

  The things that kill us live.

  The room is shut where Mother died,

  The
other rooms are as they were,

  The world goes on the same outside,

  The sparrows fly across the Square,

  The children play as we four did there,

  The trees grow green and brown and bare,

  The sun shines on the dead Church spire,

  And nothing lives here but the fire,

  While Father watches from his chair

  Day follows day

  The same, or now and then, a different grey,

  Till, like his hair,

  Which Mother said was wavy once and bright,

  They will all turn white.

  To-night I heard a bell again –

  Outside it was the same mist of fine rain,

  The lamps just lighted down the long, dim street,

  No one for me –

  I think it is myself I go to meet:

  I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be!

  T. S. ELIOT The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917

  S’io credessi che mia risposta fosse

  a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

  questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.

  Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo

  non tornò vivo alcun, si’i’odo il vero,

  senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherised upon a table;

  Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

  The muttering retreats

  Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

  And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

  Streets that follow like a tedious argument

  Of insidious intent

  To lead you to an overwhelming question…

  Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’

  Let us go and make our visit.

  In the room the women come and go

  Talking of Michelangelo.

  The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

  The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

  Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

  Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

  Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

  Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

  And seeing that it was a soft October night,

  Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

  And indeed there will be time

  For the yellow smoke that slides along the street

  Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

  There will be time, there will be time

  To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

  There will be time to murder and create,

  And time for all the works and days of hands

  That lift and drop a question on your plate;

  Time for you and time for me,

  And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

  And for a hundred visions and revisions,

  Before the taking of a toast and tea.

  In the room the women come and go

  Talking of Michelangelo.

  And indeed there will be time

  To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’

  Time to turn back and descend the stair,

  With a bald spot in the middle of my hair –

  (They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)

  My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

  My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin –

  (They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)

  Do I dare

  Disturb the universe?

  In a minute there is time

  For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  For I have known them all already, known them all –

  Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

  I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

  I know the voices dying with a dying fall

  Beneath the music from a farther room.

  So how should I presume?

  And I have known the eyes already, known them all –

  The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

  And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

  When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

  Then how should I begin

  To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

  And how should I presume?

  And I have known the arms already, known them all –

  Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

  (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

  Is it perfume from a dress

  That makes me so digress?

  Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

  And should I then presume?

  And how should I begin?

  …..

  Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

  And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

  Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

  I should have been a pair of ragged claws

  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  …..

  And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

  Smoothed by long fingers,

  Asleep… tired… or it malingers,

  Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

  Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

  Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

  But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

  Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

  I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter;

  I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

  And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

  And in short, I was afraid.

  And would it have been worth it, after all,

  After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

  Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

  Would it have been worth while,

  To have bitten off the matter with a smile,