Yes, I still remember
The whole thing in a way;
Edge and exactitude
Depend on the day.
Of all that prodigious scene
There seems scanty loss,
Though mists mainly float and screen
Canal, spire and fosse;
Though commonly I fail to name
That once obvious Hill,
And where we went and whence we came
To be killed, or kill.
Those mists are spiritual
And luminous-obscure,
Evolved of countless circumstance
Of which I am sure;
Of which, at the instance
Of sound, smell, change and stir,
New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.
And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.
On a Picture by Dürer
Sonnenuntergang
Where found you, Dürer, that strange group of trees,
That seared, shamed, mutilated group still standing
To tell us This is War: where found you these?
I did not guess, when last I saw shells landing
Smash on the track beside, how old they were.
They had been good tall pines, I saw, but not
Of such great bole as argued they stood there
When your antiquity might pass the spot.
A thousand of us who as yet survive
From what was modern war the other day
Could recognise them, killed in the great Drive
Which strewed so many bones in glory’s way.
But, you, your date was wrong. From which of your towers
Saw you that night across the centuries,
Under that cloud with baleful eye slits, ours –
Our sign, our shape, our dumb but eloquent trees?
Cricket, I Confess
‘Sir, I cannot profess to understand
One thing in England’ – and Sakabé scanned
My face to be sure there was no offence astir, –
‘It is Cricket, I confess. In the English character
That’s the chief puzzle I have. ‘“My horn is dry,”
If you don’t understand it, no more do I.’
Far out in the valley the sun was gilding green
Those meadows which in England most are seen,
Where churchyard, church, inn, forge and loft stand round
With cottages, and through the ages bound
The duckpond, and the stocks, and cricket-ground.
And I fell silent, while kind memories played
Bat and ball in the sunny past, not much dismayed
Why these things were, and why I liked them so.
O my Relf and Jessop and Hutchings long ago.
On Several Occasions (1939)
To W.O. and His Kind
If even you, so able and so keen,
And master of the business you reported
Seem now almost as though you had never been,
And in your simple purpose nearly thwarted,
What hope is there? What harvest from those hours
Deliberately, and in the name of truth,
Endured by you? Your witness moves no Powers,
And younger youth resents your sentient youth.
You would have stayed me with some parable,
The grain of mustard seed, the boy that thrust
His arm into the leaking dyke to quell
The North Sea’s onrush. Would you were not dust.
With you I might invent, and make men try,
Some kindly shelter from this frantic sky.
Poems 1930–1940 (1941)
In May 1916: Near Richebourg St Vaast
The green brook played, talked unafraid
As though like me it gladly quitted
The shabby, shattered zones of fire
With barbed wire webbed, with burnt scars pitted.
It was my hour, and sunset’s flower;
Now I could breathe and shed my trouble;
The track even here had danger in it,
And the next farm lay a heap of rubble.
So being alone, my last job done,
I followed the course of that lithe water
Westward in blossoming waywardness,
Such beauty neighbouring so much slaughter,
With ray and song beguiled along;
It seemed the war, for all its cunning,
Had missed this orchard brook, or some
Especial fortune kept it running;
Half scared at this, something amiss,
I doubted whether cursed illusion
Had seized my brain and lured me on
To some intolerable conclusion;
So paused, went back to the general track,
The safer way for soldiers’ walking:
And as the stream’s last murmur stilled,
Our sixty pounders started talking.
Company Commander, 1917
‘How lovely are the messengers that preach us the gospel of peace.’
So sang my friend, the company commander, in the trough of war,
Amid interminable shocks and snags, expecting no release.
It was not irony that prompted his song; though the daily score
Of casualities was even at the moment employing his pen,
And though his ridiculous shelter could stop no missile more
Than an empty bully-tin, being the target of daily torrents
Of hissing, shattering shells; yet no shell tore
Through VID.’s own armament; signing returns and warrants
He recalled old music, commanded, guarded, jollied his men.
‘O for the peace that floweth like a river.’
That too he sang, and damned, at each pause, the red-tabbed Brigade,
Whose orders for grimness more than the frost-spell made us shiver;
Through VID.’s mild music loomed some bomb-and-bayonet raid.
Dead lies my friend, the fighter, from whom I have rarely heard
Against a human enemy one unhumorous word.
The Sum of All
So rise, enchanting haunting faithful
Music of life recalled and now revealing
Unity; now discerned beyond
Fear, obscureness, casualty,
Exhaustion, shame and wreck,
As what was best,
As what was deeply well designed.
So rise, as a clear hill road with steady ascension,
Issuing from drifted outskirts, huddled houses,
Casual inns where guests may enter and wait
Many a moment till the hostess find them;
Thence ever before the carter, passing the quarries,
The griffin-headed gateways,
Windmill, splashing rill, derelict sheepfold,
Tower of a thousand years –
Through the pinewoods,
Where warm stones lodge the rose-leaf butterfly;
Crossing the artillery ranges whose fierce signs
Mean nothing now, whose gougings look like
Bird-baths now; and last, the frontier farm
And guard-house made of bracken.
Rising to this old eyrie, quietly forsaken,
You bear me on, and not me only.
All difference sheds away,
All shrivelling of the sense, anxious prolepsis,
Injury, staring suspicion,
Fades into pure and wise advance.
So rise; so let me pass.
Shells By a Stream (1944)
What is Winter?
The haze upon the meadow
Denies the dying year,
For the sun’s within it, something bridal
Is more than dreaming here.
There is no end, no severance,
No moment of
deliverance,
No quietus made,
Though quiet abounds and deliverance moves
In that sunny shade.
What is winter? a word,
A figure, a clever guess.
That time-word does not answer to
This drowsy wakefulness.
The secret stream scorns interval
Though the calendar shouts one from the wall;
The spirit has no last days;
And death is no more dead than this
Flower-haunted haze.
Timber
In the avenues of yesterday
A tree might have a thing to say.
Horsemen then heard
From the branches a word
That sent them serious on their way.
A tree, – a beam, a box, a crutch,
Costing so little or so much;
Wainscot or stair,
Barge, baby’s chair,
A pier, a flute, a mill, a hutch.
That tree uprooted lying there
Will make such things with knack and care,
Unless you hear
From its boughs too clear
The word that has whitened the traveller’s hair.
A Prospect of Swans
Walking the river way to change our note
From the hard season and harder care,
Marvelling we found the swans.
The swans on sullen swollen dykes afloat
Or moored on tussocks, a full company there,
White breasts and necks, advance and poise and stir
Filling the scene, while rays of steel and bronze
From the far dying sun touched the dead reeds.
So easy was the manner of each one,
So sure and wise the course of all their needs,
So free their unity, in that level sun
And floodland tipped with sedge and osiery,
It might have been where man was yet to be,
Some mere where none but swans were ever kings,
Where gulls might hunt, a wide flight in from sea,
And page-like small birds come: all innocent wings.
O picture of some first divine intent,
O young world which perhaps was modelled thus,
Where even hard winter meant
No disproportion, hopeless hungers none,
And set no task which could not well be done.
Now this primeval pattern gleamed at us
Right near the town’s black smoke-towers and the roar
Of trains bearing the sons of man to war.
Thoughts of Thomas Hardy
‘Are you looking for someone, you who come pattering
Along this empty corridor, dead leaf, to my door,
And before I had noticed that leaves were now dying?’
‘No, nobody; but the way was open.
The wind blew that way.
There was no other way.
And why your question?’
‘O, I felt I saw someone with forehead bent downward
At the sound of your coming,
And he in that sound
Looked aware of a vaster threne of decline,
And considering a law of all life.
Yet he lingered, one lovingly regarding
Your particular fate and experience, poor leaf.’
The Vanishing Land
Flashing far, tolling sweet, telling of a city fine
The steeple cons the country round, and signals farm and kiln and mine,
Inns by the road are each one good, the carters here are friendly men,
And this is a country where I mean to come again and come again.
There was a child, though, last time I was passing by St Hubert shrine,
A child whose torn black frock and thin white cheek in memory brighter shine
Than abeles and than spires. I said, I pledge this blossom’s better growth,
And so began, but one day failed; what sightless hours, and busy sloth
Followed, and now the child is lost, and no voice comes on any wind;
The silver spire gets farther off, and the inns are difficult to find.
After the Bombing and other short poems (1949)
The Tree in the Goods Yard
So sigh, that hearkening pasts arouse
In the magic circle of your boughs, –
So timelessly, on sound’s deep sea,
Sail your unfurled melody,
My small dark Tree.
Who set you in this smoky yard
None tells me; it might seem too hard
A fate for a tree whose place should be
With a sounding proud-plumed company
By a glittering sea.
And yet you live with liking here,
Are well, have some brocade to wear,
And solitary, mysteriously
Revoice light airs as sighs, which free
Tombed worlds for me.
After the Bombing
My hesitant design it was, in a time when no man feared,
To make a poem on the last poor flower to have grown on the patch of land
Where since a grey enormous stack of shops and offices reared
Its bulk as though to eternity there to stand.
Moreover I dreamed of a lyrical verse to welcome another flower,
The first to blow on that hidden site when the concrete block should cease
Gorging the space; it could not be mine to foretell the means, the hour,
But nature whispered something of a longer lease.
We look from the street now over a breezy wilderness of bloom,
Now, crowding its colours between the sills and cellars, hosts of flame
And foam, pearl-pink and thunder-red, befriending the makeshift tomb
Of a most ingenious but impermanent claim.
From the Flying-Boat
Into the blue undisturbable main
The blue streams flow,
In time they flow
Out of chasms vaporous, spurs far-whitening, winding gorges
Woven of snow;
This height we gain.
The country enlarges.
There the mountain cloudland, and far at the verge
Cliff-cloudlands upsurge;
Here, countless, an archipelago –
How the islands tower in their strength, quincunxes so
May confront such eyes as understand them, down below;
And yet up here I hardly know,
So little is this brilliant change, although
It extends in kingdom bright, so fast we go
Into apparent eternity – but, truth is, all things flow.
And now I am mounted aloft and have taken a wing,
Into the blue undisturbable oceaning,
More prospect than pyramidal Egypt, or perhaps the mountains of the moon could bring,
With whom shall we meet in this place?
Why hides He His face?
The Halted Battalion
One hour from far returns: Each man we had
Was well content that hour, the time, the place,
And war’s reprieve combining. Each good face
Stood easy, and announced life not too bad.
Then almost holy came a light, a sense,
And whence it came I did not then inquire;
Simple the scene, – a château wall, a spire,
Towpath, swing-bridge, canal with bulrush fence.
Still I, as dreamer known, that morning saw
The others round me taken with a dream.
I wonder since that never one of them
Recalls it; but how should they? We who draw
Picture and meaning are dreamless, we
Are sentinels of time while the rest are free.
High Elms, Bracknell
Two buds we took from thousands more
In Shelley’s garden overgrown,
Beneath our roof they are now full-blown,
A royal pair, a scarlet twain
Through whose warm lives our thoughts explore
Back through long years to come at one
Which Shelley loved in sun or rain.
Fleeting’s the life of these strange flowers,
Enchanting poppies satin-frilled,
Dark-purple hearts, yet these rebuild
A distant world, a summer dead*
Millions of poppy-lives ere ours,
And Shelley’s visionary towers
Come nearer in their Indian red;
Not but some shadow of despair
In this dark purple ominous
From that high summer beckons us;
And such a shadow, such a doom
Was lurking in the garden there.
We could not name the incubus,
Save that it haunted Shelley’s home.
Was it that through the same glass door
With weary heart, uncertain why,
But first discerning love can die,
Harriet had moved, alone and slow;
Or Shelley in the moonlight bore
The cold curt word Necessity
From poppies that had seemed to know?
Then tracing the lost path between
The herbs and flowers and wilderness,
Whose was the phantom of our guess
Drawn by that quiet deserted pond
With little boat, now scarcely seen
For tears or bodings? Whose distress
Darkened the watery diamond?
Selected Poems Page 11