Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  ‘Is my team ploughing,

  That I was used to drive

  And hear the harness jingle

  When I was man alive?’

  Ay, the horses trample,

  The harness jingles now;

  No change though you lie under

  The land you used to plough.

  ‘Is football playing

  Along the river shore,

  With lads to chase the leather,

  Now I stand up no more?’

  Ay, the ball is flying,

  The lads play heart and soul;

  The goal stands up, the keeper

  Stands up to keep the goal.

  ‘Is my girl happy,

  That I thought hard to leave,

  And has she tired of weeping

  As she lies down at eve?’

  Ay, she lies down lightly,

  She lies not down to weep:

  Your girl is well contented.

  Be still, my lad, and sleep.

  ‘Is my friend hearty,

  Now I am thin and pine,

  And has he found to sleep in

  A better bed than mine?’

  Yes, lad, I lie easy,

  I lie as lads would choose;

  I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,

  Never ask me whose.

  XXVIII

  The Welsh Marches

  High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam

  Islanded in Severn stream;

  The bridges from the steepled crest

  Cross the water east and west.

  The flag of morn in conqueror’s state

  Enters at the English gate:

  The vanquished eve, as night prevails,

  Bleeds upon the road to Wales.

  Ages since the vanquished bled

  Round my mother’s marriage-bed;

  There the ravens feasted far

  About the open house of war:

  When Severn down to Buildwas ran

  Coloured with the death of man,

  Couched upon her brother’s grave

  The Saxon got me on the slave.

  The sound of fight is silent long

  That began the ancient wrong;

  Long the voice of tears is still

  That wept of old the endless ill.

  In my heart it has not died,

  The war that sleeps on Severn side;

  They cease not fighting, east and west,

  On the marches of my breast.

  Here the truceless armies yet

  Trample, rolled in blood and sweat;

  They kill and kill and never die;

  And I think that each is I.

  None will part us, none undo

  The knot that makes one flesh of two,

  Sick with hatred, sick with pain,

  Strangling – When shall we be slain?

  When shall I be dead and rid

  Of the wrong my father did?

  How long, how long, till spade and hearse

  Put to sleep my mother’s curse?

  XXIX

  The Lent Lily

  ’Tis spring; come out to ramble

  The hilly brakes around,

  For under thorn and bramble

  About the hollow ground

  The primroses are found.

  And there’s the windflower chilly

  With all the winds at play,

  And there’s the Lenten lily

  That has not long to stay

  And dies on Easter day.

  And since till girls go maying

  You find the primrose still,

  And find the windflower playing

  With every wind at will,

  But not the daffodil,

  Bring baskets now, and sally

  Upon the spring’s array,

  And bear from hill and valley

  The daffodil away

  That dies on Easter day.

  XXX

  Others, I am not the first,

  Have willed more mischief than they durst:

  If in the breathless night I too

  Shiver now, ’tis nothing new.

  More than I, if truth were told,

  Have stood and sweated hot and cold,

  And through their reins in ice and fire

  Fear contended with desire.

  Agued once like me were they,

  But I like them shall win my way

  Lastly to the bed of mould

  Where there’s neither heat nor cold.

  But from my grave across my brow

  Plays no wind of healing now,

  And fire and ice within me fight

  Beneath the suffocating night.

  XXXI

  On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;

  His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

  The gale, it plies the saplings double,

  And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

  ’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger

  When Uricon the city stood:

  ’Tis the old wind in the old anger,

  But then it threshed another wood.

  Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman

  At yonder heaving hill would stare:

  The blood that warms an English yeoman,

  The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

  There, like the wind through woods in riot,

  Through him the gale of life blew high;

  The tree of man was never quiet:

  Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

  The gale, it plies the saplings double,

  It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:

  To-day the Roman and his trouble

  Are ashes under Uricon.

  XXXII

  From far, from eve and morning

  And yon twelve-winded sky,

  The stuff of life to knit me

  Blew hither: here am I.

  Now – for a breath I tarry

  Nor yet disperse apart –

  Take my hand quick and tell me,

  What have you in your heart.

  Speak now, and I will answer;

  How shall I help you, say;

  Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters

  I take my endless way.

  XXXIII

  If truth in hearts that perish

  Could move the powers on high,

  I think the love I bear you

  Should make you not to die.

  Sure, sure, if stedfast meaning,

  If single thought could save,

  The world might end to-morrow,

  You should not see the grave.

  This long and sure-set liking,

  This boundless will to please,

  – Oh, you should live for ever

  If there were help in these.

  But now, since all is idle,

  To this lost heart be kind,

  Ere to a town you journey

  Where friends are ill to find.

  XXXIV

  The New Mistress

  ‘Oh, sick I am to see you, will you never let me be?

  You may be good for something but you are not good for me.

  Oh, go where you are wanted, for you are not wanted here.

  And that was all the farewell when I parted from my dear.

  ‘I will go where I am wanted, to a lady born and bred

  Who will dress me free for nothing in a uniform of red;

  She will not be sick to see me if I only keep it clean:

  I will go where I am wanted for a soldier of the Queen.

  ‘I will go where I am wanted, for the sergeant does not mind;

  He may be sick to see me but he treats me very kind:

  He gives me beer and breakfast and a ribbon for my cap,

  And I never knew a sweetheart spend her money on a chap.

  ‘I will go where I am wanted, where there’s room for one or two,

  And the men are none too many for the work there is to do;

  Where the standing line wears
thinner and the dropping dead lie thick;

  And the enemies of England they shall see me and be sick.’

  XXXV

  On the idle hill of summer,

  Sleepy with the flow of streams,

  Far I hear the steady drummer

  Drumming like a noise in dreams.

  Far and near and low and louder

  On the roads of earth go by,

  Dear to friends and food for powder,

  Soldiers marching, all to die.

  East and west on fields forgotten

  Bleach the bones of comrades slain,

  Lovely lads and dead and rotten;

  None that go return again.

  Far the calling bugles hollo,

  High the screaming fife replies,

  Gay the files of scarlet follow:

  Woman bore me, I will rise.

  XXXVI

  White in the moon the long road lies,

  The moon stands blank above;

  White in the moon the long road lies

  That leads me from my love.

  Still hangs the hedge without a gust,

  Still, still the shadows stay:

  My feet upon the moonlit dust

  Pursue the ceaseless way.

  The world is round, so travellers tell,

  And straight though reach the track,

  Trudge on, trudge on, ’twill all be well,

  The way will guide one back.

  But ere the circle homeward hies

  Far, far must it remove:

  White in the moon the long road lies

  That leads me from my love.

  XXXVII

  As through the wild green hills of Wyre

  The train ran, changing sky and shire,

  And far behind, a fading crest,

  Low in the forsaken west

  Sank the high-reared head of Clee,

  My hand lay empty on my knee.

  Aching on my knee it lay:

  That morning half a shire away

  So many an honest fellow’s fist

  Had well nigh wrung it from the wrist.

  Hand, said I, since now we part

  From fields and men we know by heart,

  For strangers’ faces, strangers’ lands, –

  Hand, you have held true fellows’ hands.

  Be clean then; rot before you do

  A thing they’d not believe of you.

  You and I must keep from shame

  In London streets the Shropshire name;

  On banks of Thames they must not say

  Severn breeds worse men than they;

  And friends abroad must bear in mind

  Friends at home they leave behind.

  Oh, I shall be stiff and cold

  When I forget you, hearts of gold;

  The land where I shall mind you not

  Is the land where all’s forgot.

  And if my foot returns no more

  To Teme nor Corve nor Severn shore,

  Luck, my lads, be with you still

  By falling stream and standing hill,

  By chiming tower and whispering tree,

  Men that made a man of me.

  About your work in town and farm

  Still you’ll keep my head from harm,

  Still you’ll help me, hands that gave

  A grasp to friend me to the grave.

  XXXVIII

  The winds out of the west land blow,

  My friends have breathed them there;

  Warm with the blood of lads I know

  Comes east the sighing air.

  It fanned their temples, filled their lungs,

  Scattered their forelocks free;

  My friends made words of it with tongues

  That talk no more to me.

  Their voices, dying as they fly,

  Loose on the wind are sown;

  The names of men blow soundless by,

  My fellows’ and my own.

  Oh lads, at home I heard you plain,

  But here your speech is still,

  And down the sighing wind in vain

  You hollo from the hill.

  The wind and I, we both were there,

  But neither long abode;

  Now through the friendless world we fare

  And sigh upon the road.

  XXXIX

  ’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town

  The golden broom should blow;

  The hawthorn sprinkled up and down

  Should charge the land with snow.

  Spring will not wait the loiterer’s time

  Who keeps so long away;

  So others wear the broom and climb

  The hedgerows heaped with may.

  Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge,

  Gold that I never see;

  Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge

  That will not shower on me.

  XL

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

  The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

  XLI

  In my own shire, if I was sad,

  Homely comforters I had:

  The earth, because my heart was sore,

  Sorrowed for the son she bore;

  And standing hills, long to remain,

  Shared their short-lived comrade’s pain.

  And bound for the same bourn as I,

  On every road I wandered by,

  Trod beside me, close and dear,

  The beautiful and death-struck year:

  Whether in the woodland brown

  I heard the beechnut rustle down,

  And saw the purple crocus pale

  Flower about the autumn dale;

  Or littering far the fields of May

  Lady-smocks a-bleaching lay,

  And like a skylit water stood

  The bluebells in the azured wood.

  Yonder, lightening other loads,

  The seasons range the country roads,

  But here in London streets I ken

  No such helpmates, only men;

  And these are not in plight to bear,

  If they would, another’s care.

  They have enough as ’tis: I see

  In many an eye that measures me

  The mortal sickness of a mind

  Too unhappy to be kind.

  Undone with misery, all they can

  Is to hate their fellow man;

  And till they drop they needs must still

  Look at you and wish you ill.

  XLII

  The Merry Guide

  Once in the wind of morning

  I ranged the thymy wold;

  The world-wide air was azure

  And all the brooks ran gold.

  There through the dews beside me

  Behold a youth that trod,

  With feathered cap on forehead,

  And poised a golden rod.

  With mien to match the morning

  And gay delightful guise

  And friendly brows and laughter

  He looked me in the eyes.

  Oh whence, I asked, and whither?

  He smiled and would not say,

  And looked at me and beckoned

  And laughed and led the way.

  And with kind looks and laughter

  And nought to say beside

  We two went on together,

  I and my happy guide.

  Across the glittering pastures

  And empty upland still

  And solitude of shepherds

  High in the folded hill,

  By hanging woods and hamlets

  That gaze through orchards down

  On many a windmill turning

  And far-discovered town,

  With gay regards
of promise

  And sure unslackened stride

  And smiles and nothing spoken

  Led on my merry guide.

  By blowing realms of woodland

  With sunstruck vanes afield

  And cloud-led shadows sailing

  About the windy weald,

  By valley-guarded granges

  And silver waters wide,

  Content at heart I followed

  With my delightful guide.

  And like the cloudy shadows

  Across the country blown

  We two fare on for ever,

  But not we two alone.

  With the great gale we journey

  That breathes from gardens thinned,

  Borne in the drift of blossoms

  Whose petals throng the wind;

  Buoyed on the heaven-heard whisper

  Of dancing leaflets whirled

  From all the woods that autumn

  Bereaves in all the world.

  And midst the fluttering legion

  Of all that ever died

  I follow, and before us

  Goes the delightful guide,

  With lips that brim with laughter

  But never once respond,

  And feet that fly on feathers,

  And serpent-circled wand.

  XLIII

  The Immortal Part

  When I meet the morning beam

  Or lay me down at night to dream,

  I hear my bones within me say,

  ‘Another night, another day.