Long dust, and forsaken cities.
This song likewise He hid. And the flame-wrought casket,
Unimaginably brimming
With essence of all tears and laughter, ordained
To Man for a soul inviolate.
Rose-Pruner
Meanders around the rose-beds, gnarled, clay-brown,
Old Tom the pruner, snic-snac up and down.
‘Look, Tom, you’ve snipped a young shoot from the tree!’
‘Aye, so I have; but I bean’t ashamed,’ says he,
‘The Lord Hisself has made mistakes ere now.
Come Lammastide ’twere twenty year ago
He said, ‘Old Tom’s turn now,’ and upped His shears –
My son He took, the young green sprig o’ the tree,
The garden’s pride.
Mebbee He’m gettin’ old and tired; mebbe
His eyes be smudged like mine awhiles with tears
For a strong son as died.’
In a Wood
I met an old man in a wood.
He had a coat of bracken brown,
And boughs hung round him like a hood.
The winter sun was a red pomegranate
To weigh the branches down.
Pale lemon was the winter moon.
Pointing gnarled finger and gnarled stick
He said, ‘You think that is the moon?’
He said,
‘Long time ago the moon fell sick –
’Twas all along o’ my white cheeses –
And now the moon is dead.
Yon is her ghost. She died of envy.’
He pulled apart the branchy hood,
And went a’bumbling through the wood –
‘’Twas all along o’ my white cheeses.’
Songs of Sirens
Look not too long upon the golden hours,
Look not too long!
Those sirens will unstring thy powers
That made a minstrelsy of suns and showers,
Of every stone a song.
See how the wind’s bleak trumpet stuns each hill
To colder immobility!
Fool!
And canst thou quick and wakeful be
When all thy frail heart is one Philomel
With music sweetly chill –
Voices of siren echoing silverly?
Look not again on that too golden land
Or else delight
Will curdle up thy soul; and thee, unmanned
By beauty that is thy bane,
Those barren nymphs will leave on the brink of night
Forlorn, a pulseless stalactite.
O, look not back upon the golden land,
Look not again.
Words
Were I this forest pool
And you the birch tree bending over,
Your thoughts in shaken leaves could drop
Upon my heart. And we would never
So fret our happiness taming
Rebellious words that sulk, run crazy
And gibber like caged monkeys,
Mocking their tamers.
A Rune for Anthony John
May the splendid earth renew
Her first loveliness for you.
May the flowers, red and blue,
At your coming blithely strew
Poecil carpets, and the dew
Brightlier shine beneath your shoe.
May the sad, sinister yew
Smile again because of you.
May each cow benignly moo
When you run the meadows through.
All outlandish creatures, too, –
Quagga, chimpanzee and gnu,
Platypus and kangaroo,
Kneel and say a prayer for you.
Leprechaun and fairy brew
Spells to make you think and do.
So will your life be every hue
Of paroqueet and cockatoo.
Fairy to Children
It is I who touch with wonder
Wrinkled brows and solemn eyes;
I can make with powerful magic
Sleeping loveliness to rise;
Mistletoe bear pearls for berries,
Rubies hang instead of cherries,
Dust to build a diamond house.
I can summon all adventure
From a footstep in the snow.
To the sound of one toy trumpet
Unseen armies come and go.
Children, when I pipe my ditties,
March away to sack great cities
With your wooden sword and bow!
Stay quite still! Now can you hear me
Pipe the dances from a strand
Delicate as winter sunshine?
Run and take the fairy’s hand!
Just beyond the garden-paling
There’s a sea, and ships are sailing
Every hour for fairyland.
Song of Fairies
We have known no sorrow from time’s beginning,
And therefore we dance the centuries through;
Twilight ebbs on the tide of our singing,
Our singing flows with the dawn’s first blue.
Our white arms curve like waves of the ocean,
Our white feet flutter like vanishing foam;
Unwearied we of tempestuous motion
Under the echoing forest dome.
The fairy meadows were made for our pleasure,
The meadows of earth for a hiding-place.
The flowers spring up where we weave a measure,
The flowers crouch down when we cover our face.
All the children of beauty know us;
Violets strew us a purple bed;
Spiders are spinning their nets below us;
Great clouds bend down to shelter our head.
We are the light, the joy and the laughter;
The hands that beckon and vanish away;
The sweet content of a smoky rafter;
The bird-like cries of children at play.
To paint your dreams we have dipped our brushes
In pools where the feet of the rainbow stand:
They mingle and change like wavering rushes
Caressed by the wind’s impetuous hand.
Wherever a heart is brimming with beauty,
And washed in the starry water of dreams;
Wherever dim eyes are strained after beauty
And fevered lips bend over her streams;
There we frolic and dance together,
Spinning a delicate, powerful spell
With threads the moonlight hangs on the heather,
And threads of mist from the fairy well.
We have known no sorrow from time’s beginning,
And therefore we dance the centuries through;
Twilight ebbs on the tide of our singing,
Our singing flows with the dawn’s first blue.
Tapestries
I lingered in that unfriended room
Where wind in the keyhole croons forlornly
As a woman barren of womb
Over a dusty cradle.
I lingered. Nothing was there
But tapestries cobwebbed and threadbare,
Stirred by the uneasy air.
And, as I watched them, on the wall
Hound and hunter and quarry, lake and garden
And young girls playing at ball
Shook off their trance: grew dimly aware,
Remembering the delightful fingers
That wove them into life.
And soon to me
Those figures, ghostly and fantastical,
Seemed a forgotten madrigal
Sung by dead lips at midnight merrily.
Lost
Whither is now that city vanished
Where once I walked with innocence hand in hand?
O, an insidious tide hath drowned
Deeper than regret
Cupola, minaret,
And all the streets are sand.
Surely the streets were emerald-paven
When I walked there with innocence. Alas!
Vainly, vainly I peer into
The water’s riddling face,
There is left no trace
Of my lost Lyonesse.
Lines from the French
Give me your eyes, give me your hands,
Give me your hands so fairy-fine.
To lead me past the lonely lands
Give me your eyes, give me your hands,
Your childish hands in mine.
Give me your eyes, give me your hands,
Give me your hands stretched through the Veil.
To lead where Life grown lovely stands
Give me your eyes, give me your hands,
Your hands rose-petal-frail.
No Meaner Quest
Had she lived in perilous days
There had been many courtyards bright
With lances pennoned for her praise.
Now a solitary knight
Rides upon no meaner quest.
The sword her beauty made of fire
Shall strike at many a fear unguessed;
The sword that fighting may not tire
Shall shine through many an unthought field.
Should I tremble while her trust
Is a flame upon my shield?
Friends, when you see the impatient West
Engulf me, say – ‘He was a knight
In joy and fortitude not less
Than they, the troubadour’s delight,
Who sought a lady’s happiness.’
Late Summer
Sleepy the earth lies still at Edwinstowe;
That brown and green slashed coverlet,
Meadow and ploughland, hides the faces I knew
When every primrose bent eyes wet
With happiness, so graciously Spring did go.
How many ages of winter have burdened me
Since last I saw the buttercups
Sprinkling their golden laughter over the lea,
And poppies shaken like wine-drops
On the corn’s hair in summer revelry!
Dream-Maker
A chance word, and you sat there at the table,
Candlelight sharp against your hair’s rich cloud,
And that voice speaking, like a queen of fable
In rose-lamped gardens, passionate and proud.
I marvelled to have forgotten how your throat
Would curve so eagerly, and with what wonder
Seeing your eyes I had seen lilies under
Mysterious bridges slumbrously afloat.
I had forgotten all, forgetting this –
That all my dreams have flowed beneath those bridges,
That my soul heard your voice from heaven’s ridges,
Was shaken by its stormy loveliness.
No one is there. Only the coals grow livid,
Night-breath, and through the window starlight spills.
But still your voice is echoing, cool and vivid,
Like a horn blown at morning beyond the hills.
Once in Arcady
TO V. C. C. – B.
Sometime we two have sat together,
Brown, crisp-limbed shepherd boys,
In meadows under the golden weather.
Air would be shaking with noise
Of bees and honey-sweet sheep bells,
Dully, as from a gong
Once smitten. Over there the hills
Seaward would troop along
Like white fawns to their drinking-pool.
The cave – I see it all –
Stagnant with green silence, and cool;
Grapes sunnily on the wall
Asleep; and we two sprawling outside,
Slim pipes a-trill, or gazing
Where shadows fall and hide
The slow flock grazing.
There, when night hushed the whispering poplars,
Silence would blossom into a green tree:
Beauty would lean her whiteness against the branches
And sing for us most marvellously
Those songs for which all poets have wept,
Waking to find them dream. But we should awaken,
Dawn fragrant still with Beauty’s footfall
Lingering by the cave where we had slept.
A Forest Piece
Only in the forest
Walks Silence for men to see.
At one breathless moment
Tree huddles closer to tree,
Mosses more greenly burn,
Curls up in an ecstasy
Each delicate-fingered fern.
No rabbit stirs. The jay
Has left her querulous chatter,
Subdued by death of day.
Perching among the branches
Wind pauses upon tip-toe.
Now from blue mist-pavilion
You may see King Silence go
Royally through the forest –
Slips on a bough wind’s foot;
Sudden a berry patters.
Look! Silence shivers, is not.
Only in the forest
Walks Silence for men to see.
Lines from Catullus
I
My lady said that she could love no other,
Though God should come from heaven to be her suitor.
She said – but woman’s words to eager lover
Are writ on wind and the unstable water.
II
O heart distraught by her so splendid shame,
Thus hath love mazed thee. Now, if she became
Without a flaw thou could’st not wish her well,
Not cease to love, if she were queen in Hell.
III
I hate and love.
How may this be,
You ask. I do not know.
I only feel ’tis so,
And it is agony.
Sanctuary
Swung in this hammock between hills
we have dreamed a nobler quietude
than the breathless after-hush when bells
tire of their silver tumbling.
Our mood
is crystal, bright as primrose laughter
rippling beneath the bracken, clear
as rain’s metallic plash from a rafter.
How are we grown into this hour!
Drunk with the strong sun-vintage
we have seen the larchwood spire –
emerald sparks for leafage –
upwards in urgent fire …
Time lolls here, a laburnum slanting
its languid tongues.
Now do you seem
all pagan loveliness, enchanting
to witch Time’s eyelids into dream.
Lie so. Be beautiful.
Once Time rested,
kept for such beauty long eclipse;
so Deidre lay and Naisi tasted
an age of morning upon her lips.
An April Mood
Now you have gone, I remember only your smile,
Flame-like and vivid as first green in March hedgerows,
Telling the wayfarers that every mile
Is bringing them nearer to sunshine and the dog-rose.
I only remember now a beauty alien
Hanging on chair and table, cypresses
Hung with a night’s snowfall. Never Pygmalion
So quickened delight from dead stone with kisses.
Beneath your hands, so magical to sain
Fevered unreason, I found cool certitude.
Deep in my being flowers an April mood;
Strangely the sunlit hedgerows blossom again.
Eve
Dancing and revelling shouted the earth
Delirious with morning
And the turbulent splendour of birth.
Under the singing leaf
Laid her white innocence
Eve.
Lion and butterfly – all of her naming
To gaze at the beauty of Princess Eve.
Cooing-ly, mellow-ly, like honeyed lute
In a moon-rich garden,
The delightsome and terrible fruit
Called her and called … Elate
Up to the Tree she crept;
Ate.
Snapped every lute string with cackle of laughter;
Panic thereafter
Came agate-eyed, gibbering, past the gate.
Guiltily, craftily, slunk to his lair
The lion, and dreamed of
Torn bodies, and out of the air
Storm hurled the butterfly.
Faint hear the falling leaves
Cry,
‘We whose life shaded Eve from the sun’s gladness
Perish. Our deadness
Dumbly shall cover her cold body.’
He Thanks Earth for his Beloved
I
All day the spirit have we breathed
Of ferny hills and valleys and clouds hill-steep,
Knowing not how nor whence bequeathed
Joy was arisen
Lovelier than fountains seen in sleep.
Whence should have come this strange rebirth,
This rose in abandoned gardens blossoming,
Complete Poems Page 3