Is it the ravenous host
Of the dead? Or are they shadows of children
Not born, nipped by the frost?
The viaduct’s broken down behind:
They cannot turn again.
Telegraph poles stride on before them
Pacing out their pain.
Where are you going, you wan hikers,
And why this ganglion gear?
What are those packs that on your backs
Through frost and fog you bear?
Through frost and fog, by col and crag
Leads on this thoroughfare
To kingdom-come: it is our gods
That on our backs we bear.
True they had travelled a million miles
If they had travelled one:
They walked or rode, each with his load,
A leaden automaton:
But never the sun came out to meet them
At the last lap of land,
Nor in the frore and highest heaven
Did the flint-eyed stars unbend.
Now they have come to night’s massif;
Those sheer, unfissured walls
Cry halt, and still the following shadows
Rustle upon their heels.
They have come to the crisis of the road,
They have come without maps or guides:
To left and right along the night
The cryptic way divides.
I looked and I saw a stark signpost
There at the road’s crest,
And its arms were the arms of a man pointing,
Pointing to east and west.
His face was pure as the winnowed light
When the wild geese fly high,
And gentle as on October evenings
The heron-feathered sky.
The mists grovelled below his feet
And the crowd looked up to pray:
From his beacon eyes a tremendous backwash
Of darkness surged away.
Speak up, speak up, you skyward man,
Speak up and tell us true;
To east or west – which is the best,
The through-way of the two?
The heaven-wind parts your hair, the sun
Is wintering in your eyes;
Johnny Head-In-Air, tell us
Which way our good luck lies.
Wirily stirred the stiffening grasses
With a chitter of migrant birds:
Wearily all that horde fell silent
Waiting for his words.
Each way the blindly spearing headlights
Were blunted on the gloom:
Only his eyes like keen X-rays
Saw into the night’s womb.
I look to right, to right, comrades,
I look to right and I see
A smooth decline past rowan and pine
That leads to a low country.
Roses cling to a second summer
There, and the birds are late
To bed; the dying sun has left it
A legacy of light:
Winds browse over the unreaped corn,
Rivers flow on gems,
Shades dream in the dust of glory, and steeples
Hum with remembered chimes.
But go you now or go you then,
Those ferlies you’ll not behold
Till the guardians of that valley have crossed
Your hand with fairy gold.
Who takes that gold is a ghost for ever
And none shall hear his cries,
He never shall feel or heat or hail,
He never shall see sun rise.
I look to left, to left, comrades,
I look to left, and there –
Put off those gods, put off those goods
That on your backs you bear –
For he must travel light who takes
An eagle’s route, and cope
With canyons deeper than despair
And heights o’ertopping hope:
Only the lifting horizon leads him
And that is no man’s friend:
Only his duty breath to whisper
All things come to an end.
But all shall be changed, all shall be friends
Upon that mountainside;
They shall awake with the sun and take
Hilltops in their stride.
Out of their crimson-hearted east
A living day shall dawn,
Out of their agonies a rare
And equal race be born.
His arms were stretched to the warring poles,
The current coursed his frame:
Over the hill-crest, niched in night,
They saw a man of flame.
Come down, come down, you suffering man,
Come down, and high or low
Choose your fancy and go with us
The way that we should go.
That cannot be till two agree
Who long have lain apart:
Traveller, know, I am here to show
Your own divided heart.
The Ecstatic
Lark, skylark, spilling your rubbed and round
Pebbles of sound in air’s still lake,
Whose widening circles fill the noon; yet none
Is known so small beside the sun:
Be strong your fervent soaring, your skyward air!
Tremble there, a nerve of song!
Float up there where voice and wing are one,
A singing star, a note of light!
Buoyed, embayed in heaven’s noon-wide reaches –
For soon light’s tide will turn – Oh stay!
Cease not till day streams to the west, then down
That estuary drop down to peace.
Poem for an Anniversary
Admit then and be glad
Our volcanic age is over.
A molten rage shook earth from head to toe,
Seas leapt from their beds,
World’s bedrock boiling up, the terrible lava.
Now it is not so.
Remember, not regret
Those cloudy dreams that trod on air
How distantly reflecting fire below:
The mating in air, the mute
Shuddering electric storms, the foul or fair
Love was used to know.
Admire, no more afraid,
Country made for peace. Earth rent,
Rocks like prayers racked from the heart, are now
Landmarks for us and shade:
Hotfoot to havoc where the lava went,
Cooler rivers flow.
Survey what most survives –
Love’s best, climate and contour fine:
We have trained the giant lightning to lie low
And drive our linked lives;
Those clouds stand not in daydream but for rain,
And earth has grain to grow.
Sonnet
This man was strong, and like a seacape parted
The tides. There were not continents enough
For all his fledged ambitions. The hard-hearted
Mountains were moved by his explosive love.
Was young: yet between island and island
Laid living cable and whispered across seas:
When he sang, our feathery woods fell silent:
His smile put the fidgeting hours at ease.
See him now, a cliff chalk-faced and crumbling,
Eyes like craters of volcanoes dead;
A miser with the tarnished minutes fumbling,
A queasy traveller from board to bed:
The voice that charmed spirits grown insane
As the barking of dogs at the end of a dark lane.
Two Songs
I’ve heard them lilting at loom and belting,
Lasses lilting before dawn of day:
But now they are silent, not gamesome and gallant –
The flowers of the town are rotting away.
There was laught
er and loving in the lanes at evening;
Handsome were the boys then, and girls were gay.
But lost in Flanders by medalled commanders
The lads of the village are vanished away.
Cursed be the promise that takes our men from us –
All will be champion if you choose to obey:
They fight against hunger but still it is stronger –
The prime of our land grows cold as the clay.
The women are weary, once lilted so merry,
Waiting to marry for a year and a day:
From wooing and winning, from owning or earning
The flowers of the town are all turned away.
Come, live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
Of peace and plenty, bed and board,
That chance employment may afford.
I’ll handle dainties on the docks
And thou shalt read of summer frocks:
At evening by the sour canals
We’ll hope to hear some madrigals.
Care on thy maiden brow shall put
A wreath of wrinkles, and thy foot
Be shod with pain: not silken dress
But toil shall tire thy loveliness.
Hunger shall make thy modest zone
And cheat fond death of all but bone –
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
A Carol
Oh hush thee, my baby,
Thy cradle’s in pawn:
No blankets to cover thee
Cold and forlorn.
The stars in the bright sky
Look down and are dumb
At the heir of the ages
Asleep in a slum.
The hooters are blowing,
No heed let him take;
When baby is hungry
’Tis best not to wake.
Thy mother is crying,
Thy dad’s on the dole:
Two shillings a week is
The price of a soul.
A Time to Dance
IN MEMORY OF L. P. HEDGES1
For those who had the power
of the forest fires that burn
Leaving their source in ashes
to flush the sky with fire:
Those whom a famous urn
could not contain, whose passion
Brimmed over the deep grave
and dazzled epitaphs:
For all that have won us wings
to clear the tops of grief,
My friend who within me laughs
bids you dance and sing.
Some set out to explore
earth’s limit, and little they recked if
Never their feet came near it
outgrowing the need for glory:
Some aimed at a small objective
but the fierce updraught of their spirit
Forced them to the stars.
Are honoured in public who built
The dam that tamed a river;
or holding the salient for hours
Against odds, cut off and killed,
are remembered by one survivor.
All these. But most for those
whom accident made great,
As a radiant chance encounter
of cloud and sunlight grows
Immortal on the heart:
whose gift was the sudden bounty
Of a passing moment, enriches
the fulfilled eye for ever.
Their spirits float serene
above time’s roughest reaches,
But their seed is in us and over
our lives they are evergreen.
* * *
Let us sing then for my friend not a dirge, not a funeral anthem,
But words to match his mirth, a theme with a happy end;
A bird’s buoyancy in them, over the dark-toned earth
To hold a sustained flight, a tune sets death to dancing;
The stormcock’s song, the ecstatic poise of the natural fighter,
And a beat as of feet advancing to glory, a lilt emphatic.
* * *
Sing we the two lieutenants, Parer and M’Intosh,
After the War wishing to hie them home to Australia,
Planned they would take a high way, a hazardous crazy air-way:
Death their foregone conclusion, a flight headlong to failure,
We said. For no silver posh
Plane was their pigeon, no dandy dancer quick-stepping through heaven,
But a craft of obsolete design, a condemned D.H. nine;
Sold for a song it was, patched up though to write an heroic
Line across the world as it reeled on its obstinate stoic
Course to that southern haven.
On January 8th, 1920, their curveting wheels kissed
England goodbye. Over Hounslow huddled in morning mist
They rose and circled like buzzards while we rubbed our sleepy eyes:
Like a bird scarce-fledged they flew, whose flying hours are few –
Still dear is the nest but deeper its desire unto the skies –
And they left us to our sleeping.
They felt earth’s warning tug on their wings: vain to advance
Asking a thoroughfare through the angers of the air
On so flimsy a frame: but they pulled up her nose and the earth went sloping
Away, and they aimed for France.
Fog first, a wet blanket, a kill-joy, the primrose-of-morning’s blight,
Blotting out the dimpled sea, the ample welcome of land,
The gay glance from the bright
Cliff-face behind, snaring the sky with treachery, sneering
At hope’s loss of height. But they charged it, flying blind;
They took a compass-bearing against that dealer of doubt,
As a saint when the field of vision is fogged gloriously steels
His spirit against the tainter of air, the elusive taunter:
They climbed to win a way out,
Then downward dared till the moody waves snarled at the wheels.
Landing at last near Conteville, who had skimmed the crest of oblivion,
They could not rest, but rose and flew on to Paris, and there
Trivially were delayed – a defective petrol feed –
Three days: a time hung heavy on
Hand and heart, till they leapt again to the upper air,
Their element, their lover, their angel antagonist.
Would have taken a fall without fame, but the sinewy frame-work the wrist
Of steel the panting engine wrestled well: and they went
South while the going was good, as a swallow that guide nor goad
Needs on his sunny scent.
At Lyons the petrol pump failed again, and forty-eight hours
They chafed to be off, the haughty champions whose breathing-space
Was an horizon span and the four winds their fan.
Over Italy’s shores
A reverse, the oil ran out and cursing they turned about
Losing a hundred miles to find a landing-place.
Not a coast for a castaway this, no even chance of alighting
On sward or wind-smooth sand:
A hundred miles without pressure they flew, the engine fighting
For breath, and its heart nearly burst before they dropped to land.
And now the earth they had spurned rose up against them in anger,
Tier upon tier it towered, the terrible Apennines:
No sanctuary there for wings, not flares nor landing-lines,
No hope of floor and hangar.
Yet those ice-tipped spears that disputed the passage set spurs
To their two hundred and forty horse power; grimly they gained
Altitude, though the hand of heaven was heavy upon them,
The downdraught from the mountains: though desperate
&n
bsp; eddies spun them
Like a coin, yet unkindly tossed their luck came uppermost
And mastery remained.
Air was all ambushes round them, was avalanche earthquake
Quicksand, a funnel deep as doom, till climbing steep
They crawled like a fly up the face of perpendicular night
And levelled, finding a break
At fourteen thousand feet. Here earth is shorn from sight:
Deadweight a darkness hangs on their eyelids, and they bruise
Their eyes against a void: vindictive the cold airs close
Down like a trap of steel and numb them from head to heel;
Yet they kept an even keel,
For their spirit reached forward and took the controls while their fingers froze.
They had not heard the last of death. When the mountains were passed,
He raised another crest, the long crescendo of pain
Kindled to climax, the plane
Took fire. Alone in the sky with the breath of their enemy
Hot in their face they fought: from three thousand feet they tilted
Over, side-slipped away – a trick for an ace, a race
And running duel with death: flame streamed out behind,
A crimson scarf of, as life-blood out of a wound, but the wind
Of their downfall stanched it; death wilted,
Lagged and died out in smoke – he could not stay their pace.
A lull for a while. The powers of hell rallied their legions.
On Parer now fell the stress of the flight; for the plane had been bumped,
Buffeted, thrashed by the air almost beyond repair:
But he tinkered and coaxed, and they limped
Over the Adriatic on into warmer regions.
Erratic their course to Athens, to Crete: coolly they rode her
Like a tired horse at the water-jumps, they jockeyed her over seas,
Till they came at last to a land whose dynasties of sand
Had seen Alexander, Napoleon, many a straddling invader,
But never none like these.
England to Cairo, a joy-ride, a forty-hour journey at most,
Had cost them forty-four days. What centuried strata of life
Fuelled the fire that haled them to heaven, the power that held them
Aloft? For their plane was a laugh,
A patch, brittle as matchstick, a bubble, a lift for a ghost:
Bolts always working loose of propeller, cylinder, bearer;
Complete Poems Page 15