The Map and the Clock

by Carol Ann Duffy

  Those of the largest size,

  Holding his pocket-handkerchief

  Before his streaming eyes.

  ‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,

  ‘You’ve had a pleasant run!

  Shall we be trotting home again?’

  But answer came there none –

  And this was scarcely odd, because

  They’d eaten every one.

  LEWIS CARROLL

  Proud Songsters

  The thrushes sing as the sun is going,

  And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,

  And as it gets dark loud nightingales

  In bushes

  Pipe, as they can when April wears,

  As if all Time were theirs.

  These are brand-new birds of twelve-months’ growing,

  Which a year ago, or less than twain,

  No finches were, nor nightingales,

  Nor thrushes,

  But only particles of grain,

  And earth, and air, and rain.

  THOMAS HARDY

  After a Journey

  Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;

  Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

  Up the cliff, down, till I’m lonely, lost,

  And the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me.

  Where you will next be there’s no knowing,

  Facing round about me everywhere,

  With your nut-coloured hair,

  And grey eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

  Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

  Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;

  What have you now found to say of our past –

  Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?

  Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?

  Things were not lastly as firstly well

  With us twain, you tell?

  But all’s closed now, despite Time’s derision.

  I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

  To spots we knew when we haunted here together,

  The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

  At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,

  And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

  That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,

  When you were all aglow,

  And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

  Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,

  The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,

  Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,

  For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.

  Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,

  The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!

  I am just the same as when

  Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

  THOMAS HARDY

  Neutral Tones

  We stood by a pond that winter day,

  And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

  And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;

  – They had fallen from an ash, and were grey.

  Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove

  Over tedious riddles of years ago;

  And some words played between us to and fro

  On which lost the more by our love.

  The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing

  Alive enough to have strength to die;

  And a grin of bitterness swept thereby

  Like an ominous bird a-wing …

  Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,

  And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me

  Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree

  And a pond edged with greyish leaves.

  THOMAS HARDY

  The Convergence of the Twain

  Lines on the loss of the Titanic

  I

  In a solitude of the sea

  Deep from human vanity,

  And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

  II

  Steel chambers, late the pyres

  Of her salamandrine fires,

  Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

  III

  Over the mirrors meant

  To glass the opulent

  The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

  IV

  Jewels in joy designed

  To ravish the sensuous mind

  Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

  V

  Dim moon-eyed fishes near

  Gaze at the gilded gear

  And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’ …

  VI

  Well: while was fashioning

  This creature of cleaving wing,

  The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

  VII

  Prepared a sinister mate

  For her – so gaily great –

  A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

  VIII

  And as the smart ship grew

  In stature, grace, and hue,

  In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

  IX

  Alien they seemed to be:

  No morttal eye could see

  The intimate welding of their later history,

  X

  Or sign that they were bent

  By paths coincident

  On being anon twin halves of one august event,

  XI

  Till the Spinner of the Years

  Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

  And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

  THOMAS HARDY

  Felix Randal

  Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,

  Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome

  Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some

  Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

  Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended

  Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some

  Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom

  Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

  This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.

  My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,

  Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

  How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,

  When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,

  Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  God’s Grandeur

  The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

  Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

  Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

  Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

  And for all this, nature is never spent;

  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

  And though the last lights off the black West went

  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –

  Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  Hurrahing in Harvest

  Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise

  Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

  Of silk-sack c
louds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

  Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

  I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

  Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;

  And éyes, héart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a

  Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

  And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

  Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!

  These things, these things were here and but the beholder

  Wanting: which two when they once meet,

  The heart rears wings bold and bolder

  And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  The Sea and the Skylark

  On ear and ear two noises too old to end

  Trench – right, the tide that ramps against the shore;

  With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,

  Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.

  Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,

  His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score

  In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour

  And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.

  How these two shame this shallow and frail town!

  How ring right out our sordid turbid time,

  Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,

  Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:

  Our make and making break, are breaking, down

  To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime.

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’

  I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

  What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent

  This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

  And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

  With witness I speak this. But where I say

  Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

  Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

  To dearest him that lives alas! away.

  I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

  Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

  Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

  Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

  The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

  As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  London Snow

  When men were all asleep the snow came flying,

  In large white flakes falling on the city brown,

  Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,

  Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;

  Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;

  Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:

  Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;

  Hiding difference, making unevenness even,

  Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.

  All night it fell, and when full inches seven

  It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,

  The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;

  And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness

  Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:

  The eye marvelled – marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;

  The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;

  No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,

  And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.

  Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,

  They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze

  Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;

  Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;

  Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder,

  ‘O look at the trees!’ they cried, ‘O look at the trees!’

  With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,

  Following along the white deserted way,

  A country company long dispersed asunder:

  When now already the sun, in pale display

  Standing by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below

  His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.

  For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;

  And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,

  Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:

  But even for them awhile no cares encumber

  Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,

  The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber

  At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

  ROBERT BRIDGES

  On a Dead Child

  Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee,

  With promise of strength and manhood full and fair!

  Though cold and stark and bare,

  The bloom and the charm of life doth awhile remain on thee

  Thy mother’s treasure wert thou; – alas! no longer

  To visit her heart with wondrous joy; to be

  Thy father’s pride; – ah, he

  Must gather his faith together, and his strength make stronger,

  To me, as I move thee now in the last duty,

  Dost thou with a turn or gesture anon respond;

  Startling my fancy fond

  With a chance attitude of the head, a freak of beauty.

  Thy hand clasps, as ’twas wont, my finger, and holds it:

  But the grasp is the clasp of Death, heartbreaking and stiff;

  Yet feels to my hand as if

  ’Twas still thy will, thy pleasure and trust that enfolds it.

  So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing, –

  Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed! –

  Propping thy wise, sad head,

  Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing.

  So quiet! doth the change content thee? – Death, whither hath he taken thee?

  To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this?

  The vision of which I miss,

  Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee?

  Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us

  To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,

  Unwilling, alone we embark,

  And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail us.

  ROBERT BRIDGES

  Manly Sports

  How brave is the hunter who nobly will dare

  On horseback to follow the small timid hare;

  Oh! ye soldiers who fall in defence of your flag,

  What are you to the hero who brings down the stag?

  Bright eyes glance admiring, soft hearts give their loves

  To the knight who shoots best in ‘the tourney of doves’;

  Nothing else with such slaughtering feats can compare,

  To win manly applause, or the smiles of the fair.

  A cheer for fox-hunting! Come all who can dare

  Track this dangerous animal down to its lair;

  ’Tis first trapped, then set free for the huntsmen to follow

  With horses and hounds, and with heartstirring halloo!

  The brave knights on the moor when the grouse are a-drive,

  Slay so many, you’d think, there’d be none left alive;

  Oh! the desperate daring of slaughtering grouse,

  Can only be matched in a real slaughterhouse.

  The angler finds true Anglo-Saxon delight,

  In trapping small fish, who so foolishly bite,

  He enjoys the wild terror of creatures so weak,

  And what manlier pleasures can an
y one seek?

  MARION BERNSTEIN

  The Lady Poverty

  The Lady Poverty was fair:

  But she has lost her looks of late,

  With change of times and change of air.

  Ah slattern! she neglects her hair,

  Her gown, her shoes; she keeps no state

  As once when her pure feet were bare.

  Or – almost worse, if worse can be –

  She scolds in parlours, dusts and trims,

  Watches and counts. Oh, is this she

  Whom Francis met, whose step was free,

  Who with Obedience carolled hymns,

  In Umbria walked with Chastity?

  Where is her ladyhood? Not here,

  Not among modern kinds of men;

  But in the stony fields, where clear

  Through the thin trees the skies appear,

  In delicate spate soil and fen,

  And slender landscape and austere.

  ALICE MEYNELL

  ‘She was poor, but she was honest’

  She was poor, but she was honest,

  Victim of the squire’s whim: