The Bird-Catcher

by Martin Armstrong

  And when we walk along

  Green valleys and wide fields of reddening wheat,

  Grey phantoms dog our feet

  And their sere joys, voiced in a tongue outworn,

  Turn all our joy to scorn.

  An unsubstantial shadow dulls our light,

  And when we sit to write

  A ghost stands by the chair to guide the pen

  Lest we should write for men

  Some vivid truth, some song with potency

  To set the whole world free.

  And when we think, ghosts in our spirits cast

  Dust of a ruined past,

  Lest we should see and feel and, knowing our strength,

  Rise in revolt at length

  Against the iniquitous tyranny of the dead.

  But still we bow the head,

  And still the blind obstruction of the past

  Builds over us a vast

  Cold sepulchre, an incubus of stone.

  IV

  Heard in a Lane

  When the wet earth dreamed of spring

  In early February

  And the first gnats danced on fragile wing,

  I stood where the air was warm and still

  In a deep lane under a hill

  Gazing at a copse of birches

  That ran uphill to meet blue sky.

  From slim white trunks the tapering branches spread

  To a web of rosy twigs. But from their perches

  In the high hawthorn-fence

  Two robins chuckled loudly, and one said

  In his clear, dewy speech: “look how he stares

  Like a daft owl in the sun!” The other broke

  To trills of scornful laughter and then spoke:—

  “These huge unfeathered creatures are so dense

  That their slow vision sees

  Nothing but rooted wooden trees

  In those white, living flames that leap from the hill

  And the crown of rosy smoke that hangs so still.”

  Rain in Spring

  Cloud-films that hardly stain

  The sky’s blue hall

  Gather, dissolve, and fall

  In sudden visitations of bright rain.

  Then the soft voice of seas

  Is heard in the green precincts of the trees—

  A long, still hushing; then the subtler hiss

  Of thousand-bladed grass: then, over this,

  Out of the trees’ high tops

  The ticking of larger drops

  That small leaf-tricklings fill

  Till, one by one, whenever the wet leaves stir,

  From leaf to overweighted leaf they spill,

  Heavy as quicksilver.

  These are the showers of spring,

  Pilgrims that pass

  And scatter crystal seed among the grass;

  That make the still ponds sing

  Delicate tunes and leave the hedgerows filled

  With moist and odorous warmth, brim with blue haze

  Hollows of hills and glaze

  Each leaf with lacquer cunningly distilled

  From sunlight; they that fling

  A brightness along the edge of everything,

  And the frail splendour of the rainbow build

  To span six miles of meadowland, as though

  Each rain-dipped flower below

  Had breathed its colour up through the bright air

  To hang in beauty there.

  Blue Night

  Blue waves of Night

  Brim the warm hollows of the hills

  And wrap from sight

  Fields of our earth and the high fields of air.

  Slowly the great bowl of the evening fills

  With heavy darkness, till the fading sense

  Of sight falls from us, and beneath a dense

  And denser gloom all visible things are thinned

  To empty shades,—to nothing. But we hear,

  Mysteriously swayed, now far, now near,

  The long hush of hidden rivers,

  This hiss of a hidden bough that shivers

  Beneath an unfelt wind.

  On the Salt Marsh

  Here where the lark sings overhead

  And the grey sheep nibble the short salt herb

  And the bugloss lifts a sky-blue head

  And only the sea’s long sighs disturb

  The silence spread

  Like a great arch overhead;

  Here where the very air is peace

  And our footfalls stir not the smallest sound

  On a turf as soft as the ewes’ soft fleece,

  Passion has walked, till the very ground

  Pulsed like a monstrous heart, and fear

  And struggle and hate roared down the breeze

  Till even the hill-perched farms could hear.

  For see, in a spiny whin-bush bleached,

  This seaweed that was flung to parch

  A mile inland, when the sea thrice breached

  The long sea-wall and the whins were whirled

  Breast-high in a tumbling tide, wind-hurled

  On a stormy night in March.

  Frost in Lincoln’s Inn Fields

  Lifeless, still, in the frosty air

  The old stone houses round the square

  Look out upon grey lawns whose grass

  Is frozen to brittle blades of steel or glass;

  And on black beds through whose ice-welded crust,

  Hollow and hard, no gardener’s spade can thrust;

  And on black branches that forget to grow

  And hang benumbed and hypnotized as though

  The sap stood still. The very air seems dead,

  All sound dried out of it. No ringing tread

  Warms the numbed silence. Even the sun himself,

  An orange disk in a grey frost-laden sky,

  Hangs lightless, like a plate upon a shelf.

  This is not life. Some ghost of otherwhere

  Takes shadowy substance from the frozen air

  To hover briefly till the spell is broken,—

  A dream, a passing thought, a faint word spoken.

  But suddenly from a corner of the square

  A shimmering fount of sound leaps clear and rare,

  A small, thin, frosty cheer like tinkling glass.

  Is it shouts of boys that pass

  Running in file to slide on the icy kerb,

  Or Dryad, sick for spring,

  Wailing forlornly under the frozen herb?

  O light of youth, O flower of life in death!

  We listen with bated breath;

  So sad, so clear the delicate, wistful spell;

  Till frost lays hold on the sound and all is still.

  The Naiad

  Frost-bound the garden stands.

  The claws of the frost are sharp upon my hands.

  On the harsh lawn each blade of grass

  Is tempered to a brittle spear of glass.

  The fountain is crystal-hung; its waters fail.

  Wilted to colourless, frail

  Paper the tender flesh of the flowers.

  The Dryads are gone from the tree,

  For the leaves are gone, the delicate leafy towers

  Dismantled, bared to the iron anatomy

  Not even a bird could hide in. But hid within

  In the hollow trunk, the knees drawn up to the chin,

  Hugging herself each shivering Dryad sleeps,

  And frozen Echo leaps

  From her dream when my footfalls knock

  In a motionless, soundless world

  On a pathway hard as rock.

  No flutter, no song of bird

  Nor bubbling flute is heard,

  Nor laughter of green-eyed Satyr. The Satyr, curled

  In his ice-hung cave, is shaken with torpid fear;

  For the days of lust are over

  And cold are the loved and the lover

  And the birthday of Christ draws near.


  Smooth flows the stream, its shallow banks ice-coated,

  And the pool where the lilies floated

  Is glazed with a polished pane as black as flint

  And fringed with a delicate wreath

  Of crystal leaves. But a hint

  Of water moving beneath

  Draws my eyes. Pale, pale through the polished glass,

  Sweet naked body and wavering hair pass

  Pallid as death, fluid as water.

  O ghost of Arethusa, Spring’s first daughter,

  Beating vain hands against your crystal ceiling!

  O hands imploring, O white lips appealing

  Stirred and parted by syllables unheard!

  See, with a sharp-edged stone I crack the pane.

  The pale lips part again

  And the leafless garden thrills to the delicate ring

  Of a small, clear call from Naiad or hidden bird,

  From water or air, crying, “The Spring! The Spring!”

  Christmas Eve

  Still falls the snow. White-thatched are all the groves.

  Lost field, sunk roadway, and the buried heather

  Lie in unbroken whiteness all together.

  This is not snow of any worldly weather,

  For now the Queen of Loves

  Drops to our earth feather on crystal feather

  Plucked from her team of doves.

  Cold in the moonlight cold the hoar-frost shines

  On forests lost in snow, a desolation

  Like seas of foam in frozen fluctuation.

  Those moon-lit fires of frosty scintillation

  On boughs of frozen pines

  Are jewels from the days before Creation

  Dug from no mortal mines.

  Row upon glassy row, from cornice white

  Of boughs and thatches, hang the slim and even

  Long icicles, like daggers frost-engraven.

  Seven on the eaves and on the pine-bough seven

  These are the swords shall smite

  The heart of Mary Mother, Queen of Heaven;

  For on this winter’s night

  The hidden Flower of Love wakes from its dreaming,

  Breaks the green sheath, uncurls each petal folded;

  And silently as dew on green leaves gleaming

  The world is shattered and a new world moulded

  In Love’s own likeness, ere world-weary men

  Have taken breath and breathed it out again.

  V

  The Fisherman’s Rest

  Under the shining helms

  Of piled white cloud

  A sombre screen of elms

  Is set to shroud

  The little red-roofed inn

  From the midday glare.

  Its smoke climbs straight and thin

  Through windless air,

  And breaks on the sombre boughs

  To an azure bloom.

  But we, who know the house

  And the clean-swept room,

  Enter and loudly ask

  Huge Mrs. Reece

  To draw from the new-tapped cask

  A pint apiece

  Topped with a creamy crown

  And clear and cool

  As the trout-stream lagging brown

  In its rock-carved pool.

  Then, after talk and drink,

  We’ll rise and go

  To the brown stream’s trembling brink,

  To crouch and throw

  A tinselled fly, till the trout

  That sulks alone

  Is artfully wheedled out

  From his shadowy stone.

  Mrs. Reece Laughs

  Laughter, with us, is no great undertaking;

  A sudden wave that breaks and dies in breaking.

  Laughter, with Mrs. Reece, is much less simple:

  It germinates, it spreads, dimple by dimple,

  From small beginnings, things of modest girth,

  To formidable redundancies of mirth.

  Clusters of subterranean chuckles rise,

  And presently the circles of her eyes

  Close into slits, and all the woman heaves,

  As a great elm with all its mounds of leaves

  Wallows before the storm. From hidden sources

  A mustering of blind volcanic forces

  Takes her and shakes her till she sobs and gapes.

  Then all that load of bottled mirth escapes

  In one wild crow, a lifting of huge hands

  And creaking stays, a visage that expands

  In scarlet ridge and furrow. Thence collapse,

  A hanging head, a feeble hand that flaps

  An apron-end to stir an air and waft

  A steaming face … and Mrs. Reece has laughed.

  VI

  Expostulation to Helen

  Helen, I’d be, if I could have my wish,

  A pool among the rocks where small, shy fish

  Gleam to and fro, and green and rosy weed

  Sways its long fringes. So I should not heed

  Your comings and your goings nor each whim

  So skilfully contrived to torture him,

  Your chosen fool. And still, as now, each day

  Your vanity would bring you where I lay

  To kneel and on my crystal face below

  Gaze self-entranced, as now; and I should grow

  Beautiful with your beauty, and you would be

  More beautiful for the crystal lights in me.

  But when, self-surfeited, you went away

  I should not care, nor could the blown sea-spray,

  Blurring your image all the winter through,

  Vex the pure, passionless water, strictly true

  To its own being. Only the weeds would swing

  Rosy and green, and the ripples, ring on ring,

  Tremble and wink above the gleaming fish.

  So would I be, if I could have my wish.

  To Helen With a Bottle of Scent

  Sage titillator of a thousand noses,

  Old Hafiz the Perfumer, years ago

  Boiled down two gardensful of yellow roses

  And skimmed the gold froth from the sumptuous brew;

  Then strained it out into a crystal vat

  To work and settle during certain moons

  As ordered in the thirteenth Caliphate;

  Then boiled again and stirred with silver spoons

  Till shrunk to half; and so, by slow degrees,

  Boiled and laid up and boiled again, till fined

  To pure quintessence purged of subtlest lees.

  Then, death at hand, he chose with artist’s mind

  This curious flask embossed with bees and flowers,

  And, drop by drop, with trembling hand distilled

  The priceless attar, whose insidious powers,

  Helen, I place at your command, though chilled

  With aching doubts lest you, while up in town,

  Shedding its sunny fragrance on the air,

  Should trap the dashing Captain Archie Brown

  Or twang the heartstrings of some millionaire.

  Serenade

  I am the voice in the night, the voice of darkness;

  Listen, O shy one, listen, my voice shall find you.

  As the rose springs from the earth,

  So love blooms from the dark unknown.

  Hark to the voice of love that springs in the darkness.

  O timid, O craven.

  Though you have barred your doors against earth and heaven

  You shall not escape me.

  See, like a thin blue flame

  My voice burns up to your window,

  Steals through the fast-closed casement, stirs in the curtains,

  Flushes to rose the pale and delicate lamplight.

  O fear, O wonder, the bright flame circles about you,

  Flashes above you, burns deep down to your heart.

  You struggle, you cry, cry out of a heart tormented:

  “Ah Te
rror, ah Death, have mercy!”

  O timid and craven heart, it is love that takes you:

  Give yourself up to the flame. I am life, not death.

  O slim moon veiled in the cloud, shy fawn in the thicket,

  Lily hid in the water, come from your hiding.

  Why is your hair like silk and your flesh like a flower?

  Not for your own delight nor the cold delight of your mirror:

  Not for the kisses of death.

  I am a cry in the night, a song in the darkness.

  O timid, O craven,

  Vain, how vain is your hiding.

  For the night brims up with my singing, my voice enfolds you,

  And how shall you flee when the whole night turns to music?

  The House of Love

  As a bird’s wing,

  Against the soft warm body gathering

  Its folded feathers, closes and is still

  When the wind-wandering bird has dropped to rest

  On the green bough beside her hidden nest;

  So my blind will

  Wanders no more, nor beats the empty air,

  Nor follows hot-foot to their phantom lair

  Beguilement of the ear, lust of the eye

  And all such pageantry

  As lures men from fulfilment of desire;

  Wanders no more, but entering that small house

  Which Love has made his palace, lights the fire,

  Bars door and shutter, sets the wine and bread

  Where the tall candles shed

  Soft lustre, and stands ready to carouse

  With her who is the mistress of the house.

  Autumn

  All day the plane-trees have shaken from shadow to sun

  Their long depending boughs, and one by one

  From early-falling limes the yellow leaves

  Have eddied to earth. But still warm noon deceives

  Old fears of death. But when with the twilight came