The Bird-Catcher

by Martin Armstrong

  From the dim garden an air like sharp cold flame

  And bitter with burnt leaves, I knew once more

  That the walls were down between love and the silent, frore

  Wastes of eternity. O lean above me,

  Screening my eyes with your hair like a dark willow

  From the cold glare of death. O you that love me,

  Lean with your body’s weight, that the cold billow

  Not yet may lift me away, though love and light,

  Roses and fruit and leaves prepare to-night

  With unreturning wings

  To launch upon the eternal flux of things.

  The Immortals

  Beloved, in this world of sense

  We have the one omnipotence.

  None but we lovers can erase

  The foolish laws of time and space

  Or gather by their wedded power

  Eternity into an hour.

  So to the four winds let us cast

  Vague future and abysmal past

  And, proud of body, leave behind

  The fretful ghosts of soul and mind;

  Nay even scorn the ageless joys

  Of lovely sights and the soft noise

  Of waving branches, streams that sing,

  And music of the trembling string,

  And all sweet scents and tastes that creep

  Through brain to spirit. Alone we’ll keep

  (Since ours is the one certain bliss

  To come together in a kiss)

  Locked in our frail and narrow clutch

  The world-creating sense of touch.

  All things are ours because we love.

  Not men nor wrathful saints above,

  Nor all the long corroding years,

  Nor envious death’s remorseless shears,

  Can ever vanquish or destroy

  The sure possession of our joy.

  Even God Himself can ne’er retract

  His gift of the accomplished fact

  Nor cancel by divine decree

  Our once-enjoyed eternity.

  Then let us keep forever fresh

  This warm eternity of flesh,

  This only true reality

  Of lip-to-lip and knee-to-knee;

  Knowing that, whatever years may bring

  Of dusty earth or golden wing,

  Once having loved, both you and I

  Have been immortal ere we die.

  Fog in the Channel

  The sea is silent to-night. To our inland village,

  A mile from the Channel, comes never a sound of the seas.

  Windless night is heavy on pasture and tillage,

  On houses and herbs and trees.

  But suddenly over the silence, lone and far,

  Long-drawn, desolate, hovers a deep intoning,

  A measureless sadness; and soon, remote as a star,

  An answering voice. A multitudinous moaning

  Fills the night, and my heart shrinks cold, for I know

  That fog has closed on the sea in a blinding smother.

  O why do we suffer this craving for another

  To split our lives in two? Though my body lies

  So safe and warm beneath this low white ceiling,

  Dark terrors round me rise;

  For my heart is out in the Channel among the wheeling

  Wreaths of fog and the deep-tongued desolate cries

  Of fog-bound ships; and lying here I am lost

  In a darkness denser and stranger

  Than any darkness of mist. I am torn and tossed

  Upon the horns of a more than bodily danger,

  Yes, greater than yours, Beloved, who waken drifting

  In your blinded ship that utters its long lament

  From the soft, slow swell of the Channel, sinking, lifting,

  Out between France and Kent.

  From the French

  Days of the Lilac and the days of Roses

  Come not again this spring, for all our sighing.

  The days of Lilac and days of Roses

  Are past, and all the scented Pinks are dying.

  The wind has changed. A sullen vapour closes

  The weeping skies. We may not gather now

  The Lilac-blossoms and early Roses.

  Sad is the spring and bloomless hangs the bough.

  O sweet and happy springtime that invaded

  Our fields last year to gladden loved and lover.

  So utterly our flower has faded

  That even your kiss, alas, can wake it never.

  And what of you, my love? No flower uncloses

  Nor sunlight blooms through the shadowy leaves above.

  Days of the Lilac and the days of Roses

  Lie dead for evermore with our dead love.

  VII

  Cathedral at Night

  Huge as a precipice in the summer night

  The black porch yawned above him like a wave

  And swallowed him. Shrunk to a grain of sand

  He paused inside, bewildered at the sense

  Of so much height and darkness, till his eyes

  Gained strength, and in the emptiness dark shapes,

  Pinnacled rocks and towering trunks of stone,

  Loomed round him and, high hung like long pale banners,

  Tall windows showed. And it seemed the whole void cavern

  Vibrated sensitive as a strung harp,

  For his shy footfall woke a spreading trouble

  That echoed from furthest galleries and vaults

  Awareness of his presence. He crossed the transept,

  Climbed to the loft hung like a falcon’s nest

  On the sheer face of the triforium,

  From which the towering shafts of organ-pipes

  Shot up like tropic growths. There, round about him,

  The music books, the rows of stops, the close

  Familiar walls of oak glowed as a core

  Of radiance in the darkness; and he sought

  Books of old music, chose his stops, began.

  Vague tremors shook the stillness, voices woke,

  And the emptiness was peopled with the life

  Of crowding notes. Down the wide nave, along

  Cold aisles, through secret chapels, hanging vaults,

  Flowed the warm circulation of sweet sounds

  Like health into a body long diseased,

  While the august and ancient music-makers

  Woke from long sleep and their immortal voices

  Flooded the dark shrine with a golden beauty.

  And he, the player, with cunning fingers piling

  Sound upon sound, harmony on harmony,

  Launched out his spirit upon those tides of music

  Until it grew and filled the shadowy place,

  Swung with the arches, soared to the topmost vault,

  Put on the whole great structure as a garment,

  Sang with those ancient voices as with his own,

  And on the summit of the last pure chord

  Found unity and peace. He raised his hands:

  The music stopped, and his full-statured spirit

  Shrivelled. The horror of sheer height hung above him,

  The cavern of sheer depth was scooped below,

  And silence fell like doom. Out in the dark,

  Blind windows hung, dumb columns rose, vast trunks

  Upheaved the heavy foliage of the night,

  And darkness, emptiness, like birds of prey

  Swooped back and perched about him, grimly still,

  While he, as in the bright cup of a flower,

  Rigid, with sharpened senses, hung besieged.

  Poetry and Memory

  Dark is the mind’s deep dwelling,

  Roofed and walled and floored

  With ancient rock. There water, slowly welling

  Or slowly dripped, is stored

  In a dim, deep, dreaming pool

  Unvexed by rain or sunlight or the cool

>   Wings of the wind, untroubled by joy or grieving

  Or the bitterness and the ecstasy of living.

  Till the white young bathers come, warily treading,

  Lovely, desired, with rosy flesh

  Like the apple-bloom on grey boughs spreading

  In April, and their feet refresh

  Like April the grey desert place.

  For when with a sudden freakish grace

  They break the pool’s long sleep in an airy flight

  Of diving, the dim pool takes light,

  Blooms to soft fire in a thousand tongues unfurling

  That shed a shimmering beauty on roof and walls

  And rouse in those stern halls

  Laughing music of water, till the death

  Of that dark underworld

  Thrills harp-like with new ecstasy and the breath

  Of a thousand buds uncurling.

  The Secret

  Under high boughs I lay in sunny grass.

  My mind a mirror was

  Reflecting leaves and sunshine; but no Past

  Nor fancied Future cast

  Their shadows there. For I was grass and trees,

  No less, no more than these;

  Lay in the sunlight, felt the warmth, and grew;

  And sunlight, air, and dew

  And earth were all my knowledge. But a breeze,

  Winnowing the laden trees,

  Drowned me in perfume of the Lime in flower,

  And by that perfume’s power

  My sense woke on a pale transtellar coast,

  Half recognized, half lost,

  As an old dream. I lingered there expecting,

  My mind a pool reflecting

  Unfathomed shapes by dim weeds blurred and webbed,

  While waves of memory ebbed

  And climbed again up, up the gleaming shoal,

  But never reached the pool.

  Then expectation shaped. I was aware

  Of one with sea-smoothed hair

  Leaning above me, in whose eyes I caught

  The urgence of the message that she brought.

  But, even as her lips stirred,

  There fell the clear call of a hidden bird

  Out of the Lime’s green leaves,

  Waking me to warm grass and the sunny leaves

  Of roofing boughs: unheard

  The utterance of that still-escaping word

  Whose solving fire, revealing light, shall set

  All realms of being aflame. So am I yet,

  Bewildered and uneasy traveller, blown

  Between two kingdoms, neither wholly known.

  All is One

  I hear the flowing of great rivers

  And the long slow breathing of the wind,

  And solemnly, incessantly,

  Like gleaming fish

  In weeds beneath dim water,

  Stars on their universal way

  Glide among woven boughs.

  All is one,

  Surely, indivisibly.

  A falling pebble

  Ruffles the pool’s clear face,

  And in those wavering circles waken

  Powers that shall change the motion of Orion

  And vex the dreaming of a million stars.

  Deeds are immortal. Once the rose is gathered,

  Nothing can ever be the same again.

  The Cage

  Man, afraid to be alive,

  Shut his soul in senses five,

  From fields of uncreated light

  Into the crystal tower of sight,

  And from the roaring songs of space

  Into the small flesh-carven place

  Of the ear whose cave impounds

  Only small and broken sounds;

  And to this narrow sense of touch

  From strength that held the stars in clutch;

  And from the warm ambrosial spice

  Of flowers and fruits of Paradise

  To the frail and fitful power

  Of tongue’s and nostril’s sweet and sour.

  And toiling for a sordid wage

  There in his self-created cage,

  Ah, how safely barred is he

  From menace of eternity.

  A Note on the Author

  Martin Armstrong (1882–1974) was an English writer and poet. He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He served in World War I in the British Army in France as a Private in the Artist’s Rifles. He was commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment in 1915 and promoted Lieutenant in 1916. He was included in the final Georgian Poetry anthology.

  In 1929 he married writer Jessie McDonald, after she had divorced Conrad Aiken, making Armstrong the stepfather of the young Joan Aiken. He appears in disguised form as a character in Conrad Aiken’s Ushant.

  Discoverbooks by Martin Armstrong published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/MartinArmstrong

  Sir Pompey and Madame Juno

  The Bird Catcher

  The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife

  The Sleeping Fury

  The Stepson

  Venus over Lannery

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, LondonWC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1929, Martin Secker

  Copyright © Martin Armstrong

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  eISBN: 9781448210336

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