Ugh – the memory of that minute’s fear makes gooseflesh rise! Why prate
Longer? You’ve my story, there’s your instance: fear I did, you see!’
‘Well’ – I hardly kept from laughing – ‘if I see it, thanks must be
Wholly to your Lordship’s candour. Not that – in a common case –
When a bully caught at cheating thrusts a pistol in one’s face,
I should underrate, believe me, such a trial to the nerve!
’Tis no joke, at one-and-twenty, for a youth to stand nor swerve.
[200] Fear I naturally look for – unless, of all men alive,
I am forced to make exception when I come to Robert Clive.
Since at Arcot, Plassy, elsewhere, he and death – the whole world knows –
Came to somewhat closer quarters.’
Quarters? Had we come to blows,
Clive and I, you had not wondered – up he sprang so, out he rapped
Such a round of oaths – no matter! I’ll endeavour to adapt
To our modern usage words he – well, ’twas friendly licence – flung
At me like so many fire-balls, fast as he could wag his tongue.
‘You – a soldier? You – at Plassy? Yours the faculty to nick
Instantaneously occasion when your foe, if lightning-quick,
[210] – At his mercy, at his malice, – has you, through some stupid inch
Undefended in your bulwark? Thus laid open, – not to flinch
– That needs courage, you’ll concede me. Then, look here! Suppose the man,
Checking his advance, his weapon still extended, not a span
Distant from my temple, – curse him! – quietly had bade me “There!
Keep your life, calumniator! – worthless life I freely spare:
Mine you freely would have taken – murdered me and my good fame
Both at once – and all the better! Go, and thank your own bad aim
Which permits me to forgive you!” What if, with such words as these,
He had cast away his weapon? How should I have borne me, please?
Nay, I’ll spare you pains and tell you. This, and only this, remained –
[220] Pick his weapon up and use it on myself. I so had gained
Sleep the earlier, leaving England probably to pay on still
Rent and taxes for half India, tenant at the Frenchman’s will.’
‘Such the turn,’ said I, ‘the matter takes with you? Then I abate
– No, by not one jot nor tittle, – of your act my estimate.
Fear – I wish I could detect there: courage fronts me, plain enough –
Call it desperation, madness – never mind! for here’s in rough
Why, had mine been such a trial, fear had overcome disgrace.
True, disgrace were hard to bear: but such a rush against God’s face
– None of that for me, Lord Plassy, since I go to church at times,
[230] Say the creed my mother taught me! Many years in foreign climes
Rub some marks away – not all, though! We poor sinners reach life’s brink,
Overlook what rolls beneath it, recklessly enough, but think
There’s advantage in what’s left us – ground to stand on, time to call
“Lord, have mercy!” ere we topple over – do not leap, that’s all!’
Oh, he made no answer, – re-absorbed into his cloud. I caught
Something like ‘Yes – courage: only fools will call it fear.’
If aught
Comfort you, my great unhappy hero Clive, in that I heard,
Next week, how your own hand dealt you doom, and uttered just the word
[240] ‘Fearfully courageous!’ – this, be sure, and nothing else I groaned.
I’m no Clive, nor parson either: Clive’s worst deed – we’ll hope condoned.
[Wanting is – what?]
Wanting is – what?
Summer redundant,
Blueness abundant,
– Where is the blot?
Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same,
– Framework which waits for a picture to frame:
What of the leafage, what of the flower?
Roses embowering with naught they embower!
Come then, complete incompletion, O comer,
[10] Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer!
Breathe but one breath
Rose-beauty above,
And all that was death
Grows life, grows love,
Grows love!
Donald
‘Will you hear my story also,
– Huge Sport, brave adventure in plenty?’
The boys were a band from Oxford,
The oldest of whom was twenty.
The bothy we held carouse in
Was bright with fire and candle;
Tale followed tale like a merry-go-round
Whereof Sport turned the handle.
In our eyes and noses – turf-smoke:
[10] In our ears a tune from the trivet,
Whence ‘Boiling, boiling,’ the kettle sang,
‘And ready for fresh Glenlivet.’
So, feat capped feat, with a vengeance:
Truths, though, – the lads were loyal:
‘Grouse, five score brace to the bag!
Deer, ten hours’ stalk of the Royal!’
Of boasting, not one bit, boys!
Only there seemed to settle
Somehow above your curly heads,
[20] – Plain through the singing kettle,
Palpable through the cloud,
As each new-puffed Havana
Rewarded the teller’s well-told tale, –
This vaunt ‘To Sport – Hosanna!
‘Hunt, fish, shoot,
Would a man fulfil life’s duty!
Not to the bodily frame alone
Does Sport give strength and beauty,
‘But character gains in – courage?
[30] Ay, Sir, and much beside it!
You don’t sport, more’s the pity:
You soon would find, if you tried it,
‘Good sportsman means good fellow,
Sound-hearted he, to the centre;
Your mealy-mouthed mild milksops
– There’s where the rot can enter!
‘There’s where the dirt will breed,
The shabbiness Sport would banish!
Oh no, Sir, no! In your honoured case
[40] All such objections vanish.
‘’Tis known how hard you studied:
A Double-First – what, the jigger!
Give me but half your Latin and Greek,
I’ll never again touch trigger!
‘Still, tastes are tastes, allow me!
Allow, too, where there’s keenness
For Sport, there’s little likelihood
Of a man’s displaying meanness!’
So, put on my mettle, I interposed.
[50] ‘Will you hear my story?’ quoth I.
‘Never mind how long since it happed,
I sat, as we sit, in a bothy;
‘With as merry a band of mates, too,
Undergrads all on a level:
(One’s a Bishop, one’s gone to the Bench,
And one’s gone – well, to the Devil.)
‘When, lo, a scratching and tapping!
In hobbled a ghastly visitor.
Listen to just what he told us himself
[60] – No need of our playing inquisitor!’
Do you happen to know in Ross-shire
Mount … Ben … but the name scarce matters:
Of the naked fact I am sure enough,
Though I clothe it in rags and tatters.
You may recognize Ben by description;
Behind him – a moor’s immenseness:
Up goes the middle mount of a range,
Fringed with its firs in denseness.
Rimming the edge, its
fir-fringe, mind!
[70] For an edge there is, though narrow;
From end to end of the range, a stripe
Of path runs straight as an arrow.
And the mountaineer who takes that path
Saves himself miles of journey
He has to plod if he crosses the moor
Through heather, peat and burnie.
But a mountaineer he needs must be,
For, look you, right in the middle
Projects bluff Ben – with an end in ich –
[80] Why planted there, is a riddle:
Since all Ben’s brothers little and big
Keep rank, set shoulder to shoulder,
And only this burliest out must bulge
Till it seems – to the beholder
From down in the gully, – as if Ben’s breast,
To a sudden spike diminished,
Would signify to the boldest foot
‘All further passage finished!’
Yet the mountaineer who sidles on
[90] And on to the very bending,
Discovers, if heart and brain be proof,
No necessary ending.
Foot up, foot down, to the turn abrupt
Having trod, he, there arriving,
Finds – what he took for a point was breadth,
A mercy of Nature’s contriving.
So, he rounds what, when ’tis reached, proves straight,
From one side gains the other:
The wee path widens – resume the march,
[100] And he foils you, Ben my brother!
But Donald – (that name, I hope, will do) –
I wrong him if I call ‘foiling’
The tramp of the callant, whistling the while
As blithe as our kettle’s boiling.
He had dared the danger from boyhood up,
And now, – when perchance was waiting
A lass at the brig below, – ’twixt mount
And moor would he stand debating?
Moreover this Donald was twenty-five,
[110] A glory of bone and muscle:
Did a fiend dispute the right of way,
Donald would try a tussle.
Lightsomely marched he out of the broad
On to the narrow and narrow;
A step more, rounding the angular rock,
Reached the front straight as an arrow.
He stepped it, safe on the ledge he stood,
When – whom found he full-facing?
What fellow in courage and wariness too,
[120] Had scouted ignoble pacing,
And left low safety to timid mates,
And made for the dread dear danger,
And gained the height where – who could guess
He could meet with a rival ranger?
’Twas a gold-red stag that stood and stared,
Gigantic and magnific,
By the wonder – ay, and the peril – struck
Intelligent and pacific:
For a red deer is no fallow deer
[130] Grown cowardly through park-feeding;
He batters you like a thunderbolt
If you brave his haunts unheeding.
I doubt he could hardly perform volte-face
Had valour advised discretion:
You may walk on a rope, but to turn on a rope
No Blondin makes profession.
Yet Donald must turn, would pride permit,
Though pride ill brooks retiring:
Each eyed each – mute man, motionless beast –
[140] Less fearing than admiring.
These are the moments when quite new sense,
To meet some need as novel,
Springs up in the brain: it inspired resource:
– ‘Nor advance nor retreat but – grovel!’
And slowly, surely, never a whit
Relaxing the steady tension
Of eye-stare which binds man to beast, –
By an inch and inch declension,
Sank Donald sidewise down and down:
[150] Till flat, breast upwards, lying
At his six-foot length, no corpse more still,
– ‘If he cross me! The trick’s worth trying.’
Minutes were an eternity;
But a new sense was created
In the stag’s brain too; he resolves! Slow, sure,
With eye-stare unabated,
Feelingly he extends a foot
Which tastes the way ere it touches
Earth’s solid and just escapes man’s soft,
[160] Nor hold of the same unclutches
Till its fellow foot, light as a feather whisk,
Lands itself no less finely:
So a mother removes a fly from the face
Of her babe asleep supinely.
And now ’tis the haunch and hind foot’s turn
– That’s hard: can the beast quite raise it?
Yes, traversing half the prostrate length,
His hoof-tip does not graze it.
Just one more lift! But Donald, you see,
[170] Was sportsman first, man after:
A fancy lightened his caution through,
– He well-nigh broke into laughter.
‘It were nothing short of a miracle!
Unrivalled, unexampled –
All sporting feats with this feat matched
Were down and dead and trampled!’
The last of the legs as tenderly
Follows the rest: or never
Or now is the time! His knife in reach,
[180] And his right-hand loose – how clever!
For this can stab up the stomach’s soft,
While the left-hand grasps the pastern.
A rise on the elbow, and – now’s the time
Or never: this turn’s the last turn!
I shall dare to place myself by God
Who scanned – for He does – each feature
Of the face thrown up in appeal to Him
By the agonizing creature.
Nay, I hear plain words: ‘Thy gift brings this!’
[190] Up he sprang, back he staggered,
Over he fell, and with him our friend
– At following game no laggard.
Yet he was not dead when they picked next day
From the gully’s depth the wreck of him;
His fall had been stayed by the stag beneath
Who cushioned and saved the neck of him.
But the rest of his body – why, doctors said,
Whatever could break was broken;
Legs, arms, ribs, all of him looked like a toast
[200] In a tumbler of port-wine soaken.
‘That your life is left you, thank the stag!’
Said they when – the slow cure ended –
They opened the hospital door, and thence
– Strapped, spliced, main fractures mended,
And minor damage left wisely alone, –
Like an old shoe clouted and cobbled,
Out – what went in a Goliath well-nigh, –
Some half of a David hobbled.
‘You must ask an alms from house to house:
[210] Sell the stag’s head for a bracket,
With its grand twelve tines – I’d buy it myself –
And use the skin for a jacket!’
He was wiser, made both head and hide
His win-penny: hands and knees on,
Would manage to crawl – poor crab – by the roads
In the misty stalking-season.
And if he discovered a bothy like this,
Why, harvest was sure: folk listened.
He told his tale to the lovers of Sport:
[220] Lips twitched, cheeks glowed, eyes glistened.
And when he had come to the close, and spread
His spoils for the gazers’ wonder,
With ‘Gentlemen, here’s the skull of the stag
I was over, thank God, not
under!’ –
The company broke out in applause;
‘By Jingo, a lucky cripple!
Have a munch of grouse and a hunk of bread,
And a tug, besides, at our tipple!’
And ‘There’s my pay for your pluck!’ cried This,
[230] ‘And mine for your jolly story!’
Cried That, while T’other – but he was drunk –
Hiccupped ‘A trump, a Tory!’
I hope I gave twice as much as the rest;
For, as Homer would say, ‘within gate
Though teeth kept tongue,’ my whole soul growled
‘Rightly rewarded, – Ingrate!’
Never the Time and the Place
Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!
This path – how soft to pace!
This May – what magic weather!
Where is the loved one’s face?
In a dream that loved one’s face meets mine,
But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
Where, outside, rain and wind combine
With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak,
[10] With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
With a malice that marks each word, each sign!
O enemy sly and serpentine,
Uncoil thee from the waking man!
Do I hold the Past
Thus firm and fast
Yet doubt if the Future hold I can?
This path so soft to pace shall lead
Through the magic of May to herself indeed!
[20] Or narrow if needs the house must be,
Outside are the storms and strangers: we –
Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she,
– I and she!
The Names
Shakespeare! – to such name’s sounding, what succeeds
Fitly as silence? Falter forth the spell, –
Act follows word, the speaker knows full well,
Nor tampers with its magic more than needs.
Two names there are: That which the Hebrew reads
With his soul only; if from lips it fell,
Echo, back thundered by earth, heaven and hell,
Would own ‘Thou didst create us!’ Naught impedes
We voice the other name, man’s most of might,
[10] Awesomely, lovingly: let awe and love
Mutely await their working, leave to sight
All of the issue as – below – above –
Shakespeare’s creation rises: one remove,
Though dread – this finite from that infinite.
Now
Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) Page 26