by Edna Longley
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Remembered joy and misery
Bring joy to the joyous equally;
Both sadden the sad. So memory made
Parting today a double pain:
First because it was parting; next
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Because the ill it ended vexed
And mocked me from the Past again,
Not as what had been remedied
Had I gone on, – not that, oh no!
But as itself no longer woe;
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Sighs, angry word and look and deed
Being faded: rather a kind of bliss,
For there spiritualised it lay
In the perpetual yesterday
That naught can stir or stain like this.
First known when lost
I never had noticed it until
’Twas gone, – the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill.
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It was not more than a hedge overgrown.
One meadow’s breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as a bone,
And black betwixt two meadows green,
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Though fresh-cut faggot ends
Of hazel make some amends
With a gleam as if flowers they had been.
Strange it could have hidden so near!
And now I see as I look
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That the small winding brook,
A tributary’s tributary, rises there.
May 23
There never was a finer day,
And never will be while May is May, –
The third, and not the last of its kind;
But though fair and clear the two behind
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Seemed pursued by tempests overpast;
And the morrow with fear that it could not last
Was spoiled. Today ere the stones were warm
Five minutes of thunderstorm
Dashed it with rain, as if to secure,
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By one tear, its beauty the luck to endure.
At midday then along the lane
Old Jack Noman appeared again,
Jaunty and old, crooked and tall,
And stopped and grinned at me over the wall,
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With a cowslip bunch in his button-hole
And one in his cap. Who could say if his roll
Came from flints in the road, the weather, or ale?
He was welcome as the nightingale.
Not an hour of the sun had been wasted on Jack.
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‘I’ve got my Indian complexion back’
Said he. He was tanned like a harvester,
Like his short clay pipe, like the leaf and bur
That clung to his coat from last night’s bed,
Like the ploughland crumbling red.
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Fairer flowers were none on the earth
Than his cowslips wet with the dew of their birth,
Or fresher leaves than the cress in his basket.
‘Where did they come from, Jack?’ ‘Don’t ask it,
And you’ll be told no lies.’ ‘Very well:
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Then I can’t buy.’ ‘I don’t want to sell.
Take them and these flowers, too, free.
Perhaps you have something to give me?
Wait till next time. The better the day…
The Lord couldn’t make a better, I say;
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If he could, he never has done.’
So off went Jack with his roll-walk-run,
Leaving his cresses from Oakshott rill
And his cowslips from Wheatham hill.
’Twas the first day that the midges bit;
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But though they bit me, I was glad of it:
Of the dust in my face, too, I was glad.
Spring could do nothing to make me sad.
Bluebells hid all the ruts in the copse,
The elm seeds lay in the road like hops,
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That fine day, May the twenty-third,
The day Jack Noman disappeared.
The Barn
They should never have built a barn there, at all –
Drip, drip, drip! – under that elm tree,
Though then it was young. Now it is old
But good, not like the barn and me.
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Tomorrow they cut it down. They will leave
The barn, as I shall be left, maybe.
What holds it up? ’Twould not pay to pull down.
Well, this place has no other antiquity.
No abbey or castle looks so old
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As this that Job Knight built in ’54,
Built to keep corn for rats and men.
Now there’s fowls in the roof, pigs on the floor.
What thatch survives is dung for the grass,
The best grass on the farm. A pity the roof
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Will not bear a mower to mow it. But
Only fowls have foothold enough.
Starlings used to sit there with bubbling throats
Making a spiky beard as they chattered
And whistled and kissed, with heads in air,
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Till they thought of something else that mattered.
But now they cannot find a place,
Among all those holes, for a nest any more.
It’s the turn of lesser things, I suppose.
Once I fancied ’twas starlings they built it for.
Home
Not the end: but there’s nothing more.
Sweet Summer and Winter rude
I have loved, and friendship and love,
The crowd and solitude:
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But I know them: I weary not;
But all that they mean I know.
I would go back again home
Now. Yet how should I go?
This is my grief. That land,
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My home, I have never seen;
No traveller tells of it,
However far he has been.
And could I discover it,
I fear my happiness there,
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Or my pain, might be dreams of return
Here, to these things that were.
Remembering ills, though slight
Yet irremediable,
Brings a worse, an impurer pang
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Than remembering what was well.
No: I cannot go back,
And would not if I could.
Until blindness come, I must wait
And blink at what is not good.
The Owl
Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.
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Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry
Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
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No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.
And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
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Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
The Child on the Cliffs
Mother, the root of this little yellow flower
Among the stones has the taste of quinine.
Things are strange today on the cliff. The sun shines so bright,
And the grasshopper works at his sewing
-machine
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So hard. Here’s one on my hand, mother, look;
I lie so still. There’s one on your book.
But I have something to tell more strange. So leave
Your book to the grasshopper, mother dear, –
Like a green knight in a dazzling market-place, –
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And listen now. Can you hear what I hear
Far out? Now and then the foam there curls
And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s.
Fishes and gulls ring no bells. There cannot be
A chapel or church between here and Devon,
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With fishes or gulls ringing its bell, – hark! –
Somewhere under the sea or up in heaven.
‘It’s the bell, my son, out in the bay
On the buoy. It does sound sweet today.’
Sweeter I never heard, mother, no, not in all Wales.
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I should like to be lying under that foam,
Dead, but able to hear the sound of the bell,
And certain that you would often come
And rest, listening happily.
I should be happy if that could be.
The Bridge
I have come a long way today:
On a strange bridge alone,
Remembering friends, old friends,
I rest, without smile or moan,
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As they remember me without smile or moan.
All are behind, the kind
And the unkind too, no more
Tonight than a dream. The stream
Runs softly yet drowns the Past,
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The dark-lit stream has drowned the Future and the Past.
No traveller has rest more blest
Than this moment brief between
Two lives, when the Night’s first lights
And shades hide what has never been,
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Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been.
Good-night
The skylarks are far behind that sang over the down;
I can hear no more those suburb nightingales;
Thrushes and blackbirds sing in the gardens of the town
In vain: the noise of man, beast, and machine prevails.
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But the call of children in the unfamiliar streets
That echo with a familiar twilight echoing,
Sweet as the voice of nightingale or lark, completes
A magic of strange welcome, so that I seem a king
Among man, beast, machine, bird, child, and the ghost
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That in the echo lives and with the echo dies.
The friendless town is friendly; homeless, I am not lost;
Though I know none of these doors, and meet but strangers’ eyes.
Never again, perhaps, after tomorrow, shall
I see these homely streets, these church windows alight,
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Not a man or woman or child among them all:
But it is All Friends’ Night, a traveller’s good-night.
But these things also
But these things also are Spring’s –
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;
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The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung
In splashes of purest white:
All the white things a man mistakes
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For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter’s ruins
Something to pay Winter’s debts,
While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
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Keep their spirits up in the mist,
And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.
The New House
Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.
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Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,
Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
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Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs, and griefs
Not yet begun.
All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
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But I learnt how the wind would sound
After these things should be.
The Barn and the Down
It stood in the sunset sky
Like the straight-backed down,
Many a time – the barn
At the edge of the town,
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So huge and dark that it seemed
It was the hill
Till the gable’s precipice proved
It impossible.
Then the great down in the west
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Grew into sight,
A barn stored full to the ridge
With black of night;
And the barn fell to a barn
Or even less
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Before critical eyes and its own
Late mightiness.
But far down and near barn and I
Since then have smiled,
Having seen my new cautiousness
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By itself beguiled
To disdain what seemed the barn
Till a few steps changed
It past all doubt to the down;
So the barn was avenged.
Sowing
It was a perfect day
For sowing; just
As sweet and dry was the ground
As tobacco-dust.
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I tasted deep the hour
Between the far
Owl’s chuckling first soft cry
And the first star.
A long stretched hour it was;
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Nothing undone
Remained; the early seeds
All safely sown.
And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
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Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.
March the Third
Here again (she said) is March the third
And twelve hours singing for the bird
’Twixt dawn and dusk, from half-past six
To half-past six, never unheard.
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’Tis Sunday, and the church-bells end
When the birds do. I think they blend
Now better than they will when passed
Is this unnamed, unmarked godsend.
Or do all mark, and none dares say,
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How it may shift and long delay,
Somewhere before the first of Spring,
But never fails, this singing day?
And when it falls on Sunday, bells
Are a wild natural voice that dwells
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On hillsides; but the birds’ songs have
The holiness gone from the bells.
This day unpromised is more dear
Than all the named days of the year
When seasonable sweets come in,
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Because we know how lucky we are.
Two Pewits
Under the after-sunset sky
Two pewits sport and cry,
More white than is the moon on high
Riding the dark surge silently;
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More black than earth. Their cry
Is the one sound under the sky.
They alone move, now low, now high,
And merrily they cry
To the mischievous Spring sky,
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Plunging earthward, tossing high,
Over the ghost who wonders why
So merrily they cry and fly,
Nor choose ’twixt earth and sky,
While the moon’s quarter silently
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Rides, and earth rests as silently.
Will you come?
Will you come?
Will you come?
Will you ride
So late
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At my side?
O, will you come?
Will you come?
Will you come
If the night
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Has a moon,
Full and bright?
O, will you come?
Would you come?
Would you come
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If the noon
Gave light,
Not the moon?
Beautiful, would you come?
Would you have come?
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Would you have come
Without scorning,
Had it been
Still morning?
Beloved, would you have come?
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If you come,
Haste and come.
Owls have cried;
It grows dark
To ride.
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Beloved, beautiful, come.
The Path
Running along a bank, a parapet
That saves from the precipitous wood below
The level road, there is a path. It serves
Children for looking down the long smooth steep,
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Between the legs of beech and yew, to where
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women