by Edna Longley
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
Head and Bottle
The downs will lose the sun, white alyssum
Lose the bees’ hum;
But head and bottle tilted back in the cart
Will never part
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Till I am cold as midnight and all my hours
Are beeless flowers.
He neither sees, nor hears, nor smells, nor thinks,
But only drinks,
Quiet in the yard where tree trunks do not lie
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More quietly.
Home
Often I had gone this way before:
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else;
’Twas home; one nationality
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We had, I and the birds that sang,
One memory.
They welcomed me. I had come back
That eve somehow from somewhere far:
The April mist, the chill, the calm,
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Meant the same thing familiar
And pleasant to us, and strange too,
Yet with no bar.
The thrush on the oaktop in the lane
Sang his last song, or last but one;
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And as he ended, on the elm
Another had but just begun
His last; they knew no more than I
The day was done.
Then past his dark white cottage front
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A labourer went along, his tread
Slow, half with weariness, half with ease;
And, through the silence, from his shed
The sound of sawing rounded all
That silence said.
Health
Four miles at a leap, over the dark hollow land,
To the frosted steep of the down and its junipers black,
Travels my eye with equal ease and delight:
And scarce could my body leap four yards.
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This is the best and the worst of it –
Never to know,
Yet to imagine gloriously, pure health.
Today, had I suddenly health,
I could not satisfy the desire of my heart
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Unless health abated it,
So beautiful is the air in its softness and clearness, while Spring
Promises all and fails in nothing as yet;
And what blue and what white is I never knew
Before I saw this sky blessing the land.
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For had I health I could not ride or run or fly
So far or so rapidly over the land
As I desire: I should reach Wiltshire tired;
I should have changed my mind before I could be in Wales.
I could not love; I could not command love.
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Beauty would still be far off
However many hills I climbed over;
Peace would still be farther.
Maybe I should not count it anything
To leap these four miles with the eye;
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And either I should not be filled almost to bursting with desire,
Or with my power desire would still keep pace.
Yet I am not satisfied
Even with knowing I never could be satisfied.
With health and all the power that lies
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In maiden beauty, poet and warrior,
In Caesar, Shakespeare, Alcibiades,
Mazeppa, Leonardo, Michelangelo,
In any maiden whose smile is lovelier
Than sunlight upon dew,
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I could not be as the wagtail running up and down
The warm tiles of the roof slope, twittering
Happily and sweetly as if the sun itself
Extracted the song
As the hand makes sparks from the fur of a cat:
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I could not be as the sun.
Nor should I be content to be
As little as the bird or as mighty as the sun.
For the bird knows not of the sun,
And the sun regards not the bird.
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But I am almost proud to love both bird and sun,
Though scarce this Spring could my body leap four yards.
The Huxter
He has a hump like an ape on his back;
He has of money a plentiful lack;
And but for a gay coat of double his girth
There is not a plainer thing on the earth
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This fine May morning.
But the huxter has a bottle of beer;
He drives a cart and his wife sits near
Who does not heed his lack or his hump;
And they laugh as down the lane they bump
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This fine May morning.
She dotes
She dotes on what the wild birds say
Or hint or mock at, night and day, –
Thrush, blackbird, all that sing in May,
And songless plover,
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Hawk, heron, owl, and woodpecker.
They never say a word to her
About her lover.
She laughs at them for childishness,
She cries at them for carelessness
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Who see her going loverless
Yet sing and chatter
Just as when he was not a ghost,
Nor ever ask her what she has lost
Or what is the matter.
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Yet she has fancied blackbirds hide
A secret, and that thrushes chide
Because she thinks death can divide
Her from her lover;
And she has slept, trying to translate
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The word the cuckoo cries to his mate
Over and over.
Song
At poet’s tears,
Sweeter than any smiles but hers,
She laughs; I sigh;
And yet I could not live if she should die.
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And when in June
Once more the cuckoo spoils his tune,
She laughs at sighs;
And yet she says she loves me till she dies.
A Cat
She had a name among the children;
But no one loved though someone owned
Her, locked her out of doors at bedtime
And had her kittens duly drowned.
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In Spring, nevertheless, this cat
Ate blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales,
And birds of bright voice and plume and flight,
As well as scraps from neighbours’ pails.
I loathed and hated her for this;
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One speckle on a thrush’s breast
Was worth a million such; and yet
She lived long, till God gave her rest.
Melancholy
The rain and wind, the rain and wind, raved endlessly.
On me the Summer storm, and fever, and melancholy
Wrought magic, so that if I feared the solitude
Far more I feared all company: too sharp, too rude,
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Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice.
What I desired I knew not, but whate’er my choice
Vain it must be, I knew. Yet naught did my despair
But sweeten the strange sweetness, while through the wild air
All day long I heard a distant cuckoo calling
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And, soft as dulcimers, sounds of near water falling,
And, softer, and remote as if in history,
Rumours of what had touched my friends, my foes, or me.
Tonight
Harry, you know at night
The larks in Castle Alley
As if the electric light
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Were the true sun above a summer valley:
Whistle, don’t knock, tonight.
I shall come early, Kate:
And we in Castle Alley
Will sit close out of sight
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Alone, and ask no light
Of lamp or sun above a summer valley:
Tonight I can stay late.
April
The sweetest thing, I thought
At one time, between earth and heaven
Was the first smile
When mist has been forgiven
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And the sun has stolen out,
Peered, and resolved to shine at seven
On dabbled lengthening grasses,
Thick primroses and early leaves uneven,
When earth’s breath, warm and humid, far surpasses
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The richest oven’s, and loudly rings ‘cuckoo’
And sharply the nightingale’s ‘tsoo, troo, troo, troo’:
To say ‘God bless it’ was all that I could do.
But now I know one sweeter
By far since the day Emily
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Turned weeping back
To me, still happy me,
To ask forgiveness, –
Yet smiled with half a certainty
To be forgiven, – for what
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She had never done; I knew not what it might be,
Nor could she tell me, having now forgot,
By rapture carried with me past all care
As to an isle in April lovelier
Than April’s self. ‘God bless you’ I said to her.
The Glory
The glory of the beauty of the morning, –
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
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White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy
Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart: –
The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning
All I can ever do, all I can be,
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Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue,
The happiness I fancy fit to dwell
In beauty’s presence. Shall I now this day
Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,
Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start
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And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,
In hope to find whatever it is I seek,
Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things
That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?
Or must I be content with discontent
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As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?
And shall I ask at the day’s end once more
What beauty is, and what I can have meant
By happiness? And shall I let all go,
Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know
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That I was happy oft and oft before,
Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,
How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,
Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.
July
Naught moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake
Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.
The boat itself stirs only when I break
This drowse of heat and solitude afloat
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To prove if what I see be bird or mote,
Or learn if yet the shore woods be awake.
Long hours since dawn grew, – spread, – and passed on high
And deep below, – I have watched the cool reeds hung
Over images more cool in imaged sky:
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Nothing there was worth thinking of so long;
All that the ring-doves say, far leaves among,
Brims my mind with content thus still to lie.
The Chalk-Pit
‘Is this the road that climbs above and bends
Round what was once a chalk-pit: now it is
By accident an amphitheatre.
Some ash trees standing ankle-deep in briar
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And bramble act the parts, and neither speak
Nor stir.’ ‘But see: they have fallen, every one,
And briar and bramble have grown over them.’
‘That is the place. As usual no one is here.
Hardly can I imagine the drop of the axe,
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And the smack that is like an echo, sounding here.’
‘I do not understand.’ ‘Why, what I mean is
That I have seen the place two or three times
At most, and that its emptiness and silence
And stillness haunt me, as if just before
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It was not empty, silent, still, but full
Of life of some kind, perhaps tragical.
Has anything unusual happened here?’
‘Not that I know of. It is called the Dell.
They have not dug chalk here for a century.
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That was the ash trees’ age. But I will ask.’
‘No. Do not. I prefer to make a tale,
Or better leave it like the end of a play,
Actors and audience and lights all gone;
For so it looks now. In my memory
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Again and again I see it, strangely dark,
And vacant of a life but just withdrawn.
We have not seen the woodman with the axe.
Some ghost has left it now as we two came.’
‘And yet you doubted if this were the road?’
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‘Well, sometimes I have thought of it and failed
To place it. No. And I am not quite sure,
Even now, this is it. For another place,
Real or painted, may have combined with it.
Or I myself a long way back in time…’
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‘Why, as to that, I used to meet a man –
I had forgotten, – searching for birds’ nests
Along the road and in the chalk-pit too.
The wren’s hole was an eye that looked at him
For recognition. Every nest he knew.
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He got a stiff neck, by looking this side or that,
Spring after spring, he told me, with his laugh, –
A sort of laugh. He was a visitor,
A man of forty, – smoked and strolled about.
At orts and crosses Pleasure and Pain had played
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On his brown features; – I think both had lost; –
Mild and yet wild too. You may know the kind.
And once or twice a woman shared his walks,
A girl of twenty with a brown boy’s face,
And hair brown as a thrush or as a nut,
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Thick eyebrows, glinting eyes – ’ ‘You have said enough.
A pair, – free thought, free love, – I know the breed:
I shall not mix my fancies up with them.’
‘You please yourself. I should prefer the truth
Or nothing. Here, in fact, is nothing at all
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Except a silent place that once rang loud,
And trees and us – imperfect friends, we men
And trees since time began; and nevertheless
Between us still we breed a mystery.’
Fifty Faggots
There they stand, on their ends, the fifty faggots
That once were underwood of hazel and ash
In Jenny Pinks’s Copse. Now, by the hedge
Close packed, they make a thicket fancy alone
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Can creep through with the mouse and wren. Next Spring
A blackbird or a robin will nest there,
Accustomed to them, thinking they will remain
Whatever is for ever to a bird:
This Spring it is too late; the swift has come.
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’Twas a hot day for carrying them up:
Better they will never warm me, though they must
Light several Winters’ fires. Before they are done
The war will have ended, many other things
Have ended, maybe, that I can no more
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Foresee or more control than robin and wren.
Sedge-Warblers
This beauty made me dream there was a time
Long past and irrecoverable, a clime
Where any brook so radiant racing clear
Through buttercup and kingcup bright as brass
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But gentle, nourishing the meadow grass
That leans and scurries in the wind, would bear
Another beauty, divine and feminine,
Child to the sun, a nymph whose soul unstained
Could love all day, and never hate or tire,
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A lover of mortal or immortal kin.
And yet, rid of this dream, ere I had drained
Its poison, quieted was my desire
So that I only looked into the water,
Clearer than any goddess or man’s daughter,
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And hearkened while it combed the dark green hair
And shook the millions of the blossoms white
Of water-crowfoot, and curdled to one sheet
The flowers fallen from the chestnuts in the park
Far off. And sedge-warblers, clinging so light
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To willow twigs, sang longer than the lark,
Quick, shrill, or grating, a song to match the heat
Of the strong sun, nor less the water’s cool,
Gushing through narrows, swirling in the pool.
Their song that lacks all words, all melody,
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All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me