and came
Whistling over the fields, and, when he had made
all sure,
‘Thy line is at end,’ he said, ‘but at least I have saved
its name.’
THE BEGINNER
On the first hour of my first day
In the front trench I fell.
(Children in boxes at a play
Stand up to watch it well.)
R.A.F. (AGED EIGHTEEN)
Laughing through clouds, his milk-teeth still unshed,
Cities and men he smote from overhead.
His deaths delivered, he returned to play
Childlike, with childish things now put away.
THE REFINED MAN
I was of delicate mind. I stepped aside for my needs,
Disdaining the common office. I was seen from afar
and killed …
How is this matter for mirth? Let each man be judged
by his deeds.
I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that
I willed.
NATIVE WATER-CARRIER (M.E.F.)
Prometheus brought down fire to men,
This brought up water.
The Gods are jealous – now, as then,
They gave no quarter.
BOMBED IN LONDON
On land and sea I strove with anxious care
To escape conscription. It was in the air!
THE SLEEPY SENTINEL
Faithless the watch that I kept: now I have none to keep.
I was slain because I slept: now I am slain I sleep.
Let no man reproach me again, whatever watch is
unkept –
I sleep because I am slain. They slew me because I slept.
BATTERIES OUT OF AMMUNITION
If any mourn us in the workshop, say
We died because the shift kept holiday.
COMMON FORM
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
A DEAD STATESMAN
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
THE REBEL
If I had clamoured at Thy Gate
For gift of Life on Earth,
And, thrusting through the souls that wait,
Flung headlong into birth –
Even then, even then, for gin and snare
About my pathway spread,
Lord, I had mocked Thy thoughtful care
Before I joined the Dead!
But now? … I was beneath Thy Hand
Ere yet the Planets came.
And now – though Planets pass, I stand
The witness to Thy Shame.
THE OBEDIENT
Daily, though no ears attended,
Did my prayers arise.
Daily, though no fire descended,
Did I sacrifice.
Though my darkness did not lift,
Though I faced no lighter odds,
Though the Gods bestowed no gift,
None the less,
None the less, I served the Gods!
A DRIFTER OFF TARENTUM
He from the wind-bitten North with ship and
companions descended,
Searching for eggs of death spawned by invisible hulls.
Many he found and drew forth. Of a sudden the
fishery ended
In flame and a clamorous breath not new to the
eye-pecking gulls.
DESTROYERS IN COLLISION
For Fog and Fate no charm is found
To lighten or amend.
I, hurrying to my bride, was drowned –
Cut down by my best friend.
CONVOY ESCORT
I was a shepherd to fools
Causelessly bold or afraid.
They would not abide by my rules.
Yet they escaped. For I stayed.
UNKNOWN FEMALE CORPSE
Headless, lacking foot and hand,
Horrible I come to land.
I beseech all women’s sons
Know I was a mother once.
RAPED AND AVENGED
One used and butchered me: another spied
Me broken – for which thing an hundred died.
So it was learned among the heathen hosts
How much a freeborn woman’s favour costs.
SALONIKAN GRAVE
I have watched a thousand days
Push out and crawl into night
Slowly as tortoises.
Now I, too, follow these.
It is fever, and not the fight –
Time, not battle – that slays.
THE BRIDEGROOM
Call me not false, beloved,
If, from thy scarce-known breast
So little time removed,
In other arms I rest.
For this more ancient bride,
Whom coldly I embrace,
Was constant at my side
Before I saw thy face.
Our marriage, often set –
By miracle delayed –
At last is consummate,
And cannot be unmade.
Live, then, whom Life shall cure,
Almost, of Memory,
And leave us to endure
Its immortality.
V.A.D. (MEDITERRANEAN)
Ah, would swift ships had never been, for then we
ne’er had found,
These harsh Aegean rocks between, this little virgin
drowned,
Whom neither spouse nor child shall mourn, but men
she nursed through pain
And – certain keels for whose return the heathen look
in vain.
ACTORS
On a Memorial Tablet in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon
We counterfeited once for your disport
Men’s joy and sorrow: but our day has passed.
We pray you pardon all where we fell short –
Seeing we were your servants to this last.
JOURNALISTS
On a Panel in the Hall of the Institute of Journalists
We have served our day.
THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the
Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them
flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice,
outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed
us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would
certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and
Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed
the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered
their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of
the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and
presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the
lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were
utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied
she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied
that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who
promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They
prom
ised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the
wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us
bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to
the Devil you know.’
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised
the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by
loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men
lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said:
‘The Wages of Sin is Death.’
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised
abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was
nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you
don’t work you die.’
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their
smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and
began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two
make Four –
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to
explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man –
There are only four things certain since Social
Progress began: –
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns
to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling
back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new
world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must
pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire
will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and
slaughter return!
DOCTORS
Man dies too soon, beside his works half-planned.
His days are counted and reprieve is vain:
Who shall entreat with Death to stay his hand,
Or cloke the shameful nakedness of pain?
Send here the bold, the seekers of the way –
The passionless, the unshakeable of soul,
Who serve the inmost mysteries of man’s clay,
And ask no more than leave to make them whole.
LOLLIUS
HORACE, Bk V. Ode 13
Why gird at Lollius if he care
To purchase in the city’s sight,
With nard and roses for his hair,
The name of Knight?
Son of unmitigated sires
Enriched by trade in Afric corn,
His wealth allows, his wife requires,
Him to be born.
Him slaves shall serve with zeal renewed
At lesser wage for longer whiles,
And school- and station-masters rude
Receive with smiles.
His bowels shall be sought in charge
By learned doctors; all his sons
And nubile daughters shall enlarge
Their horizons.
For fierce she-Britons, apt to smite
Their upward-climbing sisters down,
Shall smooth their plumes and oft invite
The brood to town.
For these delights will he disgorge
The State enormous benefice,
But – by the head of either George –
He pays not twice!
Whom neither lust for public pelf,
Nor itch to make orations, vex –
Content to honour his own self
With his own cheques –
That man is clean. At least, his house
Springs cleanly from untainted gold –
Not from a conscience or a spouse
Sold and resold.
Time was, you say, before men knew
Such arts, and rose by Virtue guided?
The tables rock with laughter – you
Not least derided.
THE LAST ODE
HORACE, Bk V. Ode 31
As watchers couched beneath a Bantine oak,
Hearing the dawn-wind stir,
Know that the present strength of night is broke
Though no dawn threatens her
Till dawn’s appointed hour – so Virgil died,
Aware of change at hand, and prophesied.
Change upon all the Eternal Gods had made
And on the Gods alike –
Fated as dawn but, as the dawn, delayed
Till the just hour should strike –
A Star new-risen above the living and dead;
And the lost shades that were our loves restored
As lovers, and for ever. So he said;
Having received the word …
Maecenas waits me on the Esquilme:
Thither to-night go I …
And shall this dawn restore us, Virgil mine,
To dawn? Beneath what sky?
LONDON STONE
When you come to London Town,
(Grieving – grieving!)
Bring your flowers and lay them down
At the place of grieving.
When you come to London Town,
(Grieving – grieving!)
Bow your head and mourn your own,
With the others grieving.
For those minutes, let it wake
(Grieving – grieving!)
All the empty-heart and ache
That is not cured by grieving.
For those minutes, tell no lie:
(Grieving – grieving!)
‘Grave, this is your victory;
And the sting of death is grieving.’
Where’s our help, from Earth or Heaven.
(Grieving – grieving!)
To comfort us for what we’ve given,
And only gained the grieving?
Heaven’s too far and Earth too near,
(Grieving – grieving!)
But our neighbour’s standing here,
Grieving as we’re grieving.
What’s his burden every day?
(Grieving – grieving!)
Nothing man can count or weigh,
But loss and love’s own grieving.
What is the tie betwixt us two
(Grieving – grieving!)
That must last our whole lives through?
‘as I suffer, so do you.’
That may ease the grieving.
THE FLIGHT
When the grey geese heard the Fool’s tread
Too near to where they lay,
They lifted neither voice nor head,
But took themselves away.
No water broke, no pinion whirred –
There came no warning call.
The steely, sheltering rushes stirred
A little – that was all.
Only the osiers understood,
And the drowned meadows spied
What else than wreckage of a flood
Stole outward on that tide.
But the far beaches saw their ranks
Gather and greet and grow
By myriads on the naked banks
Watching their sign to go;
Till, with a roar of wings that churned
The shivering shoals to foam,
Flight after flight took air and turned
To find a safer home;
And, far below their steadfast wedge,
They heard (and hastened on)
Men thresh and clamour through the sedge
Aghast that they were gone!
And, when men prayed them come anew
An
d nest where they were bred,
‘Nay, fools foretell what knaves will do,’
Was all the grey geese said.
CHARTRES WINDOWS
Colour fulfils where Music has no power:
By each man’s light the unjudging glass betrays
All men’s surrender, each man’s holiest hour
And all the lit confusion of our days –
Purfled with iron, traced in dusk and fire,
Challenging ordered Time who, at the last,
Shall bring it, grozed and leaded and wedged fast,
To the cold stone that curbs or crowns desire.
Yet on the pavement that all feet have trod –
Even as the Spirit, in her deeps and heights,
Turns only, and that voiceless, to her God –
There falls no tincture from those anguished lights.
And Heaven’s one light, behind them, striking through,
Blazons what each man dreamed no other knew.
A LEGEND OF TRUTH
Once on a time, the ancient legends tell,
Truth, rising from the bottom of her well,
Looked on the world, but, hearing how it lied,
Returned to her seclusion horrified.
There she abode, so conscious of her worth,
Not even Pilate’s Question called her forth,
Nor Galileo, kneeling to deny
The Laws that hold our Planet ’neath the sky.
Meantime, her kindlier sister, whom men call
Kipling: Poems Page 13