Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas
Page 5
In vain: the noise of man, beast, and machine prevails.
But the call of children in the unfamiliar streets 5
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
That in the echo lives and with the echo dies. 10
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,
Not a man or woman or child among them all: 15
But it is All Friends’ Night, a traveller’s good-night.
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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;
The shell of a little snail bleached 5
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
For earliest violets 10
Who seeks through Winter’s ruins
Something to pay Winter’s debts,
While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
Keep their spirits up in the mist, 15
And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.
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THE NEW HOUSE
Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.
Old at once was the house, 5
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,
Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun 10
Shone in vain: old griefs, and griefs
Not yet begun.
All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learnt how the wind would sound 15
After these things should be.
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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,
So huge and dark that it seemed 5
It was the hill
Till the gable’s precipice proved
It impossible.
Then the great down in the west
Grew into sight, 10
A barn stored full to the ridge
With black of night;
And the barn fell to a barn
Or even less
Before critical eyes and its own 15
Late mightiness.
But far down and near barn and I
Since then have smiled,
Having seen my new cautiousness
By itself beguiled 20
To disdain what seemed the barn
Till a few steps changed
It past all doubt to the down;
So the barn was avenged.
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SOWING
It was a perfect day
For sowing; just
As sweet and dry was the ground
As tobacco-dust.
I tasted deep the hour 5
Between the far
Owl’s chuckling first soft cry
And the first star.
A long stretched hour it was;
Nothing undone 10
Remained; the early seeds
All safely sown.
And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear, 15
Saying good-night.
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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.
‘Tis Sunday, and the church-bells end 5
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,
How it may shift and long delay, 10
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
On hillsides; but the birds’ songs have 15
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,
Because we know how lucky we are. 20
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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;
More black than earth. Their cry 5
Is the one sound under the sky.
They alone move, now low, now high,
And merrily they cry
To the mischievous Spring sky,
Plunging earthward, tossing high, 10
Over the ghost who wonders why
So merrily they cry and fly,
Nor choose ‘twixt earth and sky,
While the moon’s quarter silently
Rides, and earth rests as silently. 15
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WILL YOU COME?
Will you come?
Will you come?
Will you ride
So late
At my side? 5
O, will you come?
Will you come?
Will you come
If the night
Has a moon, 10
Full and bright?
O, will you come?
Would you come?
Would you come
If the noon 15
Gave light,
Not the moon?
Beautiful, would you come?
Would you have come?
Would you have come 20
Without scorning,
Had it been
Still morning?
Beloved, would you have come?
If you come, 25
Haste and come.
Owls have cried;
It grows dark
To ride.
Beloved, beautiful, come. 30
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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,
Between the legs of beech and yew, to where 5
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women
Content themselves with the road and what they see
Over the bank, and what the children tell.
The path, winding like silver, trickles on,
Border
ed and even invaded by thinnest moss 10
That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk
With gold, olive, and emerald, but in vain.
The children wear it. They have flattened the bank
On top, and silvered it between the moss
With the current of their feet, year after year. 15
But the road is houseless, and leads not to school.
To see a child is rare there, and the eye
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
And underyawns it, and the path that looks
As if it led on to some legendary 20
Or fancied place where men have wished to go
And stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends.
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THE WASP TRAP
This moonlight makes
The lovely lovelier
Than ever before lakes
And meadows were.
And yet they are not, 5
Though this their hour is, more
Lovely than things that were not
Lovely before.
Nothing on earth,
And in the heavens no star, 10
For pure brightness is worth
More than that jar,
For wasps meant, now
A star – long may it swing
From the dead apple-bough, 15
So glistening.
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A TALE
There once the walls
Of the ruined cottage stood.
The periwinkle crawls
With flowers in its hair into the wood.
In flowerless hours 5
Never will the bank fail,
With everlasting flowers
On fragments of blue plates, to tell the tale.
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WIND AND MIST
They met inside the gateway that gives the view,
A hollow land as vast as heaven. ‘It is
A pleasant day, sir.’ ‘A very pleasant day.’
‘And what a view here. If you like angled fields
Of grass and grain bounded by oak and thorn, 5
Here is a league. Had we with Germany
To play upon this board it could not be
More dear than April has made it with a smile.
The fields beyond that league close in together
And merge, even as our days into the past, 10
Into one wood that has a shining pane
Of water. Then the hills of the horizon –
That is how I should make hills had I to show
One who would never see them what hills were like.’
‘Yes. Sixty miles of South Downs at one glance. 15
Sometimes a man feels proud of them, as if
He had just created them with one mighty thought.’
‘That house, though modern, could not be better planned
For its position. I never liked a new
House better. Could you tell me who lives in it?’ 20
‘No one.’ ‘Ah – and I was peopling all
Those windows on the south with happy eyes,
The terrace under them with happy feet;
Girls – ‘ ‘Sir, I know. I know. I have seen that house
Through mist look lovely as a castle in Spain, 25
And airier. I have thought: “‘Twere happy there
To live.” And I have laughed at that
Because I lived there then.’ ‘Extraordinary.’
‘Yes, with my furniture and family
Still in it, I, knowing every nook of it 30
And loving none, and in fact hating it.’
‘Dear me! How could that be? But pardon me.’
‘No offence. Doubtless the house was not to blame,
But the eye watching from those windows saw,
Many a day, day after day, mist – mist 35
Like chaos surging back – and felt itself
Alone in all the world, marooned alone.
We lived in clouds, on a cliff’s edge almost
(You see), and if clouds went, the visible earth
Lay too far off beneath and like a cloud. 40
I did not know it was the earth I loved
Until I tried to live there in the clouds
And the earth turned to cloud.’ ‘You had a garden
Of flint and clay, too.’ ‘True; that was real enough.
The flint was the one crop that never failed. 45
The clay first broke my heart, and then my back;
And the back heals not. There were other things
Real, too. In that room at the gable a child
Was born while the wind chilled a summer dawn:
Never looked grey mind on a greyer one 50
Than when the child’s cry broke above the groans.’
‘I hope they were both spared.’ ‘They were. Oh yes.
But flint and clay and childbirth were too real
For this cloud castle. I had forgot the wind.
Pray do not let me get on to the wind. 55
You would not understand about the wind.
It is my subject, and compared with me
Those who have always lived on the firm ground
Are quite unreal in this matter of the wind.
There were whole days and nights when the wind and I 60
Between us shared the world, and the wind ruled
And I obeyed it and forgot the mist.
My past and the past of the world were in the wind.
Now you will say that though you understand
And feel for me, and so on, you yourself 65
Would find it different. You are all like that
If once you stand here free from wind and mist:
I might as well be talking to wind and mist.
You would believe the house-agent’s young man
Who gives no heed to anything I say. 70
Good morning. But one word. I want to admit
That I would try the house once more, if I could;
As I should like to try being young again.’
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A GENTLEMAN
‘He has robbed two clubs. The judge at Salisbury
Can’t give him more than he undoubtedly
Deserves. The scoundrel! Look at his photograph!
A lady-killer! Hanging’s too good by half
For such as he.’ So said the stranger, one 5
With crimes yet undiscovered or undone.
But at the inn the Gypsy dame began:
‘Now he was what I call a gentleman.
He went along with Carrie, and when she
Had a baby he paid up so readily 10
His half a crown. Just like him. A crown’d have been
More like him. For I never knew him mean.
Oh! but he was such a nice gentleman. Oh!
Last time we met he said if me and Joe
Was anywhere near we must be sure and call. 15
He put his arms around our Amos all
As if he were his own son. I pray God
Save him from justice! Nicer man never trod.’
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LOB
At hawthorn-time in Wiltshire travelling
In search of something chance would never bring,
An old man’s face, by life and weather cut
And coloured, – rough, brown, sweet as any nut, –
A land face, sea-blue-eyed, – hung in my mind 5
When I had left him many a mile behind.
All he said was: ‘Nobody can’t stop ‘ee. It’s
A footpath, right en
ough. You see those bits
Of mounds – that’s where they opened up the barrows
Sixty years since, while I was scaring sparrows. 10
They thought as there was something to find there,
But couldn’t find it, by digging, anywhere.’
To turn back then and seek him, where was the use?
There were three Manningfords, – Abbots, Bohun, and Bruce:
And whether Alton, not Manningford, it was, 15
My memory could not decide, because
There was both Alton Barnes and Alton Priors.
All had their churches, graveyards, farms, and byres,
Lurking to one side up the paths and lanes,
Seldom well seen except by aeroplanes; 20
And when bells rang, or pigs squealed, or cocks crowed,
Then only heard. Ages ago the road
Approached. The people stood and looked and turned,
Nor asked it to come nearer, nor yet learned
To move out there and dwell in all men’s dust. 25
And yet withal they shot the weathercock, just
Because ‘twas he crowed out of tune, they said:
So now the copper weathercock is dead.
If they had reaped their dandelions and sold
Them fairly, they could have afforded gold. 30
Many years passed, and I went back again
Among those villages, and looked for men
Who might have known my ancient. He himself
Had long been dead or laid upon the shelf,
I thought. One man I asked about him roared 35
At my description: ‘‘Tis old Bottlesford
He means, Bill.’ But another said: ‘Of course,
It was Jack Button up at the White Horse.
He’s dead, sir, these three years.’ This lasted till
A girl proposed Walker of Walker’s Hill, 40