But he will overtake us anon,
If the world goes on.”
MIDNIGHT ON THE GREAT WESTERN
In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy, And the roof-lamp’s oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face, Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going, Or whence he came.
In the band of his hat the journeying boy Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box, That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams Like a living thing.
What past can be yours, O journeying boy Towards a world unknown,
Who calmly, as if incurious quite
On all at stake, can undertake
This plunge alone?
Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy, Our rude realms far above,
Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete This region of sin that you find you in, But are not of?
HONEYMOON TIME AT AN INN
At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn, The moon was at the window-square,
Deedily brooding in deformed decay – The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze; At the shiver of morning a little before the false dawn So the moon looked in there.
Her speechless eyeing reached across the chamber, Where lay two souls opprest,
One a white lady sighing, “Why am I sad!” To him who sighed back, “Sad, my Love, am I!” And speechlessly the old moon conned the chamber, And these two reft of rest.
While their large-pupilled vision swept the scene there, Nought seeming imminent,
Something fell sheer, and crashed, and from the floor Lay glittering at the pair with a shattered gaze, While their large-pupilled vision swept the scene there, And the many-eyed thing outleant.
With a start they saw that it was an old-time pier-glass Which had stood on the mantel near,
Its silvering blemished,–yes, as if worn away By the eyes of the countless dead who had smirked at it Ere these two ever knew that old-time pier-glass And its vague and vacant leer.
As he looked, his bride like a moth skimmed forth, and kneeling Quick, with quivering sighs,
Gathered the pieces under the moon’s sly ray, Unwitting as an automaton what she did; Till he entreated, hasting to where she was kneeling, Let it stay where it lies!”
“Long years of sorrow this means!” breathed the lady As they retired. “Alas!”
And she lifted one pale hand across her eyes. “Don’t trouble, Love; it’s nothing,” the bridegroom said. “Long years of sorrow for us!” murmured the lady, “Or ever this evil pass!”
And the Spirits Ironic laughed behind the wainscot, And the Spirits of Pity sighed.
It’s good,” said the Spirits Ironic, “to tickle their minds With a portent of their wedlock’s after-grinds.” And the Spirits of Pity sighed behind the wainscot, “It’s a portent we cannot abide!
“More, what shall happen to prove the truth of the portent?” –“Oh; in brief, they will fade till old, And their loves grow numbed ere death, by the cark of care.” – “But nought see we that asks for portents there? – ‘Tis the lot of all.”–“Well, no less true is a portent That it fits all mortal mould.”
THE ROBIN
When up aloft
I fly and fly,
I see in pools
The shining sky,
And a happy bird
Am I, am I!
When I descend
Towards their brink
I stand, and look,
And stoop, and drink,
And bathe my wings,
And chink and prink.
When winter frost
Makes earth as steel
I search and search
But find no meal,
And most unhappy
Then I feel.
But when it lasts,
And snows still fall,
I get to feel
No grief at all,
For I turn to a cold stiff
Feathery ball!
“I ROSE AND WENT TO ROU’TOR TOWN”
(She, alone)
I rose and went to Rou’tor Town
With gaiety and good heart,
And ardour for the start,
That morning ere the moon was down
That lit me off to Rou’tor Town
With gaiety and good heart.
When sojourn soon at Rou’tor Town
Wrote sorrows on my face,
I strove that none should trace
The pale and gray, once pink and brown, When sojourn soon at Rou’tor Town
Wrote sorrows on my face.
The evil wrought at Rou’tor Town
On him I’d loved so true
I cannot tell anew:
But nought can quench, but nought can drown The evil wrought at Rou’tor Town
On him I’d loved so true!
THE NETTLES
This, then, is the grave of my son, Whose heart she won! And nettles grow
Upon his mound; and she lives just below.
How he upbraided me, and left,
And our lives were cleft, because I said She was hard, unfeeling, caring but to wed.
Well, to see this sight I have fared these miles, And her firelight smiles from her window there, Whom he left his mother to cherish with tender care!
It is enough. I’ll turn and go;
Yes, nettles grow where lone lies he, Who spurned me for seeing what he could not see.
IN A WAITING-ROOM
On a morning sick as the day of doom
With the drizzling gray
Of an English May,
There were few in the railway waiting-room. About its walls were framed and varnished Pictures of liners, fly-blown, tarnished. The table bore a Testament
For travellers’ reading, if suchwise bent.
I read it on and on,
And, thronging the Gospel of Saint John, Were figures–additions, multiplications – By some one scrawled, with sundry emendations; Not scoffingly designed,
But with an absent mind, –
Plainly a bagman’s counts of cost, What he had profited, what lost;
And whilst I wondered if there could have been Any particle of a soul
In that poor man at all,
To cypher rates of wage
Upon that printed page,
There joined in the charmless scene And stood over me and the scribbled book (To lend the hour’s mean hue
A smear of tragedy too)
A soldier and wife, with haggard look Subdued to stone by strong endeavour;
And then I heard
From a casual word
They were parting as they believed for ever.
But next there came
Like the eastern flame
Of some high altar, children–a pair – Who laughed at the fly-blown pictures there. “Here are the lovely ships that we,
Mother, are by and by going to see! When we get there it’s ‘most sure to be fine, And the band will play, and the sun will shine!”
It rained on the skylight with a din
As we waited and still no train came in; But the words of the child in the squalid room Had spread a glory through the gloom.
THE CLOCK-WINDER
It is dark as a cave,
Or a vault in the nave
When the iron door
Is closed, and the floor
Of the church relaid
With trowel and spade.
But the parish-clerk
Cares not for the dark
As he winds in the tower
At a regular hour
The rheumatic clock,
Whose dilatory knock
You can hear when praying
At the day’s decaying,
Or at any lone while
From a pew in the aisle.
Up, up from the ground
Around and around
In the turret stair
He clambers, to where
The wheelwork is,
With its tick, click, whizz,
Reposefully measuring
Each day to its end
That mortal men spend
In sorrowing and pleasuring
Nightly thus does he climb
To the trackway of Time.
Him I followed one night
To this place without light,
And, ere I spoke, heard
Him say, word by word,
At the end of his winding,
The darkness unminding:-
“So I wipe out one more,
My Dear, of the sore
Sad days that still be,
Like a drying Dead Sea,
Between you and me!”
Who she was no man knew:
He had long borne him blind
To all womankind;
And was ever one who
Kept his past out of view.
OLD EXCURSIONS
“What’s the good of going to Ridgeway, Cerne, or Sydling Mill,
Or to Yell’ham Hill,
Blithely bearing Casterbridge-way
As we used to do?
She will no more climb up there,
Or be visible anywhere
In those haunts we knew.”
But to-night, while walking weary,
Near me seemed her shade,
Come as ’twere to upbraid
This my mood in deeming dreary
Scenes that used to please;
And, if she did come to me,
Still solicitous, there may be
Good in going to these.
So, I’ll care to roam to Ridgeway,
Cerne, or Sydling Mill,
Or to Yell’ham Hill,
Blithely bearing Casterbridge-way
As we used to do,
Since her phasm may flit out there, And may greet me anywhere
In those haunts we knew.
April 1913.
THE MASKED FACE
I found me in a great surging space,
At either end a door,
And I said: “What is this giddying place, With no firm-fixed floor,
That I knew not of before?”
“It is Life,” said a mask-clad face.
I asked: “But how do I come here,
Who never wished to come;
Can the light and air be made more clear, The floor more quietsome,
And the doors set wide? They numb Fast-locked, and fill with fear.”
The mask put on a bleak smile then,
And said, “O vassal-wight,
There once complained a goosequill pen To the scribe of the Infinite
Of the words it had to write
Because they were past its ken.”
IN A WHISPERING GALLERY
That whisper takes the voice
Of a Spirit’s compassionings
Close, but invisible,
And throws me under a spell
At the kindling vision it brings;
And for a moment I rejoice,
And believe in transcendent things
That would mould from this muddy earth A spot for the splendid birth
Of everlasting lives,
Whereto no night arrives;
And this gaunt gray gallery
A tabernacle of worth
On this drab-aired afternoon,
When you can barely see
Across its hazed lacune
If opposite aught there be
Of fleshed humanity
Wherewith I may commune;
Or if the voice so near
Be a soul’s voice floating here.
THE SOMETHING THAT SAVED HIM
It was when
Whirls of thick waters laved me
Again and again,
That something arose and saved me;
Yea, it was then.
In that day
Unseeing the azure went I
On my way,
And to white winter bent I,
Knowing no May.
Reft of renown,
Under the night clouds beating
Up and down,
In my needfulness greeting
Cit and clown.
Long there had been
Much of a murky colour
In the scene,
Dull prospects meeting duller;
Nought between.
Last, there loomed
A closing-in blind alley,
Though there boomed
A feeble summons to rally
Where it gloomed.
The clock rang;
The hour brought a hand to deliver; I upsprang,
And looked back at den, ditch and river, And sang.
THE ENEMY’S PORTRAIT
He saw the portrait of his enemy, offered At auction in a street he journeyed nigh, That enemy, now late dead, who in his life-time Had injured deeply him the passer-by.
“To get that picture, pleased be God, I’ll try, And utterly destroy it; and no more
Shall be inflicted on man’s mortal eye A countenance so sinister and sore!”
And so he bought the painting. Driving homeward, “The frame will come in useful,” he declared, “The rest is fuel.” On his arrival, weary, Asked what he bore with him, and how he fared, He said he had bid for a picture, though he cared For the frame only: on the morrow he
Would burn the canvas, which could well be spared, Seeing that it portrayed his enemy.
Next day some other duty found him busy; The foe was laid his face against the wall; But on the next he set himself to loosen The straining-strips. And then a casual call Prevented his proceeding therewithal;
And thus the picture waited, day by day, Its owner’s pleasure, like a wretched thrall, Until a month and more had slipped away.
And then upon a morn he found it shifted, Hung in a corner by a servitor.
“Why did you take on you to hang that picture? You know it was the frame I bought it for.” “It stood in the way of every visitor,
And I just hitched it there.”–“Well, it must go: I don’t commemorate men whom I abhor.
Remind me ’tis to do. The frame I’ll stow.”
But things become forgotten. In the shadow Of the dark corner hung it by its string, And there it stayed–once noticed by its owner, Who said, “Ah me–I must destroy that thing!” But when he died, there, none remembering, It hung, till moved to prominence, as one sees; And comers pause and say, examining,
“I thought they were the bitterest enemies?”
IMAGININGS
She saw herself a lady
With fifty frocks in wear,
And rolling wheels, and rooms the best, And faithful maidens’ care,
And open lawns and shady
For weathers warm or drear.
She found herself a striver,
All liberal gifts debarred,
With days of gloom, and movements stressed, And early visions marred,
And got no man to wive her
But one whose lot was hard.
Yet in the moony night-time
She steals to stile and lea
During his heavy slumberous rest
When homecome wearily,
And dreams of some blest bright-time She knows can never be.
ON THE DOORSTEP
The rain imprinted the step’s wet shine With target-circles that quivered and crossed As I was leaving this porch of mine;
When from within there swelled and paused A song’s sweet note;
And back I turned, and thought,
“Here I’ll abide.”
The step shines wet beneath the rain, Which prints its circles as heretofore;
I watch them from the porch again,
But no song-notes within the door
Now call to me
To shun the dripping lea
And forth I stride.
Jan. 1914.
SIGNS AND TOKENS
Said the red-cloaked crone
In a whispered moan:
“The dead man was limp
When laid in his chest;
Yea, limp; and why
But to signify
That the grave will crimp
Ere next year’s sun
Yet another one
Of those in that house –
It may be the best –
For its endless drowse!”
Said the brown-shawled dame
To confirm the same:
“And the slothful flies
On the rotting fruit
Have been seen to wear
While crawling there
Crape scarves, by eyes
That were quick and acute;
As did those that had pitched
On the cows by the pails,
And with flaps of their tails
Were far away switched.”
Said the third in plaid,
Each word being weighed:
“And trotting does
In the park, in the lane,
And just outside
The shuttered pane,
Have also been heard –
Quick feet as light
As the feet of a sprite –
And the wise mind knows
What things may betide
When such has occurred.”
Cried the black-craped fourth,
Cold faced as the north:
“O, though giving such
Some head-room, I smile
At your falterings
When noting those things
Round your domicile!
For what, what can touch
One whom, riven of all
That makes life gay,
No hints can appal
Of more takings away!”
PATHS OF FORMER TIME
No; no;
It must not be so:
They are the ways we do not go.
Still chew
The kine, and moo
In the meadows we used to wander through;
Still purl
The rivulets and curl
Towards the weirs with a musical swirl;
Haymakers
As in former years
Rake rolls into heaps that the pitchfork rears;
Wheels crack
On the turfy track
The waggon pursues with its toppling pack.
“Why then shun –
Since summer’s not done –
All this because of the lack of one?”
Had you been
Sharer of that scene
You would not ask while it bites in keen
Why it is so
We can no more go
By the summer paths we used to know!
1913.
THE CLOCK OF THE YEARS
“A spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up.”
And the Spirit said,
“I can make the clock of the years go backward, But am loth to stop it where you will.”
And I cried, “Agreed
To that. Proceed:
It’s better than dead!”
He answered, “Peace”;
And called her up–as last before me; Then younger, younger she freshed, to the year I first had known
Her woman-grown,
And I cried, “Cease! –
“Thus far is good –
It is enough–let her stay thus always!” But alas for me. He shook his head:
No stop was there;
And she waned child-fair,
And to babyhood.
Still less in mien
To my great sorrow became she slowly, And smalled till she was nought at all
In his checkless griff;
And it was as if
She had never been.
“Better,” I plained,
“She were dead as before! The memory of her Had lived in me; but it cannot now!”
And coldly his voice:
“It was your choice
To mar the ordained.”
1916.
AT THE PIANO
A woman was playing,
A man looking on;
And the mould of her face,
And her neck, and her hair,
Which the rays fell upon
Of the two candles there,
Sent him mentally straying
In some fancy-place
Where pain had no trace.
A cowled Apparition
Came pushing between;
And her notes seemed to sigh,
And the lights to burn pale,
As a spell numbed the scene.
But the maid saw no bale,
And the man no monition;
And Time laughed awry,
And the Phantom hid nigh.
THE SHADOW ON THE STONE
I went by the Druid stone
That broods in the garden white and lone, And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows That at some moments fall thereon
From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing, And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders Threw there when she was gardening.
I thought her behind my back,
Yea, her I long had learned to lack, And I said: “I am sure you are standing behind me, Though how do you get into this old track?” And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf As a sad response; and to keep down grief I would not turn my head to discover
That there was nothing in my belief.
Yet I wanted to look and see
That nobody stood at the back of me; But I thought once more: “Nay, I’ll not unvision A shape which, somehow, there may be.” So I went on softly from the glade,
And left her behind me throwing her shade, As she were indeed an apparition –
My head unturned lest my dream should fade.
Begun 1913: finished 1916.
IN THE GARDEN
(M. H.)
We waited for the sun
To break its cloudy prison
(For day was not yet done,
And night still unbegun)
Leaning by the dial.
After many a trial –
We all silent there –
It burst as new-arisen,
Throwing a shade to where
Time travelled at that minute.
Little saw we in it,
But this much I know,
Of lookers on that shade,
Her towards whom it made
Soonest had to go.
1915.
THE TREE AND THE LADY
I have done all I could
For that lady I knew! Through the heats I have shaded her, Drawn to her songsters when summer has jaded her, Home from the heath or the wood.
At the mirth-time of May,
When my shadow first lured her, I’d donned my new bravery Of greenth: ’twas my all. Now I shiver in slavery, Icicles grieving me gray.
Plumed to every twig’s end
I could tempt her chair under me. Much did I treasure her During those days she had nothing to pleasure her; Mutely she used me as friend.
I’m a skeleton now,
And she’s gone, craving warmth. The rime sticks like a skin to me; Through me Arcturus peers; Nor’lights shoot into me; Gone is she, scorning my bough!
AN UPBRAIDING
Now I am dead you sing to me
The songs we used to know,
But while I lived you had no wish
Or care for doing so.
Now I am dead you come to me
In the moonlight, comfortless;
Ah, what would I have given alive
To win such tenderness!
When you are dead, and stand to me
Not differenced, as now,
But like again, will you be cold
As when we lived, or how?
THE YOUNG GLASS-STAINER
“These Gothic windows, how they wear me out With cusp and foil, and nothing straight or square, Crude colours, leaden borders roundabout, And fitting in Peter here, and Matthew there!
“What a vocation! Here do I draw now
The abnormal, loving the Hellenic norm; Martha I paint, and dream of Hera’s brow, Mary, and think of Aphrodite’s form.”
Nov. 1893.
LOOKING AT A PICTURE ON AN ANNIVERSARY
But don’t you know it, my dear,
Don’t you know it,
That this day of the year
(What rainbow-rays embow it!)
We met, strangers confessed,
But parted–blest?
Though at this query, my dear,
There in your frame
Unmoved you still appear,
You must be thinking the same,
But keep that look demure
Just to allure.
And now at length a trace
I surely vision
Upon that wistful face
Of old-time recognition,
Smiling forth, “Yes, as you say,
It is the day.”
For this one phase of you
Now left on earth
This great date must endue
With pulsings of rebirth? –
I see them vitalize
Those two deep eyes!
But if this face I con
Does not declare
Consciousness living on
Still in it, little I care
To live myself, my dear,
Lone-labouring here!
Spring 1913.
THE CHOIRMASTER’S BURIAL
He often would ask us
That, when he died,
After playing so many
To their last rest,
If out of us any
Should here abide,
And it would not task us,
We would with our lutes
Play over him
By his grave-brim
The psalm he liked best –
The one whose sense suits
“Mount Ephraim” –
And perhaps we should seem
To him, in Death’s dream,
Like the seraphim.
As soon as I knew
That his spirit was gone
I thought this his due,
And spoke thereupon.
“I think,” said the vicar,
“A read service quicker
Than viols out-of-doors
In these frosts and hoars.
That old-fashioned way
Requires a fine day,
And it seems to me
It had better not be.”
Hence, that afternoon,
Though never knew he
That his wish could not be,
To get through it faster
They buried the master
Without any tune.
But ’twas said that, when
At the dead of next night
The vicar looked out,
There struck on his ken
Thronged roundabout,
Where the frost was graying
The headstoned grass,
A band all in white
Like the saints in church-glass,
Singing and playing
The ancient stave
By the choirmaster’s grave.
Such the tenor man told
When he had grown old.
THE MAN WHO FORGOT
At a lonely cross where bye-roads met I sat upon a gate;
I saw the sun decline and set,
And still was fain to wait.
A trotting boy passed up the way
And roused me from my thought;
I called to him, and showed where lay A spot I shyly sought.
“A summer-house fair stands hidden where You see the moonlight thrown;
Go, tell me if within it there
A lady sits alone.”
He half demurred, but took the track, And silence held the scene;
I saw his figure rambling back;
I asked him if he had been.
“I went just where you said, but found No summer-house was there:
Beyond the slope ’tis all bare ground; Nothing stands anywhere.
“A man asked what my brains were worth; The house, he said, grew rotten,
And was pulled down before my birth, And is almost forgotten!”
My right mind woke, and I stood dumb; Forty years’ frost and flower
Had fleeted since I’d used to come
To meet her in that bower.
WHILE DRAWING IN A CHURCH-YARD
“It is sad that so many of worth,
Still in the flesh,” soughed the yew, “Misjudge their lot whom kindly earth
Secludes from view.
“They ride their diurnal round
Each day-span’s sum of hours
In peerless ease, without jolt or bound Or ache like ours.
“If the living could but hear
What is heard by my roots as they creep Round the restful flock, and the things said there, No one would weep.”
“‘Now set among the wise,’
They say: ‘Enlarged in scope,
That no God trumpet us to rise
We truly hope.'”
I listened to his strange tale
In the mood that stillness brings, And I grew to accept as the day wore pale That show of things.
“FOR LIFE I HAD NEVER CARED GREATLY”
For Life I had never cared greatly, As worth a man’s while;
Peradventures unsought,
Peradventures that finished in nought, Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately Unwon by its style.
In earliest years–why I know not – I viewed it askance;
Conditions of doubt,
Conditions that leaked slowly out, May haply have bent me to stand and to show not Much zest for its dance.
With symphonies soft and sweet colour It courted me then,
Till evasions seemed wrong,
Till evasions gave in to its song, And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller Than life among men.
Anew I found nought to set eyes on, When, lifting its hand,
It uncloaked a star,
Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar, And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon As bright as a brand.
And so, the rough highway forgetting, I pace hill and dale
Regarding the sky,
Regarding the vision on high,
And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting My pilgrimage fail.
“MEN WHO MARCH AWAY”
(SONG OF THE SOLDIERS)
What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
Leaving all that here can win us;
What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away?
Is it a purblind prank, O think you,
Friend with the musing eye,
Who watch us stepping by
With doubt and dolorous sigh?
Can much pondering so hoodwink you! Is it a purblind prank, O think you,
Friend with the musing eye?
Nay. We well see what we are doing,
Though some may not see –
Dalliers as they be –
England’s need are we;
Her distress would leave us rueing: Nay. We well see what we are doing,
Though some may not see!
In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just,
And that braggarts must
Surely bite the dust,
Press we to the field ungrieving,
In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just.
Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
Leaving all that here can win us;
Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away.
September 5, 1914.
HIS COUNTRY
[He travels southward, and looks around;] I journeyed from my native spot
Across the south sea shine,
And found that people in hall and cot Laboured and suffered each his lot
Even as I did mine.
[and cannot discern the boundary]
Thus noting them in meads and marts It did not seem to me
That my dear country with its hearts, Minds, yearnings, worse and better parts Had ended with the sea.
[of his native country;]
I further and further went anon,
As such I still surveyed,
And further yet–yea, on and on,
And all the men I looked upon
Had heart-strings fellow-made.
[or where his duties to his fellow-creatures end;] I traced the whole terrestrial round,
Homing the other side;
Then said I, “What is there to bound My denizenship? It seems I have found
Its scope to be world-wide.”
[nor who are his enemies]
I asked me: “Whom have I to fight,
And whom have I to dare,
And whom to weaken, crush, and blight? My country seems to have kept in sight
On my way everywhere.”
1913.
ENGLAND TO GERMANY IN 1914
“O England, may God punish thee!”
– Is it that Teuton genius flowers
Only to breathe malignity
Upon its friend of earlier hours?
– We have eaten your bread, you have eaten ours, We have loved your burgs, your pines’ green moan, Fair Rhine-stream, and its storied towers; Your shining souls of deathless dowers
Have won us as they were our own:
We have nursed no dreams to shed your blood, We have matched your might not rancorously, Save a flushed few whose blatant mood
You heard and marked as well as we
To tongue not in their country’s key; But yet you cry with face aflame,
“O England, may God punish thee!”
And foul in onward history,
And present sight, your ancient name.
Autumn 1914.
ON THE BELGIAN EXPATRIATION
I dreamt that people from the Land of Chimes Arrived one autumn morning with their bells, To hoist them on the towers and citadels Of my own country, that the musical rhymes
Rung by them into space at meted times Amid the market’s daily stir and stress, And the night’s empty star-lit silentness, Might solace souls of this and kindred climes.
Then I awoke; and lo, before me stood The visioned ones, but pale and full of fear; From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend,
No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood Had shattered these to shards amid the gear Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.
October 18, 1914.
AN APPEAL TO AMERICA
ON BEHALF OF THE BELGIAN DESTITUTE
Seven millions stand
Emaciate, in that ancient Delta-land:- We here, full-charged with our own maimed and dead, And coiled in throbbing conflicts slow and sore, Can poorly soothe these ails unmerited
Of souls forlorn upon the facing shore! – Where naked, gaunt, in endless band on band Seven millions stand.
No man can say
To your great country that, with scant delay, You must, perforce, ease them in their loud need: We know that nearer first your duty lies; But–is it much to ask that you let plead Your lovingkindness with you–wooing-wise – Albeit that aught you owe, and must repay, No man can say?
December 1914.
THE PITY OF IT
I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard In field and farmstead many an ancient word Of local lineage like “Thu bist,” “Er war,”
“Ich woll,” “Er sholl,” and by-talk similar, Nigh as they speak who in this month’s moon gird At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.
Then seemed a Heart crying: “Whosoever they be At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,
“Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame; May their familiars grow to shun their name, And their brood perish everlastingly.”
April 1915.
IN TIME OF WARS AND TUMULTS
“Would that I’d not drawn breath here!” some one said, “To stalk upon this stage of evil deeds, Where purposelessly month by month proceeds A play so sorely shaped and blood-bespread.”
Yet had his spark not quickened, but lain dead To the gross spectacles of this our day, And never put on the proffered cloak of clay, He had but known not things now manifested;
Life would have swirled the same. Morns would have dawned On the uprooting by the night-gun’s stroke Of what the yester noonshine brought to flower;
Brown martial brows in dying throes have wanned Despite his absence; hearts no fewer been broke By Empery’s insatiate lust of power.
1915.
IN TIME OF “THE BREAKING OF NATIONS” {1}
I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk.
II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
1915.
CRY OF THE HOMELESS
AFTER THE PRUSSIAN INVASION OF BELGIUM
“Instigator of the ruin –
Whichsoever thou mayst be
Of the masterful of Europe
That contrived our misery –
Hear the wormwood-worded greeting
From each city, shore, and lea
Of thy victims:
“Conqueror, all hail to thee!”
“Yea: ‘All hail!’ we grimly shout thee That wast author, fount, and head
Of these wounds, whoever proven
When our times are throughly read. ‘May thy loved be slighted, blighted,
And forsaken,’ be it said
By thy victims,
‘And thy children beg their bread!’
“Nay: a richer malediction! –
Rather let this thing befall
In time’s hurling and unfurling
On the night when comes thy call; That compassion dew thy pillow
And bedrench thy senses all
For thy victims,
Till death dark thee with his pall.”
August 1915.
BEFORE MARCHING AND AFTER
(in Memoriam F. W. G.)
Orion swung southward aslant
Where the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned, The Pleiads aloft seemed to pant
With the heather that twitched in the wind; But he looked on indifferent to sights such as these, Unswayed by love, friendship, home joy or home sorrow, And wondered to what he would march on the morrow.
The crazed household-clock with its whirr Rang midnight within as he stood,
He heard the low sighing of her
Who had striven from his birth for his good; But he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze, What great thing or small thing his history would borrow From that Game with Death he would play on the morrow.
When the heath wore the robe of late summer, And the fuchsia-bells, hot in the sun, Hung red by the door, a quick comer
Brought tidings that marching was done For him who had joined in that game overseas Where Death stood to win, though his name was to borrow A brightness therefrom not to fade on the morrow.
September 1915.
“OFTEN WHEN WARRING”
Often when warring for he wist not what, An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak,
Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek, And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot;
Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgot The deed of grace amid the roar and reek; Yet larger vision than loud arms bespeak He there has reached, although he has known it not.
For natural mindsight, triumphing in the act Over the throes of artificial rage,
Has thuswise muffled victory’s peal of pride, Rended to ribands policy’s specious page That deals but with evasion, code, and pact, And war’s apology wholly stultified.
1915.
THEN AND NOW
When battles were fought
With a chivalrous sense of Should and Ought, In spirit men said,
“End we quick or dead,
Honour is some reward!
Let us fight fair–for our own best or worst; So, Gentlemen of the Guard,
Fire first!”
In the open they stood,
Man to man in his knightlihood:
They would not deign
To profit by a stain
On the honourable rules,
Knowing that practise perfidy no man durst Who in the heroic schools
Was nurst.
But now, behold, what
Is warfare wherein honour is not!
Rama laments
Its dead innocents:
Herod breathes: “Sly slaughter
Shall rule! Let us, by modes once called accurst, Overhead, under water,
Stab first.”
1915.
A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE
Up and be doing, all who have a hand
To lift, a back to bend. It must not be In times like these that vaguely linger we To air our vaunts and hopes; and leave our land
Untended as a wild of weeds and sand. – Say, then, “I come!” and go, O women and men Of palace, ploughshare, easel, counter, pen; That scareless, scathless, England still may stand.
Would years but let me stir as once I stirred At many a dawn to take the forward track, And with a stride plunged on to enterprize,
I now would speed like yester wind that whirred Through yielding pines; and serve with never a slack, So loud for promptness all around outcries!
March 1917.
THE DEAD AND THE LIVING ONE
The dead woman lay in her first night’s grave, And twilight fell from the clouds’ concave, And those she had asked to forgive forgave.
The woman passing came to a pause
By the heaped white shapes of wreath and cross, And looked upon where the other was.
And as she mused there thus spoke she: “Never your countenance did I see,
But you’ve been a good good friend to me!”
Rose a plaintive voice from the sod below: “O woman whose accents I do not know,
What is it that makes you approve me so?”
“O dead one, ere my soldier went,
I heard him saying, with warm intent, To his friend, when won by your blandishment:
“‘I would change for that lass here and now! And if I return I may break my vow
To my present Love, and contrive somehow
“‘To call my own this new-found pearl, Whose eyes have the light, whose lips the curl, I always have looked for in a girl!’
“–And this is why that by ceasing to be – Though never your countenance did I see – You prove you a good good friend to me;
“And I pray each hour for your soul’s repose In gratitude for your joining those
No lover will clasp when his campaigns close.”
Away she turned, when arose to her eye A martial phantom of gory dye,
That said, with a thin and far-off sigh:
“O sweetheart, neither shall I clasp you, For the foe this day has pierced me through, And sent me to where she is. Adieu! –
“And forget not when the night-wind’s whine Calls over this turf where her limbs recline, That it travels on to lament by mine.”
There was a cry by the white-flowered mound, There was a laugh from underground,
There was a deeper gloom around.
1915.
A NEW YEAR’S EVE IN WAR TIME
I
Phantasmal fears,
And the flap of the flame,
And the throb of the clock,
And a loosened slate,
And the blind night’s drone,
Which tiredly the spectral pines intone!
II
And the blood in my ears
Strumming always the same,
And the gable-cock
With its fitful grate,
And myself, alone.
III
The twelfth hour nears
Hand-hid, as in shame;
I undo the lock,
And listen, and wait
For the Young Unknown.
IV
In the dark there careers –
As if Death astride came
To numb all with his knock –
A horse at mad rate
Over rut and stone.
V
No figure appears,
No call of my name,
No sound but “Tic-toc”
Without check. Past the gate
It clatters–is gone.
VI
What rider it bears
There is none to proclaim;
And the Old Year has struck,
And, scarce animate,
The New makes moan.
VII
Maybe that “More Tears! –
More Famine and Flame –
More Severance and Shock!”
Is the order from Fate
That the Rider speeds on
To pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.
1915-1916.
“I MET A MAN”
I met a man when night was nigh,
Who said, with shining face and eye Like Moses’ after Sinai:-
“I have seen the Moulder of Monarchies, Realms, peoples, plains and hills,
Sitting upon the sunlit seas! –
And, as He sat, soliloquies
Fell from Him like an antiphonic breeze That pricks the waves to thrills.
“Meseemed that of the maimed and dead Mown down upon the globe, –
Their plenteous blooms of promise shed Ere fruiting-time–His words were said, Sitting against the western web of red
Wrapt in His crimson robe.
“And I could catch them now and then: –‘Why let these gambling clans
Of human Cockers, pit liege men
From mart and city, dale and glen, In death-mains, but to swell and swell again Their swollen All-Empery plans,
“‘When a mere nod (if my malign
Compeer but passive keep)
Would mend that old mistake of mine I made with Saul, and ever consign
All Lords of War whose sanctuaries enshrine Liberticide, to sleep?
“‘With violence the lands are spread Even as in Israel’s day,
And it repenteth me I bred
Chartered armipotents lust-led
To feuds . . . Yea, grieves my heart, as then I said, To see their evil way!’
–“The utterance grew, and flapped like flame, And further speech I feared;
But no Celestial tongued acclaim, And no huzzas from earthlings came,
And the heavens mutely masked as ’twere in shame Till daylight disappeared.”
Thus ended he as night rode high –
The man of shining face and eye,
Like Moses’ after Sinai.
1916.
“I LOOKED UP FROM MY WRITING”
I looked up from my writing,
And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
The moon’s full gaze on me.
Her meditative misty head
Was spectral in its air,
And I involuntarily said,
“What are you doing there?”
“Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole And waterway hereabout
For the body of one with a sunken soul Who has put his life-light out.
“Did you hear his frenzied tattle?
It was sorrow for his son
Who is slain in brutish battle,
Though he has injured none.
“And now I am curious to look
Into the blinkered mind
Of one who wants to write a book
In a world of such a kind.”
Her temper overwrought me,
And I edged to shun her view,
For I felt assured she thought me
One who should drown him too.
THE COMING OF THE END
How it came to an end!
The meeting afar from the crowd,
And the love-looks and laughters unpenned, The parting when much was avowed,
How it came to an end!
It came to an end;
Yes, the outgazing over the stream, With the sun on each serpentine bend,
Or, later, the luring moon-gleam;
It came to an end.
It came to an end,
The housebuilding, furnishing, planting, As if there were ages to spend
In welcoming, feasting, and jaunting; It came to an end.
It came to an end,
That journey of one day a week:
(“It always goes on,” said a friend, “Just the same in bright weathers or bleak;”) But it came to an end.
“HOW will come to an end
This orbit so smoothly begun,
Unless some convulsion attend?”
I often said. “What will be done
When it comes to an end?”
Well, it came to an end
Quite silently–stopped without jerk; Better close no prevision could lend;
Working out as One planned it should work Ere it came to an end.
AFTERWARDS
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, “He was a man who used to notice such things”?
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think, “To him this must have been a familiar sight.”
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, “He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone”?
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees, Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, “He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”?
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom, And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom, “He hears it not now, but used to notice such things”?
Footnotes:
{1} Jer. li. 20.