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Poems, 1908-1919

John Drinkwater
Poems, 1908-1919

RECIPROCITY

I DO not think that skies and meadows are
Moral, or that the fixture of a star
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees
Have wisdom in their windless silences.
Yet these are things invested in my mood
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,
That in my troubled season I can cry
Upon the wide composure of the sky,
And envy fields, and wish that I might be
As little daunted as a star or tree.

THE HOURS

Those hours are best when suddenly
The voices of the world are still,
And in that quiet place is heard
The voice of one small singing bird,
Alone within his quiet tree;

When to one field that crowns a hill,
With but the sky for neighbourhood,
The crowding counties of my brain
Give all their riches, lake and plain,
Cornland and fell and pillared wood;
When in a hill-top acre, bare
For the seed’s use, I am aware
Of all the beauty that an age
Of earth has taught my eyes to see;

When Pride and Generosity
The Constant Heart and Evil Rage,
Affection and Desire, and all
The passions of experience
Are no more tabled in my mind,
Learning’s idolatry, but find
Particularity of sense
In daily fortitudes that fall
From this or that companion,
Or in an angry gossip’s word;
When one man speaks for Every One,
When Music lives in one small bird,
When in a furrowed hill we see
All beauty in epitome —
Those hours are best; for those belong
To the lucidity of song.

A TOWN WINDOW

Beyond my window in the night
Is but a drab inglorious street,
Yet there the frost and clean starlight
As over Warwick woods are sweet.

Under the grey drift of the town
The crocus works among the mould
As eagerly as those that crown
The Warwick spring in flame and gold.

And when the tramway down the hill
Across the cobbles moans and rings,
There is about my window-sill
The tumult of a thousand wings.

MYSTERY

Think not that mystery has place
In the obscure and veilèd face,
Or when the midnight watches are
Uncompanied of moon or star,
Or where the fields and forests lie
Enfolded from the loving eye
By fogs rebellious to the sun,
Or when the poet’s rhymes are spun
From dreams that even in his own
Imagining are half-unknown.

These are not mystery, but mere
Conditions that deny the clear
Reality that lies behind
The weak, unspeculative mind,
Behind contagions of the air
And screens of beauty everywhere,
The brooding and tormented sky,
The hesitation of an eye.

Look rather when the landscapes glow
Through crystal distances as though
The forty shires of England spread
Into one vision harvested,
Or when the moonlit waters lie
In silver cold lucidity;
Those countenances search that bear
Witness to very character,
And listen to the song that weighs
A life’s adventure in a phrase —
These are the founts of wonder, these
The plainer miracles to please
The brain that reads the world aright;
Here is the mystery of light.

THE COMMON LOT

When youth and summer-time are gone,
And age puts quiet garlands on,
And in the speculative eye
The fires of emulation die,
But as to-day our time shall be
Trembling upon eternity,
While, still inconstant in debate,
We shall on revelation wait,
And age as youth will daily plan
The sailing of the caravan.

PASSAGE

When you deliberate the page
Of Alexander’s pilgrimage,
Or say – “It is three years, or ten,
Since Easter slew Connolly’s men,”
Or prudently to judgment come
Of Antony or Absalom,
And think how duly are designed
Case and instruction for the mind,
Remember then that also we,
In a moon’s course, are history.

THE WOOD

I walked a nut-wood’s gloom. And overhead
A pigeon’s wing beat on the hidden boughs,
And shrews upon shy tunnelling woke thin
Late winter leaves with trickling sound. Across
My narrow path I saw the carrier ants
Burdened with little pieces of bright straw.
These things I heard and saw, with senses fine
For all the little traffic of the wood,
While everywhere, above me, underfoot,
And haunting every avenue of leaves,
Was mystery, unresting, taciturn.

…

And haunting the lucidities of life
That are my daily beauty, moves a theme,
Beating along my undiscovered mind.

HISTORY

Sometimes, when walls and occupation seem
A prison merely, a dark barrier
Between me everywhere
And life, or the larger province of the mind,
As dreams confined,
As the trouble of a dream,
I seek to make again a life long gone,
To be
My mind’s approach and consolation,
To give it form’s lucidity,
Resilient form, as porcelain pieces thrown
In buried China by a wrist unknown,
Or mirrored brigs upon Fowey sea.

Then to my memory comes nothing great
Of purpose, or debate,
Or perfect end,
Pomp, nor love’s rapture, nor heroic hours to spend —
But most, and strangely, for long and so much have I seen,
Comes back an afternoon
Of a June
Sunday at Elsfield, that is up on a green
Hill, and there,
Through a little farm parlour door,
A floor
Of red tiles and blue,
And the air
Sweet with the hot June sun cascading through
The vine-leaves under the glass, and a scarlet fume
Of geranium flower, and soft and yellow bloom
Of musk, and stains of scarlet and yellow glass.

Such are the things remain
Quietly, and for ever, in the brain,
And the things that they choose for history-making pass.

THE FUGITIVE

Beauty has come to make no longer stay
Than the bright buds of May
In May-time do.

Beauty is with us for one hour, one hour,
Life is so brief a flower;
Thoughts are so few.

Thoughts are so few with mastery to give
Shape to these fugitive
Dear brevities,

That even in its hour beauty is blind,
Because the shallow mind
Not sees, not sees.

And in the mind of man only can be
Alert prosperity
For beauty brief.

So, what can be but little comes to less
Upon the wilderness
Of unbelief.

And beauty that has but an hour to spend
With you for friend,
Goes outcast by.

But know, but know – for all she is outcast —
It is not she at last,
But you that die.

CONSTANCY

The shadows that companion me
From chronicles and poetry
More constant and substantial are
Than these my men familiar,
Who draw with me uncertain breath
A little while this side of death;
For you, my friend, may fail to keep
To-morrow’s tryst, so darkly deep
The motions mutable that give
To flesh its brief prerogative,
And in the pleasant hours we make
Together for devotion’s sake,
Always the testament I see
That is our twin mortality.
But those from the recorded page
Keep an eternal pilgrimage.
They stedfastly inhabit here
With no mortality to fear,
And my communion with them
Ails not in the mind’s stratagem
Against the sudden blow, the date
That once must fall unfortunate.
They fret not nor persuade, and when
These graduates I entertain,
I grieve not that I too must fall
As you, my friend, to funeral,
But rather find example there
That, when my boughs of time are bare,
And nothing more the body’s chance
Governs my careful circumstance,
I shall, upon that later birth,
Walk in immortal fields of earth.

SOUTHAMPTON BELLS

I

Long ago some builder thrust
Heavenward in Southampton town
His spire and beamed his bells,
Largely conceiving from the dust
That pinnacle for ringing down
Orisons and Noëls.

In his imagination rang,
Through generations challenging
His peal on simple men,
Who, as the heart within him sang,
In daily townfaring should sing
By year and year again.

II

Now often to their ringing go
The bellmen with lean Time at heel,
Intent on daily cares;
The bells ring high, the bells ring low,
The ringers ring the builder’s peal
Of tidings unawares.

And all the bells’ might well be dumb
For any quickening in the street
Of customary ears;
And so at last proud builders come
With dreams and virtues to defeat
Among the clouding years.

III

Now, waiting on Southampton sea
For exile, through the silver night
I hear Noël! Noël!
Through generations down to me
Your challenge, builder, comes aright,
Bell by obedient bell.

You wake an hour with me; then wide
Though be the lapses of your sleep
You yet shall wake again;
And thus, old builder, on the tide
Of immortality you keep
Your way from brain to brain.

THE NEW MIRACLE

Of old men wrought strange gods for mystery,
Implored miraculous tokens in the skies,
And lips that most were strange in prophecy
Were most accounted wise.

The hearthstone’s commerce between mate and mate,
Barren of wonder, prospered in content,
And still the hunger of their thought was great
For sweet astonishment.

And so they built them altars of retreat
Where life’s familiar use was overthrown,
And left the shining world about their feet,
To travel worlds unknown.

…

We hunger still. But wonder has come down
From alien skies upon the midst of us;
The sparkling hedgerow and the clamorous town
Have grown miraculous.

And man from his far travelling returns
To find yet stranger wisdom than he sought,
Where in the habit of his threshold burns
Unfathomable thought.

REVERIE

Here in the unfrequented noon,
In the green hermitage of June,
While overhead a rustling wing
Minds me of birds that do not sing
Until the cooler eve rewakes
The service of melodious brakes,
And thoughts are lonely rangers, here,
In shelter of the primrose year,
I curiously meditate
Our brief and variable state.

I think how many are alive
Who better in the grave would thrive,
If some so long a sleep might give
Better instruction how to live;
I think what splendours had been said
By darlings now untimely dead
Had death been wise in choice of these,
And made exchange of obsequies.

I think what loss to government
It is that good men are content —
Well knowing that an evil will
Is folly-stricken too, and still
Itself considers only wise
For all rebukes and surgeries —
That evil men should raise their pride
To place and fortune undefied.
I think how daily we beguile
Our brains, that yet a little while
And all our congregated schemes
And our perplexity of dreams,
Shall come to whole and perfect state.
I think, however long the date
Of life may be, at last the sun
Shall pass upon campaigns undone.

I look upon the world and see
A world colonial to me,
Whereof I am the architect,
And principal and intellect,
A world whose shape and savour spring
Out of my lone imagining,
A world whose nature is subdued
For ever to my instant mood,
And only beautiful can be
Because of beauty is in me.
And then I know that every mind
Among the millions of my kind
Makes earth his own particular
And privately created star,
That earth has thus no single state,
Being every man articulate.
Till thought has no horizon then
I try to think how many men
There are to make an earth apart
In symbol of the urgent heart,
For there are forty in my street,
And seven hundred more in Greet,
And families at Luton Hoo,
And there are men in China, too.

And what immensity is this
That is but a parenthesis
Set in a little human thought,
Before the body comes to naught.
There at the bottom of the copse
I see a field of turnip tops,
I see the cropping cattle pass
There in another field, of grass.
And fields and fields, with seven towns,
A river, and a flight of downs,
Steeples for all religious men,
Ten thousand trees, and orchards ten,
A mighty span that curves away
Into blue beauty, and I lay
All this as quartered on a sphere
Hung huge in space, a thing of fear
Vast as the circle of the sky
Completed to the astonished eye;
And then I think that all I see,
Whereof I frame immensity
Globed for amazement, is no more
Than a shire’s corner, and that four
Great shires being ten times multiplied
Are small on the Atlantic tide
As an emerald on a silver bowl …
And the Atlantic to the whole
Sweep of this tributary star
That is our earth is but … and far
Through dreadful space the outmeasured mind
Seeks to conceive the unconfined.

I think of Time. How, when his wing
Composes all our quarrelling
In some green corner where May leaves
Are loud with blackbirds on all eves,
And all the dust that was our bones
Is underneath memorial stones,
Then shall old jealousies, while we
Lie side by side most quietly,
Be but oblivion’s fools, and still
When curious pilgrims ask – “What skill
Had these that from oblivion saves?” —
My song shall sing above our graves.

I think how men of gentle mind,
And friendly will, and honest kind,
Deny their nature and appear
Fellows of jealousy and fear;
Having single faith, and natural wit
To measure truth and cherish it,
Yet, strangely, when they build in thought,
Twisting the honesty that wrought
In the straight motion of the heart,
Into its feigning counterpart
That is the brain’s betrayal of
The simple purposes of love;
And what yet sorrier decline
Is theirs when, eager to confine
No more within the silent brain
Its habit, thought seeks birth again
In speech, as honesty has done
In thought; then even what had won
From heart to brain fades and is lost
In this pretended pentecost,
This their forlorn captivity
To speech, who have not learnt to be
Lords of the word, nor kept among
The sterner climates of the tongue …
So truth is in their hearts, and then
Falls to confusion in the brain,
And, fading through this mid-eclipse,
It perishes upon the lips.

I think how year by year I still
Find working in my dauntless will
Sudden timidities that are
Merely the echo of some far
Forgotten tyrannies that came
To youth’s bewilderment and shame;
That yet a magisterial gown,
Being worn by one of no renown
And half a generation less
In years than I, can dispossess
Something my circumspecter mood
Of excellence and quietude,
And if a Bishop speaks to me
I tremble with propriety.

I think how strange it is that he
Who goes most comradely with me
In beauty’s worship, takes delight
In shows that to my eager sight
Are shadows and unmanifest,
While beauty’s favour and behest
To me in motion are revealed
That is against his vision sealed;
Yet is our hearts’ necessity
Not twofold, but a common plea
That chaos come to continence,
Whereto the arch-intelligence
Richly in divers voices makes
Its answer for our several sakes.

I see the disinherited
And long procession of the dead,
Who have in generations gone
Held fugitive dominion
Of this same primrose pasturage
That is my momentary wage.
I see two lovers move along
These shadowed silences of song,
With spring in blossom at their feet
More incommunicably sweet
To their hearts’ more magnificence,
Than to the common courts of sense,
Till joy his tardy closure tells
With coming of the curfew bells.
I see the knights of spur and sword
Crossing the little woodland ford,
Riding in ghostly cavalcade
On some unchronicled crusade.
I see the silent hunter go
In cloth of yeoman green, with bow
Strung, and a quiver of grey wings.
I see the little herd who brings
His cattle homeward, while his sire
Makes bivouac in Warwickshire
This night, the liege and loyal man
Of Cavalier or Puritan.
And as they pass, the nameless dead,
Unsung, uncelebrate, and sped
Upon an unremembered hour
As any twelvemonth fallen flower,
I think how strangely yet they live
For all their days were fugitive.

I think how soon we too shall be
A story with our ancestry.

I think what miracle has been
That you whose love among this green
Delightful solitude is still
The stay and substance of my will,
The dear custodian of my song,
My thrifty counsellor and strong,
Should take the time of all time’s tide
That was my season, to abide
On earth also; that we should be
Charted across eternity
To one elect and happy day
Of yellow primroses in May.

The clock is calling five o’clock,
And Nonesopretty brings her flock
To fold, and Tom comes back from town
With hose and ribbons worth a crown,
And duly at The Old King’s Head
They gather now to daily bread,
And I no more may meditate
Our brief and variable state.

PENANCES

These are my happy penances. To make
Beauty without a covenant; to take
Measure of time only because I know
That in death’s market-place I still shall owe
Service to beauty that shall not be done;
To know that beauty’s doctrine is begun
And makes a close in sacrifice; to find
In beauty’s courts the unappeasable mind.

LAST CONFESSIONAL

For all ill words that I have spoken,
For all clear moods that I have broken,
For all despite and hasty breath,
Forgive me, Love, forgive me, Death.

Death, master of the great assize,
Love, falling now to memories,
You two alone I need to prove,
Forgive me, Death, forgive me, Love.

For every tenderness undone,
For pride when holiness was none
But only easy charity,
O Death, be pardoner to me.

For stubborn thought that would not make
Measure of love’s thought for love’s sake,
But kept a sullen difference,
Take, Love, this laggard penitence.

For cloudy words too vainly spent
To prosper but in argument,
When truth stood lonely at the gate,
On your compassion, Death, I wait.

For all the beauty that escaped
This foolish brain, unsung, unshaped,
For wonder that was slow to move,
Forgive me, Death, forgive me, Love.

For love that kept a secret cruse,
For life defeated of its dues,
This latest word of all my breath —
Forgive me, Love, forgive me, Death.

BIRTHRIGHT

Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed
Because a summer evening passed;
And little Ariadne cried
That summer fancy fell at last
To dust; and young Verona died
When beauty’s hour was overcast.

Theirs was the bitterness we know
Because the clouds of hawthorn keep
So short a state, and kisses go
To tombs unfathomably deep,
While Rameses and Romeo
And little Ariadne sleep.

ANTAGONISTS

Green shoots, we break the morning earth
And flourish in the morning’s breath;
We leave the agony of birth
And soon are all midway to death.

While yet the summer of her year
Brings life her marvels, she can see
Far off the rising dust, and hear
The footfall of her enemy.

HOLINESS

If all the carts were painted gay,
And all the streets swept clean,
And all the children came to play
By hollyhocks, with green
Grasses to grow between,

If all the houses looked as though
Some heart were in their stones,
If all the people that we know
Were dressed in scarlet gowns,
With feathers in their crowns,

I think this gaiety would make
A spiritual land.
I think that holiness would take
This laughter by the hand,
Till both should understand.

THE CITY

A shining city, one
Happy in snow and sun,
And singing in the rain
A paradisal strain…
Here is a dream to keep,
O Builders, from your sleep.

O foolish Builders, wake,
Take your trowels, take
The poet’s dream, and build
The city song has willed,
That every stone may sing
And all your roads may ring
With happy wayfaring.

TO THE DEFILERS

Go, thieves, and take your riches, creep
To corners out of honest sight;
We shall not be so poor to keep
One thought of envy or despite.

But know that in sad surety when
Your sullen will betrays this earth
To sorrows of contagion, then
Beelzebub renews his birth.

When you defile the pleasant streams
And the wild bird’s abiding-place,
You massacre a million dreams
And cast your spittle in God’s face.

A CHRISTMAS NIGHT

Christ for a dream was given from the dead
To walk one Christmas night on earth again,
Among the snow, among the Christmas bells.
He heard the hymns that are his praise: Noël,
And Christ is Born, and Babe of Bethlehem.
He saw the travelling crowds happy for home,
The gathering and the welcome, and the set
Feast and the gifts, because he once was born,
Because he once was steward of a word.
And so he thought, “The spirit has been kind;
So well the peoples might have fallen from me,
My way of life being difficult and spare.
It is beautiful that a dream in Galilee
Should prosper so. They crucified me once,
And now my name is spoken through the world,
And bells are rung for me and candles burnt.
They might have crucified my dream who used
My body ill; they might have spat on me
Always as in one hour on Golgotha.” …
And the snow fell, and the last bell was still,
And the poor Christ again was with the dead.

INVOCATION

As pools beneath stone arches take
Darkly within their deeps again
Shapes of the flowing stone, and make
Stories anew of passing men,

So let the living thoughts that keep,
Morning and evening, in their kind,
Eternal change in height and deep,
Be mirrored in my happy mind.

Beat, world, upon this heart, be loud
Your marvel chanted in my blood,
Come forth, O sun, through cloud on cloud
To shine upon my stubborn mood.

Great hills that fold above the sea,
Ecstatic airs and sparkling skies,
Sing out your words to master me,
Make me immoderately wise.

IMMORTALITY

I

When other beauty governs other lips,
And snowdrops come to strange and happy springs,
When seas renewed bear yet unbuilded ships,
And alien hearts know all familiar things,
When frosty nights bring comrades to enjoy
Sweet hours at hearths where we no longer sit,
When Liverpool is one with dusty Troy,
And London famed as Attica for wit …
How shall it be with you, and you, and you,
How with us all who have gone greatly here
In friendship, making some delight, some true
Song in the dark, some story against fear?
Shall song still walk with love, and life be brave,
And we, who were all these, be but the grave?

II

No; lovers yet shall tell the nightingale
Sometimes a song that we of old time made,
And gossips gathered at the twilight ale
Shall say, “Those two were friends,” or, “Unafraid
Of bitter thought were those because they loved
Better than most.” And sometimes shall be told
How one, who died in his young beauty, moved,
As Astrophel, those English hearts of old.
And the new seas shall take the new ships home
Telling how yet the Dymock orchards stand,
And you shall walk with Julius at Rome,
And Paul shall be my fellow in the Strand;
There in the midst of all those words shall be
Our names, our ghosts, our immortality.

THE CRAFTSMEN

Confederate hand and eye
Work to the chisel’s blade,
Setting the grain aglow
Of porch and sturdy beam —
So the strange gods may ply
Strict arms till we are made
Quick as the gods who know
What builds behind this dream.

SYMBOLS

I saw history in a poet’s song,
In a river-reach and a gallows-hill,
In a bridal bed, and a secret wrong,
In a crown of thorns: in a daffodil.

I imagined measureless time in a day,
And starry space in a waggon-road,
And the treasure of all good harvests lay
In the single seed that the sower sowed.

My garden-wind had driven and havened again
All ships that ever had gone to sea,
And I saw the glory of all dead men
In the shadow that went by the side of me.

SEALED

The doves call down the long arcades of pine,
The screaming swifts are tiring towards their eaves,
And you are very quiet, O lover of mine.

No foot is on your ploughlands now, the song
Fails and is no more heard among your leaves
That wearied not in praise the whole day long.

I have watched with you till this twilight-fall,
The proud companion of your loveliness;
Have you no word for me, no word at all?

The passion of my thought I have given you,
Striving towards your passion, nevertheless,
The clover leaves are deepening to the dew,

And I am still unsatisfied, untaught.
You lie guarded in mystery, you go
Into your night, and leave your lover naught.

Would I were Titan with immeasurable thews
To hold you trembling, lover of mine, and know
To the full the secret savour that you use

Now to my tormenting. I would drain
Your beauty to the last sharp glory of it;
You should work mightily through me, blood and brain.

Your heart in my heart’s mastery should burn,
And you before my swift and arrogant wit
Should be no longer proudly taciturn.

You should bend back astonished at my kiss,
Your wisdom should be armourer to my pride,
And you, subdued, should yet be glad of this.

The joys of great heroic lovers dead
Should seem but market-gossiping beside
The annunciation of our bridal bed.

And now, my lover earth, I am a leaf,
A wave of light, a bird’s note, a blade sprung
Towards the oblivion of the sickled sheaf;

A mere mote driven against your royal ease,
A tattered eager traveller among
The myriads beating on your sanctuaries.

I have no strength to crush you to my will,
Your beauty is invulnerably zoned,
Yet I, your undefeated lover still,

Exulting in your sap am clear of shame,
And biding with you patiently am throned
Above the flight of desolation’s aim.

You may be mute, bestow no recompense
On all the thriftless leaguers of my soul —
I am at your gates, O lover of mine, and thence

Will I not turn for any scorn you send,
Rebuked, bemused, yet is my purpose whole,
I shall be striving towards you till the end.

A PRAYER

Lord, not for light in darkness do we pray,
Not that the veil be lifted from our eyes,
Nor that the slow ascension of our day
Be otherwise.

Not for a clearer vision of the things
Whereof the fashioning shall make us great,
Not for remission of the peril and stings
Of time and fate.

Not for a fuller knowledge of the end
Whereto we travel, bruised yet unafraid,
Nor that the little healing that we lend
Shall be repaid.

Not these, O Lord. We would not break the bars
Thy wisdom sets about us; we shall climb
Unfettered to the secrets of the stars
In Thy good time.

We do not crave the high perception swift
When to refrain were well, and when fulfil,
Nor yet the understanding strong to sift
The good from ill.

Not these, O Lord. For these Thou hast revealed,
We know the golden season when to reap
The heavy-fruited treasure of the field,
The hour to sleep.

Not these. We know the hemlock from the rose,
The pure from stained, the noble from the base
The tranquil holy light of truth that glows
On Pity’s face.

We know the paths wherein our feet should press,
Across our hearts are written Thy decrees,
Yet now, O Lord, be merciful to bless
With more than these.

Grant us the will to fashion as we feel,
Grant us the strength to labour as we know,
Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel,
To strike the blow.

Knowledge we ask not – knowledge Thou hast lent,
But, Lord, the will – there lies our bitter need,
Give us to build above the deep intent
The deed, the deed.

THE BUILDING

Whence these hods, and bricks of bright red clay,
And swart men climbing ladders in the night?

Stilled are the clamorous energies of day,
The streets are dumb, and, prodigal of light,
The lamps but shine upon a city of sleep.
A step goes out into the silence; far
Across the quiet roofs the hour is tolled
From ghostly towers; the indifferent earth may keep
That ragged flotsam shielded from the cold
In earth’s good time: not, moving among men,
Shall he compel so fortunate a star.
Pavements I know, forsaken now, are strange,
Alien walks not beautiful, that then,
In the familiar day, are part of all
My breathless pilgrimage, not beautiful, but dear;
The monotony of sound has suffered change,
The eddies of wanton sound are spent, and clear
To bleak monotonies of silence fall.

And, while the city sleeps, in the central poise
Of quiet, lamps are flaming in the night,
Blown to long tongues by winds that moan between
The growing walls, and throwing misty light
On swart men bearing bricks of bright red clay
In laden hods; and ever the thin noise
Of trowels deftly fashioning the clean
Long lines that are the shaping of proud thought.
Ghost-like they move between the day and day,
These men whose labour strictly shall be wrought
Into the captive image of a dream.
Their sinews weary not, the plummet falls
To measured use from steadfast hands apace,
And momently the moist and levelled seam
Knits brick to brick and momently the walls
Bestow the wonder of form on formless space.

And whence all these? The hod and plummet-line,
The trowels tapping, and the lamps that shine
In long, dust-heavy beams from wall to wall,
The mortar and the bricks of bright red clay,
Ladder and corded scaffolding, and all
The gear of common traffic – whence are they?
And whence the men who use them?
When he came,
God upon chaos, crying in the name
Of all adventurous vision that the void
Should yield up man, and man, created, rose
Out of the deep, the marvel of all things made,
Then in immortal wonder was destroyed
All worth of trivial knowledge, and the close
Of man’s most urgent meditation stayed
Even as his first thought – “Whence am I sprung?”
What proud ecstatic mystery was pent
In that first act for man’s astonishment,
From age to unconfessing age, among
His manifold travel. And in all I see
Of common daily usage is renewed
This primal and ecstatic mystery
Of chaos bidden into many-hued
Wonders of form, life in the void create,
And monstrous silence made articulate.

Not the first word of God upon the deep
Nor the first pulse of life along the day
More marvellous than these new walls that sweep
Starward, these lines that discipline the clay,
These lamps swung in the wind that send their light
On swart men climbing ladders in the night.
No trowel-tap but sings anew for men
The rapture of quickening water and continent,
No mortared line but witnesses again
Chaos transfigured into lineament.

THE SOLDIER

The large report of fame I lack,
And shining clasps and crimson scars,
For I have held my bivouac
Alone amid the untroubled stars.

My battle-field has known no dawn
Beclouded by a thousand spears;
I’ve been no mounting tyrant’s pawn
To buy his glory with my tears.

It never seemed a noble thing
Some little leagues of land to gain
From broken men, nor yet to fling
Abroad the thunderbolts of pain.

Yet I have felt the quickening breath
As peril heavy peril kissed —
My weapon was a little faith,
And fear was my antagonist.

Not a brief hour of cannonade,
But many days of bitter strife,
Till God of His great pity laid
Across my brow the leaves of life.

THE FIRES OF GOD

I

Time gathers to my name;
Along the ways wheredown my feet have passed
I see the years with little triumph crowned,
Exulting not for perils dared, downcast
And weary-eyed and desolate for shame
Of having been unstirred of all the sound
Of the deep music of the men that move
Through the world’s days in suffering and love.

Poor barren years that brooded over-much
On your own burden, pale and stricken years —
Go down to your oblivion, we part
With no reproach or ceremonial tears.
Henceforth my hands are lifted to the touch
Of hands that labour with me, and my heart
Hereafter to the world’s heart shall be set
And its own pain forget.
Time gathers to my name —
Days dead are dark; the days to be, a flame
Of wonder and of promise, and great cries
Of travelling people reach me – I must rise.

II

Was I not man? Could I not rise alone
Above the shifting of the things that be,
Rise to the crest of all the stars and see
The ways of all the world as from a throne?
Was I not man, with proud imperial will
To cancel all the secrets of high heaven?
Should not my sole unbridled purpose fill
All hidden paths with light when once was riven
God’s veil by my indomitable will?

So dreamt I, little man of little vision,
Great only in unconsecrated pride;
Man’s pity grew from pity to derision,
And still I thought, “Albeit they deride,
Yet is it mine uncharted ways to dare
Unknown to these,
And they shall stumble darkly, unaware
Of solemn mysteries
Whereof the key is mine alone to bear.”

So I forgot my God, and I forgot
The holy sweet communion of men,
And moved in desolate places, where are not
Meek hands held out with patient healing when
The hours are heavy with uncharitable pain;
No company but vain
And arrogant thoughts were with me at my side.
And ever to myself I lied.
Saying “Apart from all men thus I go
To know the things that they may never know.”

III

Then a great change befell;
Long time I stood
In witless hardihood
With eyes on one sole changeless vision set —
The deep disturbèd fret
Of men who made brief tarrying in hell
On their earth travelling.
It was as though the lives of men should be
See circle-wise, whereof one little span
Through which all passed was blackened with the wing
Of perilous evil, bateless misery.
But all beyond, making the whole complete
O’er which the travelling feet
Of every man
Made way or ever he might come to death,
Was odorous with the breath
Of honey-laden flowers, and alive
With sacrificial ministrations sweet
Of man to man, and swift and holy loves,
And large heroic hopes, whereby should thrive
Man’s spirit as he moves
From dawn of life to the great dawn of death.

It was as though mine eyes were set alone
Upon that woeful passage of despair,
Until I held that life had never known
Dominion but in this most troubled place
Where many a ruined grace
And many a friendless care
Ran to and fro in sorrowful unrest.
Still in my hand I pressed
Hope’s fragile chalice, whence I drew deep draughts
That heartened me that even yet should grow
Out of this dread confusion, as of broken crafts
Driven along ungovernable seas,
Prosperous order, and that I should know
After long vigil all the mysteries
Of human wonder and of human fate.

O fool, O only great
In pride unhallowed, O most blind of heart!
Confusion but more dark confusion bred,
Grief nurtured grief, I cried aloud and said,
“Through trackless ways the soul of man is hurled,
No sign upon the forehead of the skies,
No beacon, and no chart
Are given to him, and the inscrutable world
But mocks his scars and fills his mouth with dust.”

And lies bore lies
And lust bore lust,
And the world was heavy with flowerless rods,
And pride outran
The strength of a man
Who had set himself in the place of gods.

IV

Soon was I then to gather bitter shame
Of spirit; I had been most wildly proud —
Yet in my pride had been
Some little courage, formless as a cloud,
Unpiloted save by a vagrant wind,
But still an earnest of the bonds that tame
The legionary hates, of sacred loves that lean
From the high soul of man towards his kind.
And all my grief
Had been for those I watched go to and fro
In uncompassioned woe
Along that little span my unbelief
Had fashioned in my vision as all life.
Now even this so little virtue waned,
For I became caught up into the strife
That I had pitied, and my soul was stained
At last by that most venomous despair,
Self-pity.
I no longer was aware
Of any will to heal the world’s unrest,
I suffered as it suffered, and I grew
Troubled in all my daily trafficking,
Not with the large heroic trouble known
By proud adventurous men who would atone
With their own passionate pity for the sting
And anguish of a world of peril and snares,
It was the trouble of a soul in thrall
To mean despairs,
Driven about a waste where neither fall
Of words from lips of love, nor consolation
Of grave eyes comforting, nor ministration
Of hand or heart could pierce the deadly wall
Of self – of self, – I was a living shame —
A broken purpose. I had stood apart
With pride rebellious and defiant heart,
And now my pride had perished in the flame.
I cried for succour as a little child
Might supplicate whose days are undefiled, —
For tutored pride and innocence are one.

To the gloom has won
A gleam of the sun
And into the barren desolate ways
A scent is blown
As of meadows mown
By cooling rivers in clover days.

V

I turned me from that place in humble wise,
And fingers soft were laid upon mine eyes,
And I beheld the fruitful earth, with store
Of odorous treasure, full and golden grain,
Ripe orchard bounty, slender stalks that bore
Their flowered beauty with a meek content,
The prosperous leaves that loved the sun and rain,
Shy creatures unreproved that came and went
In garrulous joy among the fostering green.
And, over all, the changes of the day
And ordered year their mutable glory laid —
Expectant winter soberly arrayed,
The prudent diligent spring whose eyes have seen
The beauty of the roses uncreate,
Imperial June, magnificent, elate
Beholding all the ripening loves that stray
Among her blossoms, and the golden time
Of the full ear and bounty of the boughs, —
And the great hills and solemn chanting seas
And prodigal meadows, answering to the chime
Of God’s good year, and bearing on their brows
The glory of processional mysteries
From dawn to dawn, the woven leaves and light
Of the high noon, the twilight secrecies,
And the inscrutable wonder of the stars
Flung out along the reaches of the night.

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