Part 1

AS THE WIND BLOWS

AS THE WIND BLOWS

BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS

AUTHOR OF “THE GIRL AND THE FAUN,” “DANCE OF THE MONTHS,” “EVANDER,” ETC.

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. LONDON: ELKIN MATHEWS MCMXX

THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH

CONTENTS

PAGE

ON EYLESBARROW 7

NOCTURNE 8

THE HUNTING 9

THE STRIKING HOURS 10

NIGHT 11

SWINBURNE 12

JUNE 13

BELLS OF VARENNA 14

IN THE VALLEY 16

GAFFER’S SONG 18

SCANDAL 19

WELCOME 20

THE NEOLITH 21

IN A WOOD 24

GHOSTIES AT THE WEDDING 26

DAWN WIND 27

DART 28

BY RUNDLESTONE 30

A SONG TO SILVER EYES 31

ENOUGH 32

SONG OF THE LARCHES 32

A SONG 33

BUONARROTI’S “DAWN” 34

A DARTMOOR STREAM 35

THE FALL 37

LAPWINGS 38

TO AN OPAL 39

JACK O’ LANTERN 40

THE OLD ROAD 41

THE DOUBTFUL ONES 42

LITANY TO PAN 44

A SONG 45

CHERRYBROOK 46

THE HUNTER’S MOON 47

VOICES 48

WIND OF THE WEST 50

THE LOVER AND THE WIND 51

A SONG 52

THE GRAVE OF KEATS 53

TIGER 55

THE PUDDLE 61

VISION 62

IN GALLIPOLI 63

THEN AND NOW 65

VIGIL 66

DARTMOOR NIGHT 68

THE FRUIT OF THE TREE 70

WHERE MY TREASURE IS 80

ON EYLESBARROW

Hither, at set of autumn sun, Each golden child of Hesper flies From gardens of old deities, Where Zeus the maiden Hera won.

Their footsteps kindled stone by stone The time-worn barrow, where it stands, Above wide, valley border-lands, Austere and imminent and alone.

Their fingers smoothed each granite frown And blossomed where no flow’r may live, And gave, what never flow’r can give, Of living flame-light for a crown.

And from their flickering kirtles fell A gleam upon its stubborn ways, To touch their nakedness with rays Of amaranth and asphodel.

O Hesperids, remember him Whose sun is westering to the change, Along uneven paths and strange, By shadowed aisles and frontiers dim.

Flash but one token, pure and rare, From the abundance of your grace, For many a storm hath stripped the face Of this, his life, and left it bare.

Dance but one measure in a heart Sad and unprofitably proud, Ere to your chariots of cloud Ye leap again and so depart.

NOCTURNE

Twilight and falling dew; a little bell And answering bell, from campanile far, Chime and are silent; one triumphant star Conquers the after-glow, that like a shell, Nacreous and rose, vibrating as it dies, Faints on the lifted forehead of the snow, Falls from the deepening purple of the skies And falling fades upon the hill below. Unnumbered olive-trees, like hooded wights, Stand solemn in their companies and grey; Mule-mounted men go clattering down the way To yonder galaxy of earth-born lights. The crepuscule from sea and radiant land Hath drunk the colour; night lifts up her hand For peace before the coming of the moon-- All darkling heaven will be silver soon.

THE HUNTING

When red sun fox steals down the sky, And darkness dims the heavens high, There leap again upon his tracks The eager, starry, hunting packs. They glitter, glitter, gold and green, With sparks of frosty fire between, And Dian bright as day; While in the gloaming, far below, Brown owl doth shout “Hi! Tally Ho Sun fox hath gone away!”

To music of the spheres they sweep Over the western world asleep; Then in the east, with sudden rush, Sun fox shall whisk his white-tipped brush. The field is fading, gold and green, With sparks of frosty fire between, And Dian growing grey; While morning leaps the hither hill And herald lark shouts with a will, “Sun fox hath gone away!”

Oh, Huntress fond and silly stars-- White Venus, fiery, futile Mars, In vain your pack ye whirl and cast Upon the marches of the vast; In vain ye glitter, gold and green, With sparks of frosty fire between, And Dian’s arrows fly In shattered shafts of ebbing light; For ne’er shall day be caught by night, And sun fox cannot die.

THE STRIKING HOURS

My brother, can the heart of ocean say When winds may woo her bosom; when the ships, Or sudden galleon of an azure day, Shall fling her foam to rainbows? Can eclipse Hide up their silver when the full moons will? Are the cloud-cisterns of the latter rain At beck of every, summer-starven rill? Life cannot call the time; nor man may feign That he shall haply choose when he would have: To will the striking hours he is not free, That chime between his cradle and his grave, Or speed, or slow the hands of destiny. A bunch of stars upon the vine of heaven Grows ripe and falls and passes when complete; The galaxy of grapes to your mouth given, Bursting their bloomy chalices, are sweet One little moment; for they will not stay Your pleasure and their consummation hold While you misdoubt and linger and delay Before their cups of purple and of gold. When to a feast the gods would make you free At their own time, or never, shall it be.

NIGHT

Another day has ended and again The fading emeralds of the quiet west Grow dusky o’er the hill-top and the plain, Dying along each drowsy vale and crest, Where Earth lifts up her bosom to the breast Of Night oncoming. Now once more she brings To the least folded flow’r her primal rest, Opens the mantle of her darkenings And sprinkles the white dew from both her starry wings.

The moth and beetle, owl and flittermouse-- All creatures that do call the moon their sun-- Steal silent forth, each from his little house. They mount and fly, and others creep and run, Where fox and hare and brock have all begun The task of living. Now alert, awake, They seek their joy and substance; every one Pads out into the dingle, heath and brake; While hungry fishes stir the silver of the lake.

For servants of the day another boon Brings Night, and as the working hours decrease, Lifts up her evening star and sickle moon To disenthral, unfetter and release; Bidding the long-drawn tale of labour cease. She comes with twilight healing for each smart Of soul and body, lays her unguent peace With fingers cool on every aching part; Anoints the tired flesh, soothes the day-foundered heart.

She asks no worship from our drooping eyes; She needs no prayer to minister our plight; Hers not our little deeds and destinies, But still to smooth the pillow, lower the light; Play nurse for every world-aweary wight; Comfort and succour; at a touch redeem; And pour her ancient anodyne of might: Omnipotent sleep, inviolate, supreme, Insensible as death, without one sigh or dream.

SWINBURNE

Children and lovers and the cloud-robed sea Shall mourn him first; and then the motherland, Weeping in silence by his empty hand And fallen sword, that flashed for Liberty. Song-bringer of a glad new minstrelsy, He came and found joy sleeping and swift fanned Old pagan fires, then snatched an altar brand And wrote, “The fearless only shall be free!”

Oh, by the flame that made thine heart a home, By the wild surges of thy silver song, Seer before the sunrise, may there come Spirits of dawn to light this aching wrong Called Earth! Thou saw’st them in the foregrow roam; But we still wait and watch, still thirst and long.

JUNE

June, who goes garlanded, who, never sleeping, Laughs from behind the eastern hills at night, And flashes to the hidden skylark keeping His morning watch and thrilling from the height Ere yet the stars are dim.

June, who unseals all fountains at their sources, And pours life like a river overflowing In proud and passionate desire, who courses To throne our feeling higher than our knowing And heap it to the brim.

June, when the new-born find their feet and wings, Scent the sweet grass and air and taste their being, And in their wanderings and wonderings, Their motion and their hearing and their seeing Conquer the earth and sky.

June, with her feast of flow’rs and lyric rapture, Whose fair days fly the fleetest of the year, So pure and fresh that only youth may capture Their rainbow shapes without a thought of fear, Without a single sigh.

BELLS OF VARENNA

Drowsy and sweet along the Larian Lake Your melody is stealing; Your fitful pealing Floats on the pinion of a summer night. Aloft the murmuring upland echoes wake And wing upon the mountains, Whence flying fountains Thin their wild whiteness out o’er many a height, Bells of Varenna, Bells of Varenna-- Ancient bells, Solemn bells, Bells, Bells.

A tall grey campanile and a spire Of russet red upspringing, Meet for your ringing, O most melodious, mediæval chime, Arise and point with fane of moonlight fire To forests and snow ridges And far-flung bridges And ruined castles of the olden time, Bells of Varenna, Bells of Varenna-- Dulcet bells, Dreaming bells, Bells, Bells.

Along a floor of crystal, where the moon, From her blue mansion bending, Awaits the sending Of your deep benison and soft “Good-night,” Canorous cadence comes. Too soon, too soon, Faint off the last far throbbing And silver sobbing By Como’s patined pathway, still and bright, Bells of Varenna, Bells of Varenna-- Sleeping bells, Weary bells, Bells, Bells.

IN THE VALLEY

Heather and potentilla fold The rocks with purple and with gold; The burn beneath sings clear and cold.

Here man and woman kept a tryst; Here often met; here first they kissed Under the white and secret mist.

And here, within this holy place, He came and thundered her disgrace, And looked his last upon her face.

And while he cursed her ruined name, Her young soul fainted, sick with shame, Before the death knell of her fame.

Had heath and potentil but known His wrath and her despairing moan, Their twinkling flowers had surely flown.

And had the burn but felt that cry, Or understood their agony, She must have wept her silver dry.

The grey hills heard the lover take An oath, that made their echoes ache, To hate all women for her sake.

The sunshine saw the woman cast Herself to earth when he had past, Her little pitcher broke at last.

But heath and potentil are gay; The waters sing upon their way, Though all this happened yesterday.

For June must joy, though joy departs, And life must laugh, though sorrow smarts, And buds must break as well as hearts.

GAFFER’S SONG

The boys don’t hoe like they used to do, And the maids don’t sew like they used to do; The hen don’t lay And the hound don’t bay, And the wind don’t blow like it used to do.

The men don’t drink like they used to do, And the girls don’t wink like they used to do; The bud don’t swell And the flow’rs don’t smell; And the folk don’t think like they used to do.

The milk don’t cream like it used to do, And the ewes don’t teem like they used to do; The corn don’t kern And the sun don’t burn; And my head won’t scheme like it used to do.

Bad men ban’t hung like they used to be, Good songs ban’t sung like they used to be; The jolly and wise Have all flown to the skies; And I ban’t so young as I used to be.

SCANDAL

The owl alighted in a yew Beside the portals of my house; The hour was nearly half-past two And, as he ate his juicy mouse, A cuckoo clock made cheerful chime Within and shouted out the time.

“O gracious God!” the owl began, And rolled his round eyes at the moon, “What a black piece of work is man-- Well might we miss cuckoo in June, How mad, misguided, inhumane To keep a cuckoo on a chain!

“But all the feathered folk must know; This infamy I’ll bring to light And tell the horror high and low And scream the crime by day and night. No bird shall sing to him again Who keeps a cuckoo on a chain.”

Good neighbour, of your charity Consider that mistaken fowl; Beware you tell not truth awry And, hooting with your brother owl, Into the public ear complain I keep a cuckoo on a chain.

WELCOME

The hard azure on high That bends over the Spring Falls a tinkling, a thrill-- Sudden, silvery, shrill; For the lark’s in the sky And his lyre-shapen wing Lifts the song in a spiral at will.

In the East is the wind; At the fringe of the wood Shiver catkins of gold Or the fleece and the fold. Sure the eaning ewes find That the sunlight is good, Though chill Eurus, his scythe’s on the wold.

Dawns a sweet lemon light Through the red-bosomed earth; Leaps and sparkles a train Along dingle and lane; For the primrosen bright, They are come to their birth And the daffodil’s dancing again.

THE NEOLITH

Sole standing in utter loneliness--superbly alone-- A monolith ruggedly lifts, with the roseal ling at his feet. Only the murmur of bees and the twinkle and throb of the heat On the league-long height, and the shade from his granite thrown.

Roll upon roll of the Moor flung out on a sky-line free; Clouds at the zenith blue; in the flower-clad earth beneath The dust of a neolith: one who has swept this heath As the chieftain of vanished hordes and their fate and their destiny.

When he died, that no mocking phantom, or jealous shade Of him mighty, should darken their lodge in the distant glen, They brought their lord hither, on shoulders of mourning men, And tore at their hair and howled long and fierce music made.

Then they sought for a stone of girth that should evermore mark his place And be seen for remembrance, afar on the frowning hill, Of that leader of men, whose right arm and resistless will Had lifted his clan to power and to splendour and pride of face.

He was cooped with his knees to his chin in a granite kist, And a granite flake over his head that should last till doom. So near doth he seem that one feels him not dead in his tomb, But crouching, alive and alert, with a warrior’s axe in his fist.

Does he hear the old gods of the thunder? Can summer sun Reach down to his pit? May his dog’s ears discern the rain Hissing over the heather, or tell if the purple stain From a cloud-shadow dims his grey stone? When the ponies run,

Can he mark the dull drumming above of their unshod feet? Does he chill when the snowdrift is clogged on the frozen ground? Does he thrill to the shout of the stream, or the bay of the hound, Or heed the sad curlew’s cry and the brown snipe bleating his bleat?

Nay, for nothing lies under the grass but the broken stones Or mayhap a primeval crock, or a fleck of red rust, For the hero is earth of the earth, and its dust is his dust, And his flesh is the flesh of the peat, and its bones are his very bones.

That master of men is ascended, for joy and for bane, And life after life hath he lived and relinquished since then-- In the heather and herbage and birds, in the beetles and foxes and men, Each in their turn sprung of earth; each in their turn earth again.

Yesterday clad with great thews, that builded a chieftain of might; To-day where the milkwort and fern and the starry tormentil Spread joy by the auburn beck and loveliness on the hill; To-morrow a moorman’s fire at the fall of a winter’s night.

And the aura, so azure clear, that is running above the red, Was the glow of a savage heart imprisoned within the brand; And the warmth on your hand was the sun on a stone-man’s hand In the far off urgent days that were lived by the ancient dead.

So mutable myriads wake to the ring of their morning chime; So mutable myriads pass at the set of their final sun; And only Matter remains--the august, the unchanging one-- But no shape and no shadow of aught that she moulds on the wheel of Time.

And ye who would bring man his soul from a mystical matrix apart; And ye who would lift up man’s life to a land beyond Matter’s ken, Must proclaim how her rape overtook her, and wherefore, and when, Ere we bend to your idols, or take these your fairyland stories to heart.

IN A WOOD

There runs a pathway through the wood Where lace the boughs and all is good. The beech-boles don a robe of white And gleam like ghosts at dayspring light, When first the pure, canorous note Throbs from a waking blackbird’s throat; And down the long aisle dim Another answers him.

Often they met, the girl and boy At this still hour; it was her joy To share a kiss at peep of day Before he took his working way. Then light of heart the youngster went, Leaving the little maid content To seek her home near by The forest boundary.

But when at evening back he came Where the beech-boles were all aflame With ruddy fire along the glade, She leapt from out some stealthy shade. And dawdling once when sunset shone, He cut their letters, one in one, Upon an ancient stem, And drew a heart around them.

Then rose the red, accursed star, And honour swept her boy afar; While she, sore hindered and forlorn, Still heard the blackbird sing at morn, Still felt her heart with each sun sink, Knowing he stood upon the brink, Prayed on in hope and trust-- Until the boy was dust.

Life brought its anodyne of years, To dull young griefs and dry young tears, And Time, who knows not to stand still, Sent a new lover up the hill. A wife and mother now she goes And plays with her first baby’s toes-- The name in memory Spoken without a sigh.

And grey upon the beech’s rind, Foregone, forgotten, out of mind, Two woven letters may be told When dawns are white and eves are gold; Where his aubade the blackbird makes, Or sleepy, sweet good-even takes; And down the long aisle dim Another answers him.

GHOSTIES AT THE WEDDING

Turn down a glass afore his place; Draw up the dog-eared chair; For though we shall not see his face, I think he will be there Our wedding day to share.

Turn up the glass where she would be And put a red rose there. Her quick, grey eyes we cannot see, But weren’t they everywhere, And shall not they be here?

Though them old blids are in the grave And their good light’s gone out, We’d sooner their kind ghosties have Than all the living rout As will be there no doubt.

For some are dead as cannot die, Some flown as cannot flee. You still do fancy ’em near by. ’Tis so with him and she, At any rate to we.

DAWN WIND

Wind of the Dawn am I, and only She Who knows the music of my every song Can hear the whisper lingering along Melodiously.

Melodiously along the moonlit corn, With silver fingering all my peaceful way, I nightly wander towards another day Soon to be born.

Lo! from the East he comes; and I rejoice And throbbing on into the ruddy light Leap like a giant from the dying night With organ voice.

Along the rosy, misty, magic lands That gleam above each dewy-scented lea The children of the morning welcome me And clap their hands.

DART

Elfin river, stealing from far-off granite cradle, Musical the place names upon thy tidal water; Tuckenhay and Greenway, Stoke Gabriel and Dittisham, Sharpham and Duncannon, beside thy margin’s mirror-- Sweet bells all a-chiming for native ear that knows them. Rainbows in November, above the hillside footed, Burn along the brake fern to set the auburn flaming In transparent wonders of emerald and purple; Till descends the hailstorm, with lash and scourge ice-knotted, Hurtling through the coppice; from larch and cherry robbing Amber dust and crimson. Chattering then and hissing, And fretting first thy bosom into a sudden torment, He draws his tatters round him and huddles off to seaward. So the sun returning, by hover and by ripple, Charms thy fleeting turmoil and wins thee back to laughter. At the river ferry a little bell is calling; And where the red earth arches, low on the blue above it, Man and horses ploughing, herald a cloud behind them Of the great, white sea-fowl that feed along the furrow. Cobweb grey thine orchards, still the last apples ling’ring, Topaz and ruby tangled upon the frosted lichen; While broad, oaken hangers, a rapture for the sunset, Meet the steadfast beech scrub, like red-hot fire aglowing, Till their conflagrations, that blaze along the tide way, Melt in flame and mingle their wonder with thy crystal. Massy, rounded elm-trees roll out along the river, And above, in billows far mightier and vaster, Sail the light-laden clouds, that lift another forest Bossed and round as they are and carry up their image, Crested, crowned and golden, into the hyaline azure. Pale that lifted glory and faint those sun-touched summits Seen against the ardour of thine own earth-born elm-trees. Down beside the reed-rond, pulse of the sea, a-weary, Doth bring a wreath of flow’rs to mark the place of parting. High above them glitters the wide weir’s silver apron And the bright salmon leap, springing from salt to sweetness. Farewell, worthy worship in all thy times and seasons; By thy magic subtle of many a deep and rapid; By thy sunny reaches and mystery of shadow; Thy gentle hillsides green and dear delight of forests; By the surprise of coombs, the hanging woods and dingles; The happy days and sad; the murmur of thy voices; Thy changing, winsome moods and little lovelinesses, Thou art all Devon, and so incomparably England.

BY RUNDLESTONE

Her cottage solitary stood Beside the granite Rundlestone-- Lonely enough, but not so lone That fortune missed it, ill and good.