Chapter 3
Our kisses are but love in flower, Until that greater time When, gathering strength, those flowers take wing, And Love can reach his prime. And now, my heart's delight, Good night, good night; Give me the last sweet kiss-- But do not breathe at home one word of this!
WASTED HOURS
How many buds in this warm light Have burst out laughing into leaves! And shall a day like this be gone Before I seek the wood that holds The richest music known?
Too many times have nightingales Wasted their passion on my sleep, And brought repentance soon: But this one night I'll seek the woods, The nightingale, and moon.
THE TRUTH
Since I have seen a bird one day, His head pecked more than half away; That hopped about, with but one eye, Ready to fight again, and die-- Ofttimes since then their private lives Have spoilt that joy their music gives.
So when I see this robin now, Like a red apple on the bough, And question why he sings so strong, For love, or for the love of song; Or sings, maybe, for that sweet rill Whose silver tongue is never still--
Ah, now there comes this thought unkind, Born of the knowledge in my mind: He sings in triumph that last night He killed his father in a fight; And now he'll take his mother's blood-- The last strong rival for his food.
* * * * *
WALTER DE LA MARE
THE MOTH
Isled in the midnight air, Musked with the dark's faint bloom, Out into glooming and secret haunts The flame cries, 'Come!'
Lovely in dye and fan, A-tremble in shimmering grace, A moth from her winter swoon Uplifts her face:
Stares from her glamorous eyes; Wafts her on plumes like mist; In ecstasy swirls and sways To her strange tryst.
'SOTTO VOCE'
(To EDWARD THOMAS)
The haze of noon wanned silver-grey, The soundless mansion of the sun; The air made visible in his ray, Like molten glass from furnace run, Quivered o'er heat-baked turf and stone And the flower of the gorse burned on-- Burned softly as gold of a child's fair hair Along each spiky spray, and shed Almond-like incense in the air Whereon our senses fed.
At foot--a few sparse harebells: blue And still as were the friend's dark eyes That dwelt on mine, transfixed through With sudden ecstatic surmise.
'Hst!' he cried softly, smiling, and lo, Stealing amidst that maze gold-green, I heard a whispering music flow From guileful throat of bird, unseen:-- So delicate, the straining ear Scarce carried its faint syllabling Into a heart caught-up to hear That inmost pondering Of bird-like self with self. We stood, In happy trance-like solitude, Hearkening a lullay grieved and sweet-- As when on isle uncharted beat 'Gainst coral at the palm-tree's root, With brine-clear, snow-white foam afloat, The wailing, not of water or wind-- A husht, far, wild, divine lament, When Prospero his wizardry bent Winged Ariel to bind....
Then silence, and o'er-flooding noon. I raised my head; smiled too. And he-- Moved his great hand, the magic gone-- Gently amused to see My ignorant wonderment. He sighed. 'It was a nightingale,' he said, 'That _sotto voce_ cons the song He'll sing when dark is spread; And Night's vague hours are sweet and long, And we are laid abed.'
SEPHINA
Black lacqueys at the wide-flung door Stand mute as men of wood. Gleams like a pool the ballroom floor-- A burnished solitude. A hundred waxen tapers shine From silver sconces; softly pine 'Cello, fiddle, mandoline, To music deftly wooed-- And dancers in cambric, satin, silk, With glancing hair and cheeks like milk, Wreathe, curtsey, intertwine.
The drowse of roses lulls the air Wafted up the marble stair. Like warbling water clucks the talk. From room to room in splendour walk Guests, smiling in the aery sheen; Carmine and azure, white and green, They stoop and languish, pace and preen Bare shoulder, painted fan, Gemmed wrist and finger, neck of swan; And still the pluckt strings warble on; Still from the snow-bowered, link-lit street The muffled hooves of horses beat; And harness rings; and foam-fleckt bit Clanks as the slim heads toss and stare From deep, dark eyes. Smiling, at ease, Mount to the porch the pomped grandees In lonely state, by twos, and threes, Exchanging languid courtesies, While torches fume and flare.
And now the banquet calls. A blare Of squalling trumpets clots the air. And, flocking out, streams up the rout; And lilies nod to velvet's swish; And peacocks prim on gilded dish, Vast pies thick-glazed, and gaping fish, Towering confections crisp as ice, Jellies aglare like cockatrice, With thousand savours tongues entice. Fruits of all hues barbaric gloom-- Pomegranate, quince and peach and plum, Mandarine, grape, and cherry clear Englobe each glassy chandelier, Where nectarous flowers their sweets distil-- Jessamine, tuberose, chamomill, Wild-eye narcissus, anemone, Tendril of ivy and vinery.
Now odorous wines the goblets fill; Gold-cradled meats the menials bear From gilded chair to gilded chair: Now roars the talk like crashing seas, Foams upward to the painted frieze, Echoes and ebbs. Still surges in, To yelp of hautboy and violin, Plumed and bedazzling, rosed and rare, Dance-bemused, with cheek aglow, Stooping the green-twined portal through, Sighing with laughter, debonair, That concourse of the proud and fair-- And lo! 'La, la! Mamma ... Mamma!' Falls a small cry in the dark and calls-- 'I see you standing there!'
Fie, fie, Sephina! not in bed! Crouched on the staircase overhead, Like ghost she gloats, her lean hand laid On alabaster balustrade, And gazes on and on Down on that wondrous to and fro Till finger and foot are cold as snow, And half the night is gone; And dazzled eyes are sore bestead; Nods drowsily the sleek-locked head; And, vague and far, spins, fading out, That rainbow-coloured, reeling rout, And, with faint sighs, her spirit flies Into deep sleep....
Come, Stranger, peep! Was ever cheek so wan?
THE TITMOUSE
If you would happy company win, Dangle a palm-nut from a tree, Idly in green to sway and spin, Its snow-pulped kernel for bait; and see, A nimble titmouse enter in.
Out of earth's vast unknown of air, Out of all summer, from wave to wave, He'll perch, and prank his feathers fair, Jangle a glass-clear wildering stave, And take his commons there--
This tiny son of life; this spright, By momentary Human sought, Plume will his wing in the dappling light, Clash timbrel shrill and gay-- And into time's enormous nought, Sweet-fed, will flit away.
SUPPOSE
Suppose ... and suppose that a wild little Horse of Magic Came cantering out of the sky, With bridle of silver, and into the saddle I mounted, To fly--and to fly;
And we stretched up into the air, fleeting on in the sunshine, A speck in the gleam, On galloping hoofs, his mane in the wind out-flowing, In a shadowy stream;
And oh, when, all lone, the gentle star of evening Came crinkling into the blue, A magical castle we saw in the air, like a cloud of moonlight, As onward we flew;
And across the green moat on the drawbridge we foamed and we snorted, And there was a beautiful Queen Who smiled at me strangely; and spoke to my wild little Horse, too-- A lovely and beautiful Queen;
And she cried with delight--and delight--to her delicate maidens, 'Behold my daughter--my dear!' And they crowned me with flowers, and then to their harps sate playing, Solemn and clear;
And magical cakes and goblets were spread on the table; And at window the birds came in; Hopping along with bright eyes, pecking crumbs from the platters, And sipped of the wine;
And splashing up--up to the roof tossed fountains of crystal; And Princes in scarlet and green Shot with their bows and arrows, and kneeled with their dishes Of fruits for the Queen;
And we walked in a magical garden with rivers and bowers, And my bed was of ivory and gold; And the Queen breathed soft in my ear a song of enchantment-- And I never grew old....
And I never, never came back to the earth, oh, never and never; How mother would cry and cry! There'd be snow on the fields then, and all these sweet flowers in the winter Would wither, and die....
Suppose ... and suppose ...
THE CORNER STONE
Sterile these stones By time in ruin laid. Yet many a creeping thing Its haven has made In these least crannies, where falls Dark's dew, and noonday shade.
The claw of the tender bird Finds lodgment here; Dye-winged butterflies poise; Emmet and beetle steer Their busy course; the bee Drones, laden, near.
Their myriad-mirrored eyes Great day reflect. By their exquisite farings Is this granite specked; Is trodden to infinite dust; By gnawing lichens decked.
Toward what eventual dream Sleeps its cold on, When into ultimate dark These lives shall be gone, And even of man not a shadow remain Of all he has done?
* * * * *
JOHN DRINKWATER
Then I asked: 'Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?'
He replied: 'All Poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.'
Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell'.
PERSUASION
I
At any moment love unheralded Comes, and is king. Then as, with a fall Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread Are withered in untimely burial, So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by, And as a beggar walks unfriended ways, With but remembered beauty to defy The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days. Or in that later travelling he comes Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells Himself, again, again, forgotten tombs Are all now that love was, and blindly spells His royal state of old a glory cursed, Saying 'I have forgot', and that's the worst.
II.
If we should part upon that one embrace, And set our courses ever, each from each, With all our treasure but a fading face And little ghostly syllables of speech; Should beauty's moment never be renewed, And moons on moons look out for us in vain, And each but whisper from a solitude To hear but echoes of a lonely pain,-- Still in a world that fortune cannot change Should walk those two that once were you and I, Those two that once when moon and stars were strange Poets above us in an April sky, Heard a voice falling on the midnight sea, Mute, and for ever, but for you and me.
III.
This nature, this great flood of life, this cheat That uses us as baubles for her coat, Takes love, that should be nothing but the beat Of blood for its own beauty, by the throat, Saying, you are my servant and shall do My purposes, or utter bitterness Shall be your wage, and nothing come to you But stammering tongues that never can confess. Undaunted then in answer here I cry, 'You wanton, that control the hand of him Who masquerades as wisdom in a sky Where holy, holy, sing the cherubim, I will not pay one penny to your name Though all my body crumble into shame.'
IV.
Woman, I once had whimpered at your hand, Saying that all the wisdom that I sought Lay in your brain, that you were as the sand Should cleanse the muddy mirrors of my thought; I should have read in you the character Of oracles that quick a thousand lays, Looked in your eyes, and seen accounted there Solomons legioned for bewildered praise. Now have I learnt love as love is. I take Your hand, and with no inquisition learn All that your eyes can tell, and that's to make A little reckoning and brief, then turn Away, and in my heart I hear a call, 'I love, I love, I love'; and that is all.
V.
When all the hungry pain of love I bear, And in poor lightless thought but burn and burn, And wit goes hunting wisdom everywhere, Yet can no word of revelation learn; When endlessly the scales of yea and nay In dreadful motion fall and rise and fall, When all my heart in sorrow I could pay Until at last were left no tear at all; Then if with tame or subtle argument Companions come and draw me to a place Where words are but the tappings of content, And life spreads all her garments with a grace, I curse that ease, and hunger in my heart Back to my pain and lonely to depart.
VI.
Not anything you do can make you mine, For enterprise with equal charity In duty as in love elect will shine, The constant slave of mutability. Nor can your words for all their honey breath Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme, And though my ear deliver them from death One day or two, it is so little time. Nor does your beauty in its excellence Excel a thousand in the daily sun, Yet must I put a period to pretence, And with my logic's catalogue have done, For act and word and beauty are but keys To unlock the heart, and you, dear love, are these.
VII.
Never the heart of spring had trembled so As on that day when first in Paradise We went afoot as novices to know For the first time what blue was in the skies, What fresher green than any in the grass, And how the sap goes beating to the sun, And tell how on the clocks of beauty pass Minute by minute till the last is done. But not the new birds singing in the brake, And not the buds of our discovery, The deeper blue, the wilder green, the ache For beauty that we shadow as we see, Made heaven, but we, as love's occasion brings, Took these, and made them Paradisal things.
VIII.
The lilacs offer beauty to the sun, Throbbing with wonder as eternally For sad and happy lovers they have done With the first bloom of summer in the sky; Yet they are newly spread in honour now, Because, for every beam of beauty given Out of that clustering heart, back to the bough My love goes beating, from a greater heaven. So be my love for good or sorry luck Bound, it has virtue on this April eve That shall be there for ever when they pluck Lilacs for love. And though I come to grieve Long at a frosty tomb, there still shall be My happy lyric in the lilac tree.
IX.
When they make silly question of my love, And speak to me of danger and disdain, And look by fond old argument to move My wisdom to docility again; When to my prouder heart they set the pride Of custom and the gossip of the street, And show me figures of myself beside A self diminished at their judgment seat; Then do I sit as in a drowsy pew To hear a priest expounding th' heavenly will, Defiling wonder that he never knew With stolen words of measured good and ill; For to the love that knows their counselling, Out of my love contempt alone I bring.
X.
Not love of you is most that I can bring, Since what I am to love you is the test, And should I love you more than any thing You would but be of idle love possessed, A mere love wandering in appetite, Counting your glories and yet bringing none, Finding in you occasions of delight, A thief of payment for no service done. But when of labouring life I make a song And bring it you, as that were my reward, To let what most is me to you belong, Then do I come of high possessions lord, And loving life more than my love of you I give you love more excellently true.
XI.
What better tale could any lover tell When age or death his reckoning shall write Than thus, 'Love taught me only to rebel Against these things,--the thieving of delight Without return; the gospellers of fear Who, loving, yet deny the truth they bear, Sad-suited lusts with lecherous hands to smear The cloth of gold they would but dare not wear. And love gave me great knowledge of the trees, And singing birds, and earth with all her flowers; Wisdom I knew and righteousness in these, I lived in their atonement all my hours; Love taught me how to beauty's eye alone The secret of the lying heart is known.'
XII.
This then at last; we may be wiser far Than love, and put his folly to our measure, Yet shall we learn, poor wizards that we are, That love chimes not nor motions at our pleasure. We bid him come, and light an eager fire, And he goes down the road without debating; We cast him from the house of our desire, And when at last we leave he will be waiting. And in the end there is no folly but this, To counsel love out of our little learning. For still he knows where rotten timber is, And where the boughs for the long winter burning; And when life needs no more of us at all, Love's word will be the last that we recall.
* * * * *
JOHN FREEMAN
I WILL ASK
I will ask primrose and violet to spend for you Their smell and hue, And the bold, trembling anemone awhile to spare Her flowers starry fair; Or the flushed wild apple and yet sweeter thorn Their sweetness to keep Longer than any fire-bosomed flower born Between midnight and midnight deep.
And I will take celandine, nettle and parsley, white In its own green light, Or milkwort and sorrel, thyme, harebell and meadow-sweet Lifting at your feet, And ivy-blossom beloved of soft bees; I will take The loveliest-- The seeding grasses that bend with the winds, and shake Though the winds are at rest.
'For me?' you will ask. 'Yes! surely they wave for you Their smell and hue, And you away all that is rare were so much less By your missed happiness.' Yet I know grass and weed, ivy and apple and thorn Their whole sweet would keep, Though in Eden no human spirit on a shining morn Had awaked from sleep.
THE EVENING SKY
Rose-bosom'd and rose-limb'd With eyes of dazzling bright Shakes Venus mid the twined boughs of the night; Rose-limb'd, soft-stepping From low bough to bough, Shaking the wide-hung starry fruitage--dimmed Its bloom of snow By that sole planetary glow.
Venus, avers the astronomer, Not thus idly dancing goes Flushing the eternal orchard with wild rose. She through ether burns Outpacing planetary earth, And ere two years triumphantly returns, And again wave-like swelling flows, And again her flashing apparition comes and goes.
This we have not seen, No heavenly courses set, No flight unpausing through a void serene: But when eve clears, Arises Venus as she first uprose Stepping the shaken boughs among, And in her bosom glows The warm light hidden in sunny snows.
She shakes the clustered stars Lightly, as she goes Amid the unseen branches of the night, Rose-limb'd, rose-bosom'd bright.
She leaps: they shake and pale; she glows-- And who but knows How the rejoiced heart aches When Venus all his starry vision shakes;
When through his mind Tossing with random airs of an unearthly wind, Rose-bosom'd, rose-limb'd, The mistress of his starry vision arises, And the boughs glittering sway And the stars pale away, And the enlarging heaven glows As Venus light-foot mid the twined branches goes.
THE CAVES
Like the tide--knocking at the hollowed cliff And running into each green cave as if In the cave's night to keep Eternal motion grave and deep--
That, even while each broken wave repeats Its answered knocking and with bruised hand beats Again, again, again, Tossed between ecstasy and pain;
Still in the folded hollow darkness swells, Sinks, swells, and every green-hung hollow fills, Till there's no room for sound Save that old anger rolled around;
So into every hollow cliff of life, Into this heart's deep cave so loud with strife, In tunnels I knew not, In lightless labyrinths of thought,
The unresting tide has run and the dark filled, Even the vibration of old strife is stilled; The wave returning bears Muted those time-breathing airs.
--How shall the million-footed tide still tread These hollows and in each cold void cave spread? How shall Love here keep Eternal motion grave and deep?
MOON-BATHERS
Falls from her heaven the Moon, and stars sink burning Into the sea where blackness rims the sea, Silently quenched. Faint light that the waves hold Is only light remaining; yet still gleam The sands where those now-sleeping young moon-bathers Came dripping out of the sea and from their arms Shook flakes of light, dancing on the foamy edge Of quiet waves. They were all things of light Tossed from the sea to dance under the Moon-- Her nuns, dancing within her dying round, Clear limbs and breasts silvered with Moon and waves And quick with windlike mood and body's joy, Withdrawn from alien vows, by wave and wind Lightly absolved and lightly all forgetting.
An hour ago they left. Remains the gleam Of their late motion on the salt sea-meadow, As loveliest hues linger when the sun's gone And float in the heavens and die in reedy pools-- So slowly, who shall say when light is gone?
IN THOSE OLD DAYS
In those old days you were called beautiful, But I have worn the beauty from your face; The flowerlike bloom has withered on your cheek With the harsh years, and the fire in your eyes Burns darker now and deeper, feeding on Beauty and the remembrance of things gone. Even your voice is altered when you speak, Or is grown mute with old anxiety For me.
Even as a fire leaps into flame and burns Leaping and laughing in its lovely flight, And then under the flame a glowing dome Deepens slowly into blood-like light:-- So did you flame and in flame take delight, So are you hollow'd now with aching fire. But I still warm me and make there my home, Still beauty and youth burn there invisibly For me.
Now my lips falling on your silver'd skull, My fingers in the valleys of your cheeks, Or my hands in your thin strong hands fast caught, Your body clutched to mine, mine bent to yours: Now love undying feeds on love beautiful, Now, now I am but thought kissing your thought ... --And can it be in your heart's music speaks A deeper rhythm hearing mine: can it be Indeed for me?
CATERPILLARS
Of caterpillars Fabre tells how day after day Around the rim of a vast earth pot they crawled, Tricked thither as they filed shuffling out one morn Head to tail when the common hunger called.
Head to tail in a heaving ring day after day, Night after slow night, the starving mommets crept, Each following each, head to tail, day after day, An unbroken ring of hunger--then it was snapt.
I thought of you, long-heaving, horned green caterpillars, As I lay awake. My thoughts crawled each after each, Crawling at night each after each on the same nerve, An unbroken ring of thoughts too sore for speech.
Over and over and over and over again The same hungry thoughts and the hopeless same regrets, Over and over the same truths, again and again In a heaving ring returning the same regrets.
CHANGE
I am that creature and creator who Loosens and reins the waters of the sea, Forming the rocky marge anon anew. I stir the cold breasts of antiquity, And in the soft stone of the pyramid Move wormlike; and I flutter all those sands Whereunder lost and soundless time is hid. I shape the hills and valleys with these hands, And darken forests on their naked sides, And call the rivers from the vexing springs, And lead the blind winds into deserts strange. And in firm human bones the ill that hides Is mine, the fear that cries, the hope that sings. I am that creature and creator, Change.
* * * * *
WILFRID GIBSON
FIRE
In each black tile a mimic fire's aglow, And in the hearthlight old mahogany, Ripe with stored sunshine that in Mexico Poured like gold wine into the living tree Summer on summer through a century, Burns like a crater in the heart of night: And all familiar things in the ingle-light Glow with a secret strange intensity.
And I remember hidden fires that burst Suddenly from the midnight while men slept, Long-smouldering rages in the darkness nursed That to an instant ravening fury leapt, And the old terror menacing evermore A crumbling world with fiery molten core.
BARBARA FELL