Chapter 7
My arms are round you, and I lean Against you, while the lark Sings over us, and golden lights, and green Shadows are on your bark.
There'll come a season when you'll stretch Black boards to cover me; Then in Mount Jerome I will lie, poor wretch, With worms eternally.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] (The accent is on the last syllable.)
_Nora Hopper Chesson_
Nora Hopper was born in Exeter on January 2, 1871, and married W. H. Chesson, a well-known writer, in 1901. Although the Irish element in her work is acquired and incidental, there is a distinct if somewhat fitful race consciousness in _Ballads in Prose_ (1894) and _Under Quickened Boughs_ (1896). She died suddenly April 14, 1906.
A CONNAUGHT LAMENT
I will arise and go hence to the west, And dig me a grave where the hill-winds call; But O were I dead, were I dust, the fall Of my own love's footstep would break my rest!
My heart in my bosom is black as a sloe! I heed not cuckoo, nor wren, nor swallow: Like a flying leaf in the sky's blue hollow The heart in my breast is, that beats so low.
Because of the words your lips have spoken, (O dear black head that I must not follow) My heart is a grave that is stripped and hollow, As ice on the water my heart is broken.
O lips forgetful and kindness fickle, The swallow goes south with you: I go west Where fields are empty and scythes at rest. I am the poppy and you the sickle; My heart is broken within my breast.
_Eva Gore-Booth_
Eva Gore-Booth, the second daughter of Sir Henry Gore-Booth and the sister of Countess Marcievicz, was born in Sligo, Ireland, in 1872. She first appeared in "A. E."'s anthology, _New Songs_, in which so many of the modern Irish poets first came forward.
Her initial volume, _Poems_ (1898), showed practically no distinction--not even the customary "promise." But _The One and the Many_ (1904) and _The Sorrowful Princess_ (1907) revealed the gift of the Celtic singer who is half mystic, half minstrel. Primarily philosophic, her verse often turns to lyrics as haunting as the two examples here reprinted.
THE WAVES OF BREFFNY
The grand road from the mountain goes shining to the sea, And there is traffic on it and many a horse and cart, But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through my heart.
A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o'er the hill, And there is glory in it; and terror on the wind: But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still, And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind.
The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their way, Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal; But the little waves of Breffny have drenched my heart in spray, And the little waves of Breffny go stumbling through my soul.
WALLS
Free to all souls the hidden beauty calls, The sea thrift dwelling on her spray-swept height, The lofty rose, the low-grown aconite, The gliding river and the stream that brawls Down the sharp cliffs with constant breaks and falls-- All these are equal in the equal light-- All waters mirror the one Infinite.
God made a garden, it was men built walls; But the wide sea from men is wholly freed; Freely the great waves rise and storm and break, Nor softlier go for any landlord's need, Where rhythmic tides flow for no miser's sake And none hath profit of the brown sea-weed, But all things give themselves, yet none may take.
_Moira O'Neill_
Moira O'Neill is known chiefly by a remarkable little collection of only twenty-five lyrics, _Songs from the Glens of Antrim_ (1900), simple tunes as unaffected as the peasants of whom she sings. The best of her poetry is dramatic without being theatrical; melodious without falling into the tinkle of most "popular" sentimental verse.
A BROKEN SONG
'_Where am I from?_' From the green hills of Erin. '_Have I no song then?_' My songs are all sung. '_What o' my love?_' 'Tis alone I am farin'. Old grows my heart, an' my voice yet is young.
'_If she was tall?_' Like a king's own daughter. '_If she was fair?_' Like a mornin' o' May. When she'd come laughin' 'twas the runnin' wather, When she'd come blushin' 'twas the break o' day.
'_Where did she dwell?_' Where one'st I had my dwellin'. '_Who loved her best?_' There's no one now will know. '_Where is she gone?_' Och, why would I be tellin'! Where she is gone there I can never go.
BEAUTY'S A FLOWER
_Youth's for an hour, Beauty's a flower, But love is the jewel that wins the world._
Youth's for an hour, an' the taste o' life is sweet, Ailes was a girl that stepped on two bare feet; In all my days I never seen the one as fair as she, I'd have lost my life for Ailes, an' she never cared for me.
Beauty's a flower, an' the days o' life are long, There's little knowin' who may live to sing another song; For Ailes was the fairest, but another is my wife, An' Mary--God be good to her!--is all I love in life.
_Youth's for an hour, Beauty's a flower, But love is the jewel that wins the world._
_John McCrae_
John McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 1872. He was graduated in arts in 1894 and in medicine in 1898. He finished his studies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and returned to Canada, joining the staff of the Medical School of McGill University. He was a lieutenant of artillery in South Africa (1899-1900) and was in charge of the Medical Division of the McGill Canadian General Hospital during the World War. After serving two years, he died of pneumonia, January, 1918, his volume _In Flanders Fields_ (1919) appearing posthumously.
Few who read the title poem of his book, possibly the most widely-read poem produced by the war, realize that it is a perfect rondeau, one of the loveliest (and strictest) of the French forms.
IN FLANDERS FIELDS
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
_Ford Madox Hueffer_
Ford Madox Hueffer was born in 1873 and is best known as the author of many novels, two of which, _Romance_ and _The Inheritors_, were written in collaboration with Joseph Conrad. He has written also several critical studies, those on Rossetti and Henry James being the most notable. His _On Heaven and Other Poems_ appeared in 1916.
CLAIR DE LUNE
I
I should like to imagine A moonlight in which there would be no machine-guns!
For, it is possible To come out of a trench or a hut or a tent or a church all in ruins: To see the black perspective of long avenues All silent. The white strips of sky At the sides, cut by the poplar trunks: The white strips of sky Above, diminishing-- The silence and blackness of the avenue Enclosed by immensities of space Spreading away Over No Man's Land....
For a minute ... For ten ... There will be no star shells But the untroubled stars, There will be no _Very_ light But the light of the quiet moon Like a swan. And silence....
Then, far away to the right thro' the moonbeams "_Wukka Wukka_" will go the machine-guns, And, far away to the left _Wukka Wukka_. And sharply, _Wuk_ ... _Wuk_ ... and then silence For a space in the clear of the moon.
II
I should like to imagine A moonlight in which the machine-guns of trouble Will be silent....
Do you remember, my dear, Long ago, on the cliffs, in the moonlight, Looking over to Flatholme We sat ... Long ago!... And the things that you told me ... Little things in the clear of the moon, The little, sad things of a life....
We shall do it again Full surely, Sitting still, looking over at Flatholme. Then, far away to the right Shall sound the Machine Guns of trouble _Wukka-wukka!_ And, far away to the left, under Flatholme, _Wukka-wuk!..._
I wonder, my dear, can you stick it? As we should say: "Stick it, the Welch!" In the dark of the moon, Going over....
"THERE SHALL BE MORE JOY ..."
The little angels of Heaven Each wear a long white dress, And in the tall arcadings Play ball and play at chess;
With never a soil on their garments, Not a sigh the whole day long, Not a bitter note in their pleasure, Not a bitter note in their song.
But they shall know keener pleasure, And they shall know joy more rare-- Keener, keener pleasure When you, my dear, come there.
* * * * *
The little angels of Heaven Each wear a long white gown, And they lean over the ramparts Waiting and looking down.
_Walter De la Mare_
The author of some of the most haunting lyrics in contemporary poetry, Walter De la Mare, was born in 1873. Although he did not begin to bring out his work in book form until he was over 30, he is, as Harold Williams has written, "the singer of a young and romantic world, a singer even for children, understanding and perceiving as a child." De la Mare paints simple scenes of miniature loveliness; he uses thin-spun fragments of fairy-like delicacy and achieves a grace that is remarkable in its universality. "In a few words, seemingly artless and unsought" (to quote Williams again), "he can express a pathos or a hope as wide as man's life."
De la Mare is an astonishing joiner of words; in _Peacock Pie_ (1913) he surprises us again and again by transforming what began as a child's nonsense-rhyme into a suddenly thrilling snatch of music. A score of times he takes things as casual as the feeding of chickens or the swallowing of physic, berry-picking, eating, hair-cutting--and turns them into magic. These poems read like lyrics of William Shakespeare rendered by Mother Goose. The trick of revealing the ordinary in whimsical colors, of catching the commonplace off its guard, is the first of De la Mare's two magics.
This poet's second gift is his sense of the supernatural, of the fantastic other-world that lies on the edges of our consciousness. _The Listeners_ (1912) is a book that, like all the best of De la Mare, is full of half-heard whispers; moonlight and mystery seem soaked in the lines, and a cool wind from Nowhere blows over them. That most magical of modern verses, "The Listeners," and the brief music of "An Epitaph" are two fine examples among many. In the first of these poems there is an uncanny splendor. What we have here is the effect, the thrill, the overtones of a ghost story rather than the narrative itself--the less than half-told adventure of some new Childe Roland heroically challenging a heedless universe. Never have silence and black night been reproduced more creepily, nor has the symbolism of man's courage facing the cryptic riddle of life been more memorably expressed.
De la Mare's chief distinction, however, lies not so much in what he says as in how he says it; he can even take outworn words like "thridding," "athwart," "amaranthine" and make them live again in a poetry that is of no time and of all time. He writes, it has been said, as much for antiquity as for posterity; he is a poet who is distinctively in the world and yet not wholly of it.
THE LISTENERS
'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest's ferny floor. And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller's head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; 'Is there anybody there?' he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely Traveller's call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 'Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:-- 'Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,' he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.
AN EPITAPH
Here lies a most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she; I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare--rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?
TIRED TIM
Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him. He lags the long bright morning through, Ever so tired of nothing to do; He moons and mopes the livelong day, Nothing to think about, nothing to say; Up to bed with his candle to creep, Too tired to yawn; too tired to sleep: Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him.
OLD SUSAN
When Susan's work was done, she'd sit With one fat guttering candle lit, And window opened wide to win The sweet night air to enter in; There, with a thumb to keep her place She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face. Her mild eyes gliding very slow Across the letters to and fro, While wagged the guttering candle flame In the wind that through the window came. And sometimes in the silence she Would mumble a sentence audibly, Or shake her head as if to say, 'You silly souls, to act this way!' And never a sound from night I'd hear, Unless some far-off cock crowed clear; Or her old shuffling thumb should turn Another page; and rapt and stern, Through her great glasses bent on me She'd glance into reality; And shake her round old silvery head, With--'You!--I thought you was in bed!'-- Only to tilt her book again, And rooted in Romance remain.
NOD
Softly along the road of evening, In a twilight dim with rose, Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew Old Nod, the shepherd, goes.
His drowsy flock streams on before him, Their fleeces charged with gold, To where the sun's last beam leans low On Nod the shepherd's fold.
The hedge is quick and green with briar, From their sand the conies creep; And all the birds that fly in heaven Flock singing home to sleep.
His lambs outnumber a noon's roses, Yet, when night's shadows fall, His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon, Misses not one of all.
His are the quiet steeps of dreamland, The waters of no-more-pain; His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars, "Rest, rest, and rest again."
_G. K. Chesterton_
This brilliant journalist, novelist, essayist, publicist and lyricist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, was born at Campden Hill, Kensington, in 1874, and began his literary life by reviewing books on art for various magazines. He is best known as a writer of flashing, paradoxical essays on anything and everything, like _Tremendous Trifles_ (1909), _Varied Types_ (1905), and _All Things Considered_ (1910). But he is also a stimulating critic; a keen appraiser, as in his volume _Heretics_ (1905) and his analytical studies of Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and George Bernard Shaw; a writer of strange and grotesque romances like _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ (1906), _The Man Who Was Thursday_ (1908), which Chesterton himself has subtitled "A Nightmare," and _The Flying Inn_ (1914); the author of several books of fantastic short stories, ranging from the wildly whimsical narratives in _The Club of Queer Trades_ (1905) to that amazing sequence _The Innocence of Father Brown_ (1911)--which is a series of religious detective stories!
Besides being the creator of all of these, Chesterton finds time to be a prolific if sometimes too acrobatic newspaperman, a lay preacher in disguise (witness _Orthodoxy_ [1908], _What's Wrong with the World?_ [1910], _The Ball and the Cross_ [1909]), a pamphleteer, and a poet. His first volume of verse, _The Wild Knight and Other Poems_ (1900), a collection of quaintly-flavored and affirmative verses, was followed by _The Ballad of the White Horse_ (1911), one long poem which, in spite of Chesterton's ever-present didactic sermonizing, is possibly the most stirring creation he has achieved. This poem has the swing, the vigor, the spontaneity, and, above all, the ageless simplicity of the true narrative ballad.
Scarcely less notable is the ringing "Lepanto" from his later _Poems_ (1915) which, anticipating the banging, clanging verses of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo," is one of the finest of modern chants. It is interesting to see how the syllables beat, as though on brass; it is thrilling to feel how, in one's pulses, the armies sing, the feet tramp, the drums snarl, and all the tides of marching crusaders roll out of lines like:
"Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war; Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold; Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes...."
Chesterton, the prose-paradoxer, is a delightful product of a skeptical age. But it is Chesterton the poet who is more likely to outlive it.
LEPANTO[14]
White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard; It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross. The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass; From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung, That once went singing southward when all the world was young. In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade. Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war, Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes. Don John laughing in the brave beard curled, Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world, Holding his head up for a flag of all the free. Love-light of Spain--hurrah! Death-light of Africa! Don John of Austria Is riding to the sea.
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star, (_Don John of Austria is going to the war._) He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees, His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas. He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease, And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees; And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing. Giants and the Genii, Multiplex of wing and eye, Whose strong obedience broke the sky When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn, From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn; They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be, On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl, Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl; They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,-- They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound. And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide, And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide, And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest, For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west. We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun, Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done. But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know The voice that shook our palaces--four hundred years ago: It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate; It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate! It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth, Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth." For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar, (_Don John of Austria is going to the war._) Sudden and still--hurrah! Bolt from Iberia! Don John of Austria Is gone by Alcalar.
St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north (_Don John of Austria is girt and going forth._) Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift. He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone; The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone; The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes, And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room, And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom, And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,-- But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea. Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips, Trumpet that sayeth _ha_! _Domino gloria!_ Don John of Austria Is shouting to the ships.