Part 4

He was a man with wide and patient eyes, Grey, like the drift of twitch-fires blown in June That, without fearing, searched if any wrong Might threaten from your heart. Grey eyes he had Under a brow was drawn because he knew So many seasons to so many pass Of upright service, loyal, unabased Before the world seducing, and so, barren Of good words praising and thought that mated his. He carved in stone. Out of his quiet life He watched as any faithful seaman charged With tidings of the myriad faring sea, And thoughts and premonitions through his mind Sailing as ships from strange and storied lands His hungry spirit held, till all they were Found living witness in the chiselled stone. Slowly out of the dark confusion, spread By life’s innumerable venturings Over his brain, he would triumph into the light Of one clear mood, unblemished of the blind Legions of errant thought that cried about His rapt seclusion: as a pearl unsoiled, Nay, rather washed to lonelier chastity, In gritty mud. And then would come a bird, A flower, or the wind moving upon a flower, A beast at pasture, or a clustered fruit, A peasant face as were the saints of old, The leer of custom, or the bow of the moon Swung in miraculous poise--some stray from the world Of things created by the eternal mind In joy articulate. And his perfect mood Would dwell about the token of God’s mood, Until in bird or flower or moving wind Or flock or shepherd or the troops of heaven It sprang in one fierce moment of desire To visible form. Then would his chisel work among the stone, Persuading it of petal or of limb Or starry curve, till risen anew there sang Shape out of chaos, and again the vision Of one mind single from the world was pressed Upon the daily custom of the sky Or field or the body of man.

His people Had many gods for worship. The tiger-god, The owl, the dewlapped bull, the running pard, The camel and the lizard of the slime, The ram with quivering fleece and fluted horn, The crested eagle and the doming bat Were sacred. And the king and his high priests Decreed a temple, wide on columns huge, Should top the cornlands to the sky’s far line. They bade the carvers carve along the walls Images of their gods, each one to carve As he desired, his choice to name his god.... And many came; and he among them, glad Of three leagues’ travel through the singing air Of dawn among the boughs yet bare of green, The eager flight of the spring leading his blood Into swift lofty channels of the air, Proud as an eagle riding to the sun.... An eagle, clean of pinion--there’s his choice.

Daylong they worked under the growing roof, One at his leopard, one the staring ram, And he winning his eagle from the stone, Until each man had carved one image out, Arow beyond the portal of the house. They stood arow, the company of gods, Camel and bat, lizard and bull and ram, The pard and owl, dead figures on the wall, Figures of habit driven on the stone By chisels governed by no heat of the brain But drudges of hands that moved by easy rule. Proudly recorded mood was none, no thought Plucked from the dark battalions of the mind And throned in everlasting sight. But one God of them all was witness of belief And large adventure dared. His eagle spread Wide pinions on a cloudless ground of heaven, Glad with the heart’s high courage of that dawn Moving upon the ploughlands newly sown, Dead stone the rest. He looked, and knew it so.

Then came the king with priests and counsellors And many chosen of the people, wise With words weary of custom, and eyes askew That watched their neighbour face for any news Of the best way of judgment, till, each sure None would determine with authority, All spoke in prudent praise. One liked the owl Because an owl blinked on the beam of his barn. One, hoarse with crying gospels in the street, Praised most the ram, because the common folk Wore breeches made of ram’s wool. One declared The tiger pleased him best,--the man who carved The tiger-god was halt out of the womb-- A man to praise, being so pitiful. And one, whose eyes dwelt in a distant void, With spell and omen pat upon his lips, And a purse for any crystal prophet ripe, A zealot of the mist, gazed at the bull-- A lean ill-shapen bull of meagre lines That scarce the steel had graved upon the stone-- Saying that here was very mystery And truth, did men but know. And one there was Who praised his eagle, but remembering The lither pinion of the swift, the curve That liked him better of the mirrored swan. And they who carved the tiger-god and ram, The camel and the pard, the owl and bull, And lizard, listened greedily, and made Humble denial of their worthiness, And when the king his royal judgment gave That all had fashioned well, and bade that each Re-shape his chosen god along the walls Till all the temple boasted of their skill, They bowed themselves in token that as this Never had carvers been so fortunate.

Only the man with wide and patient eyes Made no denial, neither bowed his head. Already while they spoke his thought had gone Far from his eagle, leaving it for a sign Loyally wrought of one deep breath of life, And played about the image of a toad That crawled among his ivy leaves. A queer Puff-bellied toad, with eyes that always stared Sidelong at heaven and saw no heaven there, Weak-hammed, and with a throttle somehow twisted Beyond full wholesome draughts of air, and skin Of wrinkled lips, the only zest or will The little flashing tongue searching the leaves. And king and priest, chosen and counsellor, Babbling out of their thin and jealous brains, Seemed strangely one; a queer enormous toad Panting under giant leaves of dark, Sunk in the loins, peering into the day. Their judgment wry he counted not for wrong More than the fabled poison of the toad Striking at simple wits; how should their thought Or word in praise or blame come near the peace That shone in seasonable hours above The patience of his spirit’s husbandry? They foolish and not seeing, how should he Spend anger there or fear--great ceremonies Equal for none save great antagonists? The grave indifference of his heart before them Was moved by laughter innocent of hate, Chastising clean of spite, that moulded them Into the antic likeness of his toad Bidding for laughter underneath the leaves.

He bowed not, nor disputed, but he saw Those ill-created joyless gods, and loathed, And saw them creeping, creeping round the walls, Death breeding death, wile witnessing to wile, And sickened at the dull iniquity Should be rewarded, and for ever breathe Contagion on the folk gathered in prayer. His truth should not be doomed to march among This falsehood to the ages. He was called, And he must labour there; if so the king Would grant it, where the pillars bore the roof A galleried way of meditation nursed Secluded time, with wall of ready stone In panels for the carver set between The windows--there his chisel should be set,-- It was his plea. And the king spoke of him, Scorning, as one lack-fettle, among all these Eager to take the riches of renown; One fearful of the light or knowing nothing Of light’s dimension, a witling who would throw Honour aside and praise spoken aloud All men of heart should covet. Let him go Grubbing out of the sight of these who knew The worth of substance; there was his proper trade.

A squat and curious toad indeed.... The eyes, Patient and grey, were dumb as were the lips, That, fixed and governed, hoarded from them all The larger laughter lifting in his heart. Straightway about his gallery he moved, Measured the windows and the virgin stone, Till all was weighed and patterned in his brain. Then first where most the shadow struck the wall, Under the sills, and centre of the base, From floor to sill out of the stone was wooed Memorial folly, as from the chisel leapt His chastening laughter searching priest and king-- A huge and wrinkled toad, with legs asplay, And belly loaded, leering with great eyes Busily fixed upon the void. All days His chisel was the first to ring across The temple’s quiet; and at fall of dusk Passing among the carvers homeward, they Would speak of him as mad, or weak against The challenge of the world, and let him go Lonely, as was his will, under the night Of stars or cloud or summer’s folded sun, Through crop and wood and pastureland to sleep. None took the narrow stair as wondering How did his chisel prosper in the stone, Unvisited his labour and forgot. And times when he would lean out of his height And watch the gods growing along the walls, The row of carvers in their linen coats Took in his vision a virtue that alone Carving they had not nor the thing they carved. Knowing the health that flowed about his close Imagining, the daily quiet won From process of his clean and supple craft, Those carvers there, far on the floor below, Would haply be transfigured in his thought Into a gallant company of men Glad of the strict and loyal reckoning That proved in the just presence of the brain Each chisel-stroke. How surely would he prosper In pleasant talk at easy hours with men So fashioned if it might be--and his eyes Would pass again to those dead gods that grew In spreading evil round the temple walls; And, one dead pressure made, the carvers moved Along the wall to mould and mould again The self-same god, their chisels on the stone Tapping in dull precision as before, And he would turn, back to his lonely truth.

He carved apace. And first his people’s gods, About the toad, out of their sterile time, Under his hand thrilled and were recreate. The bull, the pard, the camel and the ram, Tiger and owl and bat--all were the signs Visibly made body on the stone Of sightless thought adventuring the host That is mere spirit; these the bloom achieved By secret labour in the flowing wood Of rain and air and wind and continent sun.... His tiger, lithe, immobile in the stone, A swift destruction for a moment leashed, Sprang crying from the jealous stealth of men Opposed in cunning watch, with engines hid Of torment and calamitous desire. His leopard, swift on lean and paltry limbs, Was fear in flight before accusing faith. His bull, with eyes that often in the dusk Would lift from the sweet meadow grass to watch Him homeward passing, bore on massy beam The burden of the patient of the earth. His camel bore the burden of the damned, Being gaunt, with eyes aslant along the nose. He had a friend, who hammered bronze and iron And cupped the moonstone on a silver ring, One constant like himself, would come at night Or bid him as a guest, when they would make Their poets touch a starrier height, or search Together with unparsimonious mind The crowded harbours of mortality. And there were jests, wholesome as harvest ale Of homely habit, bred of hearts that dared Judgment of laughter under the eternal eye: This frolic wisdom was his carven owl. His ram was lordship on the lonely hills, Alert and fleet, content only to know The wind mightily pouring on his fleece, With yesterday and all unrisen suns Poorer than disinherited ghosts. His bat Was ancient envy made a mockery, Cowering below the newer eagle carved Above the arches with wide pinion spread, His faith’s dominion of that happy dawn.

And so he wrought the gods upon the wall, Living and crying out of his desire, Out of his patient incorruptible thought, Wrought them in joy was wages to his faith. And other than the gods he made. The stalks Of bluebells heavy with the news of spring, The vine loaded with plenty of the year, And swallows, merely tenderness of thought Bidding the stone to small and fragile flight; Leaves, the thin relics of autumnal boughs, Or massed in June.... All from their native pressure bloomed and sprang Under his shaping hand into a proud And governed image of the central man,-- Their moulding, charts of all his travelling. And all were deftly ordered, duly set Between the windows, underneath the sills, And roofward, as a motion rightly planned, Till on the wall, out of the sullen stone, A glory blazed, his vision manifest, His wonder captive. And he was content.

And when the builders and the carvers knew Their labour done, and high the temple stood Over the cornlands, king and counsellor And priest and chosen of the people came Among a ceremonial multitude To dedication. And, below the thrones Where king and archpriest ruled above the throng, Highest among the ranked artificers The carvers stood. And when, the temple vowed To holy use, tribute and choral praise Given as was ordained, the king looked down Upon the gathered folk, and bade them see The comely gods fashioned about the walls, And keep in honour men whose precious skill Could so adorn the sessions of their worship, Gravely the carvers bowed them to the ground. Only the man with wide and patient eyes Stood not among them; nor did any come To count his labour, where he watched alone Above the coloured throng. He heard, and looked Again upon his work, and knew it good, Smiled on his toad, passed down the stair unseen And sang across the teeming meadows home.

ELIZABETH ANN

This is the tale of Elizabeth Ann, Who went away with her fancy man.

Ann was a girl who hadn’t a gown As fine as the ladies who walk the town.

All day long from seven to six Ann was polishing candlesticks,

For Bishops and crapulous Millionaires To buy for their altars or bed-chambers.

And youth in a year and a year will pass, But there’s never an end of polishing brass.

All day long from seven to six-- Seventy thousand candlesticks.

So frail and lewd Elizabeth Ann Went away with her fancy man.

You Bishops and crapulous Millionaires, Give her your charity, give her your prayers.

THE COTSWOLD FARMERS

Sometimes the ghosts forgotten go Along the hill-top way, And with long scythes of silver mow Meadows of moonlit hay, Until the cocks of Cotswold crow The coming of the day.

There’s Tony Turkletob who died When he could drink no more, And Uncle Heritage, the pride Of eighteen-twenty-four, And Ebenezer Barleytide, And others half a score.

They fold in phantom pens, and plough Furrows without a share, And one will milk a faery cow, And one will stare and stare, And whistle ghostly tunes that now Are not sung anywhere.

The moon goes down on Oakridge lea, The other world’s astir, The Cotswold farmers silently Go back to sepulchre, The sleeping watchdogs wake, and see No ghostly harvester.

A MAN’S DAUGHTER

There is an old woman who looks each night Out of the wood. She has one tooth, that isn’t too white. She isn’t too good.

She came from the north looking for me, About my jewel. Her son, she says, is tall as can be; But, men say, cruel.

My girl went northward, holiday making, And a queer man spoke At the woodside once when night was breaking, And her heart broke.

For ever since she has pined and pined, A sorry maid; Her fingers are slack as the wool they wind, Or her girdle-braid.

So now shall I send her north to wed, Who here may know Only the little house of the dead To ease her woe?

Or keep her for fear of that old woman, As a bird quick-eyed, And her tall son who is hardly human, At the woodside?

She is my babe and my daughter dear, How well, how well. Her grief to me is a fourfold fear, Tongue cannot tell.

And yet I know that far in that wood Are crumbling bones, And a mumble mumble of nothing that’s good, In heathen tones.

And I know that frail ghosts flutter and sigh In brambles there, And never a bird or beast to cry-- Beware, beware,--

While threading the silent thickets go Mother and son, Where scrupulous berries never grow, And airs are none.

And her deep eyes peer at eventide Out of the wood, And her tall son waits by the dark woodside For maidenhood.

And the little eyes peer, and peer, and peer; And a word is said. And some house knows, for many a year, But years of dread.

THE LIFE OF JOHN HERITAGE

Born in the Cotswolds in eighteen-forty or so, Bred on a hill-top that seemed the most of the world Until he travelled the valleys, and found what a wonder Of leagues from Gloucester lay to Stroud or Ciceter, John Heritage was a tiler. He split the stone, After the frosts, and learnt the laying of tiles, And was famous about the shire. And he was friendly With Cotswold nature, hearing the hidden rooks In Golden Vale, and the thin bleat of goats, And the rattling harness of Trilly’s teams at plough, And Richard Parker’s scythe for many years, As he went upon his tiling; and the great landmarks, As loops of the Severn seen from Bisley Hill, Were his familiars, something of his religion.

And he prospered, as men do. His little wage Yet left a little over his wedded needs, And here a cottage he bought, and there another, About the Cotswolds, built of the royallest stone That’s quarried in England, until he could think of age With an easy mind; and an acre of land was his Where at hay-harvest he worked a little from tiling, Making his rick maturely or damning the wind That scattered the swathes beyond his fork’s controlling. And he trotted ajog to the town on market Thursdays, Driving a stout succession of good black geldings, That cropped his acre some twenty years apiece. And he was an honest neighbour; and so he grew old, And five strong sons, grizzled and middle-aged, Carried him down the hill, and on a stone The mason cut--“John Heritage, who died, Fearing the Lord, at the age of seventy-six.”

And I know that some of us shatter our hearts on earth, With mightier aims than ever John Heritage knew, And think such things as never the tiler thought, Because of our pride and our eagerness of mind ... But a life complete is a great nobility, And there’s a wisdom biding in Cotswold stone, While we in our furious intellectual travel Fall in with strange foot-fellows on the road.

THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON

One of those old men fearing no man, Two hundred broods his eaves have known Since they cut on a Sapperton churchyard stone-- “Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton, Yeoman.”

At dusk you can hear the yeomen calling The cattle still to Sapperton stalls, And still the stroke of the woodman falls As Thomas of Tarlton heard it falling.

I walked these meadows in seventeen-hundred, Seed of his loins, a dream that stirred Beyond the shape of a yeoman’s word, So faint that but unawares he wondered.

And now, from the weeds of his tomb uncomely, I travel again the tracks he made, And walks at my side the yeoman shade Of Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton dumbly.

MRS. WILLOW

Mrs. Thomas Willow seems very glum. Her life, perhaps, is very lonely and hum-drum, Digging up potatoes, cleaning out the weeds, Doing the little for a lone woman’s needs. Who was her husband? How long ago? What does she wonder? What does she know? Why does she listen over the wall, Morning and noon-time and twilight and all, As though unforgotten were some footfall?

“Good morning, Mrs. Willow.” “Good morning, sir,” Is all the conversation I can get from her. And her path-stones are white as lilies of the wood, And she washes this and that till she must be very good. She sends no letters, and no one calls, And she doesn’t go whispering beyond her walls; Nothing in her garden is secret, I think-- That’s all sun-bright with foxglove and pink, And she doesn’t hover around old cupboards and shelves As old people do who have buried themselves; She has no late lamps, and she digs all day And polishes and plants in a common way, But glum she is, and she listens now and then For a footfall, a footfall, a footfall again, And whether it’s hope, or whether it’s dread, Or a poor old fancy in her head, I shall never be told; it will never be said.

ROUNDELS OF THE YEAR

_I caught the changes of the year_ _In soft and fragile nets of song,_ _For you to whom my days belong._

_For you to whom each day is dear_ _Of all the high processional throng,_ _I caught the changes of the year_ _In soft and fragile nets of song._

_And here some sound of beauty, here_ _Some note of ancient, ageless wrong_ _Reshaping as my lips were strong,_ _I caught the changes of the year_ _In soft and fragile nets of song,_ _For you to whom my days belong._

I

The spring is passing through the land In web of ghostly green arrayed, And blood is warm in man and maid.

The arches of desire have spanned The barren ways, the debt is paid, The spring is passing through the land In web of ghostly green arrayed.

Sweet scents along the winds are fanned From shadowy wood and secret glade Where beauty blossoms unafraid, The spring is passing through the land In web of ghostly green arrayed And blood is warm in man and maid.

II

Proud insolent June with burning lips Holds riot now from sea to sea, And shod in sovran gold is she.

To the full flood of reaping slips The seeding-tide by God’s decree, Proud insolent June with burning lips Holds riot now from sea to sea.

And all the goodly fellowships Of bird and bloom and beast and tree Are gallant of her company-- Proud insolent June with burning lips Holds riot now from sea to sea, And shod in sovran gold is she.

III

The loaded sheaves are harvested, The sheep are in the stubbled fold, The tale of labour crowned is told.

The wizard of the year has spread A glory over wood and wold, The loaded sheaves are harvested, The sheep are in the stubbled fold.

The yellow apples and the red Bear down the boughs, the hazels hold No more their fruit in cups of gold. The loaded sheaves are harvested, The sheep are in the stubbled fold, The tale of labour crowned is told.

IV

The year is lapsing into time Along a deep and songless gloom, Unchapleted of leaf or bloom.

And mute between the dusk and prime The diligent earth resets her loom,-- The year is lapsing into time Along a deep and songless gloom.