Part 1

Produced by Al Haines

POEMS

SECOND SERIES

By J. C. Squire

London:

William Heinemann Limited

1922

TO

EDWARD SHANKS

PREFACE

Three years ago I published a volume called _Poems: First Series_, which contained a collection of what I had written between 1905 and March, 1918.

The present collection contains all that I have written since then. _The Birds_ and nine shorter poems were published in a small booklet in 1919; _The Moon_ was separately published in 1920; but the majority of the poems here printed appear in book form for the first time, and twelve have never previously been published.

The poems are as nearly as possible in chronological order, except that the group called _An Epilogue_ should have been dated 1917.

J. C. S.

_September_, 1921.

CONTENTS

YEAR

Dedication Preface

1918 The Birds A Dog's Death A Poet to his Muse Processes of Thought. I II III Airship over Suburb The Invocation of Lucretius An Epilogue: I The Fluke II The Conversation III The Deaf Adder IV The Landscape V Another Hour An Impression Received from a Symphony Fen Landscape Meditation in Lamplight Harlequin

1919 Winter Nightfall A Far Place Late Snow Song: You are My Sky Song: The Heaven is Full Old Song Epitaph in Old Mode The Moon The Happy Night

1920 Constantinople Elegy Wars and Rumours, 1920

1921 To a Musician The Rugger Match

THE BIRDS

(_To Edmund Gosse_)

Within mankind's duration, so they say, Khephren and Ninus lived but yesterday. Asia had no name till man was old And long had learned the use of iron and gold; And æons had passed, when the first corn was planted, Since first the use of syllables was granted.

Men were on earth while climates slowly swung, Fanning wide zones to heat and cold, and long Subsidence turned great continents to sea, And seas dried up, dried up interminably, Age after age; enormous seas were dried Amid wastes of land. And the last monsters died.

Earth wore another face. O since that prime Man with how many works has sprinkled time! Hammering, hewing, digging tunnels, roads; Building ships, temples, multiform abodes. How, for his body's appetites, his toils Have conquered all earth's products, all her soils; And in what thousand thousand shapes of art He has tried to find a language for his heart!

Never at rest, never content or tired: Insatiate wanderer, marvellously fired, Most grandly piling and piling into the air Stones that will topple or arch he knows not where. And yet did I, this spring, think it more strange, More grand, more full of awe, than all that change, And lovely and sweet and touching unto tears, That through man's chronicled and unchronicled years, And even into that unguessable beyond The water-hen has nested by a pond, Weaving dry flags into a beaten floor, The one sure product of her only lore. Low on a ledge above the shadowed water Then, when she heard no men, as nature taught her, Flashing around with busy scarlet bill She built that nest, her nest, and builds it still.

O let your strong imagination turn The great wheel backward, until Troy unburn, And then unbuild, and seven Troys below Rise out of death, and dwindle, and outflow, Till all have passed, and none has yet been there: Back, ever back. Our birds still crossed the air; Beyond our myriad changing generations Still built, unchanged, their known inhabitations. A million years before Atlantis was Our lark sprang from some hollow in the grass, Some old soft hoof-print in a tussock's shade; And the wood-pigeon's smooth snow-white eggs were laid, High amid green pines' sunset-coloured shafts, And rooks their villages of twiggy rafts Set on the tops of elms, where elms grew then, And still the thumbling tit and perky wren Popped through the tiny doors of cosy balls And the blackbird lined with moss his high-built walls; A round mud cottage held the thrush's young, And straws from the untidy sparrow's hung. And, skimming forktailed in the evening air, When man first was were not the martins there? Did not those birds some human shelter crave, And stow beneath the cornice of his cave Their dry tight cups of clay? And from each door Peeped on a morning wiseheads three or four.

Yes, daw and owl, curlew and crested hern, Kingfisher, mallard, water-rail and tern, Chaffinch and greenfinch, wagtail, stonechat, ruff, Whitethroat and robin, fly-catcher and chough, Missel-thrush, magpie, sparrow-hawk and jay, Built, those far ages gone, in this year's way. And the first man who walked the cliffs of Rame, As I this year, looked down and saw the same Blotches of rusty red on ledge and cleft With grey-green spots on them, while right and left A dizzying tangle of gulls were floating and flying, Wheeling and crossing and darting, crying and crying, Circling and crying, over and over and over, Crying with swoop and hover and fall and recover. And below on a rock against the grey sea fretted, Pipe-necked and stationary and silhouetted, Cormorants stood in a wise, black, equal row Above the nests and long blue eggs we know.

O delicate chain over all the ages stretched, O dumb tradition from what far darkness fetched: Each little architect with its one design Perpetual, fixed and right in stuff and line, Each little ministrant who knows one thing, One learnèd rite to celebrate the spring. Whatever alters else on sea or shore, These are unchanging: man must still explore.

A DOG'S DEATH

The loose earth falls in the grave like a peaceful regular breathing; Too like, for I was deceived a moment by the sound: It has covered the heap of bracken that the gardener laid above him; Quiet the spade swings: there we have now his mound.

A patch of fresh earth on the floor of the wood's renewing chamber: All around is grass and moss and the hyacinth's dark green sprouts: And oaks are above that were old when his fiftieth sire was a puppy: And far away in the garden I hear the children's shouts.

Their joy is remote as a dream. It is strange how we buy our sorrow For the touch of perishing things, idly, with open eyes; How we give our hearts to brutes that will die in a few seasons, Nor trouble what we do when we do it; nor would have it otherwise.

A POET TO HIS MUSE

Muse, you have opened like a flower.

* * * * *

Long ago I knew that brown integument, Like a dead husk, had dormant life within it, And waited till a first white point appeared Which shot into a naked stiff pale spike That grew. I knew this was not all; Nothing I said as greener you grew and taller, But dreamed alone of the day when your bud would unsheathe, And silently swell, and at last your crown would break Filling the air with clouds of colour and fragrance, Radiant waves, odours of immortality.

* * * * *

In a pot of earth I watered and tended you, Breaking the clods and soaking the earth with water That fed your roots and eased your way to the light. I gave you the sun and the rain But saved you from scorching and drowning: You are mine, and only I know you, And the ways of your growth, and the days.

* * * * *

But you are not from me. I am but a pen for a hand, A bed for a river, A window for light. And I bow in awe to that Power That made you a flower.

PROCESSES OF THOUGHT

I

I find my mind as it were a deep water.

Sometimes I play with a thought and hammer and bend it, Till tired and displeased with that I toss it away, Or absently let it slip to the yawning water: And down it sinks, forgotten for many a day.

But a time comes when tide or tempest washes it High on the beach, and I find that shape of mine, Or I haul it out from the depths on some casual rope, Or, passing over that spot in quiet shine,

I see, where my boat's shadow makes deep the water, A patch of colour, far down, from the bottom apart, A wavering sign like the gleam from an ancient anchor, Brown fixing and fleeting flakes; and I feel my heart

Wake to a strange excitement; so that I stop, Put up my paddles and dredge with a careful net: And I catch it, and see it stir, and feel its weight, And pull till it nears and breaks from the water wet.

And my eyes dwell on that old abandoned thing Recovered by chance. For the shape I had found so dull Has crusted and changed in secrecy and silence, And its surface shines like a pearl, most beautiful.

II

In bed I lie, and my thoughts come filing by, All forms and faces, cheerful, serene and sad: Some clear, some mistily showing and fragmentary, Some altered in size or shape since last they were seen.

But O last, you group of merry ones! Lord knows when I saw you before, but I met you once, The whole collection of you, impudent-eyed; And now, rosy and grinning, with linked arms You go swingingly by, turning your faces to mine, I laugh aloud; you bad lots; you are a secret, That nobody else knows.

And you it was that made me break the procession (While memory gave me still the power of summons), And call up all I could of a half-hour's thoughts To parade them across this proscenium of my skull In the order they came in, more carefully recognising The old, and remarking which have developed or changed. And as for you, you rogues, I am almost certain There are one or two more of you now than once there were.

* * * * *

Good-bye! Good-bye! Dance through the dark door In to the life that somewhere else you lead. And one day I shall all unwittingly call Some word you know as a signal, or you'll see Someone else coming my way; you'll suddenly follow, And you'll appear again, quite possibly Bringing new friends--who are sure to be just as bad.

III

Into the pits of my heart and brain, My eyes, ears, nose, tongue, fingers, like five gardeners Are shovelling sights, sounds, odours, savours, contacts, While I, their master, casually nod, and most times Stand idly by, looking at something else, Forgetting that the work is going on And only fully conscious of my servants When something they move is consonant with my mood And draws my notice; or some other thing, More strange than usual or stronger in its impact, Makes them exclaim and call to bid me watch.

And then in a ground of more than our dimensions Those quietly flowing cascades of things are hid. They are buried in those illimitable fields, And ever as they are swallowed by the earth The steady hours passing in procession Walk over them and trample them well down Out of sight, levelling all the soil.

Then some time my returning feet uncover them (My slaves are all agog with recognition) Or else perhaps I come and idly dig To see what thing I can find, and out there comes Some old form buried twenty years ago Now called a memory.

Or marking well the place where one was put Find it and more, drawn thither under the ground, Tangled with others as flower-roots with roots Into a new festoon, or one old image, Wearing others like gems. And that's creation.

AIRSHIP OVER SUBURB

A smooth blue sky with puffed motionless clouds.

Standing over the plain of red roofs and bushy trees The bright coloured shell of the large enamelled sky.

Out of the distance pointing, a cut dark shape That moves this way at leisure, then hesitates and turns: And its darkness suddenly dies as it turns and shows A gleaming silver, white against even the whitest cloud.

Across the blue and the low small clouds it moves Level, with a floating cloud-like motion of its own, Peaceful, sunny and slow, a thing of summer itself, Above the basking earth, travelling the clouds and the sky.

THE INVOCATION OF LUCRETIUS

BOOK I

Mother of Rome, delight of gods and men, Beloved Venus, who under the fleeting stars Fillest the freighted sea and earth's ripe fields, O since through thee alone all forms of life Are born, and climb into the sun's sweet light, Goddess, before whose lovely advancing feet The winds and towering clouds scatter and flee, And the labouring earth discloses odorous flowers, And the sea falls into a shining calm, And the assuaged heavens mellow with light. For when the spring-like face of day awakes, And the West Wind, unloosed, flies procreant forth, Then first the coursing birds, smitten at heart, Betray, Lady, thy entrance and thy power, And then the beasts caper in happy pastures And swim swift floods; so all created things, Captive to thee, drawn by their own desire, Stray through the world where'er thy presence leads. Through all the seas and hills and swelling streams, Wing-fluttering woods and green, luxuriant plains, Thou harryest them with lust, that none shall fail To carry their eternal races on.

Since then thou art sole queen of all that Is, And without thee to help can nothing rise To cross the glorious frontiers of the light, And nothing grow in gentleness or grace, Thee do I pray to aid my labouring verse, Now that of all that Is I strive to sing, Lady, for my dear Memmian heir, whom thou Hast blest with every constant excellence; For his sake, chiefly, fill my words with life.

AN EPILOGUE

I. THE FLUKE

For two years you went Through all the worst of it, Men fell around you, but you did not fall. On the Somme when the air was a sea Of contesting flashes and clouds of smoke, Your gunners fell fast but you got never a scratch. And once when you watched from a village tower (At Longueval, was it?) between our guns and theirs As men fought in the houses below, A shell from an English battery came And tore a hole in the tower below you, But you were not hurt and remained observing.

And now, A casual shell has come And pierced your head, And the men who were with you, uninjured, Carried you back, And you died on the way.

II. THE CONVERSATION

When we've greeted each other again, And you've filled your pipe and sat down and stretched your legs, You will look in the fire for a minute And then you will say, with a yawn, "Well, when do you think this damned war will be over?" And I shall say nothing, or something as empty as nothing. But I am forgetting. We shall not greet each other again; You will not ask that question again.

III. THE DEAF ADDER

Well, it's no good brooding. The past cannot return. They have killed him and buried him. Many men as good as he have gone: They were good men even if one never knew them. It is a just and honourable war. He went in readily at the start, though he hated it, And one would not have had him do otherwise. And, thank God, he did the job well That had to be done. He has suffered with millions of others For the sake of the future's peace, And ungrudgingly laid down his life In the cleanest of England's wars. There is no room for regret here, only for pride.

* * * * *

_Heart, you fool, lie down. Cannot you hear My excellent reasoning?_

IV. THE LANDSCAPE

You said, that first winter, That the landscape around Ypres Reminded you of Chinese paintings: The green plain, striped with trenches, The few trees on the plain, And the puffs of smoke sprinkled over the plain. You said, when the war was over, That you would record that green desolation In flat colours and lines As a Chinese artist would. That is what you were going to do. The plain is still there.

V. ANOTHER HOUR

How many days we spent together! Thousands. And now I would give anything, Anything, For another, or even for one hour: An hour, were it only of aimless lounging, Or a game of billiards in a pub.

AN IMPRESSION RECEIVED FROM A SYMPHONY

There was a day, when I, if that was I, Surrendered lay beneath a burning sky, Where overhead the azure ached with heat, And many red fierce poppies splashed the wheat; Motion was dead, and silence was complete, And stains of red fierce poppies splashed the wheat,

And as I lay upon a scent-warm bank, I fell away, slipped back from earth, and sank, I lost the place of sky and field and tree, One covering face obscured the world for me, And for an hour I knew eternity, For one fixed face suspended Time for me.

O had those eyes in that extreme of bliss Shed one more wise and culminating kiss, My end had come, nor had I lived to quail, Frightened and dumb as things must do that fail, And in this last black devil-mocking gale, Battered and dumb to fight the dark and fail.

FEN LANDSCAPE

Wind waves the reeds by the river, Grey sky lids the leaden water. Ducks fly low across the water, Three flying: one quacks sadly.

Grey are the sky and the water, Green the lost ribbons of reed-beds, Small in the silence a black boat Floats upon wide pale mirrors.

MEDITATION IN LAMPLIGHT

What deaths men have died, not fighting but impotent. Hung on the wire, between trenches, burning and freezing, Groaning for water with armies of men so near; The fall over cliff, the clutch at the rootless grass, The beach rushing up, the whirling, the turning head first; Stiff writhings of strychnine, taken in error or haste, Angina pectoris, shudders of the heart; Failure and crushing by flying weight to the ground, Claws and jaws, the stink of a lion's breath; Swimming, a white belly, a crescent of teeth, Agony, and a spirting shredded limb And crimson blood staining the green water; And, horror of horrors, the slow grind on the rack, The breaking bones, the stretching and bursting skin, Perpetual fainting and waking to see above The down-thrust mocking faces of cruel men, With the power of mercy, who gloat upon shrieks for mercy.

O pity me, God! O God make tolerable, Make tolerable the end that awaits for me, And give me courage to die when the time comes, When the time comes as it must, however it comes, That I shrink not nor scream, gripped by the jaws of the vice; For the thought of it turns me sick, and my heart stands still, Knocks and stands still. O fearful, fearful Shadow, Kill me, let me die to escape the terror of thee!

A tap. Come in! Oh, no, I am perfectly well, Only a little tired. Take this one, it's softer. How are things going with you? Will you have some coffee? Well, of course it's trying sometimes, but never mind, It will probably be all right. Carry on, and keep cheerful, I shouldn't, if I were you, meet trouble half-way, It is always best to take everything as it comes.

HARLEQUIN

Moonlit woodland, veils of green, Caves of empty dark between; Veils of green from rounded arms Drooping, that the moonlight charms. Tranced the trees, grass beneath Silent.... Like a stealthy breath, Mask and wand and silver skin, Sudden enters Harlequin.

Hist! Hist! Watch him go, Leaping limb and pointing toe, Slender arms that float and flow, Curving wand above, below; Flying, gliding, changing feet; Onset fading in retreat. Not a shadow of sound there is But his motion's gentle hiss, Till one fluent arm and hand Suddenly circles, and the wand Taps a bough far overhead, "Crack," and then all noise is dead. For he halts, and a space Stands erect with upward face, Taut and tense to the white Message of the moon's light.

What is he thinking of, you ask; Caught you the eyes behind the mask? Whence did he come, where would he go? Answers but the resuming flow Of that swift continuous glide, Whispering from side to side, Silvered boughs, branches dim, All the world's a frame for him; All the trees standing around On the fascinated ground, See him swifter, swifter, sweep, Dazzling, till one wildest leap... Whisht! he kneels. And he listens. How his steady silver glistens!

He was listening; he was there; Flash! he went. To the air He a waiting ear had bent, Silent; but before he went Something somewhere else to seek, He moved his lips as though to speak.

And we wait, and in vain, For he will not come again. Earth, grass, wood, and air, As we stare, and we stare, Which that fierce life did hold, Tired, dim, void, cold.

WINTER NIGHTFALL

The old yellow stucco Of the time of the Regent Is flaking and peeling: The rows of square windows In the straight yellow building Are empty and still; And the dusty dark evergreens Guarding the wicket Are draped with wet cobwebs, And above this poor wilderness Toneless and sombre Is the flat of the hill.

They said that a colonel Who long ago died here Was the last one to live here: An old retired colonel, Some Fraser or Murray, I don't know his name; Death came here and summoned him, And the shells of him vanished Beyond all speculation; And silence resumed here, Silence and emptiness, And nobody came.

Was it wet when he lived here, Were the skies dun and hurrying, Was the rain so irresolute? Did he watch the night coming, Did he shiver at nightfall Before he was dead? Did the wind go so creepily, Chilly and puffing, With drops of cold rain in it? Was the hill's lifted shoulder So lowering and menacing, So dark and so dread?

Did he turn through his doorway And go to his study, And light many candles? And fold in the shutters, And heap up the fireplace To fight off the damps? And muse on his boyhood, And wonder if India Ever was real? And shut out the loneliness With pig-sticking memoirs And collections of stamps?

Perhaps. But he's gone now, He and his furniture Dispersed now for ever; And the last of his trophies, Antlers and photographs, Heaven knows where. And there's grass in his gateway, Grass on his footpath, Grass on his door-step; The garden's grown over, The well-chain is broken, The windows are bare.

And I leave him behind me, For the straggling, discoloured Rags of the daylight, And hills and stone walls And a rick long forgotten Of blackening hay: The road pale and sticky, And cart-ruts and nail marks, And wind-ruffled puddles, And the slop of my footsteps In this desolate country's Cadaverous clay.

A FAR PLACE

(_To K. Wigram._)

Sheltered, when the rain blew over the hills it was, Sunny all day when the days of summer were long, Beyond all rumour of labouring towns it was, But at dawn and evening its trees were noisy with song.

There were four elms on the southward lawn standing, Their great trunks evenly set in a square Of shadowed grass in spring pierced with crocuses, And their tops met high in the empty air.

Where the morning rose the grey church was below us, If we stood by the porch we saw on either hand The ground falling, the trees falling, and meadows, A river, hamlets and spires: a chequered land,

A wide country where cloud shadows went chasing Mile after mile, diminishing fast, until They met the far blue downs; but round the corner The western garden lay lonely under the hill.

* * * * *

And closed in the western garden, under the hillside, Where silence was and the rest of the world was gone, We saw and took the curving year's munificence: Changing from flower to flower the garden shone.

Early its walks were fringed with little rock-plants, Sprays and tufts of blossom, white, yellow, and blue, And all about were sprinkled stars of narcissus, And swathes of tulips all over the garden grew.