MISSING They told me nothing more: I bow my head
And squander life, between the quick and dead
Irresolute. Yet I again could be
Mistress of life, Queen of my destiny,
If I but knew—But now Remembrance plays
My being back through spring and summer days
We passed together; and I see him still
Swinging to meet me down the tardy hill.
That day the birds were new-inspired; a breeze
Bestirred, as it in wonderment, the trees;
The very clouds paused in their breathless race,
And shadows played upon his open face;
And I remember how his laughing eyes
Shone deep as pools in sea-blue ecstasies.
The meadow grasses rustled in the heat;
I even heard the silence of his feet
Down the slow hill—And now the dawning birth
Of beauty woke my senses to the earth
Unveiled in radiance. The sweeping skies—
Unseen unless reflected in his eyes—
Marshalled cloud companies with new delight;
Just for us two the spangled dome of night
Swung out the journeying moon.
But still I hold
Burnt in my memory in beaten gold
Days when the Spring stirred in each waking bush
A blue-flecked jay or tawny-feathered thrush,
And drowsy Winter, startled unawares
By arc-winged partridges or listening hares,
Fled guiltily. We heard the magpies call—
Those dominoes at Nature’s carnival—
And once a kingfisher, a lovely gleam
Snatched from a rainbow, darted to a stream.
The snowdrops bowed their heads for us to see
Shy peeping buds of hooded chastity;
And stalwart cowslips raised sun-glinted eyes
To those who stooped to pluck their sanctities.
Grass-nestled crocuses that scorn the wind
Speared upward proudly and besought mankind
To step with care. Near by, we searched a glade
Where violets brood in sweetness, half afraid
To wake their petals. On we roamed, and soon
The flower that shares her secret with the moon
In pale gold fellowship peeped out, among
A host of truculent daffodils that flung
Their trumpets down the wind.
Each breathless day
Broke to fulfil its promise, till the May
Had fledged her clustered blooms and swung her pride
In bowing sweetness to the country side.
Beauty was born again. But now the sound
Of heavy Autumn patters to the ground,
And loud discordant booms of thunder roll
Where that enchanted owner of my soul
Lies dead, or dying, or is living still:
At last the fibres of my struggling will
Falter exhausted, and my cowering brain
Cries out in anguish like a child in pain.
If he is dead, then I abide to prove
That brief fulfilment may be perfect love.
How should I grieve? His life inspired in me
A joy that shall outlive eternity,
Wrought out, complete, unsnared by time and age
My jewelled past my priceless heritage.
Shall misery usurp my realm of years
And leave me drowning in self-pitying tears,
A derelict in my own whirlpool swirled—
Me—whom Love crowned an empress of the world?
But sometimes ’ere the light
Glimmers dawn-pearled to splash the feet of night,
Ere red, sun-gilded riot floods the sky,
A whisper, swelling to a ringing cry,
Tells me he’s living still. No lash could sting
Like this persistent voice re-echoing
That mocks me as I stumble to my feet.
O, shall I find him wandering in the street?
But every beckoning corner drags me past
Strangers, new faces, each one like the last
Dull, cold, inscrutable. At times I caught
The look—the walk—the gesture that I sought;
And once with throbbing veins I found those eyes
That shone like pools in sea-blue ecstasies,
But looked beyond me—cold expressionless
In vacant wonder at my helplessness,
Then, haunted by that stare,
Beaten, I knew the bedrock of despair.
O, Thou who poised the world, are all my tears
Too light, too pitiful to reach Thine ears?
Locksmith of happiness, aloof, apart,
Am I too impotent to touch Thine heart?
Tell me he’s dead or dying; say he stands
Seeking for guidance the warm touch of hands,
Doomed in an instant to eternal night,
With only mind and memory for sight—
For I could cheer him.
But Lord quench this drought,
The unfathomable immensity of doubt,
Tell me he’s maimed or crippled, torn or blind,
Staring through eyes that show his wandering mind—
Tell me he’s rotting in a place abhorred,—
Not this, not this, O Lord!
TWO TRENCH POEMS I
THE STORM NIGHT Peal after peal of splitting thunder rolls
(Still roar the howling guns, and star-shells rise)
We perish, drowned in anger-blasted holes,
Give ear, O Lord! Our very manhood cries,
Shell-fodder yea—but spare our human souls
From fury-shaken skies!
II
RESURRECTION Five million men are dead. How can the worth
Of all the world redeem such waste as this?
And yet the spring is clamorous of birth,
And whispering in winter’s chrysalis
Glad tidings to each clod, each particle of earth.
So the year’s Easter triumphs. Shall we then
Mourn for the dead unduly, and forget
The resurrection in the hearts of men?
Even the poppy on the parapet
Shall blossom as before when Summer blows again.
GOMMECOURT I The wind, which heralded the blackening night,
Swirled in grey mists the sulphur-laden smoke.
From sleep, in sparkling instancy of light,
Crouched batteries like grumbling tigers woke
And stretched their iron symmetry; they hurled
Skyward with roar and boom each pregnant shell
Rumbling on tracks unseen. Such tyrants reign
The sullen masters of a mangled world,
Grim-mothered in a womb of furnaced hell,
Wrought, forged, and hammered for the work of pain.
For six long days the common slayers played,
Till, fitfully, there boomed a heavier king,
Who, couched in leaves and branches deftly laid,
And hid in dappled colour of the spring,
Vaunted tornadoes. Far from that covered lair,
Like hidden snares the sinuous trenches lay
Mid fields where nodding poppies show their pride.
The tall star-pointed streamers leap and flare,
And turn the night’s immensity to day;
Or rockets whistle in their upward ride.
II The moment comes when thrice-embittered fire
Proclaims the prelude to the great attack.
In ruined heaps, torn saps and tangled wire
And battered parapets loom gaunt and black:
The flashes fade, the steady rattle dies,
A breathless hush brings forth a troubled day,
And men of sinew, knit to charge and stand,
Rise up. But he of words and blinded eyes
Applauds the puppets of his ghastly play,
With easy rhetoric and ready hand.
Unlike those men who waited for the word,
Clean soldiers from a country of the sea;
These were no thong-lashed band or goaded herd
Tricked by the easy speech of tyranny.
All the long week they fought encircling Fate,
While chaos clutched the throat and shuddered past
As phantoms haunt a child, and softly creep
Round cots, so Death stood sentry at the Gate
And beckoned waiting terror, till at last
He vanished at the hurrying touch of sleep.
The beauty of the Earth seemed doubly sweet
With the stored sacraments the Summer yields—
Grass-sunken kine, and softly-hissing wheat,
Blue-misted flax, and drowsy poppy fields.
But with the vanished day Remembrance came
Vivid with dreams, and sweet with magic song,
Soft haunting echoes of a distant sea
As from another world. A belt of flame
Held the swift past, and made each moment long
With the tense horror of mortality.
That easy lordling of the Universe
Who plotted days that stain the path of time,
For him was happy memory a curse,
And Man a scapegoat for a royal crime.
In lagging moments dearly sacrificed
Men sweated blood before eternity:
In cheerful agony, with jest and mirth,
They shared the bitter solitude of Christ
In a new Garden of Gethsemane,
Gethsemane walled in by crested earth.
They won the greater battle, when each soul
Lay naked to the needless wreck of Mars;
Yet, splendid in perfection, faced the goal
Beyond the sweeping army of the stars.
Necessity foretold that they must die
Mangled and helpless, crippled, maimed and blind,
And cursed with all the sacrilege of war—
To force a nation to retract a lie,
To prove the unchartered honour of Mankind,
To show how strong the silent passions are.
III The daylight broke and brought the awaited cheer,
And suddenly the land is live with men.
In steady waves the infantry surge near;
The fire, a sweeping curtain, lifts again.
A battle-plane with humming engines swerves,
Gleams like a whirring dragon-fly, and dips,
Plunging cloud-shadowed in a breathless fall
To climb undaunted in far-reaching curves.
And, swaying in the clouds like anchored ships,
Swing grim balloons with eyes that fathom all.
But as the broad-winged battle-planes outsoared
The shell-rocked skies, blue fields of cotton flowers,
When bombs like bolts of thunder leapt and roared,
And mighty moments faded into hours,
The curtain fire redoubled yet again:
The grey defence reversed their swift defeat
And rallied strongly; whilst the attacking waves,
Snared in a trench and severed from the main,
Were driven fighting in a forced retreat
Across the land that gaped with shell-turned graves.
IV The troubled day sped on in weariness
Till Night drugged Carnage in a drunken swoon.
Jet-black, with spangling stars athwart her dress
And pale in the shafted amber of the moon,
She moved triumphant as a young-eyed queen
In silent dignity: her shadowed face
Scarce veiled by gossamer clouds, that scurrying ran
Breathless in speed the high star-lanes between.
She passed unheeding ’neath the dome of space,
And scorned the petty tragedy of Man.
And one looked upward, and in wonder saw
The vast star-soldiered army of the sky.
Unheard, the needless blasphemy of War
Shrank at that primal splendour sweeping by.
The moon’s gold-shadowed craters bathed the ground—
(Pale queen, she hunted in her pathless rise
Lithe blackened raiders that bomb-laden creep)
But now the earth-walled comfort wrapped him round,
And soon in lulled forgetfulness he lies
Where soldiers clasping arms like children sleep.
Sleep held him as a mother holds her child:
Sleep the soft calm that levels hopes and fears,
Now stilled his brain and scarfed his eyelids wild,
And sped the transient misery of tears,
Until the dawn’s sure prophets cleft the night
With opal shafts, and streamers tinged with flame,
Swift merging riot of the turbaned East.
Through rustling gesture loomed the advancing light;
Through fitful eddying winds, grey vanguards came
Rising in billowy mountains silver-fleeced.
And with the dawn came action, and again
The spiteful interplay of static war:
Dogged, with grim persistence Blood and Pain
Rose venomous to greet the Morning Star.
But others watched that lonely sentinel
Chase fleeting fellow-stars before the day;
Fresh men heard tides of thunder ebb and flow.
—Stumbling in sleep, scarce heeding shot or shell,
The men who fought at Gommecourt filed away:
The poppies nodded as they passed below.
They left the barren wilderness behind,
And Gommecourt gnarled and dauntless, till they came
To fields where trees unshattered took the wind,
Which tossed the crimson poppy heads to flame.
But one stood musing at a waking thought
That spurred his blood and dimmed his searching eyes—
The primal thought that stirs the seed to birth.
Here where the battling nations clashed and fought
The common grass still breathed of Paradise
And Love with silent lips was Lord of Earth.
B. E. F. 1916.
A VISION
REVELATION Can death give you such dignity, and pride
So beautiful it puts our grief to shame?
For now we stumble as we speak your name,
Yet you were just a boy before you died.
We question blankly, pondering heavy-eyed,
Can this be he we used to praise or blame
In careless moments, ere the trial came
When all the bravest hearts in anguish cried?
Then, humbled, we beheld our poor disguise,
False moods and manners clothed in empty speech
Which drowned the silence—till there came a day
That smote our vision to awakened eyes:
For God bent down to bring you to our reach,
But ere we touched you, you had gone away.
TELL ME, STRANGER Tell me, Stranger, is it true
There is magic happening,
Are all the dappled fields of Kew
Bowing to their Lord the Spring?
Are the bluebells chaste and mute
Dancing in each dale and hollow
Dew-sprinkled, with a glad salute
To omnipotent Apollo?
Tell me, do the feathered creatures
Flutter as in days of yore,
What are the “distinctive features”
Of the Swallow’s Flying Corps?
Here there is no magic, Stranger.
Save within our merry souls—
For some wanton god in anger
Punches earth with gaping holes.
Yet the stifled land is showing
Here and there a touch of grace,
And the marshalled clouds are blowing
Through the aerodromes of space.
Hate is strong, but Love is stronger,
And the world shall wake to birth
When the touch of man no longer
Stays the touch of God from Earth.
Tell me, Stranger, is it true
There is magic happening,
Are all the dappled fields of Kew
Bowing to their Lord the Spring?
B. E. F., April, 1917.
SPRING IN THE TRENCHES The racing clouds have borne her message down
And blown a thrilling rumour, from the far
Heart-centres of each crowded port and town,
And up the flowing arteries of War.
Life, life, green tales of corn in sprouting blades,
Of swallows crowding with sea-sprinkled wings
And ash-buds amber-gummed round close-furled green.
High blossom mantling murmurous orchard glades
In air a-tingle April-sweet and keen—
Ah, we have heard of wondrous happenings.
For now the magic carnivals begin
The lilac broods in honeyed secrecy,
And dappled lawns are changed: a Harlequin
Has brushed the tangled carpet silently.
We know how white narcissus fills the lake
With dancing shadows; how in open blue
A chestnut builds her clustered pyramids,
And down below anemones awake;
Long-hushed the violets open wide their lids
And all the dreamed-of fantasy comes true.
Glad tidings thrill the re-awakened earth
By daffodils and blue-bells heralded;
Spring with her van imperial comes forth
To herald Summer proudly canopied
Beneath the bowing leaves. Persistent Spring
Bestirs the seed enshrined in Winter’s store;
And even round the parapet a breath
Of far-flung prophecy is clamouring:
“Behold new life within the tomb of death
“Importunate and vivid as before.”
ON THE ROAD We halted, with the urgent Spring behind
Our straining teams, where all the land was black,
And huddled woods lay beaten, starkly blind:
Their mangled branches loomed athwart the track
Grotesque and terrible. Yet near the way,
A river, scatheless as the open sea,
Flowed like a breathing hope that cannot die
In desolation. Now, at setting day,
Moored water lilies, pale as argent sky,
Cling to the twilight fading silently.
Such is the tale of memory, ere night
Had deepened, and our weary convoy slept
Beside the way. Slow-rising points of light
Twinkled amid the spangled netting swept
Across the ebon desert; and a gleam
Pierced the cloud-woven pillows of the moon.
Now slumber freed me from the iron cage
That bound the snarling war; and, in a dream,
The panorama of a dawning age
Unrolled, a world slow-waking from a swoon.
Before my gaze a teeming city loomed
Gay with the bustling clamour of the street—
The very town an easy word had doomed
And cast in ashes at the trampling feet
Of mortal gods. Street, corner, square and place,
Seemed woken from a long and squalid trance—
I saw a nation growing like a flower;
A nation true and loyal to a race
That forged an army of clean-soldiered power
Wrought by the common chivalry of France.
Here was no arrogance of martial pride,
The fireside boast that sows the fatal seed,
For happiness had come from those who died
Stark of delusion and the deadly creed
Of false romance. I saw a world reborn—
The very battlefield was robed again
In lines of chequered land, and bordered round
With stretching roads and rills. The poppied corn
Held rubies set in gold, and far beyond
Lay a surf-ravelled sea and swarded plain.
I marvelled, till oblivion shadowed all,
Blurred in the dawning light of every day.
It was so true, I scarcely heard the call
To feed and water and to move away.
We stretched our limbs, and packed each heavy load;
Moved on, and left the weary night behind,
Through torn and withered trees that stared aghast;
Yet, through the veil that shrouded all the road
I saw new radiance in the land we passed,
And heard a sudden murmur in the wind.
B. E. F., 1917.
KEATS, BEFORE ACTION A little moment more—O, let me hear
(The thunder rolls above, and star-shells fall)
Those melodies unheard re-echo clear
Before the shuddering moment closes all.
They come—they come—they answer to my call,
That Grecian throng of graven ecstasies,
Hyperion aglow in blazing skies,
And Cortez with the wonder in his eyes.
In battle-wreaths of smoke they rise, and fall
Beyond—beyond recall.
Now all is silent, still, and magic-keen
(Yet thunder rolls above and star-shells fall)
And slowly pacing, rides a faery queen
Wild eyed and singing to a knight in thrall.
Enough—enough—let lightning whip me bare
And leave me naked in the howling air
My body broken here, and here, and here.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all,
The very all in all.
THE SOMME From Amiens to Abbeville
My swollen waters race,
And silver-veined by many a rill
Green hamlets thrive apace.
From Amiens to Abbeville
I labour at the listless mill,
And tempt the nodding daffodil
To blur my open face.
But south of Amiens I flow
Past dumb Peronne and Brie,
The peopled land I used to know
Now all belongs to me.
Yet phantom armies come and go,
And shadows hurry to and fro;
Again my seething battles grow
In murdered Picardy.
Behold the mother of a soil forlorn;
I suckled towns, and fed the forest land,
Behold my shattered villages and mourn
How should I understand?
Why are those huts o’erpatched like dappled kine,
What are those weary men in blue and brown,
And humming craft that search my sinuous line;
Why should my name re-echo with renown
Past every phantom town?
But still my lily-breasted waters shine,
And still I chant my shadowy ripples down.
From peace through war my waters flow,
To peace again at sea,
The peopled land I used to know
Now all belongs to me.
Though battling armies come and go,
I toil and spin, I reap and sow,
And poppy-mantled meadows blow
In murdered Picardy.
My eddies bear the clinging scent of lime
To sweeten clouds of plume-tossed meadowsweet;
My meadow grasses nestle with the thyme
And flowering rushes tower in the heat.
Low-brushing swifts and swallows splashed with white
O’er flash my laden mirrors slow and deep
That bear swift-merging canopies of sleep.
Until the growing light
Has chased marauding owls, and butterflies,
Born of blue-woven skies,
Flutter away like hare-bells spurred to flight.
But who are these? The powdered butterfly
Outshines that air leviathan that swings
In rigid curves adown the barren sky,
With cloudy satellites about her wings.
And I have seen
Dark horsemen ride with spears of tapered steel;
And bellowing guns beneath the far balloons.
And once a ponderous slug bedecked in green
Crept, in the waning moon’s
Still-darkening gloom, and at her giant heel
White-gleaming, ran a train of hooded cars....
I triumph, triumph, search my sinuous line
Amid the snarling impotence of wars.
Turn where you will. Look, there a signboard shows
The lair of guns; already round the sign
White trumpeting convolvuli entwine
Their clinging arms, across the placard blows
A quiet-breathing rose.
And still my lily-breasted waters shine
And loud my chanting grows:
From peace through war my waters flow
To peace again at sea,
The peopled land I used to know
Now all belongs to me.
Though battling armies come and go
I toil and spin, I reap and sow,
And poppy-mantled meadows blow
In murdered Picardy.
SOMME FLOWER TALK Said the Cornflower to the Pimpernel,
“O sudden scarlet eyes,
You never bloomed till ploughing shell
Laid bare earth’s sanctities!”
Then upward cried the Pimpernel:
“Blue head in deeper blue,
’Tis strange this former waste of Hell
Is Paradise anew.
“But who is Lord of Paradise
And Commandant; and who
Commands sky-faring butterflies
All camouflaged in blue?
“Are dandelion parachutes
His messages, and do
Those armoured beetles clamber roots
With news from Army Q?
“Above each water-lily ship
The feathered red caps pipe.
Because the pear has earned a pip,
The tiger-moth a stripe.
“The gorse artillery has eyes
We never knew before.
And lady bees can organise
The Honey Service Corps.
“Field-marshals rule the war behind
The guns, but Summer shields
Here in the clash of human kind
Her marshal of the fields.”
TO THE UTTERMOST FARTHING. “He too! He too!” The veteran paused, the sound
Of a light paper fluttering to the ground
Rustled the twilight peace. “He—too—is—dead—”
His wife, scarce faltering from the words she read,
Stared at the glowing sun, the while her eyes
Shone mistily in nameless agonies.
Five sons, and four were dead!
The clock ticked desolation to their ears
And silence gripped the moments as they passed
Too terrible, too passionless for tears.
At last,
Stronger than he, she curbed herself and smiled
And held him weeping like a weary child
Before the first immensity of pain.
Yet once again
She conjured scenes beyond the darkened cloud
That blurred the soul’s horizon, as aloud
She spoke his name, and whispered little things
More pregnant than the utterance of kings.
That night she moved,
Spurred by devotion for the man she loved,
Without a pause for sorrow, or a breath
To murmur at the closing walls of death;
Love-steeled and queenly every step she trod;
She climbed unfaltering, serenely browed,
Until she touched the very feet of God
Undaunted and unbowed.
And there in mystic awe
Slow-turning wheels of evolution spun
The poised and pulsing universe. She saw
All life and death synonymous, and birth
The dawn of human wonderment begun
(Birth of all birth) in other realms afar.
Below, ice pivoted revolved the earth,
A traveller’s joy it seemed, a mile-stone star,
Half-glowing, bathed in sun....
At dawn they met and found each other’s eyes,
Asked the same questions, sought the same replies:
Their last and youngest fought where harsh commands
Still goaded forward lashed and driven bands,
Where Vaux and Thiaumont twin sentinels
Loomed stalwartly. And still a howl of shells
Shattered the Verdun battlements in vain;
Still domineered that keen death-tutored brain
Behind an army deaf to angry scorn,
The boast forgotten and the mask outworn.
At length she spoke: “Go quickly now,” she said,
“Quick, the next hurrying hour may see him dead.
Find the Great Overlord and tell him all
Quick, for our boy may pass beyond recall
Meanwhile. He shall know happiness to come,
He, the last scion of our stricken home,
Shall blossom like a flower in early Spring
I say it, I who bore him. Time shall bring
The old primeval happiness to birth
If there be any justice upon earth.”
She ceased; it seemed her voice re-echoed still
As strung with hope he hurried on until
He reached the palace and besought for grace
To see his royal master face to face.
That night in sudden joy he urged away
Across Lorraine, for in his wallet lay
An order blazoned with the royal seals.
Hour after hour the car’s revolving wheels
Rushed dizzily towards the high command
That held his son in fee. Around, the land
Awoke in changeless Spring. Four steady hours
They travelled, till the bloom of passing flowers
Brought tidings of the dawn. Then to his ears
Rumbled a distant thunder, sudden fears
Urged onward faster. Now the country showed
First signs of war-flung tentacles, the road
Lay pitted here and there, a wounded tree
No longer framed its lordly symmetry.
And soon the land whereon all life was stilled
Became as Man had willed.
At last his journey ended. Long delayed
He sought his goal, now pressing on, now stayed,
Until outside the place of high command
The royal warrant burning in his hand
He knocked—was bidden enter—tense and mute
He faced the marshal with a grave salute
And showed the royal word.
The crowded room was silent, no man stirred—
A pause as long as death, then, dragged and slow,
A voice—“Your son was killed an hour ago.”
A clock importunately unconcerned
Repeated tick—tick—tick. His eyes discerned
A pen vague-sprawling, madly spiderwise.
Not a man glanced—Yet all the room had eyes:
Not a man spoke—Yet clamorous voices cried:
Stumbling, he walked outside.
IN THE MESS I sat alone although the mess
Was full, when—quick as tears
A song of naked happiness
Came singing in my ears.
I summoned strength to kill a cry
And mad desire to weep;
Then, glancing round me guiltily,
Found everyone asleep!
A TRENCH INCIDENT We waited, as the thundering curtain swept
Our sector, and torn shards of iron fell;
Dust from the parapet in showers leapt
Swirled up by bursting shell.
We waited, like a storm-bespattered ship
That flutters sail to free her grounded keel;
The tingling moments tightened every grip
On rifles lanced with steel.
We knew the man who led us. All could hear
His ringing voice re-echo loud and strong,
Born of that higher bravery when fear.
Is battled into song.
Then sudden fury lulled and far behind
Like angered beasts our batteries replied—
And suddenly he stumbled, dazed and blind.
He lay, but ere he died
He struggled for a while, then dimly smiled,
Wrapped in the comradeship of happy things,
Before he entered like a wondering child
The heritage of kings.
REALITY Below my room the noise and measured beat
Of marching men re-echoed loud and clear;
Now bobbing cavalry swung down the street;
Now mules and rumbling batteries drew near.
But all is dim—The rolling wagon-stream
To Amiens between the aspen trees,
The stables, billets, men and horses, seem
Dead mummers of forgotten fantasies.
Only my dreams are still aglow, a throng
Of scenes that crowded through a waiting mind
A myriad scenes: For I have swept along
To foam ashriek with gulls, and rowed behind
Brown oarsmen swinging to an ocean song
Where stately galleons bowed before the wind.
“WE POETS OF THE PROUD OLD LINEAGE” Apart we labour, and alone we climb
The barren heights; for we the singing throng
Whose lives were hallowed by impassioned song
Must die or prove unworthy of our rhyme.
Man after man—we know the price of wars
Who watched the mask of Night whilst others slept,
And spread our laughter far and wide, but kept
Our tears and terror privy to the stars.
0 magic gift omnipotent, to sing
And conjure Heaven from surrounding Hell.
Our lips and eyes are touched (for we have seen
Celestial weavers at the loom of Spring).
But O the iron bitterness and keen
Of voices ever clamouring farewell!
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