MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. BRONWEN OF THE FLOWERS. B RONWEN gathered |
  MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. BRONWEN OF THE FLOWERS. B RONWEN gathered wild-flowers Up-and-down the lane; Her gathering touch upon them Sweeter was than rain. Now a blossom overblown, Now a bud begun-- Her eye that lightened on them Was quicker than the sun. One by one she named them, Oh, she did express In her pretty namings All their prettiness: Some were fit for virgins, Some for merry dames, And the love with which she named them Was lovelier than their names. JESSICA DANCES. W HEN Joy and Molly on the lawn Danced bare of foot like spirits of dawn Jessica watched in wonderment Until delight would not be pent, And shoe and sock she cast in mirth And felt her naked toes touch earth. Swiftly the fresh green joy shot in Through the fresh young rosy skin, And in a golden glee the child Went dancing innocently-wild Up and down and round and round Like daisies covering the ground, Called sunward by the age-long spell No ages can destroy Of youth that never sighed or sinned,-- While elfin Molly and fairy Joy Danced on like lilies in a dell Or harebells in the wind. SYLVIA SINGS. S YLVIA said that day, "I'll sing if you will play." We could deny not anything, Not even deny to hear her sing Who like a little spirit lay Uncertain whether to flutter its wing, To go or stay. So though it broke our hearts for pity, With hidden face one went To the tinkling instrument, And one with bended head Stayed by the bed, While the small voice sang over and over its ditty:-- " ' Manners make ladies, but not such as these, Manners make ladies, but not such as these. ' Now again, please! ' Manners make ladies-- But not such as these. ' " She breathed it long and long And ah, so low, Her tiny meaningless song, For she was pleased to please us so-- But what we said Sitting beside her bed I do not know, There were so many tears to keep unshed. MYFANWY AMONG THE LEAVES. D YING leaf and dead leaf, Yellow leaf and red leaf And white-backed beam, Lay along the woodland road As quiet as a dream. Summer was over, The year had lost her lover, Spent with her grief All along the woodland road Leaf fell on leaf. Then came a shuffling, Such a happy ruffling Of the dried sweet Surf of leaves upon the road Round a baby's feet. Year-old leaf ran after Three-year-old laughter, Danced through the air As she caught them from the road And flung them anywhere. Old leaf and cold leaf, Brown leaf and gold leaf And white-backed beam, Followed down the woodland road Myfanwy in a dream. FOR JOAN. I SHALL love no other child, Joan, as I love you; The second life our children build Remains for you to do. You would have been out-loved in one That never will be born, And the love that should my flower have grown Grows nothing but my thorn. You for that unborn other's sake My deepest heart do clutch, But sometimes--sometimes all you take Hurts, for her sake, too much.
A CHILD’S FEAR. “COME to your poor old Mother,” she said
Smiling, and gathered to her breast
With her good hands her baby’s head;
But the child’s eyes looked out oppressed.
“Not old—not old—it isn’t true!
Everyone may be old but you.”
Old?—Old, you see, is much too near
The half-imagined thing that takes
Our Mothers where they do not hear
Even when their baby wakes
And cries for comfort in the gloom—
Babies to cry, and Mothers not come!
Within the safe arms round her curled,
“Oh,” she half sobbed, “I wish you’d be
The youngest person in the world—
How old are you? not old?” begged she,
And caught a little panting breath,
Then lay quite still and thought of death.
A CHRISTENING. THIS day we are met to set a name
On thy mysterious dust and flame,
That in the years to follow, when
Thy feet shall walk the ways of men,
Thou mayst according to his plan
Be known thereby to man.
O being undiscoverable!
Thy name thyself will never spell.
Whate’er thou art, whate’er wilt be,
Man’s tongue will never utter thee;
Towering upon thy inmost throne
Thou shalt of none be known.
We watch in wonder how thy brow
Grows strange and silent in sleep, and how
Even more silent and more strange
Thy waking is that brings no change
When thy dim dreams of slumber press
To dimmer dreamlessness.
But looking with a love that seems
To pierce thy undiscovered dreams,
Within thy small unfolded being
Some dream of our own making seeing,
“All that she feels and dreams,” we say,
“We too will know one day.”
Ah, even when human speech has come
To make thy mouth no longer dumb,
When quickened thought and sympathy
Like angels look from either eye,
Thyself will still be hidden as deep
As now, awake, asleep.
We must our knowledge of thee still
By nothing save by love fulfil,
And with the dreamings of the heart
Still guess at the dream of what thou art
Which only of thee and God is known,
Child whom this day names Joan.
THE SINGER. I HAD a holy hour last night.
The room her presence made so pure
Was shaded in uncertain light,
But oh, the light it held was sure.
There while about her golden head
The shadows and the low light played,
She eagerly and softly read
The shining songs her soul had made.
Flower and shell and sand and sea,
And flight of gulls against the sun,
And many a friend, and many a tree,
And youth begun and age nigh-done,
Death and life, and life and death,
Divinely in her vision smiled;
She spoke them with the silver breath
Half of angel, half of child.
Upon her bed I lay at rest,
But once when kneeling by her chair
I leaned my head beside her breast
And heard the wordless singing there.
THE GIRL WITH THE BALL. SHE ran with her ball in her light dress floating and free, Tossing it, tossing it up in the evening light, She ran with her ball at the edge of the outgoing sea On sand which the dropping sun turned bright.
Over the sea hung birds more white than the skin
Of the last few swimmers who took the waves with their breasts;
The birds dipped straight as her ball when a silver fin
Glanced in the shallow crests.
She ran so swift, and suddenly stopped as swift
To look at a shell, or splash up a pool in rain;
Wind blew, and she in the wind began to drift
Foam-like, and suddenly ran again.
Children who played on the shore in the last of the day
Paused and watched in wonder her rise and fall
Like elders watching a child: she was younger than they
As she ran by the sea with her ball.
Her hair was loose and she had no shoes on her feet,
And her image ran under her feet on the wet gold shore,
She threw up her ball and she caught it, and once laughed sweet
As though the world had never heard laughter before.
THE STORY-TELLER. OVER the hearth on which we burned
Brown beech-nuts, lichen-twigs, and cones,
I sat beside her while she turned
A forkÈd wand within the pyre,
Until two little spirts of fire
Sprang from the hazel’s withered bones.
Then, with her eyes upon her branch
Pointed with ruddy nuts of flame,
Like one who has no power to staunch
The heart’s-blood flowing from his side,
She through her mouth undammed a tide
Of legends that I could not name:—
Strange villages where damsels fished
For lovers in a rainbow sea
By night: a crazy man who wished
To act like God, and very soon
Out-freaked the fools that raked the moon:
Gold underneath an apple-tree
Discovered by a thrice-dreamed dream:
Half-tales, half-ballads—until the room
Shook in its shadows with a stream
Of pedlars, witches, cats in crowns,
Denizens of enchanted towns,
And kings confined in forests of gloom.
Her voice went up and down like wind
That wanders lost among the eaves;
The flamelets on her hazel thinned
And dwindled into smouldering eyes;
Her voice failed like the wind that dies,
She threw a handful of black leaves
On the bright litter of the hearth
And thrust her hazel’s double spark
Within. The smell of smoking earth
Rose from the stones where ceased to burn
The fiery lines of cone and fern
And berry: the room was dumb and dark.
THE REFLECTION. SHE had no life except to be what men
Required of her to be.
They came for sympathy, and came again
For sympathy.
She never knew the way her heart to spare
When they were hurt or worn,
Whatever one may for another bear
By her was borne.
They said, you give us of yourself so much!
She heard them with a smile,
Knowing she only gave to such and such
Themselves awhile.
Their interests, their frets, their loneliness,
Their sorrows and despairs,
She wore for them—they saw her in no dress
That was not theirs.
She learned to understand the solitudes
When she by none was sought;
Men of themselves grow sick, and in those moods
Needed her not,
Getting relief of others who gave things
By their own purpose lit;
If she too had some freshness in her springs,
None wanted it.
She grew accustomed to be quietly shut
Away, was used to see
Love limping dutifully in a rut
That once ran free;
She knew the signs when friends began to cast
What they had asked her for—
Some asked for much, some little, all at last
Asked nothing more.
And when she died they sorrowed, it is true,
But not for long, because
They had seen some pale reflection that she threw,
Not what she was.
SOLITARY. HE moved his fellow-men among
And changed with them some forms of speech.
His heart was separate from his tongue,
They would not hear his heart beseech.
Their needs were very like his own,
Quivering in bodies numb and dazed;
They smiled and talked and felt alone.—
Did not their hearts look on amazed?
SPRING-DAWN. HEAVEN, the Spring’s coming true again!
Easterly over the sky’s spring-blue again
Passes a pearly flight of cloud—
Somewhere a dovecote is empty, surely!
And all of its birds have flown in a brood
Over the pure blue purely!
Westerly owl-grey gatherings
Linger a little yet:
Soon, owls! soon you will shrink
Out of the sun, I think,
Who even now turns silver-wet
The last of your ghostly gatherings.
Back to your windy barns again,
To your forsaken granaries,
Haunting, hating breed of the Winter!
For the grass in the mould begins to teem,
By every gate where the cuckoo flies
Primrose and fragile wind-flower enter,
And, lovelier truth than any dream,
Blue light is mirrored in ancient tarns again!
THE WORLD’S AMAZING BEAUTY. THE world’s amazing beauty would make us cry
Aloud; but something in it strikes us dumb.
Beech-forests drenched in sunny floods
Where shaking rays and shadows hum,
The unrepeated aspects of the sky,
Clouds in their lightest and their wildest moods,
Bare shapes of hills, June grass in flower,
The sea in every hour,
Slopes that one January morning flow
Unbrokenly with snow,
Peaks piercing heaven with motions sharp and harsh,
Slow-moving flats, grey reed and silver marsh,
A flock of swans in flight
Or solitary heron flapping home,
Orchards of pear and cherry turning white,
Low apple-trees with rosy-budded boughs,
Streams where young willows drink and cows,
Earth’s rich ploughed loam
Thinking darkly forward to her sheaves,
Water in Autumn spotted with yellow leaves,
Light running overland,
Gulls standing still above their images
On strips of shining sand
While evening in a haze of green
Half-hides
The calm receding tides—
What in the beauty we have seen in these
Keeps us still silent? something we have not seen?
THE WHITE BLACKBIRDS. AMONG the stripped and sooty twigs of the wild cherry tree Sometimes they flit and swing as though two blossoms of the Spring Had quickened on these bleak October branches suddenly.
They are like fairy birds flown down from skies which no one knows,
Their pointed yellow bills are bright as April daffodils,
Their plumy whiteness heavenly as January snows.
Loveliest guests that choose our garden-plot for loitering!
Oh, what a sudden flower of joy is set upon the hour
When in their cherry cages two white blackbirds sit and swing.
NIGHTINGALES. THE nightingales around our house
Among the lovely orchard boughs:
Where the young apple-dawn too soon
Turns whiter than the daylit moon,
And ’mid its shadowy silver bowers
The quince is flushed with heavenly flowers
That opening poise as though for flight:
The nightingales sing day and night,
With piercing, long, insistent calling,
And chuckle of sweet waters falling,
And unimaginable trill
That makes my heart beat and stand still.
Oh, even so, by night and day
When first the earth broke into May
Ere men shut thunder up in shells,
They came and sang their miracles;
And so, in myriad Mays to come,
When all those damnÈd storms are dumb
And only heaven’s lightning crowns
Her clouds of thunder on the Downs,
They still will come, by night and day
To sing the radiant Spring away,
Till men lie crumbled with their towns
And earth no more breaks into May.
NIGHT-PIECE. NOW independent, beautiful and proud,
Out of the vanishing body of a cloud
Like its arisen soul the full moon swims
Over the sea, into whose distant brims
Has flowed the last of the light. I am alone.
Even the diving gannet now is flown
From these unpeopled sands. A mist lies cold
Upon the muffled boundaries of the world.
The lovely earth whose silence is so deep
Is folded up in night, but not in sleep.
BEFORE WINTER. THE day is gone of the sun and the swallow
And the glory on the trees:
Before the gale the length of the pave
The dry old corpse of a plane-leaf flees,
And its step is harsh and hollow
As it chatters into its grave.
The shivering dawn now hides and slouches
Long in the cover of dark,
Till up the sky, like a murderer pale,
He drags at last a dull red mark,
And the hound of the grey wind crouches
And pants on his rusty trail.
ON THE SNOW. I KNEW no woman, child, or man
Had been before my steps to-day.
By Dippel Woods the snow-lanes ran
Soft and uncrushed above their clay;
But little starry feet had traced
Their passages as though in words,
And all those lanes of snow were laced
With runnings of departed birds.
THREE MILES TO PENN. TO-DAY I walked three miles to Penn
With an uneasy mind.
The sun shone like a frozen eye,
A light that had gone blind,
The glassy air between the sky
And earth was frozen wind—
All motion and all light again
Were closed within a rind,
As I by wood and field to Penn
Took trouble in my mind.
The slopes of cloud in heaven that lay,
Unpeopled hills grown old,
Had no more movement than the land
Locked in a flowing mould;
The sheep like mounds of cloudy sand
Stood soundless in the cold;
There was no stir on all the way
Save what my heart did hold,
So quiet earth and heaven lay,
So quiet and so old.
WHEN YOU SAY. WHEN you say, I still am young,
You are young no more;
When, I’m old, is on your tongue,
Age is still in store.
Youth and age will never grope
To say what they may be:
One only knows it has a hope,
And one a certainty.
THE OUTLET. GRIEF struck me. I so shook in heart and wit
I thought I must speak of it or die of it.
A certain friend I had with strength to lend,
When mine was spent I went to find my friend,
Who, rising up with eyes wild for relief,
Hung on my neck and spoke to me of grief.
I raked the ashes of my burned-out strength
And found one coal to warm her with at length.
I sat with her till I was icy cold.
At last I went away, my grief untold.
TWO CHORUSES FROM “MERLIN IN BROCELIANDE.” I. LIFE, what art thou? Springing water art
thou: When the waters flash and spring,
life, start thou!
When the spirit burns within the chapels
The stones are quick with faith.
When the branch hangs out its reddened apples
The tree is strong with breath;
When love’s womb conceives the stirring blossom
The heart is full of power;
When youth leaps in the darkness of the bosom
The body is in flower.
When the fiery spirit deserts the chapels,
Bury religion’s corse;
When the branch no more puts forth its apples,
Fell the tree at the source;
When love feeds itself and not its blossom
The heart’s core withereth;
When youth makes no movement in the bosom
The body is signed to death.
Life, what art thou? A golden fountain art thou:
When the fountain springs not, life, depart thou!
II. First Voices. SAW ye the stars last night, all still,
Remote, and bitter-cold,
Who were too passionless to thrill,
Being so wise and old?
Second Voices. O SAW ye not one star alight,
A leap of silver fire,
Did ye not see it sear the night
And die of its own desire?
First Voices. SAW ye the ancient stars look on
Locked in a chilly dream
Which banished the awakened one
Beyond their frozen scheme?
Second Voices. O SAW ye not the ashen band
Fade in the morning-gold,
Who long had ceased to understand,
Being so bitter-old?
All the Voices. YE petrified on heavenly thrones,
Was there not chaos once?
Ye did not keep your ordered zones
When ye were raging suns!
Once flaming rivers were your breath
And the wild hairs of your brow—
Once ye were life, once ye were death!
Ye are not either now.
PEACE. I.
NOW THAT YOU TOO NOW that you too must shortly go the way
Which in these bloodshot years uncounted men
Have gone in vanishing armies day by day,
And in their numbers will not come again:
I must not strain the moments of our meeting
Striving each look, each accent, not to miss,
Or question of our parting and our greeting,
Is this the last of all? is this—or this?
Last sight of all it may be with these eyes,
Last touch, last hearing, since eyes, hands, and ears,
Even serving love, are our mortalities,
And cling to what they own in mortal fears:—
But oh, let end what will, I hold you fast
By immortal love, which has no first or last.
B. H. BLACKWELL, OXFORD.
THIS SECOND OF THE INITIATES SERIES OF
POETRY BY PROVED HANDS, WAS PRINTED
IN OXFORD AT THE VINCENT WORKS,
AND FINISHED IN APRIL, MCMXVIII.
PUBLISHED BY B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD
STREET, OXFORD, AND SOLD IN AMERICA
BY LONGMANS, GREEN & CO., NEW YORK.
INITIATES A SERIES OF POETRY BY PROVED HANDS UNIFORM VOLUMES IN DOLPHIN OLD STYLE TYPE ART BOARDS, THREE SHILLINGS NET. NOW READY | I. | IN THE VALLEY OF VISION BY GEOFFREY FABER, AUTHOR OF “INTERFLOW.” | | II. | SONNETS AND POEMS BY ELEANOR FARJEON, AUTHOR OF “NURSERY RHYMES OF LONDON TOWN.” | | IN PREPARATION | | III. | THE DEFEAT OF YOUTH, AND OTHER POEMS BY ALDOUS HUXLEY, AUTHOR OF “THE BURNING WHEEL. | | IV. | SONGS FOR SALE AN ANTHOLOGY OF VERSE, EDITED BY E. B. C. JONES FROM BOOKS ISSUED RECENTLY BY B. H. BLACKWELL. | | V. | CLOWNS’ HOUSES BY EDITH SITWELL, EDITOR OF “WHEELS.” | THE SHELDONIAN SERIES OF REPRINTS AND RENDERINGS OF MASTERPIECES IN ALL LANGUAGES EDITED BY REGINALD HEWITT, M. A. MEDIUM 16MO, IN DOLPHIN OLD STYLE TYPE, RED AND BLACK, BOARDS, TWO SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE NET. FIRST THREE BOOKS SONGS AND SAYINGS OF WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE, MINNESAENGER ENGLISHED BY FRANK BETTS. THE FUNERAL ORATION OF PERICLES. ENGLISHED BY THOMAS HOBBES OF MALMESBURY. BALLADES OF FRANCOIS VILLON INTERPRETED INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY PAUL HOOKHAM. OXFORD B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD ST.
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