Chapter I: Front Matter

“ADVENTURERS ALL” SERIES
No. XXVII.

LONDON SONNETS

_A SERIES OF YOUNG POETS
UNKNOWN
TO FAME._

Come my friends.... ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. It may
be that the gulfs will wash us down.... It may be we shall touch
the happy isles. Yet our purpose holds ... to sail beyond the
sunset.
_Ulysses_]

LONDON SONNETS

BY

HUMBERT WOLFE

OXFORD BASIL BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET, 1920]

DEDICATION.

These were the first anemones--
God only in his heaven sees
How moving on their small green feet
They blossomed in a London street,
From a cool valley, as I guess,
Beneath a hill in Lyonesse.

CONTENTS.

Page

Dedication 4

LONDON PSEUDO-SONNETS:
The Old Clothes Dealer 9
Coves at Hampton Court 10
One Man Returns 11
The Bun-Shop 12
The Fried Fish-Shop 13
The Streets Behind the Tottenham Court Road 14
The Yorkshire Grey 15
Wardour Street 16
The Suburbs 17
The Last London Sonnet 18

OTHER VERSE:
“Sometimes when I Think of Love” 21
Old 26
The Song of the Gambucinos 28
February 14 29
Pierrot 30
The Dead Man in the Pool 32
Dead Lover 35
The Gods of the Copy-Book Headings 36
Wheels 1919 38
The Well 41
Judas 43
The Night 44

OTHER SONNETS:
Three Sonnets of Love 49
The Reply 52
God Gave us Bodies 53
Ronsard and Hélène 54
The Drift of the Lute 55
Love and Beauty 56

WAR VERSE:
V. D. F. 59
England 60
The Moon in Flanders 61
The Soldier Speaks 62
Flowers at Hampton Court 63

TO J.

LONDON PSEUDO-SONNETS.

Some of these verses have appeared in _The Saturday Review_, _The Spectator_, _The Westminster Gazette_, and are republished by the courtesy of the editors of these journals.

THE OLD CLOTHES DEALER.

It’s not my fault, now is it? I’m a Jew.
I’d a been born a Christian quick enough
If only so I could have sold my stuff
Double the price, and not be called a screw.
There’s half-day Saturday at Synagogue,
And when Atonement comes a whole day lost.
O, I don’t grumble; still one counts the cost
When on the top I’m treated like a dog.
And, though a Jew should’nt by rights complain
Bein’ the chosen, can’t a man have dreams?
Clothes’ dealing’s not the desert, still it seems
We all of us are wandering again.
I often think when the Shemah begins
“O God o’ Jacob ain’t we paid our sins?”

COVES AT HAMPTON COURT.

You go by motor-bus from Hammersmith
And come back loud and cheerful after dark
Adorned with twigs you’ve plucked in Bushey Park,
Eating the sandwiches you started with.
And you don’t care, why should you? when you’re brought
Into the grimy streets out of the green,
That, if you’d had the luck, you might have been
The sort of cove who lives at Hampton Court.

You’ve got the murders and the betting news,
And slums to bake in and the picture shows.
Why should you care if somewhere a red rose
Burns all night through, and the great avenues
Are lit as though with candles. What’s the odds?
London’s for you; the summer’s for the gods.

ONE MAN RETURNS.

He wanted me to tear me ’ands to bits
Along o’ the box-makers, ’stead of which
I took and bought a basket, struck a pitch
To sell me flowers by the Hotel Ritz.
I like ’is cheek. It isn’t ’im wot sits
Working in darkness till your fingers itch
And ’arf your side is broken with a stitch--
’Im swanking in ’is blessed epaulittes!
Nor I don’t care, not what you might say care
If ’e’s gone orf. Not that I’d reely mind
If, ’earing that I’d got a bit to spare,
He come back sudden. I should act refined,
Pin ’im ’is flower in with me ’and quite steady
And then say proud-like, “Why if it ain’t Freddy.”

THE BUN-SHOP.

O damn those marble tables: makes me larf
To think I’ve finished with them. I believe
If you rubbed hard on each one with your sleeve,
You’d find cut on them some gel’s epitaph.
They look like tombstones, don’t they? in a row
Quietly waiting in a mason’s yard.
Seein’ them there cruel and white and hard
One might ha’ guessed, I think, how things would go.
But we don’t heed no warning, gels like me,
And so I stayed, and now they’ve got my name
Carved deep, with something written about shame
For the next gel (when her turn comes) to see.
One comfort though, if God damns us who fell
He can’t find worse to ’urt us, not in ’Ell.

THE FRIED FISH-SHOP.

The upper clawses they don’t like the smell
Nor they don’t need to. They can pay for food,
But we who sometimes cawn’t, it does us good.
Lord, what a life to ’ave fried fish to sell!
Warm all day long and nuthin’ much to do
And always a hot bit if you’re inclined.
Shut all day Sundays and if you’ve a mind
Always go out and pitch into a Jew.
But wanting won’t mend ’oles up in your socks
Nor cure that ’ungry feeling when you stands
Clappin’ your stummick with your empty ’ands
And thinking gently of a wooden box
Where they will lay you at the parish charge
Straight if you’re small and doubled if you’re large.

THE STREETS BEHIND THE TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD.

The quiet folk who live in Kensington
Mothers of pleasant girls and worthy wives
Living at ease their comfortable lives
Don’t think what roots their homes are built upon,
Don’t think, or wouldn’t listen if you shewed
That beyond cure by love or change by hate
Like hooded lepers at each corner wait,
The streets behind the Tottenham Court Road.
Row upon row the phantom houses stain
The sweetness of the air and not a day
Dies, but some woman’s child turns down that way
Along those streets and is not seen again.
And only God can in his mercy say
Which is more cruel, Kensington or they.

THE YORKSHIRE GREY.

The Yorkshire Grey like any other pub,
Quietly blazes till the final shout
“Time’s-up” sends the companions tumbling out,
Giving their lips a last reluctant rub.
And if you’re passing by on any day
You’ll hear a woman with a barrel organ,
Sing in a high cracked voice what sounds like “Morgen,
Morgen kommt nie und heute is mir weh,”
And every day whether its rain or shine
She holds an old umbrella with a handle
Of curiously carved silver. Whether scandal
Or tragedy, its no affair of mine.
Why should I care then when some drunken feller
Sends her to blazes, her and her umbrella.

WARDOUR STREET.

There’s a small cafe off the Avenue
Where Alphonse, that old sinner, used to fix
A five-course dinner up at one and six,
And trust to luck and youth to pull him through.
I can’t remember much about the wine
Except that it was ninepence for the quart
Called claret and was nothing of the sort,
Cheap like the rest and like the rest divine.
But Alphonse, I suppose, is long since sped
And madame’s knitting needles rusted through
And even Marguerite, like us she flew
To wait on, waited on by death instead.
Well Alphonse, well Madame, well Marguerite
They’ve no more use for us in Wardour Street.

THE SUBURBS.

Because they are so many and the same,
The little houses row on weary row;
Because they are so loveless and so lame
It were a bitter thing to tell them so.
And ill to laugh at those who hither came
Not without hope and not without a glow,
And who, perchance, by sorrow struck or shame
Not without tears look back before they go.

Here is no place for laughter nor for blame,
And not for tears, since none shall ever know
What here is done and suffered, nor proclaim
The end to which these myriad spirits grow.
He understands, whose heart remembereth
That here is all the tale of life and death.

THE LAST LONDON SONNET.

All roads in London lead the one last way,
Like little streams that find a flowing river
They find the one great road that runs for ever,
Yet has no London name. They know it, they
Who when the lamps in Oxford Street are lighted
And star-strewn Thames through all his bridges moving,
Velvet assumes, see not for all their loving
These things they loved, hear not, as uninvited,
To London revel calling Piccadilly.
They have gone over to the bitter stranger
Light-foot and heavy, hug-the-hearth and ranger
Our streets desert. And under rose and lily
(Even through Kew were unto lilac setting)
Sleeping they pass forgotten and forgetting.

OTHER VERSE.

“SOMETIMES WHEN I THINK OF LOVE.”

I.

Sometimes when I think of love
I think of Mimi singing in Boheme,
Just as the tune across the footlights came
When we were young, my dear, at Covent Garden!
Poor music, but before the senses harden
Puccini’s made for boys and girls to wear
Spite of sham passion and a poitrinaire.
For if they looked and didn’t find the key
At least they found the hearts of you and me.
That sort of love age thinks of with a smile
How innocent it was of truth and guile,
How young perhaps and yet how half-divine
And how imperishably yours and mine.
You will not wonder nor will you reprove
My thoughts of Mimi when I think of love.

II.

Sometimes when I think of love
I see a boat upon a river,
And the rushes suddenly shiver,
Because of a perilous foot that treads
The reeds and the flowers into their beds.
Because of a music that shakes and begins
A different music and conscious of sins
A tune was old at the birth of the river
A tune is asleep in the blood for ever
Asleep in the blood and loving and hating
The time and the hour for which it is waiting.
Puccini yields to a sob in the throat
A hand round the heart as note answers note
With the music that wrenches and melts and grips
The hands hot on hands, the lips close on lips
Cruelly volleying clearer and stronger
Till we are a boy and a girl no longer.
And we struggle in vain as long as we can
Hating and loving and welcoming Pan,
And you are a woman and I am a man.
And you will not wonder and cannot reprove
If I hear Pan’s pipes when I think of love.