Chapter L: A. G. Strong (wadham)

FROST 55
VERA VENVSTAS 55
A BABY 56
FROM THE GREEK 56
A DEVON RHYME 56
THE BIRD MAN 57
CHRISTOPHER MARLYE 58

_EDMUND BLUNDEN_

(_QUEEN’S_)

SHEET LIGHTNING

WHEN on the green the rag-tag game had stopt,
And red the lights through alehouse curtains glowed,
The clambering brake drove out and took the road.
Then on the stern moors all the babble dropt
Among those merry men, who felt the dew
Sweet to the soul and saw the southern blue
Thronged with heat lightning leagues and leagues abroad,
Working and whickering; snake-like; winged and clawed;
Or like old carp lazily rising and shouldering,
Long the slate cloud flank shook with the death-white smouldering;
Yet not a voice.

The night drooped oven-hot;
Then where the turnpike pierced the black wood plot,
Tongues wagged again and each man felt the grim
Destiny of the hour speaking through him:
And then tales came of dwarfs on Starling Hill,
And those young swimmers drowned at the roller mill,
Where on the drowsiest noon the undertow
Famishing for life boiled like a pot below:
And how two higglers at the "Walnut Tree"
Had curst the Lord in thunderstorm and He
Had struck them into soot with lightning then--
It left the pitchers whole, it killed the men.
Many a lad and many a lass was named
Who once stept bold and proud--but death had tamed
Their revel on the eve of May: cut short
The primrosing and promise of good sport,
Shut up the score book, laid the ribbands by.

Such bodings mustered from the fevered sky;
But now the spring well through the honeycomb
Of scored stone rumbling tokened them near home,
The whip lash clacked, the jog-trot sharpened, all
Sang "Farmer’s Boy" as loud as they could bawl,
Till at the "Walnut Tree" the homeward brake
Stopt for hoarse ribaldry to brag and slake.

The weary wildfire faded from the dark
While this one damned the parson, that the clerk;
And anger’s balefire forked from the unbared blade
At word of notches missed or stakes not paid:
While Joe the driver stooped with oath to find
A young jack rabbit in the roadway, blind
Or dazzled by the lamps, as stiff as steel
With fear. Joe beat its brain out on the wheel.

FOREFATHERS

HERE they went with smock and crook,
Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade,
Here they mudded out the brook
And here their hatchet cleared the glade:
Harvest-supper woke their wit,
Huntsman’s moon their wooings lit.

From this church they led their brides;
From this church themselves were led
Shoulder-high; on these waysides
Sat to take their beer and bread:
Names are gone--what men they were
These their cottages declare.

Names are vanished, save the few
In the old brown Bible scrawled,
These were men of pith and thew,
Whom the city never called;
Scarce could read or hold a quill:
Built the barn, the forge, the mill.

On the green they watched their sons
Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
As my father once watched me;
While the bat and beetle flew
On the warm air webbed with dew.

Unrecorded, unrenowned,
Men from whom my ways begin,
Here I know you by your ground,
But I know you not within--
All is mist, and there survives
Not one moment of your lives.

Like the bee that now is blown
Honey-heavy on my hand
From the toppling tansy-throne
In the green tempestuous land,--
I’m a-Maying now, nor know
Who made honey long ago.

_G. H. BONNER_

(_MAGDALEN_)

SONNET

QUIETLY the old men die, in carven chairs
Nodding to silence by the extinguished hearth;
Their days are as a treasure nothing worth,
For all their joy is stolen by the years.
The striving and the fierce delights and fears
Of youth trouble them not; for them the earth
Is dead; in their cold hearts naught comes to birth
Save ghosts: they are too old even for tears.

As to the breast of some slow moving stream,
Close girt with sentinel trees on either side,
The sear leaves flutter down and silently
Glide onward on its dark November dream,
So peacefully upon the quiet tide
They steal out to the still moon-silvered sea.

_VERA M. BRITTAIN_

(_SOMERVILLE_)

BOAR’S HILL, OCTOBER, 1919

TALL slender beech-trees, whispering, touched with fire,
Swaying at even beneath a desolate sky;
Smouldering embers aflame where the clouds hurry by
To the wind’s desire.

Dark sombre woodlands, rain-drenched by the scattering shower,
Spindle that quivers and drops its dim berries to earth--
Mourning, perhaps, as I mourn here alone for the dearth
Of a happier hour.

Can you still see them, who always delighted to roam
Over the Hill where so often together we trod
When winds of wild autumn strewed summer’s dead leaves on the sod,
Ere your steps turned home?

THE LAMENT OF THE DEMOBILIZED

"FOUR years," some say consolingly. "Oh well,
What’s that? You’re young. And then it must have been
A very fine experience for you!"
And they forget
How others stayed behind, and just got on--
Got on the better since we were away.
And we came home and found
They had achieved, and men revered their names,
But never mentioned ours;
And no one talked heroics now, and we
Must just go back, and start again once more.
"You threw four years into the melting-pot--
Did you indeed!" these others cry. "Oh well,
The more fool you!"
And we’re beginning to agree with them.

DAPHNE

SUNRISE and spring, and the river agleam in the morning,
Life at its freshest, like flowers in the dawn-dew of May,
Hope, and Love’s dreams the dim hills of the future adorning,
Youth of the world, just awake to the glory of day--

Is she not part of them, golden and fair and undaunted,
Glad with the triumph of runners ahead in the race,
Free as a child by no shadows or memories haunted,
Challenging Death to his solemn and pitiful face?

Sunset and dusk, and the stars of a mellow September,
Sombre grey shadows, like Sleep stealing over the grass,
Autumn leaves blown through the chill empty lanes of November,
Sorrow enduring, though Youth with its rhapsodies pass--

Are they not part of her, sweet with unconscious compassion,
Ready to shoulder our burden of life with a jest,
Will she not make them her own in her light-hearted fashion,
Sadder than we in her song, in her laughter more blest?

_G. A. FIELDING BUCKNALL_

(_EXETER_)

UNTO DUST

NOT with a crown of thorns about his head
But with a single rose in his white hand,
Fairer than Death herself, he joins the dead,
He that could laugh at life, yet understand.
No veils are rent in twain, or unknown fears
Fall on the crowd who crucify my lord;
Lay him to rest, while poetry and tears
Be the last gifts his mourning friends accord.
Cast not white flowers on one who loved but red,
Leave him the dust who found in dust the praise
Only of life, and, now that he is dead
Surely in death is fair a thousand ways.
Leave him in peace, a poem to the end--
He was the man I loved: I was his friend.

_ROY CAMPBELL_

(_MERTON_)

THE PORPOISE

THE ocean-cleaving porpoise goes
Thrashing the waves with fins of gold,
Butting the waves with brows of steel,
From palm-fringed archipelagos
To coasts of coral, where the bold
Cannibal drives a pointed keel.

And round and round the world he runs,
A golden rocket trailing fire,
Out-distancing the moon and stars,
Leaving the pale abortive suns
To paint their dreams of dead desire
On faint horizons. Nothing mars

His constant course, though storms may rend
The charging waves from strand to strand,
Though Love may wait with fingers curled
To clutch him at the current’s bend,
Though Death may dart an eager hand
To drag him underneath the world!

Still threading depths of pearl and rose,
Derisive, gay, and overbold,
Who will not hear, who will not feel,
The ocean-cleaving porpoise goes,
Thrashing the waves with fins of gold,
Butting the waves with brows of steel!

BONGWI’S THEOLOGY

THIS is the wisdom of the ape
Who yelps beneath the moon--
’Tis God who made me in his shape;
He is a great baboon.
’Tis he who tilts the moon askew
And fans the forest trees:
The Heavens, which are broad and blue,
Provide him his trapeze.
He swings with tail divinely bent
Around those azure bars,
And munches, to his soul’s content,
The kernels of the stars.
And when I die, his loving care
Shall raise me from the sod,
To learn the perfect Mischief there,
The Nimbleness of God!

_ERIC DICKINSON_

(_EXETER_)

THREE SONNETS

FOR RANDOLPH HUGHES

I

SUCH beauty is the magic of old kings
Who webbed enchantments on the bowls of night,
Who stole the ocean-coral for their rings,
And samite-curls of mermaids for their light;
Who sent their envoys from the courts of Kand,
To find the blue-flowered crown of ecstasy
That grows beneath a Titan’s quiet hand.
The beauty that is yours is grown to me
More fine than furthest snows in golden Ind,
More fair indeed than doves, who draw the cars
Of purpurate belief in monarch’s mind,
With benediction of the ultimate stars.
Because of all this knowledge born of you,
Raise up my faith in stone, and keep men true.

II

ALWAYS your eyes, your hair, your cheek, your voice,
Impel the wish I had a magic art;
Your beauty’s kind can perfectly rejoice
With delicate music all a poet’s heart,
As voice of summer over hills of joy.
Oh, you are utterly of beauty’s dance,
Such kind of rhythmic beauty they employ,
Where Pheidias shakes the Parthenon with prance
Of his proud steeds, and prouder youths show us
The glory of a fair Athenian day.
Your beauty lived before tumultuous
Chattering knaves sped time and faith away,
Before the chime for Babylon was rung,
Or from the cross men found the stars were hung!

III

My love of most complete and dearest worth,
Has ever breath of years, one day all spent,
Mingled with thought of present smiling earth?
Have you bethought you how so soon is sent
To this poor passionate heart the Worm of Death
With twined and intimate corrupt caress?
Have you bethought you, how that your dear breath,
Bathing the rose upon your mouth, shall press
One day no more betwixt its petalled home?
How all exceeding beauties exquisite
Of limbs, of eyes, of hair, of cheek, shall come
One day perhaps within that open night,
Where sheep go plaintive on a lone highway,
And ecstasy of love is far away?

_LOUIS GOLDING_

(_QUEEN’S_)

THE MOON-CLOCK

TICK-TOCK! the moon, that pale round clock,
Her big face peering, goes tick-tock!

Metallic as a grasshopper
The far faint tickings start and stir.

All night tinily you can hear
Tick-tock tinkling down the sheer

Steep falls of space. Minute, aloof,
Here is no praise, here no reproof.

Remote in voids star-purged of sense,
Tick-tock in stark indifference!

From ice-black lands of lack and rock,
The two swords shake and clank tick-tock.

In the dark din of the day’s vault
Demand thy headlong soul shall halt

One moment. Hearken, taut and tense,
In the vast Silence beyond sense,

The moon! From the hushed heart of her,
Metallic as a grasshopper,

Patient though earth may writhe and rock,
Imperturbably, tock, tick-tock!

Till, boastful earth, your forests wilt
In grotesque death. Till death shall silt,

Loud-blooded man, her unchecked sands
From feet and warped expiring hands

Through fatuous channels of the thinned
Brain. Till all the clangours which have dinned

Through your arched ears are only this,
Tick-tock down blank eternities,

Where still the sallow death’s-head ticks
As stars burn down like candle-wicks.

COLD BRANCH IN THE BLACK AIR

WHO taps? You are not the wind tapping?
_No! Not the wind!_
You straining and moaning there,
Are you a cold branch in the black air
Which the storm has skinned?
_No! Not a cold branch!
Not the wind!_

Who are you? Who are you?
_But you loved me once,
You drank me like wine.
The dead wood simmers in my skull. I am rotten.
And your blood is red still and you have forgotten,
And my blood was yours once and yours mine!_

Are you there still? O fainter, O further ... nothing!
Nothing taps!
Surely you straining and moaning there,
You were only a cold branch in the black air?
... Or a door perhaps?