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ELIZABETH ANN
This is the tale of Elizabeth Ann,
Who went away with her fancy man.
Ann was a girl who hadn’t a gown
As fine as the ladies who walk the town.
All day long from seven to six
Ann was polishing candlesticks,
For Bishops and crapulous Millionaires
To buy for their altars or bed-chambers.
And youth in a year and a year will pass,
But there’s never an end of polishing brass.
All day long from seven to six —
Seventy thousand candlesticks.
So frail and lewd Elizabeth Ann
Went away with her fancy man.
You Bishops and crapulous Millionaires,
Give her your charity, give her your prayers.
THE COTSWOLD FARMERS
Sometimes the ghosts forgotten go
Along the hill-top way,
And with long scythes of silver mow
Meadows of moonlit hay,
Until the cocks of Cotswold crow
The coming of the day.
There’s Tony Turkletob who died
When he could drink no more,
And Uncle Heritage, the pride
Of eighteen-twenty-four,
And Ebenezer Barleytide,
And others half a score.
They fold in phantom pens, and plough
Furrows without a share,
And one will milk a faery cow,
And one will stare and stare,
And whistle ghostly tunes that now
Are not sung anywhere.
The moon goes down on Oakridge lea,
The other world’s astir,
The Cotswold farmers silently
Go back to sepulchre,
The sleeping watchdogs wake, and see
No ghostly harvester.
A MAN’S DAUGHTER
There is an old woman who looks each night
Out of the wood.
She has one tooth, that isn’t too white.
She isn’t too good.
She came from the north looking for me,
About my jewel.
Her son, she says, is tall as can be;
But, men say, cruel.
My girl went northward, holiday making,
And a queer man spoke
At the woodside once when night was breaking,
And her heart broke.
For ever since she has pined and pined,
A sorry maid;
Her fingers are slack as the wool they wind,
Or her girdle-braid.
So now shall I send her north to wed,
Who here may know
Only the little house of the dead
To ease her woe?
Or keep her for fear of that old woman,
As a bird quick-eyed,
And her tall son who is hardly human,
At the woodside?
She is my babe and my daughter dear,
How well, how well.
Her grief to me is a fourfold fear,
Tongue cannot tell.
And yet I know that far in that wood
Are crumbling bones,
And a mumble mumble of nothing that’s good,
In heathen tones.
And I know that frail ghosts flutter and sigh
In brambles there,
And never a bird or beast to cry —
Beware, beware, —
While threading the silent thickets go
Mother and son,
Where scrupulous berries never grow,
And airs are none.
And her deep eyes peer at eventide
Out of the wood,
And her tall son waits by the dark woodside
For maidenhood.
And the little eyes peer, and peer, and peer;
And a word is said.
And some house knows, for many a year,
But years of dread.
THE LIFE OF JOHN HERITAGE
Born in the Cotswolds in eighteen-forty or so,
Bred on a hill-top that seemed the most of the world
Until he travelled the valleys, and found what a wonder
Of leagues from Gloucester lay to Stroud or Ciceter,
John Heritage was a tiler. He split the stone,
After the frosts, and learnt the laying of tiles,
And was famous about the shire. And he was friendly
With Cotswold nature, hearing the hidden rooks
In Golden Vale, and the thin bleat of goats,
And the rattling harness of Trilly’s teams at plough,
And Richard Parker’s scythe for many years,
As he went upon his tiling; and the great landmarks,
As loops of the Severn seen from Bisley Hill,
Were his familiars, something of his religion.
And he prospered, as men do. His little wage
Yet left a little over his wedded needs,
And here a cottage he bought, and there another,
About the Cotswolds, built of the royallest stone
That’s quarried in England, until he could think of age
With an easy mind; and an acre of land was his
Where at hay-harvest he worked a little from tiling,
Making his rick maturely or damning the wind
That scattered the swathes beyond his fork’s controlling.
And he trotted ajog to the town on market Thursdays,
Driving a stout succession of good black geldings,
That cropped his acre some twenty years apiece.
And he was an honest neighbour; and so he grew old,
And five strong sons, grizzled and middle-aged,
Carried him down the hill, and on a stone
The mason cut – “John Heritage, who died,
Fearing the Lord, at the age of seventy-six.”
And I know that some of us shatter our hearts on earth,
With mightier aims than ever John Heritage knew,
And think such things as never the tiler thought,
Because of our pride and our eagerness of mind …
But a life complete is a great nobility,
And there’s a wisdom biding in Cotswold stone,
While we in our furious intellectual travel
Fall in with strange foot-fellows on the road.
THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON
One of those old men fearing no man,
Two hundred broods his eaves have known
Since they cut on a Sapperton churchyard stone —
“Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton, Yeoman.”
At dusk you can hear the yeomen calling
The cattle still to Sapperton stalls,
And still the stroke of the woodman falls
As Thomas of Tarlton heard it falling.
I walked these meadows in seventeen-hundred,
Seed of his loins, a dream that stirred
Beyond the shape of a yeoman’s word,
So faint that but unawares he wondered.
And now, from the weeds of his tomb uncomely,
I travel again the tracks he made,
And walks at my side the yeoman shade
Of Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton dumbly.
MRS. WILLOW
Mrs. Thomas Willow seems very glum.
Her life, perhaps, is very lonely and hum-drum,
Digging up potatoes, cleaning out the weeds,
Doing the little for a lone woman’s needs.
Who was her husband? How long ago?
What does she wonder? What does she know?
Why does she listen over the wall,
Morning and noon-time and twilight and all,
As though unforgotten were some footfall?
“Good morning, Mrs. Willow.” “Good morning, sir,”
Is all the conversation I can get from her.
And her path-stones are white as lilies of the wood,
And she washes this and that till she must be very good.
She sends no letters, and no one calls,
And she doesn’t go whispering beyond her walls;
Nothing in her garden is secret, I think —
That’s all sun-bright with foxglove and pink,
And she doesn’t hover around old cupboards and shelves
As old people do who have buried themselves;
She has no late lamps, and she digs all day
And polishes and plants in a common way,
But glum she is, and she listens now and then
For a footfall, a footfall, a footfall again,
And whether it’s hope, or whether it’s dread,
Or a poor old fancy in her head,
I shall never be told; it will never be said.
ROUNDELS OF THE YEAR
I caught the changes of the year
In soft and fragile nets of song,
For you to whom my days belong.
For you to whom each day is dear
Of all the high processional throng,
I caught the changes of the year
In soft and fragile nets of song.
And here some sound of beauty, here
Some note of ancient, ageless wrong
Reshaping as my lips were strong,
I caught the changes of the year
In soft and fragile nets of song,
For you to whom my days belong.
I
The spring is passing through the land
In web of ghostly green arrayed,
And blood is warm in man and maid.
The arches of desire have spanned
The barren ways, the debt is paid,
The spring is passing through the land
In web of ghostly green arrayed.
Sweet scents along the winds are fanned
From shadowy wood and secret glade
Where beauty blossoms unafraid,
The spring is passing through the land
In web of ghostly green arrayed
And blood is warm in man and maid.
II
Proud insolent June with burning lips
Holds riot now from sea to sea,
And shod in sovran gold is she.
To the full flood of reaping slips
The seeding-tide by God’s decree,
Proud insolent June with burning lips
Holds riot now from sea to sea.
And all the goodly fellowships
Of bird and bloom and beast and tree
Are gallant of her company —
Proud insolent June with burning lips
Holds riot now from sea to sea,
And shod in sovran gold is she.
III
The loaded sheaves are harvested,
The sheep are in the stubbled fold,
The tale of labour crowned is told.
The wizard of the year has spread
A glory over wood and wold,
The loaded sheaves are harvested,
The sheep are in the stubbled fold.
The yellow apples and the red
Bear down the boughs, the hazels hold
No more their fruit in cups of gold.
The loaded sheaves are harvested,
The sheep are in the stubbled fold,
The tale of labour crowned is told.
IV
The year is lapsing into time
Along a deep and songless gloom,
Unchapleted of leaf or bloom.
And mute between the dusk and prime
The diligent earth resets her loom, —
The year is lapsing into time
Along a deep and songless gloom.
While o’er the snows the seasons chime
Their golden hopes to reillume
The brief eclipse about the tomb,
The year is lapsing into time
Along a deep and songless gloom
Unchapleted of leaf or bloom.
V
Not wise as cunning scholars are,
With curious words upon your tongue,
Are you for whom my song is sung.
But you are wise of cloud and star,
And winds and boughs all blossom-hung,
Not wise as cunning scholars are,
With curious words upon your tongue.
Surely, clear child of earth, some far
Dim Dryad-haunted groves among,
Your lips to lips of knowledge clung —
Not wise as cunning scholars are,
With curious words upon your tongue,
Are you for whom my song is sung.
LIEGEWOMAN
You may not wear immortal leaves
Nor yet go laurelled in your days,
But he believes
Who loves you with most intimate praise
That none on earth has ever gone,
In whom a cleanlier spirit shone.
You may be unremembered when
Our chronicles are piled in dust:
No matter than —
None ever bore a lordlier lust
To know the savour sweet or sour
Down to the dregs of every hour.
And this your epitaph shall be —
“Within life’s house her eager words
Continually
Lightened as wings of arrowy birds:
She was life’s house-fellow, she knew
The passion of him, soul and thew.”
LOVERS TO LOVERS
Our love forsworn
Was very love upon a day,
Bitterness now, forlorn,
This tattered love once went as proud a way
As any born.
You well have kept
Your love from all corrupting things,
Your house of love is swept
And bright for use; whatso each season brings
You may accept
In pride. But we?
Our date of love is dead. Our blind
Brief moment was to be
The sum, yet was it signed as yours, and signed
Indelibly.
LOVE’S PERSONALITY
If I had never seen
Thy sweet grave face,
If I had never known
Thy pride as of a queen,
Yet would another’s grace
Have led me to her throne.
I should have loved as well
Not loving thee,
My faith had been as strong
Wrought by another spell;
Her love had grown to be
As thine for fire and song.
Yet is our love a thing
Alone, austere,
A new and sacred birth
That we alone could bring
Through flames of faith and fear
To pass upon the earth.
As one who makes a rhyme
Of his fierce thought,
With momentary art
May challenge change and time,
So is the love we wrought
Not greatest, but apart.
PIERROT
Pierrot alone,
And then Pierrette,
And then a story to forget.
Pierrot alone.
Pierrette among the apple boughs
Come down and take a Pierrot’s kiss,
The moon is white upon your brows,
Pierrette among the apple boughs,
Your lips are cold, and I would set
A rose upon your lips, Pierrette,
A rosy kiss,
Pierrette, Pierrette.
And then Pierrette.
I’ve left my apple boughs, Pierrot,
A shadow now is on my face,
But still my lips are cold, and O
No rose is on my lips, Pierrot,
You laugh, and then you pass away
Among the scented leaves of May,
And on my face
The shadows stay.
And then a story to forget.
The petals fall upon the grass,
And I am crying in the dark,
The clouds above the white moon pass —
My tears are falling on the grass;
Pierrot, Pierrot, I heard your vows
And left my blossomed apple boughs,
And sorrows dark
Are on my brows.
RECKONING
I heard my love go laughing
Beyond the bolted door,
I saw my love go riding
Across the windy moor,
And I would give my love no word
Because of evil tales I heard.
Let fancy men go laughing,
Let light men ride away,
Bruised corn is not for my mill,
What’s paid I will not pay, —
And so I thought because of this
Gossip that poisoned clasp and kiss.
Four hundred men went riding,
And he the best of all,
A jolly man for labour,
A sinewy man and tall;
I watched him go beyond the hill,
And shaped my anger with my will.
At night my love came riding
Across the dusky moor,
And other two rode with him
Who knocked my bolted door,
And called me out and bade me see
How quiet a man a man could be.
And now the tales that stung me
And gave my pride its rule,
Are worth a beggar’s broken shoe
Or the sermon of a fool,
And all I know and all I can
Is, false or true, he was my man.
DERELICT
The cloudy peril of the seas,
The menace of mid-winter days,
May break the scented boughs of ease
And lock the lips of praise,
But every sea its harbour knows,
And every winter wakes to spring,
And every broken song the rose
Shall yet resing.
But comfortable love once spent
May not re-shape its broken trust,
Or find anew the old content,
Dishonoured in the dust;
No port awaits those tattered sails,
No sun rides high above that gloom,
Unchronicled those half-told tales
Shall time entomb.
WED
I married him on Christmas morn, —
Ah woe betide, ah woe betide,
Folk said I was a comely bride, —
Ah me forlorn.
All braided was my golden hair,
And heavy then, and shining then,
My limbs were sweet to madden men, —
O cunning snare.
My beauty was a thing they say
Of large renown, – O dread renown, —
Its rumour travelled through the town,
Alas the day.
His kisses burn my mouth and brows, —
O burning kiss, O barren kiss, —
My body for his worship is,
And so he vows.
But daily many men draw near
With courtly speech and subtle speech;
I gather from the lips of each
A deadly fear.
As he grows sullen I grow cold,
And whose the blame? Not mine the blame;
Their passions round me as a flame
All fiercely fold.
And oh, to think that he might be
So proudly set, above them set,
If he might but awaken yet
The soul of me.
Will no man seek and seeking find
The soul of me, the soul of me?
Nay, even as they are, so is he,
And all are blind.
On Christmas morning we were wed,
Ah me the morn, the luckless morn;
Now poppies burn along the corn,
Would I were dead.
FORSAKEN
The word is said, and I no more shall know
Aught of the changing story of her days,
Nor any treasure that her lips bestow.
And I, who loving her was wont to praise
All things in love, now reft of music go
With silent step down unfrequented ways.
My soul is like a lonely market-place,
Where late were laughing folk and shining steeds
And many things of comeliness and grace;
And now between the stones are twisting weeds,
No sound there is, nor any friendly face,
Save for a bedesman telling o’er his beads.
DEFIANCE
O wide the way your beauty goes,
For all its feigned indifference,
And every folly’s path it knows,
And every humour of pretence.
But I can be as false as are
The rainbow loves which are your days,
And I will gladly go and far,
Content with your immediate praise.
Your lips, the shyer lover’s bane,
I take with disputation none,
And am your kinsman in disdain
When all is excellently done.
LOVE IN OCTOBER
The fields, the clouds, the farms and farming gear,
The drifting kine, the scarlet apple trees …
Not of the sun but separate are these,
And individual joys, and very dear;
Yet when the sun is folded, they are here
No more, the drifting skies: the argosies
Of wagoned apples: still societies
Of elms: red cattle on the stubbled year.
So are you not love’s whole estate. I owe
In many hearts more dues than I shall pay;
Yet is your heart the spring of all love’s light,
And should your love weary of me and go
With all its thriving beams out of my day,
These many loves would founder in that night.
TO THE LOVERS THAT COMEAFTER US
Lovers, a little of this your happy time
Give to the thought of us who were as you,
That we, whose dearest passion in your prime
Is but a winter garment, may renew
Our love in yours, our flesh in your desire,
Our tenderness in your discovering kiss,
For we are half the fuel of your fire,
As ours was fed by Marc and Beatrice.
Remember us, and, when you too are dead,
Our prayer with yours shall fall upon love’s spring
That all our ghostly loves be comforted
In those yet later lover’s love-making;
So shall oblivion bring his dust to spill
On brain and limbs, and we be lovers still.
DERBYSHIRE SONG
Come loving me to Darley Dale
In spring time or sickle time,
And we will make as proud a tale
As lovers in the antique prime
Of Harry or Elizabeth.
With kirtle green and nodding flowers
To deck my hair and little waist,
I ’ll be worth a lover’s hours…
Come, fellow, thrive, there is no haste
But soon is worn away in death.
Soon shall the blood be tame, and soon
Our bodies lie in Darley Dale,
Unreckoning of jolly June,
With tongues past telling any tale;
My man, come loving me to-day.
I have a wrist is smooth and brown,
I have a shoulder smooth and white,
I have my grace in any gown
By sun or moon or candle-light…
Come Darley way, come Darley way.
LOVE’S HOUSE
I
I know not how these men or those may take
Their first glad measure of love’s character,
Or whether one should let the summer make
Love’s festival, and one the falling year.
I only know that in my prime of days
When my young branches came to blossoming,
You were the sign that loosed my lips in praise,
You were the zeal that governed all my spring.
II
In prudent counsel many gathered near,
Forewarning us of deft and secret snares
That are love’s use. We heard them as we hear
The ticking of a clock upon the stairs.
The troops of reason, careful to persuade,
Blackened love’s name, but love was more than these,
For we had wills to venture unafraid
The trouble of unnavigable seas.
III
Their word was but a barren seed that lies
Undrawn of the sun’s health and undesired,
Because the habit of their hearts was wise,
Because the wisdom of their tongues was tired.
For in the smother of contentious pride,
And in the fear of each tumultuous mood,
Our love has kept serenely fortified
And unusurped one stedfast solitude.
IV
Dark words, and hasty humours of the blood
Have come to us and made no longer stay
Than footprints of a bird upon the mud
That in an hour the tide will take away.
But not March weather over ploughlands blown,
Nor cresses green upon their gravel bed,
Are beautiful with the clean rigour grown
Of quiet thought our love has piloted.
V
I sit before the hearths of many men,
When speech goes gladly, eager to withhold
No word at all, yet when I pass again
The last of words is captive and untold.
We talk together in love’s house, and there
No thought but seeks what counsel you may give,
And every secret trouble from its lair
Comes to your hand, no longer fugitive.
VI
I woo the world, with burning will to be
Delighted in all fortune it may find,
And still the strident dogs of jealousy
Go mocking down the tunnels of my mind.
Only for you my contemplation goes
Clean as a god’s, undarkened of pretence,
Most happy when your garner overflows,
Achieving in your prosperous diligence.
VII
When from the dusty corners of my brain
Comes limping some ungainly word or deed,
I know not if my dearest friend’s disdain
Be durable or brief, spent husk or seed.
But your rebuke and that poor fault of mine
Go straitly outcast, and we close the door,
And I, no promise asking and no sign,
Stand blameless in love’s presence as before.
VIII
A beggar in the ditch, I stand and call
My questions out upon the queer parade
Of folk that hurry by, and one and all
Go down the road with never answer made.
I do not question love. I am a lord
High at love’s table, and the vigilant king,
Unquestioned, from the hubbub at the board
Leans down to me and tells me everything.