Poems, 1908-1919

MAMBLE

 
I never went to Mamble
That lies above the Teme,
So I wonder who’s in Mamble,
And whether people seem
Who breed and brew along there
As lazy as the name,
And whether any song there
Sets alehouse wits aflame.
 
 
The finger-post says Mamble,
And that is all I know
Of the narrow road to Mamble,
And should I turn and go
To that place of lazy token
That lies above the Teme,
There might be a Mamble broken
That was lissom in a dream.
 
 
So leave the road to Mamble
And take another road
To as good a place as Mamble
Be it lazy as a toad;
Who travels Worcester county
Takes any place that comes
When April tosses bounty
To the cherries and the plums.
 

OUT OF THE MOON

 
Merely the moonlight
Piercing the boughs of my may-tree,
Falling upon my ferns;
Only the night
Touching my ferns with silver bloom
Of sea-flowers here in the sleeping city —
And suddenly the imagination burns
With knowledge of many a dark significant doom
Out of antiquity,
Sung to hushed halls by troubadours
Who knew the ways of the heart because they had seen
The moonlight washing the garden’s deeper green
To silver flowers,
Falling with tidings out of the moon, as now
It falls on the ferns under my may-tree bough.
 

MOONLIT APPLES

 
At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes
A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.
 
 
A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then
There is no sound at the top of the house of men
Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again
Dapples the apples with deep-sea light.
 
 
They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams;
On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams
Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams,
And quiet is the steep stair under.
 
 
In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep.
And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep
Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep
On moon-washed apples of wonder.
 

COTTAGE SONG

 
Morning and night I bring
Clear water from the spring,
And through the lyric noon
I hear the larks in tune,
And when the shadows fall
There’s providence for all.
 
 
My garden is alight
With currants red and white;
And my blue curtains peep
On starry courses deep,
When down her silver tides
The moon on Cotswold rides.
 
 
My path of paven grey
Is thoroughfare all day
For fellowship, till time
Bids us with candles climb
The little whitewashed stair
Above my lavender.
 

THE MIDLANDS

 
Black in the summer night my Cotswold hill
Aslant my window sleeps, beneath a sky
Deep as the bedded violets that fill
March woods with dusky passion. As I lie
Abed between cool walls I watch the host
Of the slow stars lit over Gloucester plain,
And drowsily the habit of these most
Beloved of English lands moves in my brain,
While silence holds dominion of the dark,
Save when the foxes from the spinneys bark.
 
 
I see the valleys in their morning mist
Wreathed under limpid hills in moving light,
Happy with many a yeoman melodist:
I see the little roads of twinkling white
Busy with fieldward teams and market gear
Of rosy men, cloth-gaitered, who can tell
The many-minded changes of the year,
Who know why crops and kine fare ill or well;
I see the sun persuade the mist away,
Till town and stead are shining to the day.
 
 
I see the wagons move along the rows
Of ripe and summer-breathing clover-flower,
I see the lissom husbandman who knows
Deep in his heart the beauty of his power,
As, lithely pitched, the full-heaped fork bids on
The harvest home. I hear the rickyard fill
With gossip as in generations gone,
While wagon follows wagon from the hill.
I think how, when our seasons all are sealed,
Shall come the unchanging harvest from the field.
 
 
I see the barns and comely manors planned
By men who somehow moved in comely thought,
Who, with a simple shippon to their hand,
As men upon some godlike business wrought;
I see the little cottages that keep
Their beauty still where since Plantagenet
Have come the shepherds happily to sleep,
Finding the loaves and cups of cider set;
I see the twisted shepherds, brown and old,
Driving at dusk their glimmering sheep to fold.
 
 
And now the valleys that upon the sun
Broke from their opal veils, are veiled again,
And the last light upon the wolds is done,
And silence falls on flocks and fields and men;
And black upon the night I watch my hill,
And the stars shine, and there an owly wing
Brushes the night, and all again is still,
And, from this land of worship that I sing,
I turn to sleep, content that from my sires
I draw the blood of England’s midmost shires.
 

OLD CROW

 
The bird in the corn
Is a marvellous crow.
He was laid and was born
In the season of snow;
And he chants his old catches
Like a ghost under hatches.
 
 
He comes from the shades
Of his wood very early,
And works in the blades
Of the wheat and the barley,
And he’s happy, although
He’s a grumbleton crow.
 
 
The larks have devices
For sunny delight,
And the sheep in their fleeces
Are woolly and white;
But these things are the scorn
Of the bird in the corn.
 
 
And morning goes by,
And still he is there,
Till a rose in the sky
Calls him back to his lair
In the boughs where the gloom
Is a part of his plume.
 
 
But the boy in the lane
With his gun, by and by,
To the heart of the grain
Will narrowly spy,
And the twilight will come,
And no crow will fly home.
 

VENUS IN ARDEN

 
Now Love, her mantle thrown,
Goes naked by,
Threading the woods alone,
Her royal eye
Happy because the primroses again
Break on the winter continence of men.
 
 
I saw her pass to-day
In Warwickshire,
With the old imperial way,
The old desire,
Fresh as among those other flowers they went
More beautiful for Adon’s discontent.
 
 
Those other years she made
Her festival
When the blue eggs were laid
And lambs were tall,
By the Athenian rivers while the reeds
Made love melodious for the Ganymedes.
 
 
And now through Cantlow brakes,
By Wilmcote hill,
To Avon-side, she makes
Her garlands still,
And I who watch her flashing limbs am one
With youth whose days three thousand years are done.
 

ON A LAKE

 
Sweet in the rushes
The reed-singers make
A music that hushes
The life of the lake;
The leaves are dumb,
And the tides are still,
And no calls come
From the flocks on the hill.
 
 
Forgotten now
Are nightingales,
And on his bough
The linnet fails, —
Midway the mere
My mirrored boat
Shall rest and hear
A slenderer note.
 
 
Though, heart, you measure
But one proud rhyme,
You build a treasure
Confounding time —
Sweet in the rushes
The reed-singers make
A music that hushes
The life of the lake.
 

HARVEST MOON

 
“Hush!” was my whisper
At the stair-top
When the waggoners were down below
Home from the barley-crop.
Through the high window
Looked the harvest moon,
While the waggoners sang
A harvest tune, —
“Hush!” was my whisper when
Marjory stept
Down from her attic-room,
A true-love-adept.
 
 
“Fill a can, fill a can,”
Waggoners of heart were they,
“Harvest-home, harvest-home,
Barleycorn is home to-day.” …
“Marjory, hush now —
Harvest – you hear?” —
Red was the moon’s rose
On the full year,
The cobwebs shook, so well
Did the waggoners sing —
“Hush!” – there was beauty at
That harvesting.
 

AT AN EARTHWORKS

 
Ringed high with turf the arena lies,
The neighbouring world unseen, unheard,
Here are but unhorizoned skies,
And on the skies a passing bird,
 
 
The conies and a wandering sheep,
The castings of the chambered mole, —
These, and the haunted years that keep
Lost agonies of blood and soul.
 
 
They say that in the midnight moon
The ghostly legions gather yet,
And hear a ghostly timbrel-tune,
And see a ghostly combat met.
 
 
These are but yeoman’s tales. And here
No marvel on the midnight falls,
But starlight marvellously clear,
Being girdled in these shadowy walls.
 
 
Yet now strange glooms of ancestry
Creep on me through this morning light,
Some spectral self is seeking me …
I will not parley with the night.
 

INSTRUCTION

 
I have a place in a little garden,
That laurel-leaf and fern
Keep a cool place though fires of summer
All the green grasses burn.
Little cool winds creep there about
When winds all else are dead,
And tired limbs there find gentle keeping,
And humours of sloth are shed.
 
 
So do your songs come always to me,
Poets of age and age,
Clear and cool as rivers of wind
Threading my hermitage,
Stilling my mind from tribulation
Of life half-seen, half-heard,
With images made in the brain’s quietness,
And the leaping of a word.
 

HABITATION

 
High up in the sky there, now, you know,
In this May twilight, our cottage is asleep,
Tenantless, and no creature there to go
Near it but Mrs. Fry’s fat cows, and sheep
Dove-coloured, as is Cotswold. No one hears
Under that cherry-tree the night-jars yet,
The windows are uncurtained; on the stairs
Silence is but by tip-toe silence met.
All doors are fast there. It is a dwelling put by
From use for a little, or long, up there in the sky.
 
 
Empty; a walled-in silence, in this twilight of May —
A home for lovers, and friendly withdrawing, and sleep,
With none to love there, nor laugh, nor climb from the day
To the candles and linen… Yet in the silence creep,
This minute, I know, little ghosts, little virtuous lives,
Breathing upon that still, insensible place,
Touching the latches, sorting the napkins and knives,
And such for the comfort of being, and bowls for the grace,
That roses will brim; they are creeping from that room to this,
One room, and two, till the four are visited … they,
Little ghosts, little lives, are our thoughts in this twilight of May,
Signs that even the curious man would miss,
Of travelling lovers to Cotswold, signs of an hour,
Very soon, when up from the valley in June will ride
Lovers by Lynch to Oakridge up in the wide
Bow of the hill, to a garden of lavender flower…
 
 
The doors are locked; no foot falls; the hearths are dumb —
But we are there – we are waiting ourselves who come.
 

WRITTEN IN WINTERBORNE CAME CHURCH (William Barnes, 1801-1886)

To Mrs. Thomas Hardy

 
I do not use to listen well
At sermon time,
I ’ld rather hear the plainest rhyme
Than tales the parsons tell;
 
 
The homespun of experience
They will not wear,
But walk a transcendental air
In dusty rags of sense.
 
 
But humbly in your little church
Alone I watch;
Old rector, lift again the latch,
Here is a heart to search.
 
 
Come, with a simple word and wise
Quicken my brain,
And while upon the painted pane
The painted butterflies
 
 
Beat in the early April beams,
You shall instruct
My spirit in the knowledge plucked
From your still Dorset dreams.
 
 
Your word shall strive with no obscure
Debated text,
Your vision being unperplexed,
Your loving purpose pure.
 
 
I know you’ll speak of April flowers,
Or lambs in pen,
Or happy-hearted maids and men
Weaving their April hours.
 
 
Or rising to your thought will come,
For lessoning,
Those lovers of an older spring,
That now in tombs are dumb.
 
 
And brooding in your theme shall be,
Half said, half heard,
The presage of a poet’s word
To mock mortality.
 

…

 
The years are on your grave the while,
And yet, almost,
I think to see your surpliced ghost
Stand hesitant in the aisle,
 
 
Find me sole congregation there,
Assess my mood,
Know mine a kindred solitude,
And climb the pulpit-stair.
 

BUDS

 
The raining hour is done,
And, threaded on the bough,
The May-buds in the sun
Are shining emeralds now.
 
 
As transitory these
As things of April will,
Yet, trembling in the trees,
Is briefer beauty still.
 
 
For, flowering from the sky
Upon an April day,
Are silver buds that lie
Amid the buds of May.
 
 
The April emeralds now,
While thrushes fill the lane,
Are linked along the bough
With silver buds of rain.
 
 
And, straightly though to earth
The buds of silver slip,
The green buds keep the mirth
Of that companionship.
 

BLACKBIRD

 
He comes on chosen evenings,
My blackbird bountiful, and sings
Over the gardens of the town
Just at the hour the sun goes down.
His flight across the chimneys thick,
By some divine arithmetic,
Comes to his customary stack,
And couches there his plumage black,
And there he lifts his yellow bill,
Kindled against the sunset, till
These suburbs are like Dymock woods
Where music has her solitudes,
And while he mocks the winter’s wrong
Rapt on his pinnacle of song,
Figured above our garden plots
Those are celestial chimney-pots.
 

MAY GARDEN

 
A shower of green gems on my apple-tree
This first morning of May
Has fallen out of the night, to be
Herald of holiday —
Bright gems of green that, fallen there,
Seem fixed and glowing on the air.
 
 
Until a flutter of blackbird wings
Shakes and makes the boughs alive,
And the gems are now no frozen things,
But apple-green buds to thrive
On sap of my May garden, how well
The green September globes will tell.
 
 
Also my pear-tree has its buds,
But they are silver yellow,
Like autumn meadows when the floods
Are silver under willow,
And here shall long and shapely pears
Be gathered while the autumn wears.
 
 
And there are sixty daffodils
Beneath my wall…
And jealousy it is that kills
This world when all
The spring’s behaviour here is spent
To make the world magnificent.
 

AT AN INN

 
We are talkative proud, and assured, and self-sufficient,
The quick of the earth this day;
This inn is ours, and its courtyard, and English history,
And the Post Office up the way.
 
 
The stars in their changes, and heavenly speculation,
The habits of birds and flowers,
And character bred of poverty and riches,
All these are ours.
 
 
The world is ours, and these its themes and its substance,
And of these we are free men and wise;
Among them all we move in possession and judgment,
For a day, till it dies.
 
 
But in eighteen-hundred-and-fifty, who were the tenants,
Sure and deliberate as we?
They knew us not in the time of their ascension,
Their self-sufficiency.
 
 
And in nineteen-hundred-and-fifty this inn shall flourish,
And history still be told,
And the heat of blood shall thrive, and speculation,
When we are cold.
 

PERSPECTIVE

 
In the Wheatsheaf parlour I sat to see
The story of Chippington street go by,
The squire, and dames of little degree,
And drovers with cattle and flocks to cry.
 
 
And these were all as my creatures there,
Twinkling to and fro in the sun,
And placidly I had joy, had care,
Of all their labours and dealings done.
 
 
Into the parlour strode me then
Two fellows fiercely set at odds,
To whom the difference of men
Gave the sufficiency of God.
 
 
They saw me, and they stept beyond
To a chamber within earshot still,
And each on each of broken bond,
And honour, and inflexible will,
 
 
Railed. And loud the little inn grew,
But nothing I cared their quarrel to learn,
Though the issue tossing between the two
They deemed the bait of the world’s concern.
 
 
Only I thought how most are men
Fantastic when they most are proud,
And out of my laughter I looked again
On the flowing figures of Chippington crowd.
 

CROCUSES TO E. H. C

 
Desires,
Little determined desires,
Gripped by the mould,
Moving so hardly among
The earth, of whose heart they were bred,
That is old; it is old,
Not gracious to little desires such as these,
But apter for work on the bases of trees,
Whose branches are hung
Overhead,
Very mightily, there overhead.
 
 
Through the summer they stirred,
They strove to the bulbs after May,
Until harvest and song of the bird
Went together away;
And ever till coming of snows
They worked in the mould, for undaunted were those
Swift little determined desires, in the earth
Without sign, any day,
Ever shaping to marvels of birth,
Far away.
 
 
And we went
Without heed
On our way,
Never knowing what virtue was spent,
Day by day,
By those little desires that were gallant to breed
Such beauty as fortitude may.
Not once in our mind
Was that corner of earth under trees,
Very mighty and tall,
As we travelled the roads and the seas,
And gathered the wage of our kind,
And were laggard or trim to the call
Of the duties that lengthen the hours
Into seasons that flourish and fall.
 
 
And blind,
In the womb of the flowers,
Unresting they wrought,
In the bulbs, in the depth of the year,
Buried far from our thought;
Till one day, when the thrushes were clear
In their note it was spring – and they know —
Unheeding we came into sight
Of that corner forgotten, and lo,
They had won through the meshes of mould,
And treasuries lay in the light,
Of ivory, purple, and gold.
 

RIDDLES, R.F.C. ¹ (1916)

 
He was a boy of April beauty; one
Who had not tried the world; who, while the sun
Flamed yet upon the eastern sky, was done.
 
 
Time would have brought him in her patient ways —
So his young beauty spoke – to prosperous days,
To fulness of authority and praise.
 
 
He would not wait so long. A boy, he spent
His boy’s dear life for England. Be content:
No honour of age had been more excellent.
 

THE SHIPS OF GRIEF

 
On seas where every pilot fails
A thousand thousand ships to-day
Ride with a moaning in their sails,
Through winds grey and waters grey.
 
 
They are the ships of grief. They go
As fleets are derelict and driven,
Estranged from every port they know,
Scarce asking fortitude of heaven.
 
 
No, do not hail them. Let them ride
Lonely as they would lonely be …
There is an hour will prove the tide,
There is a sun will strike the sea.
 

NOCTURNE

 
O royal night, under your stars that keep
Their golden troops in charted motion set,
The living legions are renewed in sleep
For bloodier battle yet.
 
 
O royal death, under your boundless sky
Where unrecorded constellations throng,
Dispassionate those other legions lie,
Invulnerably strong.
 

THE PATRIOT

 
Scarce is my life more dear to me,
Brief tutor of oblivion,
Than fields below the rookery
That comfortably looks upon
The little street of Piddington.
 
 
I never think of Avon’s meadows,
Ryton woods or Rydal mere,
Or moon-tide moulding Cotswold shadows,
But I know that half the fear
Of death’s indifference is here.
 
 
I love my land. No heart can know
The patriot’s mystery, until
It aches as mine for woods ablow
In Gloucestershire with daffodil,
Or Bicester brakes that violets fill.
 
 
No man can tell what passion surges
For the house of his nativity
In the patriot’s blood, until he purges
His grosser mood of jealousy,
And comes to meditate with me
 
 
Of gifts of earth that stamp his brain
As mine the pools of Ludlow mill,
The hazels fencing Trilly’s Lane,
And Forty Acres under Brill,
The ferry under Elsfield hill.
 
 
These are what England is to me,
Not empire, nor the name of her
Ranging from pole to tropic sea.
These are the soil in which I bear
All that I have of character.
 
 
That men my fellows near and far
May live in like communion,
Is all I pray; all pastures are
The best beloved beneath the sun;
I have my own; I envy none.