To me, still happy me,
To ask forgiveness, –
Yet smiled with half a certainty
To be forgiven, – for what
She had never done; I knew not what it might be, 20
Nor could she tell me, having now forgot,
By rapture carried with me past all care
As to an isle in April lovelier
Than April’s self. ‘God bless you’ I said to her.
List of poems in chronological order
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THE GLORY
The glory of the beauty of the morning, –
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay; 5
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy
Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart: –
The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning
All I can ever do, all I can be,
Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue, 10
The happiness I fancy fit to dwell
In beauty’s presence. Shall I now this day
Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,
Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start
And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops, 15
In hope to find whatever it is I seek,
Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things
That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?
Or must I be content with discontent
As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings? 20
And shall I ask at the day’s end once more
What beauty is, and what I can have meant
By happiness? And shall I let all go,
Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know
That I was happy oft and oft before, 25
Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,
How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,
Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.
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JULY
Naught moves but clouds, and in the glassy lake
Their doubles and the shadow of my boat.
The boat itself stirs only when I break
This drowse of heat and solitude afloat
To prove if what I see be bird or mote, 5
Or learn if yet the shore woods be awake.
Long hours since dawn grew, – spread, – and passed on high
And deep below, – I have watched the cool reeds hung
Over images more cool in imaged sky:
Nothing there was worth thinking of so long; 10
All that the ring-doves say, far leaves among,
Brims my mind with content thus still to lie.
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THE CHALK-PIT
‘Is this the road that climbs above and bends
Round what was once a chalk-pit: now it is
By accident an amphitheatre.
Some ash trees standing ankle-deep in briar
And bramble act the parts, and neither speak 5
Nor stir.’ ‘But see: they have fallen, every one,
And briar and bramble have grown over them.’
‘That is the place. As usual no one is here.
Hardly can I imagine the drop of the axe,
And the smack that is like an echo, sounding here.’ 10
‘I do not understand.’ ‘Why, what I mean is
That I have seen the place two or three times
At most, and that its emptiness and silence
And stillness haunt me, as if just before
It was not empty, silent, still, but full 15
Of life of some kind, perhaps tragical.
Has anything unusual happened here?’
‘Not that I know of. It is called the Dell.
They have not dug chalk here for a century.
That was the ash trees’ age. But I will ask.’ 20
‘No. Do not. I prefer to make a tale,
Or better leave it like the end of a play,
Actors and audience and lights all gone;
For so it looks now. In my memory
Again and again I see it, strangely dark, 25
And vacant of a life but just withdrawn.
We have not seen the woodman with the axe.
Some ghost has left it now as we two came.’
‘And yet you doubted if this were the road?’
‘Well, sometimes I have thought of it and failed 30
To place it. No. And I am not quite sure,
Even now, this is it. For another place,
Real or painted, may have combined with it.
Or I myself a long way back in time…’
‘Why, as to that, I used to meet a man – 35
Along the road and in the chalk-pit too.
The wren’s hole was an eye that looked at him
For recognition. Every nest he knew.
He got a stiff neck, by looking this side or that, 40
Spring after spring, he told me, with his laugh, –
A sort of laugh. He was a visitor,
A man of forty, – smoked and strolled about.
At orts and crosses Pleasure and Pain had played
On his brown features; – I think both had lost; – 45
Mild and yet wild too. You may know the kind.
And once or twice a woman shared his walks,
A girl of twenty with a brown boy’s face,
And hair brown as a thrush or as a nut,
Thick eyebrows, glinting eyes – ‘ ‘You have said enough. 50
A pair, – free thought, free love, – I know the breed:
I shall not mix my fancies up with them.’
‘You please yourself. I should prefer the truth
Or nothing. Here, in fact, is nothing at all
Except a silent place that once rang loud, 55
And trees and us – imperfect friends, we men
And trees since time began; and nevertheless
Between us still we breed a mystery.’
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FIFTY FAGGOTS
There they stand, on their ends, the fifty faggots
That once were underwood of hazel and ash
In Jenny Pinks’s Copse. Now, by the hedge
Close packed, they make a thicket fancy alone
Can creep through with the mouse and wren. Next Spring 5
A blackbird or a robin will nest there,
Accustomed to them, thinking they will remain
Whatever is for ever to a bird:
This Spring it is too late; the swift has come.
‘Twas a hot day for carrying them up: 10
Better they will never warm me, though they must
Light several Winters’ fires. Before they are done
The war will have ended, many other things
Have ended, maybe, that I can no more
Foresee or more control than robin and wren. 15
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SEDGE-WARBLERS
This beauty made me dream there was a time
Long past and irrecoverable, a clime
Where any brook so radiant racing clear
Through buttercup and kingcup bright as brass
But gentle, nourishing the meadow grass 5
That leans and scurries in the wind, would bear
Another beauty, divine and feminine,
Child to the sun, a nymph whose soul unstained
Could love all day, and never hate or tir
e,
A lover of mortal or immortal kin. 10
And yet, rid of this dream, ere I had drained
Its poison, quieted was my desire
So that I only looked into the water,
Clearer than any goddess or man’s daughter,
And hearkened while it combed the dark green hair 15
And shook the millions of the blossoms white
Of water-crowfoot, and curdled to one sheet
The flowers fallen from the chestnuts in the park
Far off. And sedge-warblers, clinging so light
To willow twigs, sang longer than the lark, 20
Quick, shrill, or grating, a song to match the heat
Of the strong sun, nor less the water’s cool,
Gushing through narrows, swirling in the pool.
Their song that lacks all words, all melody,
All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me 25
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.
This was the best of May – the small brown birds
Wisely reiterating endlessly
What no man learnt yet, in or out of school.
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I BUILT MYSELF A HOUSE OF GLASS
I built myself a house of glass:
It took me years to make it:
And I was proud. But now, alas,
Would God someone would break it.
But it looks too magnificent. 5
No neighbour casts a stone
From where he dwells, in tenement
Or palace of glass, alone.
The original manuscript
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WORDS
Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
A crack in a wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me, 10
You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold, 15
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose 20
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet 25
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows, 30
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, –
As our hills are, old, –
Worn new 35
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove 40
That we love.
Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales 45
Have no wings, –
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there, –
From the names, and the things 50
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb
Or stand perchance 55
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.
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THE WORD
There are so many things I have forgot,
That once were much to me, or that were not,
All lost, as is a childless woman’s child
And its child’s children, in the undefiled
Abyss of what can never be again. 5
I have forgot, too, names of the mighty men
That fought and lost or won in the old wars,
Of kings and fiends and gods, and most of the stars.
Some things I have forgot that I forget.
But lesser things there are, remembered yet, 10
Than all the others. One name that I have not –
Though ‘tis an empty thingless name – forgot
Never can die because Spring after Spring
Some thrushes learn to say it as they sing.
There is always one at midday saying it clear 15
And tart – the name, only the name I hear.
While perhaps I am thinking of the elder scent
That is like food, or while I am content
With the wild rose scent that is like memory,
This name suddenly is cried out to me 20
From somewhere in the bushes by a bird
Over and over again, a pure thrush word.
The original manuscript
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UNDER THE WOODS
When these old woods were young
The thrushes’ ancestors
As sweetly sung
In the old years.
There was no garden here, 5
Apples nor mistletoe;
No children dear
Ran to and fro.
New then was this thatched cot,
But the keeper was old, 10
And he had not
Much lead or gold.
Most silent beech and yew:
As he went round about
The woods to view 15
Seldom he shot.
But now that he is gone
Out of most memories,
Still lingers on
A stoat of his, 20
But one, shrivelled and green,
And with no scent at all,
And barely seen
On this shed wall.
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HAYMAKING
After night’s thunder far away had rolled
The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,
And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,
Like the first gods before they made the world
And misery, swimming the stormless sea 5
In beauty and in divine gaiety.
The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn
With leaves – the holly’s Autumn falls in June –
And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.
The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit 10
With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd
Of children pouring out of school aloud.
And in the little thickets where a sleeper
For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper
And garden warbler sang unceasingly; 15
While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee
The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow
As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.
Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown
Travelled the road. In the field sloping down, 20
Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,
Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook
Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood
Without its team, it seemed it never would
Move from the shadow of that single yew. 25
The team, as still, until their task was due,
Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade
That three squat oaks mid-field together made
Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,
And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but 30
Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower
so clean.
The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,
But still. And all were silent. All was old,
This morning time, with a great age untold,
Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome, 35
Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,
A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.
Under the heavens that know not what years be
The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
Uttered even what they will in times far hence – 40
All of us gone out of the reach of change –
Immortal in a picture of an old grange.
The original manuscript
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A DREAM
Over known fields with an old friend in dream
I walked, but came sudden to a strange stream.
Its dark waters were bursting out most bright
From a great mountain’s heart into the light.
They ran a short course under the sun, then back 5
Into a pit they plunged, once more as black
As at their birth; and I stood thinking there
How white, had the day shone on them, they were,
Heaving and coiling. So by the roar and hiss
And by the mighty motion of the abyss 10
I was bemused, that I forgot my friend
And neither saw nor sought him till the end,
When I awoke from waters unto men
Saying: ‘I shall be here some day again.’
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THE BROOK
Seated once by a brook, watching a child
Chiefly that paddled, I was thus beguiled.
Mellow the blackbird sang and sharp the thrush
Not far off in the oak and hazel brush,
Unseen. There was a scent like honeycomb 5
From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
A butterfly alighted. From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below.