From the dim garden an air like sharp cold flame
And bitter with burnt leaves, I knew once more
That the walls were down between love and the silent, frore
Wastes of eternity. O lean above me,
Screening my eyes with your hair like a dark willow
From the cold glare of death. O you that love me,
Lean with your body’s weight, that the cold billow
Not yet may lift me away, though love and light,
Roses and fruit and leaves prepare to-night
With unreturning wings
To launch upon the eternal flux of things.
The Immortals
Beloved, in this world of sense
We have the one omnipotence.
None but we lovers can erase
The foolish laws of time and space
Or gather by their wedded power
Eternity into an hour.
So to the four winds let us cast
Vague future and abysmal past
And, proud of body, leave behind
The fretful ghosts of soul and mind;
Nay even scorn the ageless joys
Of lovely sights and the soft noise
Of waving branches, streams that sing,
And music of the trembling string,
And all sweet scents and tastes that creep
Through brain to spirit. Alone we’ll keep
(Since ours is the one certain bliss
To come together in a kiss)
Locked in our frail and narrow clutch
The world-creating sense of touch.
All things are ours because we love.
Not men nor wrathful saints above,
Nor all the long corroding years,
Nor envious death’s remorseless shears,
Can ever vanquish or destroy
The sure possession of our joy.
Even God Himself can ne’er retract
His gift of the accomplished fact
Nor cancel by divine decree
Our once-enjoyed eternity.
Then let us keep forever fresh
This warm eternity of flesh,
This only true reality
Of lip-to-lip and knee-to-knee;
Knowing that, whatever years may bring
Of dusty earth or golden wing,
Once having loved, both you and I
Have been immortal ere we die.
Fog in the Channel
The sea is silent to-night. To our inland village,
A mile from the Channel, comes never a sound of the seas.
Windless night is heavy on pasture and tillage,
On houses and herbs and trees.
But suddenly over the silence, lone and far,
Long-drawn, desolate, hovers a deep intoning,
A measureless sadness; and soon, remote as a star,
An answering voice. A multitudinous moaning
Fills the night, and my heart shrinks cold, for I know
That fog has closed on the sea in a blinding smother.
O why do we suffer this craving for another
To split our lives in two? Though my body lies
So safe and warm beneath this low white ceiling,
Dark terrors round me rise;
For my heart is out in the Channel among the wheeling
Wreaths of fog and the deep-tongued desolate cries
Of fog-bound ships; and lying here I am lost
In a darkness denser and stranger
Than any darkness of mist. I am torn and tossed
Upon the horns of a more than bodily danger,
Yes, greater than yours, Beloved, who waken drifting
In your blinded ship that utters its long lament
From the soft, slow swell of the Channel, sinking, lifting,
Out between France and Kent.
From the French
Days of the Lilac and the days of Roses
Come not again this spring, for all our sighing.
The days of Lilac and days of Roses
Are past, and all the scented Pinks are dying.
The wind has changed. A sullen vapour closes
The weeping skies. We may not gather now
The Lilac-blossoms and early Roses.
Sad is the spring and bloomless hangs the bough.
O sweet and happy springtime that invaded
Our fields last year to gladden loved and lover.
So utterly our flower has faded
That even your kiss, alas, can wake it never.
And what of you, my love? No flower uncloses
Nor sunlight blooms through the shadowy leaves above.
Days of the Lilac and the days of Roses
Lie dead for evermore with our dead love.
VII
Cathedral at Night
Huge as a precipice in the summer night
The black porch yawned above him like a wave
And swallowed him. Shrunk to a grain of sand
He paused inside, bewildered at the sense
Of so much height and darkness, till his eyes
Gained strength, and in the emptiness dark shapes,
Pinnacled rocks and towering trunks of stone,
Loomed round him and, high hung like long pale banners,
Tall windows showed. And it seemed the whole void cavern
Vibrated sensitive as a strung harp,
For his shy footfall woke a spreading trouble
That echoed from furthest galleries and vaults
Awareness of his presence. He crossed the transept,
Climbed to the loft hung like a falcon’s nest
On the sheer face of the triforium,
From which the towering shafts of organ-pipes
Shot up like tropic growths. There, round about him,
The music books, the rows of stops, the close
Familiar walls of oak glowed as a core
Of radiance in the darkness; and he sought
Books of old music, chose his stops, began.
Vague tremors shook the stillness, voices woke,
And the emptiness was peopled with the life
Of crowding notes. Down the wide nave, along
Cold aisles, through secret chapels, hanging vaults,
Flowed the warm circulation of sweet sounds
Like health into a body long diseased,
While the august and ancient music-makers
Woke from long sleep and their immortal voices
Flooded the dark shrine with a golden beauty.
And he, the player, with cunning fingers piling
Sound upon sound, harmony on harmony,
Launched out his spirit upon those tides of music
Until it grew and filled the shadowy place,
Swung with the arches, soared to the topmost vault,
Put on the whole great structure as a garment,
Sang with those ancient voices as with his own,
And on the summit of the last pure chord
Found unity and peace. He raised his hands:
The music stopped, and his full-statured spirit
Shrivelled. The horror of sheer height hung above him,
And silence fell like doom. Out in the dark,
Blind windows hung, dumb columns rose, vast trunks
Upheaved the heavy foliage of the night,
And darkness, emptiness, like birds of prey
Swooped back and perched about him, grimly still,
While he, as in the bright cup of a flower,
Rigid, with sharpened senses, hung besieged.
Poetry and Memory
Dark is the mind’s deep dwelling,
Roofed and walled and floored
With ancient rock. There water, slowly welling
Or slowly dripped, is stored
In a dim, deep, dreaming pool
Unvexed by rain or sunlight or the cool
Wings of the wind, untroubled by joy or grieving
Or the bitterness and the ecstasy of living.
Till the white young bathers come, warily treading,
Lovely, desired, with rosy flesh
Like the apple-bloom on grey boughs spreading
In April, and their feet refresh
Like April the grey desert place.
For when with a sudden freakish grace
They break the pool’s long sleep in an airy flight
Of diving, the dim pool takes light,
Blooms to soft fire in a thousand tongues unfurling
That shed a shimmering beauty on roof and walls
And rouse in those stern halls
Laughing music of water, till the death
Of that dark underworld
Thrills harp-like with new ecstasy and the breath
Of a thousand buds uncurling.
The Secret
Under high boughs I lay in sunny grass.
My mind a mirror was
Reflecting leaves and sunshine; but no Past
Nor fancied Future cast
Their shadows there. For I was grass and trees,
No less, no more than these;
Lay in the sunlight, felt the warmth, and grew;
And sunlight, air, and dew
And earth were all my knowledge. But a breeze,
Winnowing the laden trees,
Drowned me in perfume of the Lime in flower,
And by that perfume’s power
My sense woke on a pale transtellar coast,
Half recognized, half lost,
As an old dream. I lingered there expecting,
My mind a pool reflecting
Unfathomed shapes by dim weeds blurred and webbed,
While waves of memory ebbed
And climbed again up, up the gleaming shoal,
But never reached the pool.
Then expectation shaped. I was aware
Of one with sea-smoothed hair
Leaning above me, in whose eyes I caught
The urgence of the message that she brought.
But, even as her lips stirred,
There fell the clear call of a hidden bird
Out of the Lime’s green leaves,
Waking me to warm grass and the sunny leaves
Of roofing boughs: unheard
The utterance of that still-escaping word
Whose solving fire, revealing light, shall set
All realms of being aflame. So am I yet,
Bewildered and uneasy traveller, blown
Between two kingdoms, neither wholly known.
I hear the flowing of great rivers
And the long slow breathing of the wind,
And solemnly, incessantly,
Like gleaming fish
In weeds beneath dim water,
Stars on their universal way
Glide among woven boughs.
All is one,
Surely, indivisibly.
A falling pebble
Ruffles the pool’s clear face,
And in those wavering circles waken
Powers that shall change the motion of Orion
And vex the dreaming of a million stars.
Deeds are immortal. Once the rose is gathered,
Nothing can ever be the same again.
The Cage
Man, afraid to be alive,
Shut his soul in senses five,
From fields of uncreated light
Into the crystal tower of sight,
And from the roaring songs of space
Into the small flesh-carven place
Of the ear whose cave impounds
Only small and broken sounds;
And to this narrow sense of touch
From strength that held the stars in clutch;
And from the warm ambrosial spice
Of flowers and fruits of Paradise
To the frail and fitful power
Of tongue’s and nostril’s sweet and sour.
And toiling for a sordid wage
There in his self-created cage,
Ah, how safely barred is he
From menace of eternity.
A Note on the Author
Martin Armstrong (1882–1974) was an English writer and poet. He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He served in World War I in the British Army in France as a Private in the Artist’s Rifles. He was commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment in 1915 and promoted Lieutenant in 1916. He was included in the final Georgian Poetry anthology.
In 1929 he married writer Jessie McDonald, after she had divorced Conrad Aiken, making Armstrong the stepfather of the young Joan Aiken. He appears in disguised form as a character in Conrad Aiken’s Ushant.
Discoverbooks by Martin Armstrong published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/MartinArmstrong
Sir Pompey and Madame Juno
The Bird Catcher
The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife
The Sleeping Fury
The Stepson
Venus over Lannery
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, LondonWC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1929, Martin Secker
Copyright © Martin Armstrong
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eISBN: 9781448210336
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