The body being no poet.
Yet it had been the woman
Who drew herself apart,
Cushioned on her divan,
And lent some bolder man
Her body, not her heart.
When seven long years were over
How would their story end?
No change of heart for either,
Mere changes in the weather,
A lover being no friend.
THE FIELD-POSTCARD
475 Graves (Robert) AUTOGRAPH POSTCARD signed (written in pencil), I.R.W. Fus. B.E.F. Nov 27, ’15 to Edward Marsh, autograph address panel on verso signed, Post Office and Censor’s postmarks £30 ‘In the last few days I’ve been made a captain and shifted here. I won’t get any leave till January at the earliest…’
Back in ’15, when life was harsh
And blood was hourly shed,
I reassured Sir Edward Marsh
So far I was not dead.
My field-postcard duly arrived,
It seems, at Gray’s Inn Square
Where Eddie, glad I still survived,
Ruffled his thinning hair…
A full half century out of sight
It lay securely hid
Till Francis Edwards with delight
Sold it for thirty quid.
But who retained the copyright,
The invaluable copyright?
In common law I did.
IF NO CUCKOO SINGS
And if no cuckoo sings,
What can I care, or you?
Each heart will yet beat true
While outward happenings
Kaleidoscopically continue.
Year in, year out, we lie
Each in a lonely bed
With vows of true love read
Like prayers, though silently,
To a well-starred and open sky.
Fierce poems of our past –
How can they ever die,
Condemned by love to last
Word for word and exactly
Under a wide and changeful sky?
MOUNTAIN LOVERS
We wandered diligently and widely
On mountains by the sea,
Greeting no now that was not always,
Nor any I but we,
And braved a turbulence of nights and days
From which no honest lover strays,
However stark the adversity.
THREE TIMES IN LOVE
You have now fallen three times in love
With the same woman, first indeed blindly
And at her blind insistence;
Next with your heart alive to the danger
Of what hers might conceal, although such passion
Strikes nobly and for ever;
Now at last, deep in dream, transported
To her rose garden on the high ridge,
Assured that there she can deny you
No deserved privilege,
However controvertible or new.
THE SENTENCE
Is this a sentence passed upon us both
For too ambitious love in separation:
Not as an alien intervention or intrusion
But as heaviness and silence,
As a death in absence?
We have lived these seven years beyond recourse,
Each other’s single love in separation:
A whispered name before sleep overtakes us
And before morning wakes us
At some far-distant station.
Let us not hold that either drew apart
In weariness or anger or adventure,
Or the resolve to nurse a single heart….
Call it an irresistible thunderbolt.
It was not my fault, love, nor was it your fault.
SPRING 1974
None yet have been good jocund days,
Clear dawning days,
Days of leisure and truth
Reflecting love’s sharp gaze,
Being born, alas, in an evil month
By fetid marsh or by fouled river
Maligned in Hell, accursed in Heaven,
Always by love unshriven,
Void still of honest praise.
ADVENT OF SUMMER
You have lived long but over-lonely,
My grey-haired fellow-poet
Sighing for new melodies
In face of sullen grief,
With wanings of old friendship,
With sullen repetition –
For who can thrive in loneliness,
Accepting its cold needs?
Let love dawn with the advent
Of a cool, showery summer
With no firm, fallen apricots
Nor pods on any beanstalk,
Nor strawberries in blossom,
Nor cherries on the boughs.
Let us deny the absurdities
Of every true summer:
Let us never live ill-used
Or derided by new strangers;
Let us praise the vagrant thrushes
And listen to their songs.
THE UNPENNED POEM
Should I wander with no frown, these idle days,
My dark hair trespassing on its pale brow –
If so, without companionship or praise,
Must I revisit marshes where frogs croak
Like me, mimicking penitential ways?
Are you still anchored to my slow, warm heart
After long years of drawing nightly nearer
And visiting our haunted room, timely
Ruffling its corners with love’s hidden mop?
And still must we not part?
What is a poem if as yet unpenned
Though truthful and emancipated still
From what may never yet appear,
From the flowery riches of still silent song,
From golden hours of a wakeful Spring?
Approach me, Rhyme; advise me, Reason!
The wind blows gently from the mountain top.
Let me display three penetrative wounds
White and smooth in this wrinkled skin of mine,
Still unacknowledged by the flesh beneath.
A poem may be trapped here suddenly,
Thrusting its adder’s head among the leaves,
Without reason or rhyme, dumb –
Or if not dumb, then with a single voice
Robbed of its chorus.
Here looms November. When last did I approach
Paper with ink, pen, and the half truth?
Advise me, Reason!
THE GREEN WOODS OF UNREST
Let the weeks end as well they must
Not with clouds of scattered dust
But in pure certainty of sun –
And with gentle winds outrun
By the love that we contest
In these green woods of unrest.
You, love, are beauty’s self indeed,
Never the harsh pride of need.
Uncollected Poems
(1910–1974)
JUVENILIA: 1910–1914
A POT OF WHITE HEATHER
Thou, a poor woman’s fairing, white heather,
Witherest from the ending
Of summer’s bliss to the sting
Of winter’s grey beginning.
Which is better, Dame Nature? A human
Woman’s oft-uttered rapture
O’er thy dear gift, and the pure
Love that enshrines a treasure?
Or all the sweet plant loses, where grandly
A friendly mountain rises,
And a land of heather-trees
About its knees reposes?
THE MOUNTAIN SIDE AT EVENING
Now even falls
And fresh, cold breezes blow
Adown the grey-green mountain side
Strewn with rough boulders. Soft and low
Night speaks, her tongue untied
Darkness to Darkness calls.
’Tis now men say
From rugged piles of stones
Steal Shapes and Things that should be still;
Green terror ripples through our bones,
Our inmost heart-strings thrill
And yearn for careless day.
THE WILL O’ THE WISP
See a gleam in the gloaming – out yonder
It wand’reth bright flaming;
Its force – that is a fierce thing!
It draweth men to drowning.
THE KING’s SON
Daintily stepped the son of the king
Through the palace-gates flung wide,
He breathed of the fine fresh scents of Spring,
As he walked by the river side;
But deep in his heart was blossoming
The Tiger-lily of pride.
His eyes were a royal purple-grey,
And his sweet lips harboured a smile,
As he dreamed of his kingdom far away,
Of his wonderful Southern isle;
But evil lay in the purple-grey,
And the smile was a tyrant’s smile.
The fairest isle in all his lands;
Three-score stout vessels fringe her sands,
And seven-score guard the sea.
Thither I’ll bid my captains bold
Bring droves of slaves, and thrice a day
A hundred heads I’ll blow away
With my great gun of gold.
My squires will take the shattered skulls
And bind them with a golden chain,
To whiten in the sun and rain,
From my palace pinnacles.
O’er that fair isle my fancy roves,
She shall be clothed in majesty,
I’ll pave her paths with ivory,
And gem-bedeck her groves.’
He mused by the river, foes forgot,
While the wind in his love-locks blew;
But an hairy arm from the reeds upshot,
And dragged him down by the shoe….
The king’s own brother plotted the plot,
And the isle no boy-king knew.
THE MISER OF SHENHAM HEATH
A miser lived on Shenham Heath,
As lean and grey he was as death.
All children feared his long grey beard,
His toes peeped from the boots beneath.
Within the thatch he kept his store,
A thousand pounds of gold and more;
And every night by candle light
Would take and count them, o’er and o’er.
It chanced one chill November night,
He told the tale by candle light,
When sudden fled from heart and head
The lust for guineas round and bright.
He shivered, rose. Though he was old,
And though the waters glimmered cold,
A plunge he took in Shenham Brook
And washed away the taint of gold.
He cast his clouts and donned instead
A suit he’d worn when he was wed.
The cloth was new, of red and blue;
A feathered hat adorned his head.
He rose at dawning of the day,
That none might meet him on his way.
To Chert he went and money spent
But was not minded there to stay.
He bade a barber shave his chin,
And rode a-horse to Shenham Inn
In proper pride. The neighbours cried:
‘A lord! A lord! but gruesome thin!’
Nor from that day forth did he cease
Feeding the countryside like geese:
He lavished gold on young and old –
Aye, even to his last gold piece!
A pauper lives on Shenham Heath,
As lean and grey he is as death;
All people fear to view him near,
His toes peep from his boots beneath.
RONDEAU
Word comes of a pursuing robber-band
From great Bokhara or from Samarkand.
With tightened belly-girth and loosened rein
The gallant, speedy dromedary-train
Pounds with broad feet the soft-embosomed sand;
And hearts are by such panic fear unmanned,
It hounds them onward while they yet can stand,
With mingled snarl and cry and blow and strain,
Southward away.
So, as I watch from my far Northern strand,
High o’er the waves sweep by on either hand
Great gibbous cloud-beasts, merchandized with rain
From chilly Northern seas to thirsty Spain,
Wind-chased in frightened rout o’er sea, o’er land,
Southward away.
’AM AND ADVANCE: A COCKNEY STUDY
When we was wed my ’Erbert sed
‘Wot? Give ’em ’am? Good Lord!
Them wedding guests can beat their breasts,
But ’am we can’t afford.’
When ’Erbert died, Lord, ’ow I cried!
But ’arf them tears was sham.
‘At ’is bedside,’ I thinks with pride,
‘The mourners they ’as ’Am.’
PEEPING TOM
I sat in my chamber yesternight;
I lit the lamp, I drew the blind,
And scratched with a quill at paper white;
With Mistress Bess was all my mind!
But stormy gusts had rent the blind
And you were peering from behind,
Peeping Tom in the skies afar –
Bold, inquisitive, impudent star!
Fair Bess was leaning o’er the well,
When down there dropped her store-room key.
A bucket lowered me where it fell;
Invisible, I yet could see
To blow her kisses secretly.
Peeping Tom in the skies afar –
Bold, inquisitive, impudent star!
To-night I walk with Sweetheart Bess,
And love-glance follows love-glance swift;
I gather her in a soft caress,
With joy my eyes to heaven uplift.
But through the scudding vapour-drift
My mocker finds a fleeting rift,
Peeping Tom in the skies afar –
Bold, inquisitive, impudent star!
THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE MONSTER
We drave before a boisterous wind
For twenty days and three.
Stout was the barque wherein we sailed,
Shipmen from Normandie.
O carpenters, go take your tools
To patch the good ship’s side.
Ceased is the wind whereon we drave;
The swelling waves subside.
The carpenters ’gan take their tools
To patch the good ship’s side:
They caulked the gaping seams also,
To keep therefrom the tide.
But as they caulked the gaping seams
With mighty craft and care,
Writhed from the oily sea beneath,
White serpents everywhere.
Oh, be these worms or serpents strange
Thus rising from the sea?
Nay, ’tis a terrible monstér
Whose snaky arms they be.
The fish from out the oily waves
Heaved forth his vast bodie,
And seized the hapless carpenters
To pull them to the sea.
Come save us, save us, shipmates all,
Save us from this monstér
That hath seizèd us with his white, white arms,
An inch we may not stir.
’Tis they have ta’en their trusty swords
And fought right valiantlie,
The creature twined about the mast,
Most terrible to see.
The mariners ’gan smite and hack
To save the carpenters
,
And swore their blows they’d not abate
For seven such monstérs.
They hacked away the slimy flesh
And gared the monster flee,
Who took with him the carpenters
To perish in the sea.
He sank beneath the yeasty waves,
But erst a mariner
Had gougèd out with a bony thumb
An eye of the monstér.
A wind arose, and back we sailed
To France right merrilie,
And thanked the Saints we fed no fish
At bottom of the sea.
THE FUTURE
Shepherd. ‘Little Lamb of the Spring, in your pale-hued mountainy
meadow,
By the rough wall bramble-bound mortarless couched in
the shadow,
Lamb of the white hyacinthine fleece, give your heart to
this saying:
Life for a lamb is a Year with his seasons. The Spring is for playing,
Summer for love, and the Colds for decaying.
‘You will grow ere long, my delicate dainty creature –’
Lamb. ‘As your Southdown Beast, not a sheep, but an insult to
nature,
Loving the plains, large-trunked, foul, smutty-faced? I
such another?’
Shepherd. ‘No, little friend, but a ewe, slim, gentle and fair as your
mother.’
Lamb. ‘That would be good, to become like my mother.’
Shepherd. ‘And the little white ram that is butting his fellow out yonder
Will be lover and lord in the Summer: beside him you’ll
wander
Out o’er the open summer-clad hills through harebell and
heather….
I will recall this day: I will laugh to behold you together.’
Lamb. ‘Love? What is Love, thus to keep us together?’
ALCAICS ADDRESSED TO MY STUDY FAUNA
Mine eye commends thee, Japanese elephant,
Bright body, proud trunk, wrought by a silver-smith:
Thee too, O swart-cheeked elfin rider,
Bought for a couple of Greek Iambics.
Fair wooden doe-deer, chiselled in Switzerland,
Why starest sad-eyed down from my cup-board top?
‘Once, lord, a stag ten-tyned, tremendous
Shielded my side – now the dust-cart holds him!’
Green china kit-cat, hailing from Chester-town,
Sweet mouthed thou smilest after the Cheshire way,