Works

(To K. Wigram.)

Sheltered, when the rain blew over the hills it was,
Sunny all day when the days of summer were long,
Beyond all rumour of labouring towns it was,...

Now am I a tin whistle
Through which God blows,
And I wish to God I were a trumpet
But why, God only knows.

There was a day, when I, if that was I,
Surrendered lay beneath a burning sky,
Where overhead the azure ached with heat,
And many red fierce poppies splashed the wheat;...

My heart was like a bird and took to flight,
Around the rigging circling joyously;
The ship rolled on beneath a cloudless sky
Like a great angel drunken with the light.
...

When I see truth, do I seek truth
Only that I may things denote,
And, rich by striving, deck my youth
As with a vain unusual coat?

Or seek I truth for other ends:...

Wind waves the reeds by the river,
Grey sky lids the leaden water.
Ducks fly low across the water,
Three flying: one quacks sadly.

Grey are the sky and the water,...

My soul, it shall not take us,
O we will escape
This world that strives to break us
And cast us to its shape;
Its chisel shall not enter,
Its fire shall not touch,
Hard from rim to centre,...

Death in the cold grey morning
Came to the man where he lay;
And the wind shivered, and the tree shuddered
And the dawn was grey.

And the face of the man was grey in the dawn,...

I

When I was a boy there was a friend of mine:
We thought ourselves warriors and grown folk swine,
Stupid old animals who never understood
And never had an impulse and said "you must be good."
...

Agatha, tell me, does thy heart not ache,
Plunged in this squalid city's filthy sea,
For another ocean where the splendours break
Blue, clear, and deep as is virginity....

Oft Music, as it were some moving mighty sea,
Bears me towards my pale
Star: in clear space, or 'neath a vaporous canopy
On-floating, I set sail.
...

I

The stream goes fast.
When this that is the present is the past,
'Twill be as all the other pasts have been,
A failing hill, a daily dimming scene,
A far strange port with foreign life astir...

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit aching for the light
And all the wide horizon's line is hid
By a black day sadder than any night;

When the changed earth is but a dungeon dank...

One, Nature! burns and makes thee bright,
One gives thee weeds to mourn withal;
And what to one is burial
Is to the other life and light.

The unknown Hermes who assists...

The lover and the stern philosopher
Both love, in their ripe time, the confident
Soft cats, the house's chiefest ornament,
Who like themselves are cold and seldom stir.
...

'Tis bitter-sweet, when winter nights are long,
To watch, beside the flames which smoke and twist,
The distant memories which slowly throng,
Brought by the chime soft-singing through the mist.
...

Flying his hair and his eyes averse,
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.
How could our song his charms rehearse?
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.

High on a down we found him last,...

O moon, O lamp of hill and secret dale!
Thou whom our fathers, ages out of mind,
Worshipped in thy blue heaven, whilst behind
Thy stars streamed after thee a glittering trail,
...

'Neath their black yews in solemn state
The owls are sitting in a row
Like foreign gods; and even so
Blink their red eyes; they meditate.

Quite motionless they hold them thus...

This evening the Moon dreams more languidly,
Like a beauty who on mounded cushions rests,
And with her light hand fondles lingeringly,
Before she sleeps, the slope of her sweet breasts.
...