Works

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

(F.T.)


The cord broke, and the tent
Slipped, and the silken roof
Lay prone beneath the viewless hoof
Of the deliberate firmament.
Yet cared we not; how should we care?...

Muse, you have opened like a flower.

* * * * *

Long ago I knew that brown integument,
Like a dead husk, had dormant life within it,
And waited till a first white point appeared...

(To F. S.)

In the smooth grey heaven is poised the pale half moon
And sheds on the wide grey river a broken reflection.
Out from the low church-tower the boats are moored...

The leaves fall gently on the grass,
And all the willow trees, and poplar trees, and elder trees
That bend above her where she sleeps,
O all the willow trees, the willow trees
Breathe sighs upon her tomb....

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 shall make beauty out of many things:
Lights, colours, motions, sky and earth and sea,
The soft unbosoming of all the springs
Which that inscrutable hand allows to me,...

What deaths men have died, not fighting but impotent.
Hung on the wire, between trenches, burning and freezing,
Groaning for water with armies of men so near;...

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.
...

The lily of Malud is born in secret mud.
It is breathed like a word in a little dark ravine
Where no bird was ever heard and no beast was ever seen,
And the leaves are never stirred by the panther's velvet sheen....

I heard a voice that cried, "Make way for those who died!"
And all the coloured crowd like ghosts at morning fled;
And down the waiting road, rank after rank there strode,...

I

Beneath my skull-bone and my hair,
Covered like a poisonous well,
There is a land: if you looked there
What you saw you'd quail to tell.
You that sit there smiling, you...

(To Maurice Baring)

I waited for a miracle to-night.
Dim was the earth beneath a star-swept sky,
Her boughs were vague in that phantasmal light,
Her current rippled past invisibly....

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,
...

(OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE, QUEEN'S, DECEMBER)

(To Hugh Brooks)

I

The walls make a funnel, packed full; the distant gate
Bars us from inaccessible light and peace....

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.
...

Musician, with the bent and brooding face,
White brow and thunderous eyes: you are not playing
Merely the music that dead hand did trace.

Musician, with the lifted resolute face,...