I like a tree wave all my thoughts with you,
As your boughs wave to other tossed boughs when
First in the windy east the dawn looks through
Night's soon-dissolving bars.
Return, return? But I have never strayed:
Hush, thoughts, that for a moment played
In that enchanted forest of the stars
Where the mind grows numb.
Return, return?
Back, thoughts, from heights that freeze and deeps that burn,
Where sight fails and song's dumb.
And as, after long absence, a child stands
In each familiar room
And with fond hands
Touches the table, casement, bed,
Anon, each sleeping, half-forgotten toy;
So I to your sharp light and friendly gloom
Returning, with first pale leaves round me shed,
Recover the old joy
Since here the long-acquainted hill-path lies,
Steeps I have clambered up, and spaces where
The Mount opens her bosom to the air
And all around gigantic beeches rise.
JOHN FREEMAN
_Shobeensho_
(_From the Irish Gaelic_)
_For my Granddaughter Jenny_
O not as the wife of a churl would wrap you,
In coarse country woollens so roughly to hap you;
Between two sheets of the silk I'll lay you,
A cradle of gold in the wind to sway you.
I'd rock you to rest, my bright new-comer,
One dreamy day in the height of summer,
Under the eaves of whispering leaves,
Drowsed by the drone of the wee bee-drummer.
May a dream of delight steal into your slumber;
Till evening makes way for the Starry Number,
And with God's bright angels around to mind you,
No finger of death I pray may find you!
ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES
_Storm and Stars_
Naked night; black elms, pallid and streaming sky?
Alone with the passion of the wind,
In a hollow of stormy sound lost and alone am I,
On beaten earth a lost, unmated mind,
Marvelling at the stars, few, strange and bright,
That all this dark assault of surging air,
Wrenching the rooted wood, hunting the cloud of night,
As if it would tear all and nothing spare,
Leaves supreme in the height.
Against what laws, what laws, what powers invisible,
Sought not, yet always found,
Cries this dumb passion, strains this wrestle of wild will,
With tiger-leaps that seem to shake the ground?
Is it the baffled, homeless, rebel wind's crying,
Or storm from a profounder passion wrung?
Ah, heart of man, is it you, the old powers defying,
By far desires, by terrible beauty stung,
Broken on laws unseen, in a starry world dying,
Ignorant, tameless, young?
LAURENCE BINYON
THE FORESHORE OF LONDON
By H. M. TOMLINSON
It begins on the north side of the City, at Poverty Corner. It begins
imperceptibly, and very likely is no more than what a native knows is
there. It does not look like a foreshore. It looks like another of the
byways of the capital. There is nothing to distinguish it from the rest
of Fenchurch Street. You will not find it in the directory, for its
name is only a familiar bearing used by seamen among themselves. If
a wayfarer came upon it from the west, he might stop to light a pipe
(as well there as anywhere) and pass on, guessing nothing of what it
is and of its memories. And why should he? London is built of such old
shadows; and while we are here casting our own there is not much time
to turn and question what they fall upon. Yet if some unreasonable
doubt, a suspicion that he was being watched, made a stranger hesitate
at that corner, he might begin to feel that London there was as
different from Bayswater and Clapham as though deep water intervened.
In a sense deep water does; and not only the sea, but legends of ships
that have gone, and of the men who knew them, and traditions of a
service older than anything Whitehall knows, though still as lively as
enterprise itself, and as recent as the ships which moved on to-day's
high water.
In a frame outside one of its shops hangs a photograph of a sailing
ship. The portrait is so large and the beauty of the subject so evident
that it might have been the cause of the stranger stopping there to
fill his pipe. Yet how could he know that to those groups of men
loitering about the name of that ship is as familiar as Suez or Rio,
even though they have never seen her? They know her as well as they
know their business. They know her house-flag--it is indistinguishable
in the picture--and her master, and it is possible the oldest of them
remembers the Clippers of that fleet of which she alone now carries the
emblem; for this is not only another year, but another era. But they do
not look at her portrait. They spit into the road, or stare across it,
and rarely move from where they stand, except to pace up and down as
though keeping a watch. At one time, perhaps thirty years ago, it was
usual to see gold rings in their ears. It is said that if you wanted
a bunch of men to run a little river steamer, with a freeboard of six
inches, out to Delagoa Bay, you could engage them all at this corner,
or at the taverns just up the turning. The suggestion of such a voyage,
in such a ship, would turn us to look on these men in wonder, for it is
the way of all but the wise to expect appearance to betray admirable
qualities. These fellows, though, are not significant, except that you
might think of some of them that their ease and indifference were
assumed, and that, when trying not to look so, they were very conscious
of the haste and importance of this great city into which that corner
jutted far enough for them. They have just landed or they are about to
sail again, and they might be standing on the shore eyeing the town
beyond, in which the fate of ships is known by those they never see,
but who are inimical to them, and whose ways are inscrutable.
If there are any inland shops which can hold one longer than the place
where that ship's portrait hangs, then I do not know them. That comes
from no more, of course, than the usual fault of an early impression.
That fault gives a mould to the mind, and our latest thoughts, which
we try to make reasonable, betray that accidental shape. It may be
said that I looked into this window while still soft. The consequence,
everybody knows, would be incurable in a boy who saw sextants for the
first time, compasses, patent logs, sounding-machines, signalling-gear,
and the other secrets of navigators. Not only those things, either.
There was a section given to books, with classics like Stevens on
_Stowage_, and Norie's _Navigation_, volumes never seen west of
Gracechurch Street. The books were all for the eyes of sailors, and
were sorted by chance. _Knots and Splices_, _Typee_, _Know Your Own
Ship_, the _South Pacific Directory_, and _Castaway on the Auckland
Islands_. There were many of them, and they were in that fortuitous and
attractive order. The back of every volume had to be read, though the
light was bad. On one wall between the windows a specimen chart was
framed. Maps are good; but how much better are charts, especially when
you cannot read them except by guessing at their cryptic lettering!
About the coast line the fathom marks cluster thickly, and venture to
sea in lines which attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till the chart
is blank, being beyond soundings. At the Capes are red dots, with arcs
on the seaward side to show at what distance mariners pick up the real
lights at night. Through such windows, boys with bills of lading and
mates' receipts in their pockets, being on errands to ship-owners, look
outward, and only seem to look inward. Where are the confines of London?
Opposite Poverty Corner there is, or there used to be, an archway
into a courtyard where in one old office the walls were hung with
half-models of sailing ships. I remember the name of one, the
_Winifred_. Deed-boxes stood on shelves, with the name of a ship on
each. There was a mahogany counter, an encrusted pewter inkstand,
desks made secret with high screens, and a silence that might have
been the reproof to intruders of a repute remembered in silence and
dignity behind the screens by those who kept waiting so unimportant
a visitor as a boy. On the counter was a stand displaying sailing
cards, announcing, among other events in London river, "the fine ship
_Blackadder_ for immediate dispatch, having most of her cargo engaged,
to Brisbane." And in those days, just round the corner in Billiter
Street, one of the East India Company's warehouses still remained, a
sombre relic among the new limestone and red granite offices, a massive
archway in its centre leading, it could be believed, to an enclosure
of night left by the eighteenth century and forgotten. I never saw
anybody go into it, nor come out. How could they? It was of another
time and place. The familiar Tower, the Guildhall that we knew nearly
as well, the Cathedral which certainly existed, for it could often be
seen in the distance, and the Abbey that was little more than something
we had heard named, they were but the scenery close to the 'buses. Yet
London was more wonderful than anything they could make it appear.
About Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street waggons could be seen
going east, bearing bales and cases, and the packages were portmarked
for Sourabaya, Para, Ilo-Ilo, and Santos--names like those. They had
to be seen to be believed. One could stand there, forced to think that
the sun never did more than make the floor of asphalted streets glow
like polished brass, and that the evening light was full of glittering
motes and smelt of dust, and that life worked itself out with ink in
cupboards made of glass and mahogany; and suddenly you learned, while
smelling the dust, that Acapulco was more than a portent in a book and
held only by an act of faith. Yet that astonishing revelation, enough
to make any youthful messenger forget where he himself was bound,
through turning to follow with his eyes so casual an acceptance by a
carrier's cart of the verity of a fable, is nowhere mentioned, I have
found since, in any guide to our capital, though you may learn how
Cornhill got its name.
For though Londoners understand the Guildhall pigeons have as much
right to the place as the Aldermen, they look upon the seabirds by
London Bridge as vagrant strangers. They do not know where their city
ends on the east side. Their river descends from Oxford in more than
one sense, and ceases to lose their respect in the neighbourhood of
Westminster. It has little history worth mentioning below that. To
the poets the river fails them, it becomes flat and songless where at
Richmond the sea's remote influence just moves it; and there they leave
it. The Thames goes down then to a wide grey vacuity, a featureless
monotony where men but toil, where life becomes silent in effort, and
goes out through fogs to nowhere in particular. But there is a hilltop
at Woolwich from which, better than from Richmond, our river, the
burden-bearer, the road which joins us to New York and Sydney, can
be seen for what it is, plainly related to a vaster world, with the
ships upon its bright path moving through the smoke and buildings of
the City. And surely some surmise of what our river is comes to a few
of that multitude which crosses London Bridge every day? They favour
the east side of it, I have noticed, and they cannot always resist a
pause to stare overside to the Pool. Why do they? Ships are there, it
is true, but only insignificant traders, diminished by sombre cliffs up
which their cargo is hauled piecemeal to vanish instantly into mid-air
caverns; London absorbs all they have as morsels. Anyhow, it is the
business of ships. The people on the bridge watch another life below,
with its strange cries and mysterious movements. A leisurely wisp of
steam rises from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and breathing,
though motionless. The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in a
winter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory
of a dark past. Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the
wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only by
the frail effort of his will. Once they were, but now, in some moods,
they are merely remembered. Only the men busy on the deck of the ship
below are real. Through an arch beneath the feet a barge shoots out
noiselessly on the ebb, and staring down at its sudden apparition you
feel dizzily that it has the bridge in tow and that all you people
there are being drawn down resistlessly into that lower world of
shades. You release yourself from this spell with an effort and look at
the faces of those who are beside you at the parapet. What are their
thoughts? Do they know? Have they also seen the ghosts? Have they felt
stirring a secret and forgotten desire, old memories, and tales that
were told? They move away and go to their desks, or to their homes in
the suburbs. A vessel that has hauled into the fairway calls for the
Tower Bridge gates to be opened for her. She is going. We watch the
eastern mists which take her from us. For we never are so passive and
well disciplined to the routine of the things which compel us, but
rebellion comes at times--misgiving that there is a world beyond the
one we know, regret that we never ventured and made no discovery, and
that our time has been saved and not spent. The bascules descend again.
There, where that ship vanished, is the highway which brought those
unknown folk whose need created London out of reeds and mere. It is
our oldest road, and now has many by-paths. Near Poverty Corner is a
building which recently was dismissed with a brief humorous reference
in a new guide to our City--a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a
brick-front topped by a clock-face: Fenchurch Street Station. Beyond
its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is
the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would
guess to be at the end of it. The train runs over a wilderness of
tiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked and
scored as though by a withering heat. Nothing grows there; nothing
could live there. Smoke still pours from it, as though it were
volcanic, from numberless vents. The region is without sap. Above its
plains project superior fumaroles, their drifting vapours dissolving
great areas. When the train descends slightly, then holes appear in
that cliff which runs parallel with your track. The desert is actually
burrowed, and every hole in the plateau is a habitation. Something does
live there. That region of burnt and fissured rock is tunnelled and
inhabited; the unlikely serrations and ridges with the smoke moving
over them are porous, and a fluid life ranges beneath unseen. It is the
beginning of Dockland. That the life is in upright beings, each with
independent volition and a soul; that it is not an amorphous movement,
flowing in bulk through buried pipes, incapable of the idea of height,
of rising, is difficult to believe. It has not been believed. If
life, you protest, is really there, has any sense which is better than
that of extending worm-like through the underground, then why, at
intervals, is there not an upheaval, a geyser-like burst, a plain hint
from a power usually pent, but liable to go skywards? But that is for
the desert to answer. As by mocking chance the desert itself almost
instantly shows what possibilities are hidden within it. The train
roars unexpectedly over a viaduct, and below is a deep hollow filled
with light, with a floor of water, and a surprise of ships. How did
that white schooner get into such an enclosure? Is freedom nearer here
than we thought?
The crust of roofs ends abruptly in a country which is a complexity of
gasometers, canals, railway junctions, between which the long spokes
of cabbage-fields radiate from the train and revolve, and what is the
grotesque suggestion of many ships in the distance, for through gaps
in a nondescript horizon masts appear in a kaleidoscopic way. The
journey ends, usually in the rain, among iron sheds that are topped on
the far side by the rigging and smoke-stacks of great liners. There is
no doubt about it now. At the corner of one shed, sheltering from the
weather, is a group of brown men in coloured rags, first seen in the
gloom because of the whites of their eyes. What we remember of such a
day is that it was half of night, and the wind played castanets with
the sheet iron, hummed in the cordage, and swayed wildly the loose gear
aloft. Towering hulls were ranged down each side of a lagoon that ended
in vacancy. The rigging and funnels of the fleet were unrelated; those
ships were phantom and monstrous. They seemed on too great a scale
to be within human control. We felt diminished and a little fearful,
as among the looming urgencies of a dream. The forms were gigantic
but vague, and they were seen in a smother of the elements; and their
sounds, sonorous, melancholy, and prolonged, were like the warning of
something alien, yet without form, which we knew was adverse, but could
not recall when awake again. We remember, that day, a few watchers
insecure on an exposed dockhead that projected into a sullen dreariness
of river and mud which could have been the finish of the land. At the
end of a creaking hawser was a steamer canting as she backed to head
down stream--she was obviously exposed now to a great adventure--the
tide, rapid and noisy on her plates, the reek from her funnel sinking
over the water. And from the dockhead, in the fuddle of a rain-squall,
we were waving a handkerchief, probably to the wrong man, till the
vessel went out where all was one, rain, river, mud, and sky, and the
future.
It is afterwards that so strange an ending to a brief journey from
a city station is seen to have had more in it than the time-table,
hurriedly scanned, gave away. Or it would be remembered as strange, if
the one who had to make that journey so much as thought of it again;
for perhaps to a stranger occupied with more important matters it was
passed as being quite relevant to the occasion, ordinary and rather
dismal, the usual boredom of a duty. Its strangeness depends, very
likely, as much on an idle and squandering mind as on the ships, the
river, and the gasometers. Yet suppose you first saw the river from
Blackwall Stairs, in the days when the windows of the Artichoke Tavern,
an ancient weather-boarded house with benches outside, still looked
towards the ships coming in! And how if then, one evening, you had
seen a Blackwall liner haul out for the Antipodes while her crew sang
a chanty! It might put another light on the river; but a light, I will
admit, which others should not be expected to see, and if they looked
for it now might not discover, for it is possible that it has vanished,
like the old tavern. It is easy to persuade ourselves that a matter is
made plain by the light in which we prefer to see it, for it is our
light. One day, I remember, a boy had to take a sheaf of documents to
a vessel loading in the London Dock. She was sailing that tide. It was
a hot July noon. It is unlucky to send a boy, who is marked by all the
omens for a city prisoner, to that dock, for it is one of the best
of its kind. He had not been there before. There was an astonishing
vista, once inside the gates, of sherry butts and port casks. On the
flagstones were pools of wine lees. There was an unforgettable smell.
It was of wine, spices, oakum, wool, and hides. The sun made it worse,
but the boy, I think, preferred it strong. After wandering along many
old quays, and through dark sheds with wide doors that, on such a sunny
day, were stored with cool night and cubes and planks of gold, he found
his ship, the _Mulatto Girl_. She was for the Brazils. Now it is clear
that one even wiser in shipping affairs than a boy would have expected
to see a craft that was haughty and portentous when bound for the
Brazils, a ship that looked equal to making a coast of that kind. There
she was, her flush deck well below the quay wall. A ladder went down to
her, for she was no more than a schooner of a little over 100 tons. If
that did not look like the beginning of one of those voyages that are
reputed to have ended with the Elizabethans, then I am trying to convey
a wrong impression. On the deck of the _Mulatto Girl_ was her master,
in shirt and trousers and a remarkable straw hat more like a canopy,
bending over to discharge some weighty words into the hatch. He rose
and looked up at the boy on the quay, showing then a taut black beard
and formidable eyes. With his hands on his hips, he surveyed for a few
seconds the messenger above without speaking. Then he talked business,
and more than legitimate business. "Do you want to come?" he asked,
and smiled. "Eh?" He stroked his beard. The Brazils and all! A ship
like that! "There's a berth for you. Come along, my son." And observe
what we may lose through that habit of ours of uncritical obedience to
duty; see what may leave us for ever in that fatal pause, caused by
the surprise of the challenge to our narrow experience and knowledge,
the pause in which we miserably allow habit to overcome adventurous
instinct! I never heard again of the _Mulatto Girl_. I could not expect
to. Something, though, was gained that day. It cannot be named. It is
of no value. It is, you may have guessed, that very light which it has
been admitted may since have gone out.
Well, nobody who has ever surprised that light in Dockland will be
persuaded that it is not there still, and will remain. What the
foreshore of London is to some of us, and what those lights are which
we see as reflections coming down the waters from a far adventure, to
others would be what they are. The foreshore to them is the unending
monotony of grey streets, sometimes grim, often decayed, and always
reticent and sullen, that might never have seen the stars or heard of
good luck; and the light would be, when closely looked at, merely a
high gas bracket on a dank brick wall in solitude, its glass broken,
and the flame within it fluttering to extinction like an imprisoned
and crippled moth trying to evade the squeeze of giant darkness and
the wind. The narrow and forbidden by-way under that glim, a path
intermittent, and depending on the weight of the night which is trying
to blot it out altogether, goes to Wapping Old Stairs. Prince Rupert
once went that way. The ketch _Nonsuch_, Captain Zachary Gillam, was
then lying just off, about to make the voyage which established the
Hudson's Bay Company.
It is a path, like all those stairs and ways that go down to the
river, which began when human footsteps first originated London with
rough tracks. It is a path by which the successors of those primitives
went out of London, when projecting the original enterprise of their
ancestors from Wapping to the Guinea Coast and Manitoba. Why should we
believe it is different to-day? The sea does not change, and seamen
are what they were, if their ships are not those we admired many years
ago in the India Docks. It is impossible for those who know them to
see those moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for they follow
the river, which run from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to
the Deptford Docks, and from Tower Hill along Wapping High Street to
Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, as strangers would see them. What could
they be to strangers? Mud, taverns, pawnshops, neglected and obscure
churches, and houses that might know nothing but ill-fortune.