Here, Betsey, where the sainfoin blows,
Pink and the grass more thickly grows,
Where small brown bees are winging
To clamber up the stooping flowers,
We’ll share the sweet and sunny hours
Made murmurous with their singing.
Dear, it requires no small address
In such a billowy floweriness
For you, so young, to sally:
Yet would you still out-stay the sun
And linger when his light was done
Along the haunted valley.
O small brown fingers, clutched to seize
The biggest blooms, don’t spill the bees;
Imagine what contempt he
Would meet who ventured to arrive
Home, of an evening, at the hive,
With both his pockets empty!
Moreover, if you steal their share,
The bees become too poor to spare
Their sweets nor part with any
Honey at tea-time; so for you
What were for them a cell too few
Would be a sell too many!
Or, what were worse for you and me,
They might admire the industry
So thoughtlessly paraded,
And, tired of their brown queen, maintain
That no one needed Betsey-Jane
As urgently as they did.
So should you taste in some far clime
The plunder of eternal thyme
And you would quite forget us,
Our cottage and these English trees,
When you were Queen of Honey Bees
At Hybla or Hymettus.
AN ELEGY, FOR FATHER ANSELM, OF THE ORDER OF REFORMED CISTERCIANS,
GUEST-MASTER AND PARISH PRIEST
“Et pastores erant in regione eadem vigilantes”
You to whose soul a death propitious brings
Its Heaven, who attain a windless bourne
Of sanctity beyond all sufferings,
It is not ours to mourn;
For you, to whom the earth could nothing give,
Who knew no hint of our inspirèd pride,
You could not very well be said to live
Until the day you died.
’Tis upon us—father and kindly friend,
Holy and cheerful host—the unbidden guests
You welcomed and the souls you would amend,
The weight of sorrow rests.
From Sarum in the mesh of her five streams,
Her idle belfries and her glittering vanes,
We are clomb to where the cloud-race dusks and gleams
On turf of upland plains.
Southward the road through juniper and briar
Clambers the down, untrodden and unworn
Save where some flock pitted the chalky mire
With little feet at dawn.
Twice in a week the hooded carrier’s lamp,
Flashing on wayside flints and grasses, spills
Its misty radiance where the dews lie damp
Among the untended hills;
Here lies the hamlet ringed with grassy mound
And brambled barrow where, superbly dead,
The dust of pagans turned to holy ground
Beneath your humble tread.
Here we descend at drooping dusk the side
Of the stony down beneath the planted ring
Of beeches where you showed with pastoral pride
The folded lambs in spring;
Here pull at eve the self-same bell that hastened
Your rough-shod feet behind the hollow door—
Yet never see you stand, the chain unfastened,
Your lantern on the floor.
Others will spread the board now you are gone
Here where you smiled and gave your guests to eat,
Learning your menial kingliness from One
Who washed His servants’ feet;
Along the slumbering corridor betimes
Others will knock and other footsteps pass
Down the wet lane e’er the thin shivering chimes
Toll for the early mass.
Yet in the chapel’s self no sorrows sing
In the strange priest’s voice, nor any dolour grips
The heart because it is not you who bring
Your Master to its lips.
Here let us leave the things you would not have—
Vain grief and sorrow useless to be shown—
“God’s gift and the Community’s I gave
And nothing of my own,”
You would have said, self-deemed of no more worth
Than the green hands that guard a poppy’s grace,—
Blows the eternal flower and back to earth
Tumbles the withered case.
Nay, but Our Lord hath made renouncement vain,
Himself into those humble hands let fall,
Guerdon of willing poverty and pain,
The greatest gift of all;
To you and all who in that life austere
Mid fields remote your harsher labours ply
Singing His praise, girt round from year to year
With sheep-bells and the sky—
This, that to you is larger audience given
Where prayer and praise with sighing pinions shod
Piercing the starry ante-rooms of Heaven
Sway the designs of God:
And now yourself, standing where late hath stood
The echo of your voice, are prayer and praise—
O sweet reward and unsurpassing good
For that small gift of days.
Yourself, who now have heard such summoning
And seen such burning clarities alight
As broke the vigilant shepherds’ drowsy ring
On the predestined night,
Who made such haste as theirs who rose and trod
To Bethlehem the dew-encumbered grass,
Trustful to see the showing forth of God
And the Word come to pass;
With how much more than home-spun Israelites’
Poor hungry glimpse of Godhead are you blest
Whom Mary shows for more than mortal nights
The Jewel on her breast.
Yet, as one kneeling churl might chance to think
Of the wan herd behind their wattled bars,
Moving unshepherded with bells that clink
And stir beneath the stars,
And, for the thought’s space wishing he were back,
Pray to that Sum of Sweetness for his sheep—
“Take them, O Thou that dost supply our lack,
Into Thy hands to keep,”
So you who in His presence move and live
Recall amid your glad celestial cares
Your chosen office, to your children give
The charity of prayers.