At Jaffa by a sea of malachite,
In red tarboosh, green sash, and flowing white
Burnous—among the shadowy memories
That haunt me yet by these bleak northern seas
He lives for ever in my eyes’ delight,
Bizarre, superb in young immortal might—
A god of old barbaric mysteries.
Maybe he lived a life of lies and lust,
Maybe his bones are now but scattered dust;
Yet, for a moment he was life supreme
Exultant and unchallenged: and my rhyme
Would set him safely out of reach of time
In that old heaven where things are what they seem.
OBLIVION
Near the great pyramid, unshadowed, white,
With apex piercing the white noon-day blaze.
Swathed in white robes beneath the blinding rays
Lie sleeping Bedouins drenched in white-hot light.
About them, searing to the tingling sight,
Swims the white dazzle of the desert ways
Where the sense shudders, witless and adaze,
In a white void with neither depth nor height.
Within the black core of the pyramid,
Beneath the weight of sunless centuries,
Lapt in dead night King Cheops lies asleep:
Yet in the darkness of his chamber hid
He knows no black oblivion more deep
Than that blind white oblivion of noon skies.
TENANTS
Suddenly, out of dark and leafy ways,
We came upon the little house asleep
In cold blind stillness, shadowless and deep,
In the white magic of the full moon-blaze:
Strangers without the gate, we stood agaze,
Fearful to break that quiet, and to creep
Into the home that had been ours to keep
Through a long year of happy nights and days.
So unfamiliar in the white moon-gleam,
So old and ghostly like a house of dream
It stood, that over us there stole the dread
That even as we watched it, side by side,
The ghosts of lovers, who had lived and died
Within its walls, were sleeping in our bed.
GOLD
All day the mallet thudded far below
My garret, in an old ramshackle shed
Where ceaselessly, with stiffly nodding head
And rigid motions ever to and fro
A figure like a puppet in a show
Before the window moved till day was dead,
Beating out gold to earn his daily bread,
Beating out thin fine gold-leaf blow on blow.
And I within my garret all day long
Unto that ceaseless thudding tuned my song,
Beating out golden words in tune and time
To that dull thudding, rhyme on golden rhyme.
But in my dreams all night, in that dark shed,
With aching arms I beat fine gold for bread.
ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH
Against the green flame of the hawthorn-tree,
His scarlet tunic burns;
And livelier than the green sap’s mantling glee
The spring fire tingles through him headily
As quivering he turns
And stammers out the old amazing tale
Of youth and April weather;
While she, with half-breathed jests that, sobbing, fail,
Sits, tight-lipped, quaking, eager-eyed and pale
Beneath her purple feather.
BATTLE
THE GOING
He’s gone.
I do not understand.
I only know
That as he turned to go
And waved his hand,
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone:
And I was dazzled by a sunset glow,
And he was gone.
THE JOKE
He’d even have his joke
While we were sitting tight,
And so he needs must poke
His silly head in sight
To whisper some new jest
Chortling. But as he spoke
A rifle cracked ...
And now God knows when I shall hear the rest!
IN THE AMBULANCE
“Two rows of cabbages,
Two of curly-greens,
Two rows of early peas,
Two of kidney-beans.”
That’s what he is muttering,
Making such a song,
Keeping other chaps awake,
The whole night long.
Both his legs are shot away,
And his head is light;
So he keeps on muttering
All the blessed night:
“Two rows of cabbages,
Two of curly-greens,
Two rows of early peas,
Two of kidney-beans.”
HIT
Out of the sparkling sea
I drew my tingling body clear, and lay
On a low ledge the livelong summer day,
Basking, and watching lazily
White sails in Falmouth Bay.
My body seemed to burn
Salt in the sun that drenched it through and through,
Till every particle glowed clean and new
And slowly seemed to turn
To lucent amber in a world of blue....
I felt a sudden wrench—
A trickle of warm blood—
And found that I was sprawling in the mud
Among the dead men in the trench.
THE HOUSEWIFE
She must go back, she said,
Because she’d not had time to make the bed.
We’d hurried her away
So roughly ... and for all that we could say,
She broke from us, and passed
Into the night, shells falling thick and fast.
HILL-BORN
I sometimes wonder if it’s really true
I ever knew
Another life
Than this unending strife
With unseen enemies in lowland mud;
And wonder if my blood
Thrilled ever to the tune
Of clean winds blowing through an April noon
Mile after sunny mile
On the green ridges of the Windy Gile.
THE FEAR
I do not fear to die
’Neath the open sky,
To meet death in the fight
Face to face, upright.
But when at last we creep
Into a hole to sleep,
I tremble, cold with dread,
Lest I wake up dead.
BACK
They ask me where I’ve been,
And what I’ve done and seen.
But what can I reply
Who know it wasn’t I,
But someone, just like me,
Who went across the sea
And with my head and hands
Slew men in foreign lands ...
Though I must bear the blame
Because he bore my name.
Richard Butler Glaenzer
STAR-MAGIC
Though your beauty be a flower
Of unimagined loveliness,
It cannot lure me tonight;
For I am all spirit.
As in the billowy oleander,
Full-bloomed,
Each blossom is all but lost
In the next—
One flame in a glow
Of green-veined rhodonite;
So is heaven a crystal magnificence
Of stars
Powdered lightly with blue.
For this one night
My spirit has turned honey-moth
And has made of the stars
Its flowers.
So all uncountable are the stars
That heaven shimmers as a web,
Bursting with light
From beyond,
A light exquisite,
Immeasurable!
For this one night
My spirit has dared, and been caught
In the web of the stars.
Though your beauty were a net
Of unimagined power,
It could not hold me tonight;
For I am all spirit.
Douglas Goldring
VOYAGES
I
To come so soon to this imagined dark—
More velvet-deep than any midnight park!
Palaces hem me in, with blind black walls;
The water is hushed for a voice that never calls.
My gondolier sways silently over his oar.
II
_At St. Blaise, à la Zuecca! Oh, my dear,
Laugh your gentle laughter! This old land,
From Provence to Paris—never fear—
All the heart can feel will understand._
A small town, a white town,
A town for you and me—
With a _Café Glacier_ in the square,
And schooners at the quay;
And the _terrasse_ of a small hotel
That looks upon the sea!
There gay sounds and sweet sounds
And sounds of peace come through:
The cook sings in the kitchen,
The pink-foot ring-doves coo,
And Julien brings the Pernods
That are bad for me and you.
_At St. Blaise, à la Zuecca! Oh, my dear,
Laugh your gentle laughter! This old land,
From Provence to Paris—never fear—
All the heart can feel will understand._
III
Waves lap the beach, pines stretch to meet the sea;
A pale light on the horizon lingers and shines,
That might shine round the Graal: and we
Stand very silent, underneath the pines.
O swift expresses for the spirit’s flight!
Sometimes the moon is like a maid I know,
Looking roguishly back, and flying forward—so
I follow, flashing after. Blessed night!
IV
Do you remember, have you been these ways,
Dreaming or waking, after sunny days;
Sailed, in a moment, to imagined lands—
With one to love you, holding both your hands—
To old hot countries where the warm grape clings,
And an old, musical language strikes the ear
Like a caress, most exquisite to hear—
Your soul the voyager and your heart her wings?
Hermann Hagedorn
EARLY MORNING AT BARGIS
Clear air and grassy lea,
Stream-song and cattle-bell—
Dear man, what fools are we
In prison-walls to dwell!
To live our days apart
From green things and wide skies,
And let the wistful heart
Be cut and crushed with lies!
Bright peaks!—And suddenly
Light floods the placid dell,
The grass-tops brush my knee:
A good crop it will be,
So all is well!
O man, what fools are we
In prison-walls to dwell!
DOORS
Like a young child who to his mother’s door
Runs eager for the welcoming embrace,
And finds the door shut, and with troubled face
Calls and through sobbing calls, and o’er and o’er
Calling, storms at the panel—so before
A door that will not open, sick and numb,
I listen for a word that will not come,
And know, at last, I may not enter more.
Silence! And through the silence and the dark
By that closed door, the distant sob of tears
Beats on my spirit, as on fairy shores
The spectral sea; and through the sobbing—hark!—
Down the fair-chambered corridor of years,
The quiet shutting, one by one, of doors.
DEPARTURE
My true love from her pillow rose
And wandered down the summer lane.
She left her house to the wind’s carouse,
And her chamber wide to the rain.
She did not stop to don her coat,
She did not stop to smooth her bed—
But out she went in glad content
There where the bright path led.
She did not feel the beating storm,
But fled like a sunbeam, white and frail,
To the sea, to the air, somewhere, somewhere—
I have not found her trail.
BROADWAY
How like the stars are these white, nameless faces—
These far innumerable burning coals!
This pale procession out of stellar spaces,
This Milky Way of souls!
Each in its own bright nebulæ enfurled,
Each face, dear God, a world!
I fling my gaze out through the silent night:
In those far stars, what gardens, what high halls,
Has mortal yearning built for its delight,
What chasms and what walls?
What quiet mansions where a soul may dwell?
What heaven and what hell?
Thomas Hardy
SHE HEARS THE STORM
There was a time in former years—
While my roof-tree was his—
When I should have been distressed by fears
At such a night as this.
I should have murmured anxiously,
“The pricking rain strikes cold;
His road is bare of hedge or tree,
And he is getting old.”
But now the fitful chimney-roar,
The drone of Thorncombe trees,
The Froom in flood upon the moor,
The mud of Mellstock Leaze,
The candle slanting sooty wick’d,
The thuds upon the thatch,
The eaves-drops on the window flicked,
The clacking garden-hatch,
And what they mean to wayfarers,
I scarcely heed or mind;
He has won that storm-tight roof of hers
Which Earth grants all her kind.
THE VOICE
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
And the woman calling.
IN THE MOONLIGHT
“O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave, as no other grave there were?
“If your great gaunt eyes so importune
Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon,
Maybe you’ll raise her phantom soon!”
“Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!”
“Ah—she was one you loved, no doubt,
Through good and evil, through rain and drought,
And when she passed, all your sun went out?”
“Nay: she was the woman I did not love,
Whom all the others were ranked above,
Whom during her life I thought nothing of.”
THE MAN HE KILLED
“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
“But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
“I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although
“He thought he’d ’list, perhaps,
Off-hand like—just as I—
Was out of work—had sold his traps—
No other reason why.
“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”
Ralph Hodgson
THE MYSTERY
He came and took me by the hand
Up to a red rose tree,
He kept His meaning to Himself
But gave a rose to me.
I did not pray Him to lay bare
The mystery to me;
Enough the rose was Heaven to smell,
And His own face to see.
THREE POEMS
I
Babylon—where I go dreaming
When I weary of to-day,
Weary of a world grown gray.
II
God loves an idle rainbow,
No less than laboring seas.
III
Reason has moons, but moons not hers
Lie mirrored on her sea,
Confounding her astronomers,
But, oh, delighting me!
STUPIDITY STREET
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.
I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat,
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.
Horace Holley
CREATIVE
Renew the vision of delight
By vigil, praise and prayer,
Till every sinew leaps in might
And every sense is fair.
TWILIGHT AT VERSAILLES
Unfold for men, O God, love’s true, creative day,
To flower our barren souls by mellow sun and noon:
The glory of old thought is still, and cold, and gray,
Like gardens unrenewed beneath the sterile moon.
LOVERS
Whate’er our joy compelled, men’s praise and blame fall hollow,
A voice upon the winds that drown it as they blow:
So fair a vision led, our thought was all to follow;
So strong a passion urged, our will was all to go.
Helen Hoyt
ELLIS PARK
Little park that I pass through,
I carry off a piece of you
Every morning hurrying down
To my work-day in the town;
Carry you for country there
To make the city ways more fair.
I take your trees,
And your breeze,
Your greenness,
Your cleanness,
Some of your shade, some of your sky,
Some of your calm as I go by;
Your flowers to trim
The pavements grim;
Your space for room in the jostled street
And grass for carpet to my feet.
Your fountains take and sweet bird calls
To sing me from my office walls.
All that I can see
I carry off with me.
But you never miss my theft,
So much treasure you have left.
As I find you, fresh at morning,
So I find you, home returning—
Nothing lacking from your grace.
All your riches wait in place
For me to borrow
On the morrow.
Do you hear this praise of you,
Little park that I pass through?
THE NEW-BORN
I have heard them in the night—
The cry of their fear,
Because there is no light,
Because they do not hear
Familiar sounds and feel the familiar arm,
And they awake alone.
Yet they have never known
Danger or harm.
What is their dread?—
This dark about their bed?
But they are so lately come
Out of the dark womb
Where they were safely kept.
That blackness was good;
And the silence of that solitude
Wherein they slept
Was kind.
Where did they find
Knowledge of death?
Caution of darkness and cold?
These—of the little, new breath—
Have they a prudence so old?
RAIN AT NIGHT
Are you awake? Do you hear the rain?
How rushingly it strikes upon the ground,
And on the roof, and the wet window-pane!
Sometimes I think it is a comfortable sound,
Making us feel how safe and snug we are:
Closing us off in this dark, away from the dark outside.
The rest of the world seems dim tonight, mysterious and far.
Oh, there is no world left! Only darkness, darkness stretching wide
And full of the blind rain’s immeasurable fall!
How nothing must we seem unto this ancient thing!
How nothing unto the earth—and we so small!
Oh, wake, wake!—do you not feel my hands cling?
One day it will be raining as it rains tonight; the same wind blow—
Raining and blowing on this house wherein we lie: but you and I—
We shall not hear, we shall not ever know.
O love, I had forgot that we must die.
THE LOVER SINGS OF A GARDEN
Oh, beautiful are the flowers of your garden,
The flowers of your garden are fair:
Blue flowers of your eyes
And dusk flower of your hair;
Dew flower of your mouth
And peony-budded breasts,
And the flower of the curve of your hand
Where my hand rests.
SINCE I HAVE FELT THE SENSE OF DEATH
Since I have felt the sense of death,
Since I have borne its dread, its fear—
Oh, how my life has grown more dear
Since I have felt the sense of death!
Sorrows are good, and cares are small,
Since I have known the loss of all.
Since I have felt the sense of death,
And death forever at my side—
Oh, how the world has opened wide
Since I have felt the sense of death!
My hours are jewels that I spend,
For I have seen the hours end.
Since I have felt the sense of death,
Since I have looked on that black night—
My inmost brain is fierce with light
Since I have felt the sense of death.
O dark, that made my eyes to see!
O death, that gave my life to me!
Ford Madox Hueffer
ANTWERP
I
Gloom!
An October like November;
August a hundred thousand hours,
And all September,
A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days,
And half October like a thousand years ...
And doom!
That then was Antwerp ...
In the name of God,
How could they do it?
Those souls that usually dived
Into the dirty caverns of mines;
Who usually hived
In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars;
Who dragged muddy shovels, over the grassy mud,
Lumbering to work over the greasy sods ...
Those men there, with the appearance of clods
Were the bravest men that a usually listless priest of God
Ever shrived ...
And it is not for us to make them an anthem.
If we found words there would come no wind that would fan them
To a tune that the trumpets might blow it,
Shrill through the heaven that’s ours or yet Allah’s,
Or the wide halls of any Valhallas.
We can make no such anthem. So that all that is ours
For inditing in sonnets, pantoums, elegiacs, or lays
Is this:
“In the name of God, how could they do it?”
II
For there is no new thing under the sun,
Only this uncomely man with a smoking gun
In the gloom....
What the devil will he gain by it?
Digging a hole in the mud and standing all day in the rain by it
Waiting his doom;
The sharp blow, the swift outpouring of the blood
Till the trench of gray mud
Is turned to a brown purple drain by it.
Well, there have been scars
Won in many wars,
Punic,
Lacedæmonian, wars of Napoleon, wars for faith, wars for honor, for
love, for possession,
But this Belgian man in his ugly tunic,
His ugly round cap, shooting on, in a sort of obsession,
Overspreading his miserable land,
Standing with his wet gun in his hand....
Doom!
He finds that in a sudden scrimmage,
And lies, an unsightly lump on the sodden grass ...
An image that shall take long to pass!
III
For the white-limbed heroes of Hellas ride by upon their horses
Forever through our brains.
The heroes of Cressy ride by upon their stallions;
And battalions and battalions and battalions—
The Old Guard, the Young Guard, the men of Minden and of Waterloo,
Pass, for ever staunch,
Stand, for ever true;
And the small man with the large paunch,
And the gray coat, and the large hat, and the hands behind the back,
Watches them pass
In our minds for ever....
But that clutter of sodden corses
On the sodden Belgian grass—
That is a strange new beauty.
IV
With no especial legends of marchings or triumphs or duty,
Assuredly that is the way of it,
The way of beauty....
And that is the highest word you can find to say of it.
For you cannot praise it with words
Compounded of lyres and swords,
But the thought of the gloom and the rain
And the ugly coated figure, standing beside a drain,
Shall eat itself into your brain:
And you will say of all heroes, “They fought like the Belgians!”
And you will say, “He wrought like a Belgian his fate out of gloom.”
And you will say, “He bought like a Belgian
His doom.”
And that shall be an honorable name;
“Belgian” shall be an honorable word;
As honorable as the fame of the sword,
As honorable as the mention of the many-chorded lyre,
And his old coat shall seem as beautiful as the fabrics woven in Tyre.
V
And what in the world did they bear it for?
I don’t know.
And what in the world did they dare it for?
Perhaps that is not for the likes of me to understand.
They could very well have watched a hundred legions go
Over their fields and between their cities
Down into more southerly regions.
They could very well have let the legions pass through their woods,
And have kept their lives and their wives and their children and cattle
and goods.
I don’t understand.
Was it just love of their land?
Oh, poor dears!
Can any man so love his land?
Give them a thousand thousand pities
And rivers and rivers of tears
To wash off the blood from the cities of Flanders.
VI
This is Charing Cross;
It is midnight;
There is a great crowd
And no light—
A great crowd, all black, that hardly whispers aloud.
Surely, that is a dead woman—a dead mother!
She has a dead face;
She is dressed all in black;
She wanders to the book-stall and back,
At the back of the crowd;
And back again and again back,
She sways and wanders.
This is Charing Cross;
It is one o’clock.
There is still a great cloud, and very little light;
Immense shafts of shadows over the black crowd
That hardly whispers aloud....
And now!... That is another dead mother,
And there is another and another and another....
And little children, all in black,
All with dead faces, waiting in all the waiting-places,
Wandering from the doors of the waiting-room
In the dim gloom.
These are the women of Flanders:
They await the lost.
They await the lost that shall never leave the dock;
They await the lost that shall never again come by the train
To the embraces of all these women with dead faces;
They await the lost who lie dead in trench and barrier and fosse,
In the dark of the night.
This is Charing Cross; it is past one of the clock;
There is very little light.
There is so much pain.
_L’Envoi_:
And it was for this that they endured this gloom;
This October like November,
That August like a hundred thousand hours,
And that September,
A hundred thousand dragging sunlit days
And half October like a thousand years....
Oh, poor dears!
Scharmel Iris
AFTER THE MARTYRDOM
They threw a stone, you threw a stone,
I threw a stone that day.
Although their sharpness bruised his flesh
He had no word to say.
But for the moan he did not make
To-day I make my moan;
And for the stone I threw at him
My heart must bear a stone.
LAMENT
Lady, your heart has turned to dust,
Your wail is taken by the sea.
The wind is knocking at my heart,
And will not let me be.
Your moaning smites me in my dreams,
And I must sorrow till I die.
And I shall rove, and I shall weep,
Till in the grave I lie.
ITERATION
My son is dead and I am going blind,
And in the Ishmael-wind of grief
I tremble like a leaf;
I have no mind for any word you say:
My son is dead and I am going blind.
EARLY NIGHTFALL
The pale day drowses on the western steep;
The toiler faints along the marge of sleep
Within the sunset-press, incarnadine,
The sun, a peasant, tramples out his wine.
Ah, scattered gold rests on the twilight streams;
The poppy opes her scarlet purse of dreams.
Night with the sickle-moon engarners wheat,
And binds the sheaves of stars beneath her feet.
Rest, weary heart, and every flight-worn bird!
The brooklet of the meadow lies unstirred.
Sleep, every soul, against a comrade breast!
God grant you peace, and guard you in your rest!
Orrick Johns
SONGS OF DELIVERANCE
I—THE SONG OF YOUTH
This is the song of youth,
This is the cause of myself;
I knew my father well and he was a fool,
Therefore will I have my own foot in the path before I take a step;
I will go only into new lands,
And I will walk on no plank-walks.
The horses of my family are wind-broken,
And the dogs are old,
And the guns rusty;
I will make me a new bow from an ash-tree,
And cut up the homestead into arrows.
Behold how people stand around!
(There are always crowds of people standing around,
Whose legs have no knees)—
While the engineers put up steel work ...
Is it something to catch the sunlight,
Jewelry and gew-gaw?
I have no time to wait for them to build bridges for me;
Where awful the gap seems stretching there is no gap,
Leaping I take it at once from a thought to a thought.
I can no more walk in the stride of other men
Than be father of their children.
My treasure lured like a bright star,
And I went to it young and desirous.
Lo, as it stood there in its great chests,
The wise men came up with the keys,
Crying, “Blasphemy, blasphemy!”
For I had broken the locks....
And when the procession went waving to a funeral,
They cried it again;
For I stayed in my home and spoke truth about the dead.