Selected Poems

Selected Poems

Day that I have Loved

Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes,And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin dead hands.The grey veils of the half-light deepen; colour dies.I bear you, a light burden, to the shrouded sands,Where lies your waiting boat, by wreaths of the sea's makingMist-garlanded, with all grey weeds of the water crowned.There you'll be laid, past fear of sleep or hope of waking;And over the unmoving sea, without a sound,Faint hands will row you outward, out beyond our sight,Us with stretched arms and empty eyes on the far-gleamingAnd marble sand…Beyond the shifting cold twilight,Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming,There'll be no port, no dawn-lit islands! But the drearWaste darkening, and, at length, flame ultimate on the deep.Oh, the last fire – and you, unkissed, unfriended there!Oh, the lone way's red ending, and we not there to weep!(We found you pale and quiet, and strangely crowned with flowers,Lovely and secret as a child. You came with us,Came happily, hand in hand with the young dancing hours,High on the downs at dawn!) Void now and tenebrous,The grey sands curve before me…From the inland meadows,Fragrant of June and clover, floats the dark and fillsThe hollow sea's dead face with little creeping shadows,And the white silence brims the hollow of the hills.Close in the nest is folded every weary wing,Hushed all the joyful voices, and we, who held you dear,Eastward we turn and homeward, alone, remembering…Day that I loved, day that I loved, the Night is here!

On the Death of Smet-Smet, theHippopotamus-Goddess

SONG OF A TRIBE OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS(The Priests within the Temple)She was wrinkled and huge and hideous?She was our Mother.She was lustful and lewd? – but a God; we had none other.In the day She was hidden and dumb, but at nightfall moaned in the shade;We shuddered and gave Her Her will in the darkness; we were afraid.(The People without)She sent us pain,And we bowed before Her;She smiled againAnd bade us adore Her.She solaced our woeAnd soothed our sighing;And what shall we doNow God is dying?(The Priests within)She was hungry and ate our children; – how should we stay Her?She took our young men and our maidens; – ours to obey Her.We were loathed and mocked and reviled of all nations; that was our pride.She fed us, protected us, loved us, and killed us; now She has died.(The People without)She was so strong;But Death is stronger.She ruled us long;But Time is longer.She solaced our woeAnd soothed our sighing;And what shall we doNow God is dying?

Second Best

Here in the dark, O heart;Alone with the enduring Earth, and Night,And Silence, and the warm strange smell of clover;Clear-visioned, though it break you; far apartFrom the dead best, the dear and old delight;Throw down your dreams of immortality,O faithful, O foolish lover!Here's peace for you, and surety; here the oneWisdom – the truth! – "All day the good glad sunShowers love and labour on you, wine and song;The greenwood laughs, the wind blows, all day longTill night." And night ends all things.Then shall beNo lamp relumed in heaven, no voices crying,Or changing lights, or dreams and forms that hover!(And, heart, for all your sighing,That gladness and those tears are over, over…)And has the truth brought no new hope at all,Heart, that you're weeping yet for Paradise?Do they still whisper, the old weary cries?"'Mid youth and song, feasting and carnival,Through laughter, through the roses, as of oldComes Death, on shadowy and relentless feet,Death, unappeasable by prayer or gold;Death is the end, the end!"Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greetDeath as a friend!Exile of immortality, strongly wise,Strain through the dark with undesirous eyesTo what may lie beyond it. Sets your star,O heart, for ever! Yet, behind the night,Waits for the great unborn, somewhere afar,Some white tremendous daybreak. And the light,Returning, shall give back the golden hours,Ocean a windless level, Earth a lawnSpacious and full of sunlit dancing-places,And laughter, and music, and, among the flowers,The gay child-hearts of men, and the child-facesO heart, in the great dawn!

The Hill

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,When we are old, are old…" "And when we dieAll's over that is ours; and life burns onThrough other lovers, other lips," said I,– "Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!""We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;"We shall go down with unreluctant treadRose-crowned into the darkness!" … Proud we were,And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.– And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

Sonnet

Oh! Death will find me, long before I tireOf watching you; and swing me suddenlyInto the shade and loneliness and mireOf the last land! There, waiting patiently,One day, I think, I'll feel a cool wind blowing,See a slow light across the Stygian tide,And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing,And tremble. And I shall know that you have died,And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream,Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host,Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam —Most individual and bewildering ghost! —And turn, and toss your brown delightful head,Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.

Dust

When the white flame in us is gone,And we that lost the world's delightStiffen in darkness, left aloneTo crumble in our separate night;When your swift hair is quiet in death,And through the lips corruption thrustHas stilled the labour of my breath —When we are dust, when we are dust! —Not dead, not undesirous yet,Still sentient, still unsatisfied,We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit,Around the places where we died,And dance as dust before the sun,And light of foot, and unconfined,Hurry from road to road, and runAbout the errands of the wind.And every mote, on earth or air,Will speed and gleam, down later days,And like a secret pilgrim fareBy eager and invisible ways,Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,Till, beyond thinking, out of view,One mote of all the dust that's IShall meet one atom that was you.Then in some garden hushed from wind,Warm in a sunset's afterglow,The lovers in the flowers will findA sweet and strange unquiet growUpon the peace; and, past desiring,So high a beauty in the air,And such a light, and such a quiring,And such a radiant ecstasy there,They'll know not if it's fire, or dew,Or out of earth, or in the height,Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,Or two that pass, in light, to light,Out of the garden, higher, higher…But in that instant they shall learnThe shattering ecstasy of our fire,And the weak passionless hearts will burnAnd faint in that amazing glow,Until the darkness close above;And they will know – poor fools, they'll know! —One moment, what it is to love.

Song

"Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings,And Triumph is his crown.Earth fades in flame before his wings,And Sun and Moon bow down." —But that, I knew, would never do;And Heaven is all too high.So whenever I meet a Queen, I said,I will not catch her eye."Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said,"The gift of Love is this;A crown of thorns about thy head,And vinegar to thy kiss!" —But Tragedy is not for me;And I'm content to be gay.So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady,I went another way.And so I never feared to seeYou wander down the street,Or come across the fields to meOn ordinary feet.For what they'd never told me of,And what I never knew,It was that all the time, my love,Love would be merely you.

Kindliness

When love has changed to kindliness —Oh, love, our hungry lips, that pressSo tight that Time's an old god's dreamNodding in heaven, and whisper stuffSeven million years were not enoughTo think on after, make it seemLess than the breath of children playing,A blasphemy scarce worth the saying,A sorry jest, "When love has grownTo kindliness – to kindliness!" …And yet – the best that either's knownWill change, and wither, and be less,At last, than comfort, or its ownRemembrance. And when some caressTendered in habit (once a flameAll heaven sang out to) wakes the shameUnworded, in the steady eyesWe'll have, —that day, what shall we do?Being so noble, kill the twoWho've reached their second-best? Being wise,Break cleanly off, and get away,Follow down other windier skiesNew lures, alone? Or shall we stay,Since this is all we've known, contentIn the lean twilight of such day,And not remember, not lament?That time when all is over, andHand never flinches, brushing hand;And blood lies quiet, for all you're near;And it's but spoken words we hear,Where trumpets sang; when the mere skiesAre stranger and nobler than your eyes;And flesh is flesh, was flame before;And infinite hungers leap no moreIn the chance swaying of your dress;And love has changed to kindliness.

The Voice

Safe in the magic of my woodsI lay, and watched the dying light.Faint in the pale high solitudes,And washed with rain and veiled by night,Silver and blue and green were showing.And the dark woods grew darker still;And birds were hushed; and peace was growing;And quietness crept up the hill;And no wind was blowing …And I knewThat this was the hour of knowing,And the night and the woods and youWere one together, and I should findSoon in the silence the hidden keyOf all that had hurt and puzzled me —Why you were you, and the night was kind,And the woods were part of the heart of me.And there I waited breathlessly,Alone; and slowly the holy three,The three that I loved, together grewOne, in the hour of knowing,Night, and the woods, and you —And suddenlyThere was an uproar in my woods,The noise of a fool in mock distress,Crashing and laughing and blindly going,Of ignorant feet and a swishing dress,And a Voice profaning the solitudes.The spell was broken, the key denied me.And at length your flat clear voice beside meMouthed cheerful clear flat platitudes.You came and quacked beside me in the wood.You said, "The view from here is very good!"You said, "It's nice to be alone a bit!"And, "How the days are drawing out!" you said.You said, "The sunset's pretty, isn't it?"* * * * *By God! I wish – I wish that you were dead!

Menelaus and Helen

I

Hot through Troy's ruin Menelaus brokeTo Priam's palace, sword in hand, to sateOn that adulterous whore a ten years' hateAnd a king's honour. Through red death, and smoke,And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode,Till the still innermost chamber fronted him.He swung his sword, and crashed into the dimLuxurious bower, flaming like a god.High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.He had not remembered that she was so fair,And that her neck curved down in such a way;And he felt tired. He flung the sword away,And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.

II

So far the poet. How should he beholdThat journey home, the long connubial years?He does not tell you how white Helen bearsChild on legitimate child, becomes a scold,Haggard with virtue. Menelaus boldWaxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys'Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voiceGot shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.Often he wonders why on earth he wentTroyward, or why poor Paris ever came.Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent;Her dry shanks twitch at Paris' mumbled name.So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried;And Paris slept on by Scamander side.

The Jolly Company

The stars, a jolly company,I envied, straying late and lonely;And cried upon their revelry:"O white companionship! You onlyIn love, in faith unbroken dwell,Friends radiant and inseparable!"Light-heart and glad they seemed to meAnd merry comrades (even soGod out of Heaven may laugh to seeThe happy crowds; and never knowThat in his lone obscure distressEach walketh in a wilderness).But I, remembering, pitied wellAnd loved them, who, with lonely light,In empty infinite spaces dwell,Disconsolate. For, all the night,I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,Star to faint star, across the sky.

Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body

How can we find? how can we rest? how canWe, being gods, win joy, or peace, being man?We, the gaunt zanies of a witless Fate,Who love the unloving, and the lover hate,Forget the moment ere the moment slips,Kiss with blind lips that seek beyond the lips,Who want, and know not what we want, and cryWith crooked mouths for Heaven, and throw it by.Love's for completeness! No perfection grows'Twixt leg, and arm, elbow, and ear, and nose,And joint, and socket; but unsatisfiedSprawling desires, shapeless, perverse, denied.Finger with finger wreathes; we love, and gape,Fantastic shape to mazed fantastic shape,Straggling, irregular, perplexed, embossed,Grotesquely twined, extravagantly lostBy crescive paths and strange protuberant waysFrom sanity and from wholeness and from grace.How can love triumph, how can solace be,Where fever turns toward fever, knee toward knee?Could we but fill to harmony, and dwellSimple as our thought and as perfectible,Rise disentangled from humanityStrange whole and new into simplicity,Grow to a radiant round love, and bearUnfluctuant passion for some perfect sphere,Love moon to moon unquestioning, and beLike the star Lunisequa, steadfastlyFollowing the round clear orb of her delight,Patiently ever, through the eternal night!

Town and Country

Here, where love's stuff is body, arm and sideAre stabbing-sweet 'gainst chair and lamp and wall.In every touch more intimate meanings hide;And flaming brains are the white heart of allHere, million pulses to one centre beat:Closed in by men's vast friendliness, alone,Two can be drunk with solitude, and meetOn the sheer point where sense with knowing's one.Here the green-purple clanging royal night,And the straight lines and silent walls of town,And roar, and glare, and dust, and myriad whiteUndying passers, pinnacle and crownIntensest heavens between close-lying facesBy the lamp's airless fierce ecstatic fire;And we've found love in little hidden places,Under great shades, between the mist and mire.Stay! though the woods are quiet, and you've heardNight creep along the hedges. Never goWhere tangled foliage shrouds the crying bird,And the remote winds sigh, and waters flow!Lest – as our words fall dumb on windless noons,Or hearts grow hushed and solitary, beneathUnheeding stars and unfamiliar moons,Or boughs bend over, close and quiet as death, —Unconscious and unpassionate and still,Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare,And gradually along the stranger hillOur unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air,And suddenly there's no meaning in our kiss,And your lit upward face grows, where we lieLonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is,And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky.

The Fish

In a cool curving world he liesAnd ripples with dark ecstasies.The kind luxurious lapse and stealShapes all his universe to feelAnd know and be; the clinging streamCloses his memory, glooms his dream,Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glidesSuperb on unreturning tides.Those silent waters weave for himA fluctuant mutable world and dim,Where wavering masses bulge and gapeMysterious, and shape to shapeDies momently through whorl and hollow,And form and line and solid followSolid and line and form to dreamFantastic down the eternal stream;An obscure world, a shifting world,Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,Or serpentine, or driving arrows,Or serene slidings, or March narrows.There slipping wave and shore are one,And weed and mud. No ray of sun,But glow to glow fades down the deep(As dream to unknown dream in sleep);Shaken translucency illumesThe hyaline of drifting glooms;The strange soft-handed depth subduesDrowned colour there, but black to hues,As death to living, decomposes —Red darkness of the heart of roses,Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,And gold that lies behind the eyes,The unknown unnameable sightless whiteThat is the essential flame of night,Lustreless purple, hooded green,The myriad hues that lie betweenDarkness and darkness!..And all's one,Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,The world he rests in, world he knows,Perpetual curving. Only – growsAn eddy in that ordered falling,A knowledge from the gloom, a callingWeed in the wave, gleam in the mud —The dark fire leaps along his blood;Dateless and deathless, blind and still,The intricate impulse works its will;His woven world drops back; and he,Sans providence, sans memory,Unconscious and directly driven,Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.O world of lips, O world of laughter,Where hope is fleet and thought flies after,Of lights in the clear night, of criesThat drift along the wave and riseThin to the glittering stars above,You know the hands, the eyes of love!The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging,The infinite distance, and the singingBlown by the wind, a flame of sound,The gleam, the flowers, and vast aroundThe horizon, and the heights above —You know the sigh, the song of love!But there the night is close, and thereDarkness is cold and strange and bare;And the secret deeps are whisperless;And rhythm is all deliciousness;And joy is in the throbbing tide,Whose intricate fingers beat and glideIn felt bewildering harmoniesOf trembling touch; and music isThe exquisite knocking of the blood.Space is no more, under the mud;His bliss is older than the sun.Silent and straight the waters run.The lights, the cries, the willows dim,And the dark tide are one with him.

Dining-room Tea

When you were there, and you, and you,Happiness crowned the night; I too,Laughing and looking, one of all,I watched the quivering lamplight fallOn plate and flowers and pouring teaAnd cup and cloth; and they and weFlung all the dancing moments byWith jest and glitter. Lip and eyeFlashed on the glory, shone and cried,Improvident, unmemoried;And fitfully and like a flameThe light of laughter went and came.Proud in their careless transience movedThe changing faces that I loved.Till suddenly, and otherwhence,I looked upon your innocence.For lifted clear and still and strangeFrom the dark woven flow of changeUnder a vast and starless skyI saw the immortal moment lie.One instant I, an instant, knewAs God knows all. And it and youI, above Time, oh, blind! could seeIn witless immortality.I saw the marble cup; the tea,Hung on the air, an amber stream;I saw the fire's unglittering gleam,The painted flame, the frozen smoke.No more the flooding lamplight brokeOn flying eyes and lips and hair;But lay, but slept unbroken there,On stiller flesh, and body breathless,And lips and laughter stayed and deathless,And words on which no silence grew.Light was more alive than you.For suddenly, and otherwhence,I looked on your magnificence.I saw the stillness and the light,And you, august, immortal, white,Holy and strange; and every glintPosture and jest and thought and tintFreed from the mask of transiency,Triumphant in eternity,Immote, immortal.Dazed at lengthHuman eyes grew, mortal strengthWearied; and Time began to creep.Change closed about me like a sleep.Light glinted on the eyes I loved.The cup was filled. The bodies moved.The drifting petal came to ground.The laughter chimed its perfect round.The broken syllable was ended.And I, so certain and so friended,How could I cloud, or how distress,The heaven of your unconsciousness?Or shake at Time's sufficient spell,Stammering of lights unutterable?The eternal holiness of you,The timeless end, you never knew,The peace that lay, the light that shone.You never knew that I had goneA million miles away, and stayedA million years. The laughter playedUnbroken round me; and the jestFlashed on. And we that knew the bestDown wonderful hours grew happier yet.I sang at heart, and talked, and eat,And lived from laugh to laugh, I too,When you were there, and you, and you.

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

Café des WestensBerlin, May 1912Just now the lilac is in bloom,All before my little room;And in my flower-beds, I think,Smile the carnation and the pink;And down the borders, well I know,The poppy and the pansy blow…Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,Beside the river make for youA tunnel of green gloom, and sleepDeeply above; and green and deepThe stream mysterious glides beneath,Green as a dream and deep as death.– Oh, damn! I know it! And I knowHow the May fields all golden show,And when the day is young and sweet,Gild gloriously the bare feetThat run to bathe…Du lieber Gott!Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,And there the shadowed waters freshLean up to embrace the naked flesh.Temperamentvott German JewsDrink beer around; – and there the dewsAre soft beneath a morn of gold.Here tulips bloom as they are told;Unkempt about those hedges blowsAn English unofficial rose;And there the unregulated sunSlopes down to rest when day is done,And wakes a vague unpunctual star,A slippered Hesper; and there areMeads towards Haslingfield and CotonWhere das Betreten's not verboten…[Greek: eíthe genoimen] … would I wereIn Grantchester, in Grantchester! —Some, it may be, can get in touchWith Nature there, or Earth, or such.And clever modern men have seenA Faun a-peeping through the green,And felt the Classics were not dead,To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,Or hear the Goat-foot piping low;But these are things I do not know.I only know that you may lieDay long and watch the Cambridge sky,And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,Until the centuries blend and blurIn Grantchester, in Grantchester…Still in the dawnlit waters coolHis ghostly Lordship swims his pool,And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx,Dan Chaucer hears his river stillChatter beneath a phantom mill.Tennyson notes, with studious eye,How Cambridge waters hurry by…And in that garden, black and white,Creep whispers through the grass all night;And spectral dance, before the dawn,A hundred Vicars down the lawn;Curates, long dust, will come and goOn lissom, clerical, printless toe;And oft between the boughs is seenThe sly shade of a Rural Dean…Till, at a shiver in the skies,Vanishing with Satanic cries,The prim ecclesiastic routLeaves but a startled sleeper-out,Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,The falling house that never falls.God! I will pack, and take a train,And get me to England once again!For England's the one land, I know,Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;And Cambridgeshire, of all England,The shire for Men who Understand;And of that district I preferThe lovely hamlet Grantchester.For Cambridge people rarely smile,Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;And Royston men in the far SouthAre black and fierce and strange of mouth;At Over they fling oaths at one,And worse than oaths at Trumpington,And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,And there's none in Harston under thirty,And folks in Shelford and those partsHave twisted lips and twisted hearts,And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,And Coton's full of nameless crimes,And things are done you'd not believeAt Madingley, on Christmas Eve.Strong men have run for miles and miles,When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;Strong men have blanched, and shot their wivesRather than send them to St. Ives;Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,To hear what happened at Babraham.But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!There's peace and holy quiet there,Great clouds along pacific skies,And men and women with straight eyes,Lithe children lovelier than a dream,A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,And little kindly winds that creepRound twilight corners, half asleep.In Grantchester their skins are white;They bathe by day, they bathe by night;The women there do all they ought;The men observe the Rules of Thought.They love the Good; they worship Truth;They laugh uproariously in youth;(And when they get to feeling old,They up and shoot themselves, I'm told)…Ah God! to see the branches stirAcross the moon at Grantchester!To smell the thrilling-sweet and rottenUnforgettable, unforgottenRiver-smell, and hear the breezeSobbing in the little trees.Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand,Still guardians of that holy land?The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,The yet unacademic stream?Is dawn a secret shy and coldAnadyomene, silver-gold?And sunset still a golden seaFrom Haslingfield to Madingley?And after, ere the night is born,Do hares come out about the corn?Oh, is the water sweet and cool,Gentle and brown, above the pool?And laughs the immortal river stillUnder the mill, under the mill?Say, is there Beauty yet to find?And Certainty? and Quiet kind?Deep meadows yet, for to forgetThe lies, and truths, and pain? … oh! yetStands the Church clock at ten to three?And is there honey still for tea?