Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses

THE TWO WIVES

(SMOKER’S CLUB-STORY)

I waited at home all the while they were boating together —      My wife and my near neighbour’s wife:   Till there entered a woman I loved more than life,And we sat and sat on, and beheld the uprising dark weather,      With a sense that some mischief was rife.Tidings came that the boat had capsized, and that one of the ladies      Was drowned – which of them was unknown:   And I marvelled – my friend’s wife? – or was it my ownWho had gone in such wise to the land where the sun as the shade is?      – We learnt it was his had so gone.Then I cried in unrest: “He is free!  But no good is releasing      To him as it would be to me!”   “ – But it is,” said the woman I loved, quietly.“How?” I asked her.  “ – Because he has long loved me too without ceasing,      And it’s just the same thing, don’t you see.”

“I KNEW A LADY”

(CLUB SONG)

I knew a lady when the days   Grew long, and evenings goldened;   But I was not emboldenedBy her prompt eyes and winning ways.And when old Winter nipt the haws,   “Another’s wife I’ll be,   And then you’ll care for me,”She said, “and think how sweet I was!”And soon she shone as another’s wife:   As such I often met her,   And sighed, “How I regret her!My folly cuts me like a knife!”And then, to-day, her husband came,   And moaned, “Why did you flout her?   Well could I do without her!For both our burdens you are to blame!”

A HOUSE WITH A HISTORY

There is a house in a city street   Some past ones made their own;Its floors were criss-crossed by their feet,      And their babblings beat   From ceiling to white hearth-stone.And who are peopling its parlours now?   Who talk across its floor?Mere freshlings are they, blank of brow,      Who read not how   Its prime had passed beforeTheir raw equipments, scenes, and says   Afflicted its memoried face,That had seen every larger phase      Of human ways   Before these filled the place.To them that house’s tale is theirs,   No former voices callAloud therein.  Its aspect bears      Their joys and cares   Alone, from wall to wall.

A PROCESSION OF DEAD DAYS

I see the ghost of a perished day;I know his face, and the feel of his dawn:’Twas he who took me far away   To a spot strange and gray:Look at me, Day, and then pass on,But come again: yes, come anon!Enters another into view;His features are not cold or white,But rosy as a vein seen through:   Too soon he smiles adieu.Adieu, O ghost-day of delight;But come and grace my dying sight.Enters the day that brought the kiss:He brought it in his foggy handTo where the mumbling river is,   And the high clematis;It lent new colour to the land,And all the boy within me manned.Ah, this one.  Yes, I know his name,He is the day that wrought a shineEven on a precinct common and tame,   As ’twere of purposed aim.He shows him as a rainbow signOf promise made to me and mine.The next stands forth in his morning clothes,And yet, despite their misty blue,They mark no sombre custom-growths   That joyous living loathes,But a meteor act, that left in its queueA train of sparks my lifetime through.I almost tremble at his nod —This next in train – who looks at meAs I were slave, and he were god   Wielding an iron rod.I close my eyes; yet still is heIn front there, looking mastery.In the similitude of a nurseThe phantom of the next one comes:I did not know what better or worse   Chancings might bless or curseWhen his original glossed the thrumsOf ivy, bringing that which numbs.Yes; trees were turning in their sleepUpon their windy pillows of grayWhen he stole in.  Silent his creep   On the grassed eastern steep.I shall not soon forget that day,And what his third hour took away!

HE FOLLOWS HIMSELF

In a heavy time I dogged myself   Along a louring way,Till my leading self to my following self   Said: “Why do you hang on me      So harassingly?”“I have watched you, Heart of mine,” I cried,   “So often going astrayAnd leaving me, that I have pursued,   Feeling such truancy      Ought not to be.”He said no more, and I dogged him on   From noon to the dun of dayBy prowling paths, until anew   He begged: “Please turn and flee! —      What do you see?”“Methinks I see a man,” said I,   “Dimming his hours to gray.I will not leave him while I know   Part of myself is he      Who dreams such dree!”“I go to my old friend’s house,” he urged,   “So do not watch me, pray!”“Well, I will leave you in peace,” said I,   “Though of this poignancy      You should fight free:“Your friend, O other me, is dead;   You know not what you say.”– “That do I!  And at his green-grassed door   By night’s bright galaxy      I bend a knee.”– The yew-plumes moved like mockers’ beards,   Though only boughs were they,And I seemed to go; yet still was there,   And am, and there haunt we      Thus bootlessly.

THE SINGING WOMAN

   There was a singing woman      Came riding across the mead   At the time of the mild May weather,         Tameless, tireless;This song she sung: “I am fair, I am young!”      And many turned to heed.   And the same singing woman      Sat crooning in her need   At the time of the winter weather;         Friendless, fireless,She sang this song: “Life, thou’rt too long!”      And there was none to heed.

WITHOUT, NOT WITHIN HER

It was what you bore with you, Woman,   Not inly were,That throned you from all else human,   However fair!It was that strange freshness you carried   Into a soulWhereon no thought of yours tarried   Two moments at all.And out from his spirit flew death,   And bale, and ban,Like the corn-chaff under the breath   Of the winnowing-fan.

“O I WON’T LEAD A HOMELY LIFE”

(To an old air)

“O I won’t lead a homely lifeAs father’s Jack and mother’s Jill,But I will be a fiddler’s wife,   With music mine at will!      Just a little tune,      Another one soon,   As I merrily fling my fill!”And she became a fiddler’s Dear,And merry all day she strove to be;And he played and played afar and near,   But never at home played he      Any little tune      Or late or soon;   And sunk and sad was she!

IN THE SMALL HOURS

I lay in my bed and fiddled   With a dreamland viol and bow,And the tunes flew back to my fingers   I had melodied years ago.It was two or three in the morning   When I fancy-fiddled soLong reels and country-dances,   And hornpipes swift and slow.And soon anon came crossing   The chamber in the grayFigures of jigging fieldfolk —   Saviours of corn and hay —To the air of “Haste to the Wedding,”   As after a wedding-day;Yea, up and down the middle   In windless whirls went they!There danced the bride and bridegroom,   And couples in a train,Gay partners time and travail   Had longwhiles stilled amain!.It seemed a thing for weeping   To find, at slumber’s waneAnd morning’s sly increeping,   That Now, not Then, held reign.

THE LITTLE OLD TABLE

Creak, little wood thing, creak,When I touch you with elbow or knee;That is the way you speakOf one who gave you to me!You, little table, she brought —Brought me with her own hand,As she looked at me with a thoughtThat I did not understand.– Whoever owns it anon,And hears it, will never knowWhat a history hangs uponThis creak from long ago.

VAGG HOLLOW

Vagg Hollow is a marshy spot on the old Roman Road near Ilchester, where “things” are seen. Merchandise was formerly fetched inland from the canal-boats at Load-Bridge by waggons this way.

“What do you see in Vagg Hollow,Little boy, when you goIn the morning at five on your lonely drive?”“ – I see men’s souls, who followTill we’ve passed where the road lies low,When they vanish at our creaking!“They are like white faces speakingBeside and behind the waggon —One just as father’s was when here.The waggoner drinks from his flagon,(Or he’d flinch when the Hollow is near)But he does not give me any.“Sometimes the faces are many;But I walk along by the horses,He asleep on the straw as we jog;And I hear the loud water-courses,And the drops from the trees in the fog,And watch till the day is breaking.“And the wind out by Tintinhull waking;I hear in it father’s callAs he called when I saw him dying,And he sat by the fire last Fall,And mother stood by sighing;But I’m not afraid at all!”

THE DREAM IS – WHICH?

I am laughing by the brook with her,   Splashed in its tumbling stir;And then it is a blankness looms   As if I walked not there,Nor she, but found me in haggard rooms,   And treading a lonely stair.With radiant cheeks and rapid eyes   We sit where none espies;Till a harsh change comes edging in   As no such scene were there,But winter, and I were bent and thin,   And cinder-gray my hair.We dance in heys around the hall,   Weightless as thistleball;And then a curtain drops between,   As if I danced not there,But wandered through a mounded green   To find her, I knew where. March 1913.

THE COUNTRY WEDDING

(A FIDDLER’S STORY)

Little fogs were gathered in every hollow,But the purple hillocks enjoyed fine weatherAs we marched with our fiddles over the heather– How it comes back! –  to their wedding that day.Our getting there brought our neighbours and all, O!Till, two and two, the couples stood ready.And her father said: “Souls, for God’s sake, be steady!”And we strung up our fiddles, and sounded out “A.”The groomsman he stared, and said, “You must follow!”But we’d gone to fiddle in front of the party,(Our feelings as friends being true and hearty)And fiddle in front we did – all the way.Yes, from their door by Mill-tail-Shallow,And up Styles-Lane, and by Front-Street houses,Where stood maids, bachelors, and spouses,Who cheered the songs that we knew how to play.I bowed the treble before her father,Michael the tenor in front of the lady,The bass-viol Reub – and right well played he! —The serpent Jim; ay, to church and back.I thought the bridegroom was flurried rather,As we kept up the tune outside the chancel,While they were swearing things none can cancelInside the walls to our drumstick’s whack.“Too gay!” she pleaded.  “Clouds may gather,And sorrow come.”  But she gave in, laughing,And by supper-time when we’d got to the quaffingHer fears were forgot, and her smiles weren’t slack.A grand wedding ’twas!  And what would followWe never thought.  Or that we should have buried herOn the same day with the man that married her,A day like the first, half hazy, half clear.Yes: little fogs were in every hollow,Though the purple hillocks enjoyed fine weather,When we went to play ’em to church together,And carried ’em there in an after year.

FIRST OR LAST

(SONG)

   If grief come early   Joy comes late,   If joy come early   Grief will wait;      Aye, my dear and tender!Wise ones joy them earlyWhile the cheeks are red,Banish grief till surlyTime has dulled their dread. And joy being oursEre youth has flown,   The later hours   May find us gone;      Aye, my dear and tender!

LONELY DAYS

Lonely her fate was,Environed from sightIn the house where the gate wasPast finding at night.None there to share it,No one to tell:Long she’d to bear it,And bore it well.Elsewhere just so sheSpent many a day;Wishing to go sheContinued to stay.And people withoutBasked warm in the air,But none sought her out,Or knew she was there.Even birthdays were passed so,Sunny and shady:Years did it last soFor this sad lady.Never declaring it,No one to tell,Still she kept bearing it —Bore it well.The days grew chillier,And then she wentTo a city, familiarIn years forespent,When she walked gailyFar to and fro,But now, moving frailly,Could nowhere go.The cheerful colourOf houses she’d knownHad died to a dullerAnd dingier tone.Streets were now noisyWhere once had rolledA few quiet coaches,Or citizens strolled.Through the party-wallOf the memoried spotThey danced at a ballWho recalled her not.Tramlines lay crossingOnce gravelled slopes,Metal rods clanked,And electric ropes.So she endured it all,Thin, thinner wrought,Until time cured it all,And she knew nought.Versified from a Diary.

“WHAT DID IT MEAN?”

What did it mean that noontide, whenYou bade me pluck the flowerWithin the other woman’s bower,   Whom I knew nought of then?I thought the flower blushed deeplier – aye,And as I drew its stalk to meIt seemed to breathe: “I am, I see,Made use of in a human play.”And while I plucked, upstarted sheerAs phantom from the pane therebyA corpse-like countenance, with eyeThat iced me by its baleful peer —   Silent, as from a bier.When I came back your face had changed,   It was no face for me;O did it speak of hearts estranged,   And deadly rivalry   In times before   I darked your door,   To seise me of   Mere second love,Which still the haunting first deranged?

AT THE DINNER-TABLE

I sat at dinner in my prime,And glimpsed my face in the sideboard-glass,And started as if I had seen a crime,And prayed the ghastly show might pass.Wrenched wrinkled features met my sight,Grinning back to me as my own;I well-nigh fainted with affrightAt finding me a haggard crone.My husband laughed.  He had slily setA warping mirror there, in whimTo startle me.  My eyes grew wet;I spoke not all the eve to him.He was sorry, he said, for what he had done,And took away the distorting glass,Uncovering the accustomed one;And so it ended?  No, alas,Fifty years later, when he died,I sat me in the selfsame chair,Thinking of him.  Till, weary-eyed,I saw the sideboard facing there;And from its mirror looked the leanThing I’d become, each wrinkle and scoreThe image of me that I had seenIn jest there fifty years before.

THE MARBLE TABLET

There it stands, though alas, what a little of her   Shows in its cold white look!Not her glance, glide, or smile; not a tittle of her   Voice like the purl of a brook;   Not her thoughts, that you read like a book.It may stand for her once in November   When first she breathed, witless of all;Or in heavy years she would remember   When circumstance held her in thrall;   Or at last, when she answered her call!Nothing more.  The still marble, date-graven,   Gives all that it can, tersely lined;That one has at length found the haven   Which every one other will find;   With silence on what shone behind.St. Juliot: September 8, 1916.

THE MASTER AND THE LEAVES

IWe are budding, Master, budding,   We of your favourite tree;March drought and April flooding   Arouse us merrily,Our stemlets newly studding;   And yet you do not see!IIWe are fully woven for summer   In stuff of limpest green,The twitterer and the hummer   Here rest of nights, unseen,While like a long-roll drummer   The nightjar thrills the treen.IIIWe are turning yellow, Master,   And next we are turning red,And faster then and faster   Shall seek our rooty bed,All wasted in disaster!   But you lift not your head.IV– “I mark your early going,   And that you’ll soon be clay,I have seen your summer showing   As in my youthful day;But why I seem unknowing   Is too sunk in to say!”1917.

LAST WORDS TO A DUMB FRIEND

Pet was never mourned as you,Purrer of the spotless hue,Plumy tail, and wistful gazeWhile you humoured our queer ways,Or outshrilled your morning callUp the stairs and through the hall —Foot suspended in its fall —While, expectant, you would standArched, to meet the stroking hand;Till your way you chose to wendYonder, to your tragic end.Never another pet for me!Let your place all vacant be;Better blankness day by dayThan companion torn away.Better bid his memory fade,Better blot each mark he made,Selfishly escape distressBy contrived forgetfulness,Than preserve his prints to makeEvery morn and eve an ache.From the chair whereon he satSweep his fur, nor wince thereat;Rake his little pathways outMid the bushes roundabout;Smooth away his talons’ markFrom the claw-worn pine-tree bark,Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,Waiting us who loitered round.Strange it is this speechless thing,Subject to our mastering,Subject for his life and foodTo our gift, and time, and mood;Timid pensioner of us Powers,His existence ruled by ours,Should – by crossing at a breathInto safe and shielded death,By the merely taking henceOf his insignificance —Loom as largened to the sense,Shape as part, above man’s will,Of the Imperturbable.As a prisoner, flight debarred,Exercising in a yard,Still retain I, troubled, shaken,Mean estate, by him forsaken;And this home, which scarcely tookImpress from his little look,By his faring to the DimGrows all eloquent of him.Housemate, I can think you stillBounding to the window-sill,Over which I vaguely seeYour small mound beneath the tree,Showing in the autumn shadeThat you moulder where you played. October 2, 1904.

A DRIZZLING EASTER MORNING

And he is risen?  Well, be it so.And still the pensive lands complain,And dead men wait as long ago,As if, much doubting, they would knowWhat they are ransomed from, beforeThey pass again their sheltering door.I stand amid them in the rain,While blusters vex the yew and vane;And on the road the weary wainPlods forward, laden heavily;And toilers with their aches are fainFor endless rest – though risen is he.

ON ONE WHO LIVED AND DIED WHERE HE WAS BORN

When a night in November   Blew forth its bleared airsAn infant descended   His birth-chamber stairs   For the very first time,   At the still, midnight chime;All unapprehended   His mission, his aim. —Thus, first, one November,An infant descended   The stairs.On a night in November   Of weariful cares,A frail aged figure   Ascended those stairs   For the very last time:   All gone his life’s prime,All vanished his vigour,   And fine, forceful frame:Thus, last, one NovemberAscended that figure   Upstairs.On those nights in November —   Apart eighty years —The babe and the bent one   Who traversed those stairs   From the early first time   To the last feeble climb —That fresh and that spent one —   Were even the same:Yea, who passed in NovemberAs infant, as bent one,      Those stairs.Wise child of November!   From birth to blanched hairsDescending, ascending,   Wealth-wantless, those stairs;   Who saw quick in time   As a vain pantomimeLife’s tending, its ending,   The worth of its fame.Wise child of November,Descending, ascending      Those stairs!

THE SECOND NIGHT

(BALLAD)

I missed one night, but the next I went;   It was gusty above, and clear;She was there, with the look of one ill-content,   And said: “Do not come near!”– “I am sorry last night to have failed you here,   And now I have travelled all day;And it’s long rowing back to the West-Hoe Pier,   So brief must be my stay.”– “O man of mystery, why not say   Out plain to me all you mean?Why you missed last night, and must now away   Is – another has come between!”– “O woman so mocking in mood and mien,   So be it!” I replied:“And if I am due at a differing scene   Before the dark has died,“’Tis that, unresting, to wander wide   Has ever been my plight,And at least I have met you at Cremyll side   If not last eve, to-night.”– “You get small rest – that read I quite;   And so do I, maybe;Though there’s a rest hid safe from sight   Elsewhere awaiting me!”A mad star crossed the sky to the sea,   Wasting in sparks as it streamed,And when I looked to where stood she   She had changed, much changed, it seemed:The sparks of the star in her pupils gleamed,   She was vague as a vapour now,And ere of its meaning I had dreamed   She’d vanished – I knew not how.I stood on, long; each cliff-top bough,   Like a cynic nodding there,Moved up and down, though no man’s brow   But mine met the wayward air.Still stood I, wholly unaware   Of what had come to pass,Or had brought the secret of my new Fair   To my old Love, alas!I went down then by crag and grass   To the boat wherein I had come.Said the man with the oars: “This news of the lass   Of Edgcumbe, is sharp for some!“Yes: found this daybreak, stiff and numb   On the shore here, whither she’d spedTo meet her lover last night in the glum,   And he came not, ’tis said.“And she leapt down, heart-hit.  Pity she’s dead:   So much for the faithful-bent!”.I looked, and again a star overhead   Shot through the firmament.

SHE WHO SAW NOT

   “Did you see something within the houseThat made me call you before the red sunsetting?Something that all this common scene endowsWith a richened impress there can be no forgetting?”   “ – I have found nothing to see therein,O Sage, that should have made you urge me to enter,Nothing to fire the soul, or the sense to win:I rate you as a rare misrepresenter!”   “ – Go anew, Lady, – in by the right.Well: why does your face not shine like the face of Moses?”“ – I found no moving thing there save the lightAnd shadow flung on the wall by the outside roses.”   “ – Go yet once more, pray.  Look on a seat.”“ – I go.. O Sage, it’s only a man that sits thereWith eyes on the sun.  Mute, – average head to feet.”“ – No more?” – “No more.  Just one the place befits there,   “As the rays reach in through the open door,And he looks at his hand, and the sun glows through his fingers,While he’s thinking thoughts whose tenour is no moreTo me than the swaying rose-tree shade that lingers.”   No more.  And years drew on and onTill no sun came, dank fogs the house enfolding;And she saw inside, when the form in the flesh had gone,As a vision what she had missed when the real beholding.

THE OLD WORKMAN

“Why are you so bent down before your time,Old mason?  Many have not left their primeSo far behind at your age, and can still   Stand full upright at will.”He pointed to the mansion-front hard by,And to the stones of the quoin against the sky;“Those upper blocks,” he said, “that there you see,   It was that ruined me.”There stood in the air up to the parapetCrowning the corner height, the stones as setBy him – ashlar whereon the gales might drum   For centuries to come.“I carried them up,” he said, “by a ladder there;The last was as big a load as I could bear;But on I heaved; and something in my back   Moved, as ’twere with a crack.“So I got crookt.  I never lost that sprain;And those who live there, walled from wind and rainBy freestone that I lifted, do not know   That my life’s ache came so.“They don’t know me, or even know my name,But good I think it, somehow, all the sameTo have kept ’em safe from harm, and right and tight,   Though it has broke me quite.“Yes; that I fixed it firm up there I am proud,Facing the hail and snow and sun and cloud,And to stand storms for ages, beating round   When I lie underground.”

THE SAILOR’S MOTHER

   “O whence do you come,Figure in the night-fog that chills me numb?”“I come to you across from my house up there,And I don’t mind the brine-mist clinging to me   That blows from the quay,For I heard him in my chamber, and thought you unaware.”   “But what did you hear,That brought you blindly knocking in this middle-watch so drear?”“My sailor son’s voice as ’twere calling at your door,And I don’t mind my bare feet clammy on the stones,   And the blight to my bones,For he only knows of this house I lived in before.”   “Nobody’s nigh,Woman like a skeleton, with socket-sunk eye.”“Ah – nobody’s nigh!  And my life is drearisome,And this is the old home we loved in many a day   Before he went away;And the salt fog mops me.  And nobody’s come!”From “To Please his Wife.”

OUTSIDE THE CASEMENT

(A REMINISCENCE OF THE WAR)

   We sat in the room   And praised her whomWe saw in the portico-shade outside:   She could not hear   What was said of her,But smiled, for its purport we did not hide.   Then in was brought   That message, fraughtWith evil fortune for her out there,   Whom we loved that day   More than any could say,And would fain have fenced from a waft of care.   And the question pressed   Like lead on each breast,Should we cloak the tidings, or call her and tell?   It was too intense   A choice for our sense,As we pondered and watched her we loved so well.   Yea, spirit failed us   At what assailed us;How long, while seeing what soon must come,   Should we counterfeit   No knowledge of it,And stay the stroke that would blanch and numb?   And thus, before   For evermoreJoy left her, we practised to beguile   Her innocence when   She now and againLooked in, and smiled us another smile.

THE PASSER-BY

(L. H. RECALLS HER ROMANCE)

He used to pass, well-trimmed and brushed,   My window every day,And when I smiled on him he blushed,That youth, quite as a girl might; aye,   In the shyest way.Thus often did he pass hereby,   That youth of bounding gait,Until the one who blushed was I,And he became, as here I sate,   My joy, my fate.And now he passes by no more,   That youth I loved too true!I grieve should he, as here of yore,Pass elsewhere, seated in his view,   Some maiden new!If such should be, alas for her!   He’ll make her feel him dear,Become her daily comforter,Then tire him of her beauteous gear,   And disappear!