Poems of To-Day: an Anthology

42. PLYMOUTH HARBOUR

  Oh, what know they of harbours    Who toss not on the sea!  They tell of fairer havens,    But none so fair there be  As Plymouth town outstretching    Her quiet arms to me;  Her breast's broad welcome spreading    From Mewstone to Penlee.  Ah, with this home-thought, darling,    Come crowding thoughts of thee.  Oh, what know they of harbours    Who toss not on the sea!Ernest Radford.

43. OXFORD

  I came to Oxford in the light    Of a spring-coloured afternoon;  Some clouds were grey and some were white,    And all were blown to such a tune  Of quiet rapture in the sky,    I laughed to see them laughing by.  I had been dreaming in the train    With thoughts at random from my book;  I looked, and read, and looked again,    And suddenly to greet my look  Oxford shone up with every tower    Aspiring sweetly like a flower.  Home turn the feet of men that seek,    And home the hearts of children turn,  And none can teach the hour to speak    What every hour is free to learn;  And all discover, late or soon,    Their golden Oxford afternoon.Gerald Gould.

44. ALMA MATER

  Know you her secret none can utter?    Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?  Still on the spire the pigeons flutter,    Still by the gateway flits the gown;  Still on the street, from corbel and gutter,    Faces of stone look down.  Faces of stone, and stonier faces—    Some from library windows wan  Forth on her gardens, her green spaces,    Peer and turn to their books anon.  Hence, my Muse, from the green oases    Gather the tent, begone!  Nay, should she by the pavement linger    Under the rooms where once she played,  Who from the feast would rise to fling her    One poor sou for her serenade?  One short laugh for the antic finger    Thrumming a lute-string frayed?  Once, my dear—but the world was young then—    Magdalen elms and Trinity limes—  Lissom the blades and the backs that swung then,    Eight good men in the good old times—  Careless we, and the chorus flung then    Under St. Mary's chimes!  Reins lay loose and the ways led random—    Christ Church meadow and Iffley track,  "Idleness horrid and dog-cart" (tandem),    Aylesbury grind and Bicester pack—  Pleasant our lines, and faith! we scanned 'em;    Having that artless knack.  Come, old limmer, the times grow colder;    Leaves of the creeper redden and fall.  Was it a hand then clapped my shoulder?—    Only the wind by the chapel wall!  Dead leaves drift on the lute . . . So fold her    Under the faded shawl.  Never we wince, though none deplore us,    We who go reaping that we sowed;  Cities at cockcrow wake before us—    Hey, for the lilt of the London road!  One look back, and a rousing chorus!    Never a palinode!  Still on her spire the pigeons hover;    Still by her gateway haunts the gown.  Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,    Drumming her old ones forth from town,  Know you the secret none discover?    Tell it—when you go down.  Yet if at length you seek her, prove her,    Lean to her whispers never so nigh;  Yet if at last not less her lover    You in your hansom leave the High;  Down from her towers a ray shall hover—    Touch you, a passer-by.Arthur Quiller-Couch.

45. FROM "DEDICATORY ODE"

  I will not try the reach again,    I will not set my sail alone,  To moor a boat bereft of men    At Yarnton's tiny docks of stone.  But I will sit beside the fire,    And put my hand before my eyes,  And trace, to fill my heart's desire,    The last of all our Odysseys.  The quiet evening kept her tryst:    Beneath an open sky we rode,  And passed into a wandering mist    Along the perfect Evenlode.  The tender Evenlode that makes    Her meadows hush to hear the sound  Of waters mingling in the brakes,    And binds my heart to English ground.  A lovely river, all alone,    She lingers in the hills and holds  A hundred little towns of stone,    Forgotten in the western wolds.Hilaire Belloc.

46. THE DEVOURERS

  Cambridge town is a beleaguered city;    For south and north, like a sea,  There beat on its gates, without haste or pity,    The downs and the fen country.  Cambridge towers, so old, so wise,    They were builded but yesterday,  Watched by sleepy gray secret eyes    That smiled as at children's play.  Roads south of Cambridge run into the waste,    Where learning and lamps are not,  And the pale downs tumble, blind, chalk-faced,    And the brooding churches squat.  Roads north of Cambridge march through a plain    Level like the traitor sea.  It will swallow its ships, and turn and smile again—    The insatiable fen country.  Lest the downs and the fens should eat Cambridge up,    And its towers be tossed and thrown,  And its rich wine drunk from its broken cup,    And its beauty no more known—  Let us come, you and I, where the roads run blind,    Out beyond the transient city,  That our love, mingling with earth, may find    Her imperishable heart of pity.Rose Macaulay.

47. THE OLD VICARAGE, GRANTCHESTER

Café des Westens, Berlin

  Just 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 you  A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep  Deeply above; and green and deep  The stream mysterious glides beneath,  Green as a dream and deep as death.—  Oh, damn! I know it! and I know  How the May fields all golden show,  And when the day is young and sweet,  Gild gloriously the bare feet  That run to bathe . . .      Du lieber Gott!  Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,  And there the shadowed waters fresh  Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.  Temperamentvoll German Jews  Drink beer around; and there the dews  Are soft beneath a morn of gold.  Here tulips bloom as they are told;  Unkempt about those hedges blows  An English unofficial rose;  And there the unregulated sun  Slopes down to rest when day is done,  And wakes a vague unpunctual star,  A slippered Hesper; and there are  Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton  Where das Betreten's not verboten . . .  Eithe genoimên . . . would I were  In Grantchester, in Grantchester!—  Some, it may be, can get in touch  With Nature there, or Earth, or such.  And clever modern men have seen  A 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 lie  Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,  And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,  Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,  Until the centuries blend and blur  In Grantchester, in Grantchester . . .  Still in the dawnlit waters cool  His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,  And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,  Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx;  Dan Chaucer hears his river still  Chatter 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 go  On lissom, clerical, printless toe;  And oft between the boughs is seen  The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .  Till, at a shiver in the skies,  Vanishing with Satanic cries,  The prim ecclesiastic rout  Leaves 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 prefer  The lovely hamlet Grantchester.  For Cambridge people rarely smile,  Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;  And Royston men in the far South  Are 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 parts,  Have 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 believe  At 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 wives  Rather 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 creep  Round 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 stir  Across the moon at Grantchester!  To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten,  Unforgettable, unforgotten  River smell, and hear the breeze  Sobbing 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 cold  Anadyomene, silver-gold?  And sunset still a golden sea  From 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 still  Under the mill, under the mill?  Say, is there Beauty yet to find?  And Certainty? and Quiet kind?  Deep meadows yet, for to forget  The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet  Stands the Church clock at ten to three?  And is there honey still for tea?Rupert Brooke.

48. DAYS THAT HAVE BEEN

  Can I forget the sweet days that have been,    When poetry first began to warm my blood;  When from the hills of Gwent I saw the earth    Burned into two by Severn's silver flood:  When I would go alone at night to see    The moonlight, like a big white butterfly,  Dreaming on that old castle near Caerleon,    While at its side the Usk went softly by:  When I would stare at lovely clouds in Heaven,    Or watch them when reported by deep streams;  When feeling pressed like thunder, but would not    Break into that grand music of my dreams?  Can I forget the sweet days that have been,    The villages so green I have been in;  Llantarnam, Magor, Malpas, and Llanwern,    Liswery, old Caerleon, and Alteryn?  Can I forget the banks of Malpas Brook,    Or Ebbw's voice in such a wild delight,  As on he dashed with pebbles in his throat,    Gurgling towards the sea with all his might?  Ah, when I see a leafy village now    I sigh and ask it for Llantarnam's green;  I ask each river where is Ebbw's voice—    In memory of the sweet days that have been.William H. Davies.

49. THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;  Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,  Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;  There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,  And evening full of the linnet's wings.  I will arise and go now, for always night and day  I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;  While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,  I hear it in the deep heart's core.W. B. Yeats.

50. THE FLOWERS

  Buy English posies!

Kent and Surrey may—

Violets of the Undercliff

Wet with Channel spray;

Cowslips from a Devon combe—

Midland furze afire—

Buy my English posies,

And I'll sell your heart's desire!

  Buy my English posies!    You that scorn the may,  Won't you greet a friend from home    Half the world away?  Green against the draggled drift,    Faint and frail and first—  Buy my Northern blood-root    And I'll know where you were nursed;  Robin down the logging-road whistles, "Come to me!"  Spring has found the maple-grove, the sap is running free;  All the winds of Canada call the ploughing-rain.  Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again!  Buy my English posies!    Here's to match your need—  Buy a tuft of royal heath,    Buy a bunch of weed  White as sand of Muysenberg    Spun before the gale—  Buy my heath and lilies    And I'll tell you whence you hail!  Under hot Constantia broad the vineyards lie—  Throned and thorned the aching berg props the speckless sky—  Slow below the Wynberg firs trails the tilted wain—  Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again.  Buy my English posies!    You that will not turn—  Buy my hot-wood clematis    Buy a frond o' fern  Gather'd where the Erskine leaps    Down the road to Lorne—  Buy my Christmas creeper    And I'll say where you were born!  West away from Melbourne dust holidays begin—  They that mock at Paradise woo at Cora Lynn—  Through the great South Otway gums sings the great South Main—  Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again.  Buy my English posies!    Here's your choice unsold!  Buy a blood-red myrtle-bloom,    Buy the kowhai's gold  Flung for gift on Taupo's face,    Sign that spring is come—  Buy my clinging myrtle    And I'll give you back your home!  Broom behind the windy town; pollen o' the pine—  Bell-bird in the leafy deep where the ratas twine—  Fern above the saddle-bow, flax upon the plain—  Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again.  Buy my English posies!    Ye that have your own  Buy them for a brother's sake    Overseas, alone.  Weed ye trample underfoot    Floods his heart abrim—  Bird ye never heeded,    O, she calls his dead to him.  Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas;  Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these!  Unto each his mother-beach, bloom and bird and land—  Masters of the Seven Seas, oh, love and understand.Rudyard Kipling.

51. THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL

 A naked house, a naked moor,

A shivering pool before the door,

A garden bare of flowers and fruit

And poplars at the garden foot.

Such is the place that I live in,

Bleak without and bare within.

  Yet shall your ragged moor receive  The incomparable pomp of eve,  And the cold glories of the dawn  Behind your shivering trees be drawn;  And when the wind from place to place  Doth the unmoored cloud-galleons chase,  Your garden gloom and gleam again,  With leaping sun, with glancing rain.  Here shall the wizard moon ascend  The heavens, in the crimson end  Of day's declining splendour; here  The army of the stars appear.  The neighbour hollows dry or wet,  Spring shall with tender flowers beset;  And oft the morning muser see  Larks rising from the broomy lea,  And every fairy wheel and thread  Of cobweb dew-bediamonded.  When daisies go, shall winter time  Silver the simple grass with rime;  Autumnal frosts enchant the pool  And make the cart-ruts beautiful;  And when snow-bright the moor expands,  How shall your children clap their hands!  To make this earth our hermitage,  A cheerful and a changeful page,  God's bright and intricate device  Of days and seasons doth suffice.Robert Louis Stevenson.

52. THE OLD LOVE

  Out of my door I step into  The country, all her scent and dew,  Nor travel there by a hard road,  Dusty and far from my abode.  The country washes to my door  Green miles on miles in soft uproar,  The thunder of the woods, and then  The backwash of green surf again.  Beyond the feverfew and stocks,  The guelder-rose and hollyhocks;  Outside my trellised porch a tree  Of lilac frames a sky for me.  A stretch of primrose and pale green  To hold the tender Hesper in;  Hesper that by the moon makes pale  Her silver keel and silver sail.  The country silence wraps me quite,  Silence and song and pure delight;  The country beckons all the day  Smiling, and but a step away.  This is that country seen across  How many a league of love and loss,  Prayed for and longed for, and as far  As fountains in the desert are.  This is that country at my door,  Whose fragrant airs run on before,  And call me when the first birds stir  In the green wood to walk with her.Katharine Tynan.

53. EARLY MORN

  When I did wake this morn from sleep,    It seemed I heard birds in a dream;  Then I arose to take the air—    The lovely air that made birds scream;  Just as a green hill launched the ship  Of gold, to take its first clear dip.  And it began its journey then,    As I came forth to take the air;  The timid Stars had vanished quite,    The Moon was dying with a stare;  Horses, and kine, and sheep were seen,  As still as pictures, in fields green.  It seemed as though I had surprised    And trespassed in a golden world  That should have passed while men still slept!    The joyful birds, the ship of gold,  The horses, kine, and sheep did seem  As they would vanish for a dream.William H. Davies.

54. THE HILL PINES WERE SIGHING

  The hill pines were sighing,  O'ercast and chill was the day:  A mist in the valley lying  Blotted the pleasant May.  But deep in the glen's bosom  Summer slept in the fire  Of the odorous gorse-blossom  And the hot scent of the brier.  A ribald cuckoo clamoured,  And out of the copse the stroke  Of the iron axe that hammered  The iron heart of the oak.  Anon a sound appalling,  As a hundred years of pride  Crashed, in the silence falling;  And the shadowy pine-trees sighed.Robert Bridges.

55. THE CHOICE

  When skies are blue and days are bright  A kitchen-garden's my delight,  Set round with rows of decent box  And blowsy girls of hollyhocks.  Before the lark his Lauds hath done  And ere the corncrake's southward gone;  Before the thrush good-night hath said  And the young Summer's put to bed.  The currant-bushes' spicy smell,  Homely and honest, likes me well,  The while on strawberries I feast,  And raspberries the sun hath kissed.  Beans all a-blowing by a row.  Of hives that great with honey go,  With mignonette and heaths to yield  The plundering bee his honey-field.  Sweet herbs in plenty, blue borage  And the delicious mint and sage,  Rosemary, marjoram, and rue,  And thyme to scent the winter through.  Here are small apples growing round,  And apricots all golden-gowned,  And plums that presently will flush  And show their bush a Burning Bush.  Cherries in nets against the wall,  Where Master Thrush his madrigal  Sings, and makes oath a churl is he  Who grudges cherries for a fee.  Lavender, sweet-briar, orris. Here  Shall Beauty make her pomander,  Her sweet-balls for to lay in clothes  That wrap her as the leaves the rose.  Take roses red and lilies white,  A kitchen garden's my delight;  Its gillyflowers and phlox and cloves,  And its tall cote of irised doves.Katharine Tynan.

56. THERE IS A HILL

  There is a hill beside the silver Thames,  Shady with birch and beech and odorous pine  And brilliant underfoot with thousand gems  Steeply the thickets to his floods decline.    Straight trees in every place    Their thick tops interlace,  And pendent branches trail their foliage fine    Upon his watery face.  Swift from the sweltering pasturage he flows:  His stream, alert to seek the pleasant shade,  Pictures his gentle purpose, as he goes  Straight to the caverned pool his toil has made.    His winter floods lay bare    The stout roots in the air:  His summer streams are cool, when they have played    Among their fibrous hair.  A rushy island guards the sacred bower,  And hides it from the meadow, where in peace  The lazy cows wrench many a scented flower,  Robbing the golden market of the bees:    And laden barges float    By banks of myosote;  And scented flag and golden flower-de-lys    Delay the loitering boat.  And on this side the island, where the pool  Eddies away, are tangled mass on mass  The water-weeds, that net the fishes cool,  And scarce allow a narrow stream to pass;    Where spreading crowfoot mars    The drowning nenuphars,  Waving the tassels of her silken grass    Below her silver stars.  But in the purple pool there nothing grows,  Not the white water-lily spoked with gold;  Though best she loves the hollows, and well knows  On quiet streams her broad shields to unfold:    Yet should her roots but try    Within these deeps to lie,  Not her long-reaching stalk could ever hold    Her waxen head so high.  Sometimes an angler comes, and drops his hook  Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree  Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book,  Forgetting soon his pride of fishery;    And dreams, or falls asleep,    While curious fishes peep  About his nibbled bait, or scornfully    Dart off and rise and leap.  And sometimes a slow figure 'neath the trees,  In ancient-fashioned smock, with tottering care  Upon a staff propping his weary knees.  May by the pathway of the forest fare:    As from a buried day    Across the mind will stray  Some perishing mute shadow,—and unaware    He passeth on his way.  Else, he that wishes solitude is safe,  Whether he bathe at morning in the stream:  Or lead his love there when the hot hours chafe  The meadows, busy with a blurring steam;    Or watch, as fades the light,    The gibbous moon grow bright,  Until her magic rays dance in a dream,    And glorify the night.  Where is this bower beside the silver Thames?  O pool and flowery thickets, hear my vow!  O trees of freshest foliage and straight stems,  No sharer of my secret I allow:    Lest ere I come the while    Strange feet your shades defile;  Or lest the burly oarsman turn his prow    Within your guardian isle.Robert Bridges.

57. BAB-LOCK-HYTHE

  In the time of wild roses  As up Thames we travelled  Where 'mid water-weeds ravelled  The lily uncloses,  To his old shores the river  A new song was singing,  And young shoots were springing  On old roots for ever.  Dog-daisies were dancing,  And flags flamed in cluster,  On the dark stream a lustre  Now blurred and now glancing.  A tall reed down-weighing  The sedge-warbler fluttered;  One sweet note he uttered,  Then left it soft-swaying.  By the bank's sandy hollow  My dipt oars went beating,  And past our bows fleeting  Blue-backed shone the swallow.  High woods, heron-haunted,  Rose, changed, as we rounded  Old hills greenly mounded,  To meadows enchanted.  A dream ever moulded  Afresh for our wonder,  Still opening asunder  For the stream many-folded;  Till sunset was rimming  The West with pale flushes;  Behind the black rushes  The last light was dimming;  And the lonely stream, hiding  Shy birds, grew more lonely,  And with us was only  The noise of our gliding.  In cloud of gray weather  The evening o'erdarkened,  In the stillness we hearkened;  Our hearts sang together.Laurence Binyon.

58. ROWER'S CHANT

  Row till the land dip 'neath  The sea from view.  Row till a land peep up,  A home for you.  Row till the mast sing songs  Welcome and sweet.  Row till the waves, out-stripped,  Give up dead beat.  Row till the sea-nymphs rise  To ask you why  Rowing you tarry not  To hear them sigh.  Row till the stars grow bright  Like certain eyes.  Row till the noon be high  As hopes you prize.  Row till you harbour in  All longing's port.  Row till you find all things  For which you sought.T. Sturge Moore.

59. FAREWELL

  Not soon shall I forget—a sheet  Of golden water, cold and sweet,  The young moon with her head in veils  Of silver, and the nightingales.  A wain of hay came up the lane—  O fields I shall not walk again,  And trees I shall not see, so still  Against a sky of daffodil!  Fields where my happy heart had rest,  And where my heart was heaviest,  I shall remember them at peace  Drenched in moon-silver like a fleece.  The golden water sweet and cold,  The moon of silver and of gold,  The dew upon the gray grass-spears,  I shall remember them with tears.Katharine Tynan.

60. A SHIP, AN ISLE, A SICKLE MOON

  A ship, an isle, a sickle moon—  With few but with how splendid stars  The mirrors of the sea are strewn  Between their silver bars!* * * * * *  An isle beside an isle she lay,  The pale ship anchored in the bay,  While in the young moon's port of gold  A star-ship—as the mirrors told—  Put forth its great and lonely light  To the unreflecting Ocean, Night.  And still, a ship upon her seas,  The isle and the island cypresses  Went sailing on without the gale:  And still there moved the moon so pale,  A crescent ship without a sail!James Elroy Flecker.