Poems

by Edward Shanks

Persuasion.

Still must your hands withhold your loveliness?
Is your soul jealous of your body still?
The fair white limbs beneath the clouding dress
Are such hard forms as you alone could fill
With life and sweetness. Such a harmony
Is yours as music and the thought expressed
By the musician: have no rivalry
Between your soul and the shape in which it's drest.
Kisses or words, both sensual, which shall be
The burning symbol of the love we bear?
My art is words, yours song, but still must we
Be mute and songless, seeing how love is fair.
Both our known arts being useless, we must turn
To love himself and his old practice learn.

Apology.

Have I slept and failed to hear you calling?
Cry again, belov'd; for sleep is heavy,
Curtaining away the golden sunlight,
Shutting out the blue sky and the breezes,
Sealing up my ears to all you tell me.
Cry again! your voice shall pierce the clumsy
Leaden folds that sleep has wrapt about me,
Cry again! accomplish what the singing,
Hours old now on all the trees and bushes,
And the wind and sun could not accomplish.
Lo! I waste good hours of love and kisses
While the sun and you have spilt your glory
Freely on me lying unregarding.
In the happy islands, where no sunset
Stains the waters with a morbid splendour,
Where the open skies are blue for ever,
I might stay for years and years unsleeping,
Living for divinest conversation,
Music, colour, scent and sense unceasing,
Entering by eye and ear and nostril.
Ah, but flesh is flesh and I am mortal!
Cry again and do not leave me sleeping.

The Golden Moment.

Along the branches of the laden tree
The ripe fruit smiling hang. The afternoon
Is emptied of all things done and things to be.
Low in the sky the inconspicuous moon
Stares enviously upon the mellow earth,
That mocks her barren girth.

Ripe blackberries and long green trailing grass
Are motionless beneath the heavy light:
The happy birds and creeping things that pass
Go fitfully and stir as if in fright,
That they have broken on some mystery
In bramble or in tree.

This is no hour for beings that are maiden;
The spring is virgin, lightly afraid and cold,
But now the whole round earth is ripe and laden
And stirs beneath her coverlet of gold
And in her agony a moment calls...
A heavy apple falls.

Bramber.

Before the downs in their great horse-shoes rise,
I know a village where the Adur runs,
Blown by sweet winds and by beneficent suns
Visited and made ripe beneath kind skies.
Light and delight are in the children's eyes
And there the mothers sit, the fortunate ones,
Blest in their daughters, happy in their sons,
And the old men are beautiful and wise.

There stand the downs, great, close, tall, friendly, still,
Linked up by grassy saddles, hill on hill,
And steep the village in unending peace
And to the north the plains in order lie,
Heavy with crops and woods alternately
And lively with low sounds that never cease.

Now would I be.

Now would I be in that removèd place
Where the dim sunlight hardly comes at all
And branches of the young trees interlace
And long swathes of the brambles twine and fall;
A space between the hedgerow and a road
Not trod by foot of any known to me,
Where now and then a cart with scented load
Goes sleepy down the lane with creaking axle-tree.

And there I'd lie upon the tumbled leaves,
Watching a square of the all else hidden sky,
And made such songs a drowsy mind believes
To be most perfect music. So would I
Keep my face heavenwards and bless eternity,
Wherein my heart could be as glad as this
And lazily I'd bid all men come hither
And in my dreams I'd tell them what they miss,
Living in hate and work and all foul weather.

And still my happy dreams would go,
Like children in a cowslip field
Chasing rich-winged insects to and fro
To see what rare delights they yield....

... O I am tired of working to be cheated
And sick of barriers that will not fall,
Of ancient prudent words too much repeated
And worn-out dreams that come not true at all.
I know too well what things they are that ail me;
To fight is nothing but to see
Thus at the last my own hand fail me
Is agony.

O for that corner by the hummocked marshes,
Visited hardly by the cynic sun,
Where nothing clear and nothing bright or harsh is,
Where labour and the ache of it are done,
Where naught is ended and where naught begun!

Midwinter Madness.

A month or twain to live on honeycomb
Is pleasant—but to eat it for a year
Is simply beastly. Thus the poet spake,
Feeling how sticky all his stomach was
With hivings of ten thousand cheated bees.
O wisdom that could shape immortal words
And frame a diet for dyspeptic man!
But what of turnips? Come, a lyric now
Upon the luscious roots unsung as yet,
(Not roots I know but stalks; still, never mind,
Metre and sauce will suit them just as well)
Or shall we speak of omelettes? Muse, begin!
To feed a fortnight on transmuted eggs
Would doubtless be both comforting and cheap
But oh, the nausea on the fourteenth day!
I'd rather read a book by Ezra Pound
Then choke the seven hundredth omelette down,
Just as I'd rather read some F. S. Flint
Than live a month or twain on honeycomb.

O Ezra Pound! O omelette of the world!
Concocted with strange herbs from dead Provence,
Garlic from Italy and spice from Greece,
Having suffered a rare Pound-change on the way,
How rarely shouldst thou taste, were not the eggs
Laid in America and hither brought
Too late. I don't like omelettes made with fowls.
Take hence this Pound and put him to the test,
Try him with acid, see if he turn black
As will the best old silver, when enraged
At touching fungi of the baser sort.
(Forgive digression. These similitudes
Entrance me and I lose myself in them,
As schoolboys, picking flowers by the way,
Escape the angry usher's vigilance
And then, concealed behind a hedge or shed,
Produce the awesome pipe or thrice-lit fag
And make themselves incredibly unwell.)
My brain is bubbling and the thoughts will out,
But, Ezra Pound! they turn again to thee,
As surely as the lode-stone to the Pole
Or as the dog to what he hath cast up
(A simile of Solomon's, not mine)
And your shock head of damp, unwholesome hay,
Such as, the cunning farmer oft declares,
When stacked, will perish by spontaneous fire,
Frequents my dreams and makes them ludicrous.
Thou most ridiculous sprite! Thou ponderous fairy!
Bourgeois Bohemian! Innocent Verlaine!
I read in The Booksellers' Circular
That, in the University of Pa.
(Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.
—A line of normal pattern, Saintsbury)
You hold a fellowship in (O merciful gods!)
Romanics, which strange word interpreted
Means, I suppose, the Romance languages.
Doubtless they read Italian in Pa.
And some may speak French fluently in Ont.
But German, Ezra! There's the bloody rub,
It's not Romance and it is hard to learn
And Heine, though an easy-going chap,
Would doubtless trounce you soundly if he knew
The sorry hash that you have made of him.
But no! you're not for immortality,
Not even such as that of Freiligrath,
Enshrined, together with his Mohrenfurst,
In unrelenting amber. I hold you here,
In a soap-bubble's iridescent walls,
The whimsy of a long midwinter night,
And give you immortality enough.
Thou sorry brat! Thou transatlantic clown!
That seek'st to ape the treadless Ariel
And out-top Shelley in an aeroplane,
Take the all-obvious padding from your pants
And cut your hair and go to Pa. again
(Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.
Or even Oomp. if such a place exist)
And take with you the poets you admire,
Both Yeats and Flint to charm the folk of Oomp.
And write again for Munsey's Magazine
Of your good brother Everyone. (Just God!
Am even I of his relationship?)
So end as you began or even worse:
No matter, so 'tis in America.

At a Lecture.

The lecturer took his place and looked
At the eager women's faces,
Then he cleared his throat and he jetted out
A stream of commonplaces.

He fondled Wordsworth and patted Shelley
And said with his hand on his heart
He would brook no interference from morals
In any matter of art.

He finished at last and strode away
Over the naked boards,
Erect in his conscious majesty
Back to the House of Lords.

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