Tides: A Book of Poems

by John Drinkwater

CONTENTS

	Page
DEDICATION	[5]
A MAN’S DAUGHTER
There is an old woman who looks each night	[9]
VENUS IN ARDEN
Now Love, her mantle thrown,	[11]
COTSWOLD LOVE
Blue skies are over Cotswold	[12]
THE MIDLANDS
Black in the summer night my Cotswold hill	[13]
MAY GARDEN
A shower of green gems on my apple tree	[15]
PLOUGH
The snows are come in early state,	[16]
POLITICS
You say a thousand things,	[17]
BIRMINGHAM—1916
Once Athens worked and went to see the play,	[19]
INSCRIPTION FOR A WAR MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN
They nothing feared whose names I celebrate.	[20]
TREASON
What time I write my roundelays,	[21]
MY ESTATE
I have four loves, four loves are mine,	[22]
WITH DAFFODILS
I send you daffodils, my dear,	[23]
FOR A GUEST ROOM
All words are said,	[24]
ON READING THE MS. OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH’S JOURNALS
To-day I read the poet’s sister’s book,	[25]
THE OLD WARRIOR
Sorrow has come to me,	[26]
THE GUEST
Sometimes I feel that death is very near,	[27]
REVERIE
Here in the unfrequented noon,	[28]
PENANCES
These are my happy penances. To make	[36]
COLOPHON	[37]

A MAN’S DAUGHTER

There is an old woman who looks each night

Out of the wood.

She has one tooth, that isn’t too white.

She isn’t too good.

She came from the north looking for me,

About my jewel.

Her son, she says, is tall as can be;

But, men say, cruel.

My girl went northward, holiday making,

And a queer man spoke

At the woodside once when night was breaking,

And her heart broke.

For ever since she has pined and pined,

A sorry maid;

Her fingers are slack as the wool they wind,

Or her girdle-braid.

So now shall I send her north to wed,

Who here may know

Only the little house of the dead

To ease her woe?

Or keep her for fear of that old woman,

As a bird quick-eyed,

And her tall son who is hardly human,

At the woodside?

She is my babe and my daughter dear,

How well, how well.

Her grief to me is a fourfold fear,

Tongue cannot tell.

And yet I know that far in that wood

Are crumbling bones,

And a mumble mumble of nothing that’s good,

In heathen tones.

And I know that frail ghosts flutter and sigh

In brambles there,

And never a bird or beast to cry—

Beware, beware,—

While threading the silent thickets go

Mother and son,

Where scrupulous berries never grow,

And airs are none.

And her deep eyes peer at eventide

Out of the wood,

And her tall son waits by the dark woodside,

For maidenhood.

And the little eyes peer, and peer, and peer;

And a word is said.

And some house knows, for many a year,

But years of dread.

VENUS IN ARDEN

Now love, her mantle thrown,

Goes naked by,

Threading the woods alone,

Her royal eye

Happy because the primroses again

Break on the winter continence of men.

I saw her pass to-day

In Warwickshire,

With the old imperial way,

The old desire,

Fresh as among those other flowers they went,

More beautiful for Adon’s discontent.

Those other years she made

Her festival

When the blue eggs were laid

And lambs were tall,

By the Athenian rivers while the reeds

Made love melodious for the Ganymedes.

And now through Cantlow brakes,

By Wilmcote hill,

To Avon-side, she makes

Her garlands still,

And I who watch her flashing limbs am one

With youth whose days three thousand years are done.

COTSWOLD LOVE

Blue skies are over Cotswold

And April snows go by,

The lasses turn their ribbons

For April’s in the sky,

And April is the season

When Sabbath girls are dressed,

From Rodboro’ to Campden,

In all their silken best.

An ankle is a marvel

When first the buds are brown,

And not a lass but knows it

From Stow to Gloucester town.

And not a girl goes walking

Along the Cotswold lanes

But knows men’s eyes in April

Are quicker than their brains.

It’s little that it matters,

So long as you’re alive,

If you’re eighteen in April,

Or rising sixty-five,

When April comes to Amberley

With skies of April blue,

And Cotswold girls are briding

With slyly tilted shoe.

THE MIDLANDS

Black in the summer night my Cotswold hill

Aslant my window sleeps, beneath a sky

Deep as the bedded violets that fill

March woods with dusky passion. As I lie

Abed between cool walls I watch the host

Of the slow stars lit over Gloucester plain,

And drowsily the habit of these most

Beloved of English lands moves in my brain,

While silence holds dominion of the dark,

Save when the foxes from the spinneys bark.

I see the valleys in their morning mist

Wreathed under limpid hills in moving light,

Happy with many a yeoman melodist:

I see the little roads of twinkling white

Busy with fieldward teams and market gear

Of rosy men, cloth-gaitered, who can tell

The many-minded changes of the year,

Who know why crops and kine fare ill or well;

I see the sun persuade the mist away,

Till town and stead are shining to the day.

I see the wagons move along the rows

Of ripe and summer-breathing clover-flower,

I see the lissom husbandman who knows

Deep in his heart the beauty of his power,

As, lithely pitched, the full-heaped fork bids on

The harvest home. I hear the rickyard fill

With gossip as in generations gone,

While wagon follows wagon from the hill.

I think how, when our seasons all are sealed,

Shall come the unchanging harvest from the field.

I see the barns and comely manors planned

By men who somehow moved in comely thought,

Who, with a simple shippon to their hand,

As men upon some godlike business wrought;

I see the little cottages that keep

Their beauty still where since Plantaganet

Have come the shepherds happily to sleep,

Finding the loaves and cups of cider set;

I see the twisted shepherds, brown and old,

Driving at dusk their glimmering sheep to fold.

And now the valleys that upon the sun

Broke from their opal veils, are veiled again,

And the last light upon the wolds is done,

And silence falls on flocks and fields and men;

And black upon the night I watch my hill,

And the stars shine, and there an owly wing

Brushes the night, and all again is still,

And, from this land of worship that I sing,

I turn to sleep, content that from my sires

I draw the blood of England’s midmost shires.

MAY GARDEN

A shower of green gems on my apple tree

This first morning of May

Has fallen out of the night, to be

Herald of holiday—

Bright gems of green that, fallen there,

Seem fixed and glowing on the air.

Until a flutter of blackbird wings

Shakes and makes the boughs alive,

And the gems are now no frozen things,

But apple-green buds to thrive

On sap of my May garden, how well

The green September globes will tell.

Also my pear tree has its buds,

But they are silver yellow,

Like autumn meadows when the floods

Are silver under willow,

And here shall long and shapely pears

Be gathered while the autumn wears.

And there are sixty daffodils

Beneath my wall....

And jealousy it is that kills

This world when all

The spring’s behaviour here is spent

To make the world magnificent.

PLOUGH

The snows are come in early state,

And love shall now go desolate

If we should keep too close a gate.

Over the woods a splendour falls

Of death, and grey are the Gloucester walls,

And grey the skies for burials.

But secret in the falling snow

I see the patient ploughman go,

And watch the quiet furrows grow.

POLITICS

You say a thousand things,

Persuasively,

And with strange passion hotly I agree,

And praise your zest,

And then

A blackbird sings

On April lilac, or fieldfaring men,

Ghostlike, with loaded wain,

Come down the twilit lane

To rest,

And what is all your argument to me?

Oh yes—I know, I know,

It must be so—

You must devise

Your myriad policies,

For we are little wise,

And must be led and marshalled, lest we keep

Too fast a sleep

Far from the central world’s realities.

Yes, we must heed—

For surely you reveal

Life’s very heart; surely with flaming zeal

You search our folly and our secret need;

And surely it is wrong

To count my blackbird’s song,

My cones of lilac, and my wagon team,

More than a world of dream.

But still

A voice calls from the hill—

I must away—

I cannot hear your argument to-day.

BIRMINGHAM—1916

Once Athens worked and went to see the play,

And Thomas Atkins kissed the girls of Rome,

In council in Victoria Square to-day

Are grey-beard Nazarenes, with shop and home

And counting-house and all the friendly cares

That Joseph knew; in Bull Ring markets meet

Gossips as once at Babylonian fairs,

And Helen walks in Corporation Street.

Now Troy is Homer; and of Nazareth

Grave histories are of one love that was strong;

Athens is beauty; Rome an immortal death;

And Babylon immortal in a song....

Perplexed as ours these cities were of old;

And shall our name greatly as these be told?

INSCRIPTION FOR A WAR MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN

They nothing feared whose names I celebrate.

Greater than death they died; and their estate

Is here on Cotswold comradely to live

Upon your lips in every draught I give.

TREASON

What time I write my roundelays,

I am as proud as princes gone,

Who built their empires in old days,

As Tamburlaine or Solomon;

And wisely though companions then

Say well it is and well I sing,

Assured above the praise of men

I am a solitary king.

But when I leave that straiter mood,

That lonely hour, and put aside

The continence of solitude,

I fall in treason to my pride,

And if a witling’s word be spent

Upon my song in jealousy,

In anger and in argument

I am as derelict as he.

MY ESTATE

I have four loves, four loves are mine,

My wife who makes all beauty be,

Tom Squire and Master Candleshine,

And then my grey dog Timothy.

My wife makes bramble-berry pies,

And she is bright as bramble dew,

She knows the way the weather flies,

And tells me every thing to do.

Tom Squire he is my neighbour man,

His apples fall upon my grass,

And in the morning, when we can,

We say good-morning as we pass.

And Master Candleshine the True,

Considering some fault of mine,

Says—“Had it been for me to do,

It had been hard for Candleshine.”

When I have thought all things that be,

And drop the latch and climb the stair,

And want an eye for company,

My grey dog Timothy is there.

My loves are one and two and three

And four they are, good loves of mine,

Tom Squire, my grey dog Timothy,

My wife and Master Candleshine.

WITH DAFFODILS

I send you daffodils, my dear,

For these are emperors of spring,

And in my heart you keep so clear

So delicate an empery,

That none but emperors could be

Ambassadors endowed to bring

My messages of honesty.

My mind makes faring to and fro,

Deft or bewildered, dark or kind,

That not the eye of God may know

Which motion is of true estate

And which a twisted runagate

Of all the farings of my mind,

And which has honesty for mate.

Only my hope for you is clean

Of scandal’s use, and though, may be,

Far rangers have my passions been,—

Since thus the word of Eden went,—

Yet of the springs of my content,

My very wells of honesty,

Are you the only firmament.

FOR A GUEST ROOM

All words are said,

And may it fall

That, crowning these,

You here shall find

A friendly bed,

A sheltering wall,

Your body’s ease,

A quiet mind.

May you forget

In happy sleep

The world that still

You hold as friend,

And may it yet

Be ours to keep

Your friendly will

To the world’s end.

For he is blest

Who, fixed to shun

All evil, when

The worst is known,

Counts, east and west,

When life is done,

His debts to men

In love alone.

ON READING THE MS. OF DOROTHY
WORDSWORTH’S JOURNALS

To-day I read the poet’s sister’s book,

She who so comforted those Grasmere days

When song was at the flood, and thence I took

A larger note of fortitude and praise.

And in her ancient fastness beauty stirred,

And happy faith was in my heart again,

Because the virtue of a simple word

Was durable above the lives of men.

For reading there that quiet record made

Of skies and hills, domestic hours, and free

Traffic of friends, and song, and duty paid,

I touched the wings of immortality.

THE OLD WARRIOR

Sorrow has come to me,

Making the world to be

Of sunken cheek;

Faded my fields, and of

Names that were most to love,

I dare not speak.

Would that my soul were blind,

Since duty brings to mind

All that is done,

Saying, ‘How gladly you

Walked with your chosen few

Under my sun.’

I am an alien now;

Tell me, good stranger, how

Best may be borne

His grief who comes at night

To his own window-light

Friendless, forlorn.

No. I will pass. Again

Of my delight in men

Nothing shall tell.

Now is my travel where

My lost companions fare;

Onward. Farewell.

THE GUEST

Sometimes I feel that death is very near,

And, with half-lifted hand,

Looks in my eyes, and tells me not to fear,

But walk his friendly land,

Comrade with him, and wise

As peace is wise.

Then, greatly though my heart with pity moves

For dear imperilled loves,

I somehow know

That death is friendly so,

A comfortable spirit; one who takes

Long thought for all our sakes.

I wonder; will he come that friendly way,

That guest, or roughly in the appointed day?

And will, when the last drops of life are spilt,

My soul be torn from me,

Or, like a ship truly and trimly built,

Slip quietly to sea?

REVERIE

Here in the unfrequented noon,

In the green hermitage of June,

While overhead a rustling wing

Minds me of birds that do not sing

Until the cooler eve rewakes

The service of melodious brakes,

And thoughts are lonely rangers, here,

In shelter of the primrose year,

I curiously meditate

Our brief and variable state.

I think how many are alive

Who better in the grave would thrive,

If some so long a sleep might give

Better instruction how to live;

I think what splendours had been said

By darlings now untimely dead

Had death been wise in choice of these,

And made exchange of obsequies.

I think what loss to government

It is that good men are content,

Well knowing that an evil will

Is folly-stricken too, and still

Itself considers only wise

For all rebukes and surgeries,

That evil men should raise their pride

To place and fortune undefied.

I think how daily we beguile

Our brains, that yet a little while

And all our congregated schemes

And our perplexity of dreams,

Shall come to whole and perfect state.

I think, however long the date

Of life may be, at last the sun

Shall pass upon campaigns undone.

I look upon the world and see

A world colonial to me,

Whereof I am the architect,

And principal and intellect,

A world whose shape and savour spring

Out of my lone imagining,

A world whose nature is subdued

For ever to my instant mood,

And only beautiful can be

Because of beauty is in me.

And then I know that every mind

Among the millions of my kind

Makes earth his own particular

And privately created star,

That earth has thus no single state,

Being every man articulate.

Till thought has no horizon then

I try to think how many men

There are to make an earth apart

In symbol of the urgent heart,

For there are forty in my street,

And seven hundred more in Greet,

And families at Luton Hoo,

And there are men in China, too.

And what immensity is this

That is but a parenthesis

Set in a little human thought,

Before the body comes to naught.

There at the bottom of the copse

I see a field of turnip tops,

I see the cropping cattle pass

There in another field, of grass,

And fields and fields, with seven towns,

A river, and a flight of downs,

Steeples for all religious men,

Ten thousand trees, and orchards ten,

A mighty span that curves away

Into blue beauty, and I lay

All this as quartered on a sphere

Hung huge in space, a thing of fear

Vast as the circle of the sky

Completed to the astonished eye;

And then I think that all I see,

Whereof I frame immensity

Globed for amazement, is no more

Than a shire’s corner, and that four

Great shires being ten times multiplied

Are small on the Atlantic tide

As an emerald on a silver bowl ...

And the Atlantic to the whole

Sweep of this tributary star

That is our earth is but ... and far

Through dreadful space the outmeasured mind

Seeks to conceive the unconfined.

I think of Time. How, when his wing

Composes all our quarrelling

In some green corner where May leaves

Are loud with blackbirds on all eves,

And all the dust that was our bones

Is underneath memorial stones,

Then shall old jealousies, while we

Lie side by side most quietly,

Be but oblivion’s fools, and still

When curious pilgrims ask—‘What skill

Had these that from oblivion saves?’—

My song shall sing above our graves.

I think how men of gentle mind,

And friendly will, and honest kind,

Deny their nature and appear

Fellows of jealousy and fear;

Having single faith, and natural wit

To measure truth and cherish it,

Yet, strangely, when they build in thought,

Twisting the honesty that wrought

In the straight motion of the heart,

Into its feigning counterpart

That is the brain’s betrayal of

The simple purposes of love;

And what yet sorrier decline

Is theirs when, eager to confine

No more within the silent brain

Its habit, thought seeks birth again

In speech, as honesty has done

In thought; then even what had won

From heart to brain fades and is lost

In this pretended pentecost,

This their forlorn captivity

To speech, who have not learnt to be

Lords of the word, nor kept among

The sterner climates of the tongue ...

So truth is in their hearts, and then

Falls to confusion in the brain,

And, fading through this mid-eclipse,

It perishes upon the lips.

I think how year by year I still

Find working in my dauntless will

Sudden timidities that are

Merely the echo of some far

Forgotten tyrannies that came

To youth’s bewilderment and shame;

That yet a magisterial gown,

Being worn by one of no renown

And half a generation less

In years than I, can dispossess

Something my circumspecter mood

Of excellence and quietude,

And if a Bishop speaks to me

I tremble with propriety.

I think how strange it is that he

Who goes most comradely with me

In beauty’s worship, takes delight

In shows that to my eager sight

Are shadows and unmanifest,

While beauty’s favour and behest

To me in motion are revealed

That is against his vision sealed;

Yet is our hearts’ necessity

Not twofold, but a common plea

That chaos come to continence,

Whereto the arch-intelligence

Richly in divers voices makes

Its answer for our several sakes.

I see the disinherited

And long procession of the dead,

Who have in generations gone

Held fugitive dominion

Of this same primrose pasturage

That is my momentary wage.

I see two lovers move along

These shadowed silences of song,

With spring in blossom at their feet

More incommunicably sweet

To their hearts’ more magnificence,

Than to the common courts of sense,

Till joy his tardy closure tells

With coming of the curfew bells.

I see the knights of spur and sword

Crossing the little woodland ford,

Riding in ghostly cavalcade

On some unchronicled crusade.

I see the silent hunter go

In cloth of yeoman green, with bow

Strung, and a quiver of grey wings.

I see the little herd who brings

His cattle homeward, while his sire

Makes bivouac in Warwickshire

This night, the liege and loyal man

Of Cavalier or Puritan.

And as they pass, the nameless dead,

Unsung, uncelebrate, and sped

Upon an unremembered hour

As any twelvemonth fallen flower,

I think how strangely yet they live

For all their days were fugitive.

I think how soon we too shall be

A story with our ancestry.

I think what miracle has been

That you whose love among this green

Delightful solitude is still

The stay and substance of my will,

The dear custodian of my song,

My thrifty counsellor and strong,

Should take the time of all time’s tide

That was my season, to abide

On earth also; that we should be

Charted across eternity

To one elect and happy day

Of yellow primroses in May.

The clock is calling five o’clock,

And Nonesopretty brings her flock

To fold, and Tom comes back from town

With hose and ribbons worth a crown,

And duly at The Old King’s Head

They gather now to daily bread,

And I no more may meditate

Our brief and variable state.

PENANCES

These are my happy penances. To make

Beauty without a Covenant; to take

Measure of time only because I know

That in death’s market-place I still shall owe

Service to beauty that shall not be done;

To know that beauty’s doctrine is begun

And makes a close in sacrifice; to find

In beauty’s courts the unappeasable mind.

HERE ENDS TIDES A BOOK OF POEMS

by John Drinkwater the Typography and Binding

arranged by Cyril William Beaumont Printed

on his Press in London and Published by

him at 75 Charing Cross Road in the

City of Westminster Completed

on the first day of September

MDCCCCXVII

SIMPLEX MUNDITIIS
THE BEAUMONT PRESS

The Binding has been

executed by F. Sangorski and G. Sutcliffe

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

The author’s spelling and punctuation has been maintained.

Repeating titles in the front of the book have been reduced.