[The Shepherdess]
[The Two Poets]
[The Lady Poverty]
[November Blue]
[A Dead Harvest]
[The Watershed (for R. T.)]
[The Joyous Wanderer]
[The Rainy Summer]
[The Roaring Frost]
[West Wind in Winter]
[The Fold]
["Why wilt thou Chide?"]
[Veneration of Images]
["I am the Way"]
[Via, et Veritas, et Vita]
[Parentage]
[The Modern Mother]
[Unto us a Son is Given]
[Veni Creator]
[Two Boyhoods]
[To Sylvia]
[Saint Catherine of Siena]
[Chimes]
[A Poet's Wife]
[Messina, 1908]
[The Unknown God]
[A General Communion]
[The Fugitive]
[In Portugal, 1912]
[The Crucifixion]
[The Newer Vainglory]
[In Manchester Square]
[Maternity]
[The First Snow]
[The Courts]
[The Launch]
[To the Body]
[The Unexpected Peril]
[Christ in the Universe]
[Beyond Knowledge]
[Easter Night]
[A Father of Women]
[Length of Days: To the Early Dead in Battle]
[Nurse Edith Cavell]
[Summer in England, 1914]
[To Tintoretto in Venice]
[A Thrush before Dawn]
[The Two Shakespeare Tercentenaries]
[To O——, of Her Dark Eyes]
[The Treasure]
[A Wind of Clear Weather in England]
[In Sleep]
[The Divine Privilege]
[Free Will]
[The Two Questions]
[The Lord's Prayer]
[The Poet and His Book]
[Intimations of Mortality]
[The Wind is Blind]
[Time's Reversals]
[The Threshing Machine]
[Winter Trees on the Horizon]
[To Sleep]
[The Marriage of True Minds]
[In Honour of America, 1917]
[Lord, I owe Thee a Death]
[Reflections]
[To Conscripts]
[The Voice of a Bird]
[The Question]
[The Laws of Verse]
["The Return to Nature"]
[To Silence]
[The English Metres]
["Rivers Unknown to Song"]
[To the Mother of Christ the Son of Man]
[A Comparison]
[Surmise]
[To Antiquity]
[Christmas Night]
[The October Redbreast]
[To "a Certain Rich Man"]
["Everlasting Farewells"]
[The Poet to the Birds]
Early Poems
IN EARLY SPRING
O Spring, I know thee! Seek for sweet surprise
In the young children's eyes.
But I have learnt the years, and know the yet
Leaf-folded violet.
Mine ear, awake to silence, can foretell
The cuckoo's fitful bell.
I wander in a grey time that encloses
June and the wild hedge-roses.
A year's procession of the flowers doth pass
My feet, along the grass.
And all you wild birds silent yet, I know
The notes that stir you so,
Your songs yet half devised in the dim dear
Beginnings of the year.
In these young days you meditate your part;
I have it all by heart.
I know the secrets of the seeds of flowers
Hidden and warm with showers,
And how, in kindling Spring, the cuckoo shall
Alter his interval.
But not a flower or song I ponder is
My own, but memory's.
I shall be silent in those days desired
Before world inspired.
O all brown birds, compose your old song-phrases,
Earth, thy familiar daisies!
A poet mused upon the dusky height,
Between two stars towards night,
His purpose in his heart. I watched, a space,
The meaning of his face:
There was the secret, fled from earth and skies,
Hid in his grey young eyes.
My heart and all the Summer wait his choice,
And wonder for his voice.
Who shall foretell his songs, and who aspire
But to divine his lyre?
Sweet earth, we know thy dimmest mysteries,
But he is lord of his.