[PROTHALAMION]
[TESTAMENT]
[LOCHANILAUN]
[LETTERMORE]
[LAMENT]
[THE LEMON-TREE]
[PHTHONOS]
[EASTER]
[THE LEANING ELM]
[THE JOYOUS LOVER]
[DEAD POETS]
[PORTON WATER]
[AN OLD HOUSE]
[THE DHOWS]
[THE GIFT]
[FIVE DEGREES SOUTH]
[104° FAHRENHEIT]
[FEVER-TREES]
[THE RAIN-BIRD]
[MOTHS]
[BÊTE HUMAINE]
[DOVES]
[SONG (i)]
[BEFORE ACTION]
[ON A SUBALTERN KILLED IN ACTION]
[AFTER ACTION]
[SONNET]
[A FAREWELL TO AFRICA]
[SONG (ii)]
[THE HAWTHORN SPRAY]
[THE PAVEMENT]
[TO LYDIA LOPOKOVA (i)]
[TO LYDIA LOPOKOVA (ii)]
[TO LYDIA LOPOKOVA (iii)]
[GHOSTLY LOVES]
[FEBRUARY]
[SONG OF THE DARK AGES]
[WINTER SUNSET]
[SONG (iii)]
[ENGLAND, APRIL 1918]
[SLENDER THEMES]
[INVOCATION]
[THAMAR]
[ENVOI]
PROTHALAMION
When the evening came my love said to me:
Let us go into the garden now that the sky is cool,
The garden of black hellebore and rosemary,
Where wild woodruff spills in a milky pool.
Low we passed in the twilight, for the wavering heat
Of day had waned, and round that shaded plot
Of secret beauty the thickets clustered sweet:
Here is heaven, our hearts whispered, but our lips spake not.
Between that old garden and seas of lazy foam
Gloomy and beautiful alleys of trees arise
With spire of cypress and dreamy beechen dome,
So dark that our enchanted sight knew nothing but the skies
Veiled with soft air, drench'd in the roses' musk
Or the dusky, dark carnation's breath of clove;
No stars burned in their deeps, but through the dusk
I saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.
No star their secret ravished, no wasting moon
Mocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:
Only the soft, unseeing heaven of June,
The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.
For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday now
Were silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,
Nor even a mild sea-whisper moved a creaking bough--
Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?
Was ever a moment meeter made for love?
Beautiful are your closed lips beneath my kiss;
And all your yielding sweetness beautiful--
Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!
TESTAMENT
If I had died, and never seen the dawn
For which I hardly hoped, lighting this lawn
Of silvery grasses; if there had been no light,
And last night merged into perpetual night;
I doubt if I should ever have been content
To have closed my eyes without some testament
To the great benefits that marked my faring
Through the sweet world; for all my joy was sharing
And lonely pleasures were few. Unto which end
Three legacies I'll send,
Three legacies, already half possess'd:
One to a friend, of all good friends the best,
Better than which is nothing; yet another
Unto thy twin, dissimilar spirit, Brother;
The third to you,
Most beautiful, most true,
Most perfect one, to whom they all are due.
Quick, quick ... while there is time....
O best of friends, I leave you one sublime
Summer, one fadeless summer. 'Twas begun
Ere Cotswold hawthorn tarnished in the sun,
When hedges were fledged with green, and early swallows
Swift-darting, on curved wings, pillaged the fallows;
When all our vale was dappled blossom and light,
And oh, the scent of beanfields in the night!
You shall remember that rich dust at even
Which made old Evesham like a street in heaven,
Gold-paved, and washed within a wave of golden
Air all her dreamy towers and gables olden.
You shall remember
How arms sun-blistered, hot palms crack'd with rowing,
Clove the cool water of Avon, sweetly flowing;
And how our bodies, beautifully white,
Stretch'd to a long stroke lengthened in green light,
And we, emerging, laughed in childish wise,
And pressed the kissing water from our eyes.
Ah, was our laughter childish, or were we wise?
And then, crown of the day, a tired returning
With happy sunsets over Bredon burning,
With music and with moonlight, and good ale,
And no thought for the morrow.... Heavy phlox
Our garden pathways bordered, and evening stocks,
Those humble weeds, in sunlight withered and pale,
With a night scent to match the nightingale,
Gladdened with spicèd sweetness sweet night's shadows,
Meeting the breath of hay from mowing meadows:
As humble was our joy, and as intense
Our rapture. So, before I hurry hence,
Yours be the memory.
One night again,
When we were men, and had striven, and known pain,
By a dark canal debating, unresigned,
On the blind fate that shadows humankind,
On the blind sword that severs human love...
Then did the hidden belfry from above
On troubled minds in benediction shed
The patience of the great anonymous dead
Who reared those towers, those high cathedrals builded
In solemn stone, and with clear fancy gilded
A beauty beyond ours, trusting in God.
Then dared we follow the dark way they trod,
And bowing to the universal plan
Trust in the true and fiery spirit of Man.
And you, my Brother,
You know, as knows one other,
How my spirit revisiteth a room
In a high wing, beneath pine-trees, where gloom
Dwelleth, dispelled by resinous wood embers,
Where, in half-darkness ... How the heart remembers...
We talked of beauty, and those fiery things
To which the divine desirous spirit clings,
In a wing'd rapture to that heaven flinging,
Where beauty is an easy thing, and singing
The natural speech of man. Like kissing swords
Our wits clashed there; the brittle beauty of words
Breaking, seemed to discover its secret heart
And all the rapt elusiveness of Art.
Now I have known sorrow, and now I sing
That a lovely word is not an idle thing;
For as with stars the cloth of night is spangled,
With star-like words, most lovelily entangled,
The woof of sombre thought is deckt.... Ah, bright
And cold they glitter in the spirit's night!
But neither distant nor dispassionate;
For beauty is an armour against fate....
I tell you, who have stood in the dark alone.
Seeing the face that turneth all to stone,
Medusa, blind with hate,
While I was dying, Beauty sate with me
Nor tortured any longer; gracious was she;
To her soft words I listened, and was content
To die, nor sorry that my light was spent.
So, Brother, if I come not home,
Go to that little room
That my spirit revisiteth, and there,
Somewhere in the blue air, you shall discover
If that you be a lover
Nor haughtily minded, all that once half-shaped
Then fled us, and escaped:
All that I found that day,
Far, so far away.
And you, my lovely one,
What can I leave to you, who, you having left,
Am utterly bereft?
What in my store of visionary dowers
Is not already yours?
What silences, what hours
Of peace passing all understanding; days
Made lyric by your beauty and its praise;
Years neither time can tarnish, nor death mar,
Wherein you shined as steadfast as a star
In my bleak night, heedless of the cloud-wrack
Scudding in torn fleeces black
Of my dark moods, as those who rule the far
Star-haunted pleasaunces of heaven are?
So think but lightly of that afternoon
With white clouds climbing a blue sky in June
When a boy worshipped under dreaming trees,
Who touched your hand, and sought your eyes.
... Ah, cease,
Not these, not these...
Nor yet those nights when icy Brathay thundered
Under his bridges, and ghostly mountains wondered
At the white blossoming of a Christmas rose
More stainless than their snows;
Nor even of those placid days together
Mellow as early autumn's amber weather
When beech is ankleted with fire, and old
Elms wear their livery of yellow gold,
When orchards all are laden with increase,
And the quiet earth hath fruited, and knows peace
Oh, think not overmuch on those sweet years
Lest their last fruit be tears,--
Your tears, beloved, that were my utmost pain,--
But rather, dream again
How that a lover, half poet and half child,
An eager spirit of fragile fancies wild
Compact, adored the beauty and truth in you:
To your own truth be true;
And when, not mournfully, you turn this page
Consider still your starry heritage,
Continue in your loveliness, a star
To gladden me from afar
Even where there is no light
In my last night.
LOCHANILAUN
This is the image of my last content:
My soul shall be a little lonely lake,
So hidden that no shadow of man may break
The folding of its mountain battlement;
Only the beautiful and innocent
Whiteness of sea-born cloud drooping to shake
Cool rain upon the reed-beds, or the wake
Of churn'd cloud in a howling wind's descent.
For there shall be no terror in the night
When stars that I have loved are born in me,
And cloudy darkness I will hold most fair;
But this shall be the end of my delight:
That you, my lovely one, may stoop and see
Your image in the mirrored beauty there.
LETTERMORE
These winter days on Lettermore
The brown west wind it sweeps the bay,
And icy rain beats on the bare
Unhomely fields that perish there:
The stony fields of Lettermore
That drink the white Atlantic spray.
And men who starve on Lettermore,
Cursing the haggard, hungry surf,
Will souse the autumn's bruisèd grains
To light dark fires within their brains
And fight with stones on Lettermore
Or sprawl beside the smoky turf.
When spring blows over Lettermore
To bloom the ragged furze with gold,
The lovely south wind's living breath
Is laden with the smell of death:
For fever breeds on Lettermore
To waste the eyes of young and old.
A black van comes to Lettermore;
The horses stumble on the stones,
The drivers curse,--for it is hard
To cross the hills from Oughterard
And cart the sick from Lettermore:
A stinking load of rags and bones.
But you will go to Lettermore
When white sea-trout are on the run,
When purple glows between the rocks
About Lord Dudley's fishing-box
Adown the road to Lettermore,
And wide seas tarnish in the sun.
And so you'll think of Lettermore
As a lost island of the blest:
With peasant lovers in a blue
Dim dusk, with heather drench'd in dew,
And the sweet peace of Lettermore
Remote and dreaming in the West.
LAMENT