Poems, 1916-1918

by Francis Brett Young

THE LEANING ELM

Before my window, in days of winter hoar

Huddled a mournful wood:

Smooth pillars of beech, domed chestnut, sycamore,

In stony sleep they stood:

But you, unhappy elm, the angry west

Had chosen from the rest,

Flung broken on your brothers' branches bare,

And left you leaning there

So dead that when the breath of winter cast

Wild snow upon the blast,

The other living branches, downward bowed,

Shook free their crystal shroud

And shed upon your blackened trunk beneath,

Their livery of death....

On windless nights between the beechen bars

I watched cold stars

Throb whitely in the sky, and dreamily

Wondered if any life lay locked in thee:

If still the hidden sap secretly moved,

As water in the icy winterbourne

Floweth unheard;

And half I pitied you your trance forlorn:

You could not hear, I thought, the voice of any bird,

The shadowy cries of bats in dim twilight

Or cool voices of owls crying by night....

Hunting by night under the hornèd moon:

Yet half I envied you your wintry swoon,

Till, on this morning mild, the sun, new-risen

Steals from his misty prison;

The frozen fallows glow, the black trees shaken

In a clear flood of sunlight vibrating awaken:

And lo, your ravaged bole, beyond belief

Slenderly fledged anew with tender leaf

As pale as those twin vanes that break at last

In a tiny fan above the black beech-mast

Where no blade springeth green

But pallid bells of the shy helleborine.

What is this ecstasy that overwhelms

The dreaming earth? See, the embrownèd elms

Crowding purple distances warm the depths of the wood;

A new-born wind tosses their tassels brown,

His white clouds dapple the down;

Into a green flame bursting the hedgerows stand;

Soon, with banners flying, Spring will walk the land....

There is no day for thee, my soul, like this,

No spring of lovely words. Nay, even the kiss

Of mortal love that maketh man divine

This light cannot outshine:

Nay, even poets, they whose frail hands catch

The shadow of vanishing beauty, may not match

This leafy ecstasy. Sweet words may cull

Such magical beauty as time may not destroy;

But we, alas, are not more beautiful:

We cannot flower in beauty as in joy.

We sing, our musèd words are sped, and then

Poets are only men

Who age, and toil, and sicken.... This maim'd tree

May stand in leaf when I have ceased to be.

THE JOYOUS LOVER

O, now that I am free as the air

And fleet as clouds above,

I will wander everywhere

Over the ways I love.

Lightly, lightly will I pass

Nor scatter as I go

A shadow on the blowing grass

Or a footprint in the snow.

All the wild things of the wood

That once were timid and shy

They shall not flee their solitude

For fear, when I pass by;

And beauty, beauty, the wide world over,

Shall blush when I draw near:

She knows her lover, the joyous lover,

And greets him without fear.

But if I come to the dark room

From which our love hath fled

And bend above you in the gloom

Or kneel beside your bed,

Smile soft in your sleep, my beautiful one,

For if you should say 'Nay'

To the dream which visiteth you alone,

My joy would wither away.

DEAD POETS

ODE WRITTEN AT WILTON HOUSE

Last night, amazed, I trod on holy ground

Breathing an air that ancient poets knew,

Where, in a valley compassed with sweet sound,

Beneath a garden's alley'd shades of yew,

With eager feet passèd that singer sweet

Who Stella loved, whom bloody Zutphen slew

In the starred zenith of his knightly fame.

There too a dark-stoled figure I did meet:

Herbert, whose faith burned true

And steadfast as the altar candle's flame.

Under the Wilton cedars, pondering

Upon the pains of Beauty and the wrong

That sealeth lovely lips, fated to sing,

Before they reach the cadence of their song,

I mused upon dead poets: mighty ones

Who sang and suffered: briefly heard were they

As Libyan nightingales weary of wing

Fleeing the temper of Saharan suns

To gladden our moon'd May,

And with the broken blossom vanishing.

So to my eyes a sorrowful vision came

Of one whose name was writ in water: bright

His cheeks and eyes burned with a hectic flame;

And one, alas! I saw whose passionate might

Was spent upon a fevered fen in Greece;

One shade there was who, starving, choked with bread;

One, a drown'd corpse, through stormy water slips;

One in the numbing poppy-juice found peace;

And one, a youth, lay dead

With powdered arsenic upon his lips.

O bitter were the sorrow that could dull

The sombre music of slow evening

Here, where the old world is so beautiful

That even lesser lips are moved to sing

How the wide heron sails into the light

Black as the cedarn shadows on the lawns

Or stricken woodlands patient in decay,

And river water murmurs through the night

Until autumnal dawns

Burn in the glass of Nadder's watery way.

Nay, these were they by whom the world was lost,

To whom the world most richly gave: forlorn

Beauty they worshipp'd, counting not the cost

If of their torment beauty might be born;

And life, the splendid flower of their delight,

Loving too eagerly, they broke, and spill'd

The perfume that the folded petals close

Before its prime; yet their frail fingers white

From that bruised bloom distill'd

Uttermost attar of the living rose.

Wherefore, O shining ones, I will not mourn

You, who have ravish'd beauty's secret ways

Beneath death's impotent shadow, suffering scorn,

Hatred, and desolation in her praise....

Thus as I spoke their phantom faces smiled,

As brooding night with heavy downward wing

Fell upon Wilton's elegiac stone,

On the dark woodlands and the waters wild

And every living thing--

Leaving me there amazèd and alone.

PORTON WATER

Through Porton village, under the bridge,

A clear bourne floweth, with grasses trailing,

Wherein are shadows of white clouds sailing,

And elms that shelter under the ridge.

Through Porton village we passed one day,

Marching the plain for mile on mile,

And crossed the bridge in single file,

Happily singing, and marched away

Over the bridge where the shallow races,

Under a clear and frosty sky:

And the winterbourne, as we marched by,

Mirrored a thousand laughing faces.

O, do we trouble you, Porton river,

We who laughing passed, and after

Found a resting-place for laughter?

Over here, where the poplars shiver

By stagnant waters, we lie rotten.

On windless nights, in the lonely places,

There, where the winter water races,

O, Porton river, are we forgotten?

Through Porton village, under the bridge,

The clear bourne floweth with grasses trailing,

Wherein are shadows of light cloud sailing,

And elms that shelter under the ridge.

The pale moon she comes and looks;

Over the lonely spire she climbs;

For there she is lovelier many times

Than in the little broken brooks.

AN OLD HOUSE