Poems, 1916-1918

by Francis Brett Young

I made a song in my love's likeness

From colours of my quietude,

From trees whose blossoms shine no less

Than butterflies in the wild-wood.

I laid claim on all beauty

Under the sun to praise her wonder,

Till the noise of war swept over me,

Stopp'd my singing mouth with thunder.

The angel of death hath swift wings,

I heard him strip the huddled trees

Overhead, as a hornet sings,

And whip the grass about my knees.

Down we crouched in the parchèd dust,

Down beneath that deadly rain:

Dead still I lay, as lie one must

Who hath a bullet in his brain.

Dead they left me: but my soul, waking,

Quietly laughed at their distress

Who guessed not that I still was making

That new song in my love's likeness.

BEFORE ACTION

Now the wind of the dawn sighs,

Now red embers have burned white,

Under the darkness faints and dies

The slow-beating heart of night.

Into the darkness my eyes peer

Seeing only faces steel'd,

And level eyes that know not fear;

Yet each heart is a battlefield

Where phantom armies foin and feint

And bloody victories are won

From the time when stars are faint

To the rising of the sun.

With banners broken, and the roll

Of drums, at dawn the phantoms fly:

A man must commune with his soul

When he marches out to die.

O day of wrath and of desire!

For each may know upon this day

Whether he be a thing of fire

Or fettered to the traitor clay.

Such is the hazard that is thrown:

We know not how the dice may fall:

All the secrets shall be known

Or else we shall not know at all.

ON A SUBALTERN KILLED IN ACTION

Into that dry and most desolate place

With heavy gait they dragged the stretcher in

And laid him on the bloody ground: the din

Of Maxim fire ceased not. I raised his head,

And looked into his face,

And saw that he was dead.

Saw beneath matted curls the broken skin

That let the bullet in;

And saw the limp, lithe limbs, the smiling mouth...

(Ah, may we smile at death

As bravely....) the curv'd lips that no more drouth

Should blacken, and no sweetly stirring breath

Mildly displace.

So I covered the calm face

And stripped the shirt from his firm breast, and there,

A zinc identity disc, a bracelet of elephant hair

I found.... Ah, God, how deep it stings

This unendurable pity of small things!

But more than this I saw,

That dead stranger welcoming, more than the raw

And brutal havoc of war.

England I saw, the mother from whose side

He came hither and died, she at whose hems he had play'd,

In whose quiet womb his body and soul were made.

That pale, estrangèd flesh that we bowed over

Had breathed the scent in summer of white clover;

Dreamed her cool fading nights, her twilights long,

And days as careless as a blackbird's song

Heard in the hush of eve, when midges' wings

Make a thin music, and the night-jar spins.

(For it is summer, I thought, in England now....)

And once those forward gazing eyes had seen

Her lovely living green: that blackened brow

Cool airs, from those blue hills moving, had fann'd--

Breath of that holy land

Whither my soul aspireth without despair:

In the broken brain had many a lovely word

Awakened magical echoes of things heard,

Telling of love and laughter and low voices,

And tales in which the English heart rejoices

In vanishing visions of childhood and its glories:

Old-fashioned nursery rhymes and fairy stories:

Words that only an English tongue could tell.

And the firing died away; and the night fell

On our battle. Only in the sullen sky

A prairie fire, with huge fantastic flame

Leapt, lighting dark clouds charged with thunder.

And my heart was sick with shame

That there, in death, he should lie,

Crying: 'Oh, why am I alive, I wonder?'

In a dream I saw war riding the land:

Stark rode she, with bowed eyes, against the glare

Of sack'd cities smouldering in the dark,

A tired horse, lean, with outreaching head,

And hid her face of dread....

Yet, in my passion would I look on her,

Crying, O hark,

Thou pale one, whom now men say bearest the scythe

Of God, that iron scythe forged by his thunder

For reaping of nations overripened, fashioned

Upon the clanging anvil whose sparks, flying

In a starry night, dying, fall hereunder....

But she, she heeded not my cry impassioned

Nor turned her face of dread,

Urging the tired horse, with outreaching head,

O thou, cried I, who choosest for thy going

These bloomy meadows of youth, these flowery ways

Whereby no influence strays

Ruder than a cold wind blowing,

Or beating needles of rain,

Why must thou ride again

Ruthless among the pastures yet unripened,

Crushing their beauty in thine iron track

Downtrodden, ravish'd in thy following flame,

Parched and black?

But she, she stayed not in her weary haste

Nor turned her face; but fled:

And where she passed the lands lay waste....

And now I cannot tell whither she rideth:

But tired, tired rides she.

Yet know I well why her dread face she hideth:

She is pale and faint to death. Yea, her day faileth,

Nor all her blood, nor all her frenzy burning,

Nor all her hate availeth:

For she passeth out of sight

Into that night

From which none, none returneth

To waste the meadows of youth,

Nor vex thine eyelids, Routhe,

O sorrowful sister, soother of our sorrow.

And a hope within me springs

That fair will be the morrow,

And that charred plain,

Those flowery meadows, shall rejoice at last

In a sweet, clean

Freshness, as when the green

Grass springeth, where the prairie fire hath passed.

AFTER ACTION

All through that day of battle the broken sound

Of shattering Maxim fire made mad the wood;

So that the low trees shuddered where they stood,

And echoes bellowed in the bush around:

But when, at last the light of day was drowned,

That madness ceased.... Ah, God, but it was good!

There, in the reek of iodine and blood,

I flung me down upon the thorny ground.

So quiet was it, I might well have been lying

In a room I love, where the ivy cluster shakes

Its dew upon the lattice panes at even:

Where rusty ivory scatters from the dying

Jessamine blossom, and the musk-rose breaks

Her dusky bloom beneath a summer heaven.

SONNET

Not only for remembered loveliness,

England, my mother, my own, we hold thee rare

Who toil, and fight, and sicken beneath the glare

Of brazen skies that smile on our duress,

Making us crave thy cloudy state no less

Than the sweet clarity of thy rain-wash'd air,

Meadows in moonlight cool, and every fair

Slow-fading flower of thy summer dress:

Not for thy flowers, but for the unfading crown

Of sacrifice our happy brothers wove thee:

The joyous ones who laid thy beauty down

Nor stayed to see it shamed. For these we love thee,

For this (O love, O dread!) we hold thee more

Divinely fair to-day than heretofore.

A FAREWELL TO AFRICA