Behold the mother of a soil forlorn;
I suckled towns, and fed the forest land,
Behold my shattered villages and mourn
How should I understand?
Why are those huts o’erpatched like dappled kine,
What are those weary men in blue and brown,
And humming craft that search my sinuous line;
Why should my name re-echo with renown
Past every phantom town?
But still my lily-breasted waters shine,
And still I chant my shadowy ripples down.
From peace through war my waters flow,
To peace again at sea,
The peopled land I used to know
Now all belongs to me.
Though battling armies come and go,
I toil and spin, I reap and sow,
And poppy-mantled meadows blow
In murdered Picardy.
My eddies bear the clinging scent of lime
To sweeten clouds of plume-tossed meadowsweet;
My meadow grasses nestle with the thyme
And flowering rushes tower in the heat.
Low-brushing swifts and swallows splashed with white
O’er flash my laden mirrors slow and deep
That bear swift-merging canopies of sleep.
Until the growing light
Has chased marauding owls, and butterflies,
Born of blue-woven skies,
Flutter away like hare-bells spurred to flight.
But who are these? The powdered butterfly
Outshines that air leviathan that swings
In rigid curves adown the barren sky,
With cloudy satellites about her wings.
And I have seen
Dark horsemen ride with spears of tapered steel;
And bellowing guns beneath the far balloons.
And once a ponderous slug bedecked in green
Crept, in the waning moon’s
Still-darkening gloom, and at her giant heel
White-gleaming, ran a train of hooded cars....
I triumph, triumph, search my sinuous line
Amid the snarling impotence of wars.
Turn where you will. Look, there a signboard shows
The lair of guns; already round the sign
White trumpeting convolvuli entwine
Their clinging arms, across the placard blows
A quiet-breathing rose.
And still my lily-breasted waters shine
And loud my chanting grows:
From peace through war my waters flow
To peace again at sea,
The peopled land I used to know
Now all belongs to me.
Though battling armies come and go
I toil and spin, I reap and sow,
And poppy-mantled meadows blow
In murdered Picardy.
SOMME FLOWER TALK
Said the Cornflower to the Pimpernel,
“O sudden scarlet eyes,
You never bloomed till ploughing shell
Laid bare earth’s sanctities!”
Then upward cried the Pimpernel:
“Blue head in deeper blue,
’Tis strange this former waste of Hell
Is Paradise anew.