The gaunt stones upright on nude fells
Alone shall be his gods: naught else
Hold his urgent blood and sense
Subdued in proud stern reverence.
Only to these who make their house
Among clean winds he bends his brows.
On their austere lips he shall place
The spent passions of his face.
The cupped midnight like a great bowl
Shall lave him. He shall go forth whole.
COURAGE THE DREAMERS
(For Anthony Bertram)
We swing our swords against the bare
Bleak brows of granite. Yea, we dare.
We of clay limbs, armed with frail rhyme,
To taunt the passive globes that stare
From the eye-sockets of stern Time.
Though our long anguish may not dint
His towering flanks, yet from this flint
Our swords strike such fierce sparks of light,
The moon is blanched, the fool stars stint
Their weak flames at the crest of night.
Yea though we bleed from crown to heel,
Yea though the points of our split steel
Make futile glories and then die
Against Time's blear immensity,
Yet for black woe there shall be weal!
Stauncher than Time our dream is built.
Despair not, human dreamers, for
We shall prevail after much war.
Yea, the poor stump of our sword's hilt
At length shall be Time's conqueror!
A number of these poems are reprinted from Voices, Coterie, the Nation, the English Review, the Englishwoman, To-day, Colour, the Apple, the New Witness, the Sphere, the Saturday Westminster, and other journals; and from "A Queen's College Miscellany," "The Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany," and Messrs. Palmer and Hayward's "Miscellany of Poetry."
THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD. LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.