Poems - First Series

by Sir John Collings Squire

For I heard the thin gnat-like voices of the trout
—My body felt woolly and sick and astray and cold—
Crying with mockery in them: "You are not allowed
To take us, you know, under ten years old."

And the room swam, the calm woman and the yellow lamp,
The table, and the dim-glistering walls, and the floor,
And the stream sank away, and all whirled dizzily,
And I moaned, and the pain at my heart grew more and more.

And I fainted away, utterly miserable.
Falling in a place where there was nothing to pass,
Knowing all sorrows and the mothers and sisters of sorrows,
And the pain of the darkness before anything ever was.

RIVERS

Rivers I have seen which were beautiful,
Slow rivers winding in the flat fens,
With bands of reeds like thronged green swords
Guarding the mirrored sky;
And streams down-tumbling from the chalk hills
To valleys of meadows and watercress-beds,
And bridges whereunder, dark weed-coloured shadows,
Trout flit or lie.

I know those rivers that peacefully glide
Past old towers and shaven gardens,
Where mottled walls rise from the water
And mills all streaked with flour;
And rivers with wharves and rusty shipping,
That flow with a stately tidal motion
Towards their destined estuaries
Full of the pride of power;

Noble great rivers, Thames and Severn,
Tweed with his gateway of many grey arches,
Clyde, dying at sunset westward
In a sea as red as blood;
Rhine and his hills in close procession,
Placid Elbe, Seine slaty and swirling,
And Isar, son of the Alpine snows,
A furious turquoise flood.

All these I have known, and with slow eyes
I have walked on their shores and watched them,
And softened to their beauty and loved them
Wherever my feet have been;
And a hundred others also
Whose names long since grew into me,
That, dreaming in light or darkness,
I have seen, though I have not seen.

Those rivers of thought: cold Ebro,
And blue racing Guadiana,
Passing white houses, high-balconied,
That ache in a sun-baked land,
Congo, and Nile and Colorado,
Niger, Indus, Zambesi,
And the Yellow River, and the Oxus,
And the river that dies in sand.