The poems are as nearly as possible in chronological order, except that the group called An Epilogue should have been dated 1917.
J. C. S.
September, 1921.
CONTENTS
YEAR
[Dedication] [Preface]
1918 [The Birds] [A Dog's Death] [A Poet to his Muse] [Processes of Thought. I] [II] [III] [Airship over Suburb] [The Invocation of Lucretius] An Epilogue:
I [The Fluke] II [The Conversation] III [The Deaf Adder] IV [The Landscape] V [Another Hour] [An Impression Received from a Symphony] [Fen Landscape] [Meditation in Lamplight] [Harlequin]
1919 [Winter Nightfall] [A Far Place] [Late Snow] [Song: You are My Sky] [Song: The Heaven is Full] [Old Song] [Epitaph in Old Mode] [The Moon] [The Happy Night]
1920 [Constantinople] [Elegy] [Wars and Rumours, 1920]
1921 [To a Musician] [The Rugger Match]
THE BIRDS
(To Edmund Gosse)
Within mankind's duration, so they say,
Khephren and Ninus lived but yesterday.
Asia had no name till man was old
And long had learned the use of iron and gold;
And æons had passed, when the first corn was planted,
Since first the use of syllables was granted.
Men were on earth while climates slowly swung,
Fanning wide zones to heat and cold, and long
Subsidence turned great continents to sea,
And seas dried up, dried up interminably,
Age after age; enormous seas were dried
Amid wastes of land. And the last monsters died.
Earth wore another face. O since that prime
Man with how many works has sprinkled time!
Hammering, hewing, digging tunnels, roads;
Building ships, temples, multiform abodes.
How, for his body's appetites, his toils
Have conquered all earth's products, all her soils;
And in what thousand thousand shapes of art
He has tried to find a language for his heart!