ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES
Storm and Stars
Naked night; black elms, pallid and streaming sky?
Alone with the passion of the wind,
In a hollow of stormy sound lost and alone am I,
On beaten earth a lost, unmated mind,
Marvelling at the stars, few, strange and bright,
That all this dark assault of surging air,
Wrenching the rooted wood, hunting the cloud of night,
As if it would tear all and nothing spare,
Leaves supreme in the height.
Against what laws, what laws, what powers invisible,
Sought not, yet always found,
Cries this dumb passion, strains this wrestle of wild will,
With tiger-leaps that seem to shake the ground?
Is it the baffled, homeless, rebel wind's crying,
Or storm from a profounder passion wrung?
Ah, heart of man, is it you, the old powers defying,
By far desires, by terrible beauty stung,
Broken on laws unseen, in a starry world dying,
Ignorant, tameless, young?
LAURENCE BINYON
THE FORESHORE OF LONDON
By H. M. TOMLINSON
IT begins on the north side of the City, at Poverty Corner. It begins imperceptibly, and very likely is no more than what a native knows is there. It does not look like a foreshore. It looks like another of the byways of the capital. There is nothing to distinguish it from the rest of Fenchurch Street. You will not find it in the directory, for its name is only a familiar bearing used by seamen among themselves. If a wayfarer came upon it from the west, he might stop to light a pipe (as well there as anywhere) and pass on, guessing nothing of what it is and of its memories. And why should he? London is built of such old shadows; and while we are here casting our own there is not much time to turn and question what they fall upon. Yet if some unreasonable doubt, a suspicion that he was being watched, made a stranger hesitate at that corner, he might begin to feel that London there was as different from Bayswater and Clapham as though deep water intervened. In a sense deep water does; and not only the sea, but legends of ships that have gone, and of the men who knew them, and traditions of a service older than anything Whitehall knows, though still as lively as enterprise itself, and as recent as the ships which moved on to-day's high water.