THE FARMER’S BRIDE

The Original Edition of The Farmer’s Bride, consisting of seventeen of the poems included in this volume, was first published in 1916.

THE FARMER’S BRIDE

By

CHARLOTTE MEW

[A new Edition with eleven new Poems]

LONDON

THE POETRY BOOKSHOP

35 DEVONSHIRE STREET, THEOBALD’S ROAD, W.C.

1921

Printed in England at

The Westminster Press, Harrow Road,

London, W.

The Author begs to thank the Editors of The Nation, The Westminster Gazette, The New Weekly, The Englishwoman, The Egoist, The Graphic, The Athenæum, and The Monthly Chapbook for permission to reprint some of the poems in this book.

To ——

He asked life of thee, and thou gavest him a long life:

even for ever and ever.

CONTENTS

THE FARMER’S BRIDE

Three Summers since I chose a maid,

Too young maybe—but more’s to do

At harvest-time than bide and woo.

When us was wed she turned afraid

Of love and me and all things human;

Like the shut of a winter’s day.

Her smile went out, and ’twasn’t a woman—

More like a little frightened fay.

One night, in the Fall, she runned away.

“Out ’mong the sheep, her be,” they said,

’Should properly have been abed;

But sure enough she wasn’t there

Lying awake with her wide brown stare.

So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down

We chased her, flying like a hare

Before our lanterns. To Church-Town

All in a shiver and a scare

We caught her, fetched her home at last

And turned the key upon her, fast.

She does the work about the house

As well as most, but like a mouse:

Happy enough to chat and play

With birds and rabbits and such as they,

So long as men-folk keep away.

“Not near, not near!” her eyes beseech

When one of us comes within reach.

The women say that beasts in stall

Look round like children at her call.

I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.

Shy as a leveret, swift as he,

Straight and slight as a young larch tree,

Sweet as the first wild violets, she,

To her wild self. But what to me?

The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,

The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,

One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,

A magpie’s spotted feathers lie

On the black earth spread white with rime,

The berries redden up to Christmas-time.

What’s Christmas-time without there be

Some other in the house than we!

She sleeps up in the attic there

Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair

Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,

The soft young down of her, the brown,

The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair!

FAME

Sometimes in the over-heated house, but not for long,

Smirking and speaking rather loud,

I see myself among the crowd,

Where no one fits the singer to his song,

Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces

Of the people who are always on my stair;

They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places;

But could I spare

In the blind Earth’s great silences and spaces,

The din, the scuffle, the long stare

If I went back and it was not there?

Back to the old known things that are the new,

The folded glory of the gorse, the sweet-briar air,

To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do

And the divine, wise trees that do not care

Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair!

God! If I might! And before I go hence

Take in her stead

To our tossed bed,

One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.

Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence—

A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white.

A blot upon the night,

The moon’s dropped child!

THE NARROW DOOR

The narrow door, the narrow door

On the three steps of which the café children play

Mostly at shop with pebbles from the shore,

It is always shut this narrow door

But open for a little while to-day.

And round it, each with pebbles in his hand,

A silenced crowd the café children stand

To see the long box jerking down the bend

Of twisted stair; then set on end,

Quite filling up the narrow door

Till it comes out and does not go in any more.

Along the quay you see it wind,

The slow black line. Someone pulls up the blind

Of the small window just above the narrow door—

“Tiens! que veux-tu acheter?” Rénée cries,

“Mais, pour quat’sous, des oignons,” Jean replies

And one pays down with pebbles from the shore.

THE FÊTE

To-night again the moon’s white mat

Stretches across the dormitory floor

While outside, like an evil cat

The pion prowls down the dark corridor,

Planning, I know, to pounce on me, in spite

For getting leave to sleep in town last night.

But it was none of us who made that noise,

Only the old brown owl that hoots and flies

Out of the ivy—he will say it was us boys—

Seigneur mon Dieu! the sacré soul of spies!

He would like to catch each dream that lies

Hidden behind our sleepy eyes:

Their dream? But mine—it is the moon and the wood that sees;

All my long life how I shall hate the trees!

In the Place d’Armes, the dusty planes, all Summer through

Dozed with the market women in the sun and scarcely stirred

To see the quiet things that crossed the Square—,

A tiny funeral, the flying shadow of a bird,

The hump-backed barber Célestin Lemaire,

Old madame Michel in her three-wheeled chair,

And filing past to Vespers, two and two,

The demoiselles of the pensionnat.

Towed like a ship through the harbour bar,

Safe into port, where le petit Jésus

Perhaps makes nothing of the look they shot at you:

Si, c’est défendu, mais que voulez-vous?

It was the sun. The sunshine weaves

A pattern on dull stones: the sunshine leaves

The portraiture of dreams upon the eyes

Before it dies:

All Summer through

The dust hung white upon the drowsy planes

Till suddenly they woke with the Autumn rains.

It is not only the little boys

Who have hardly got away from toys,

But I, who am seventeen next year,

Some nights, in bed, have grown cold to hear

That lonely passion of the rain

Which makes you think of being dead,

And of somewhere living to lay your head

As if you were a child again,

Crying for one thing, known and near

Your empty heart, to still the hunger and the fear

That pelts and beats with it against the pane.

But I remember smiling too

At all the sun’s soft tricks and those Autumn dreads

In winter time, when the grey light broke slowly through

The frosted window-lace to drag us shivering from our beds.

And when at dusk the singing wind swung down

Straight from the stars to the dark country roads

Beyond the twinkling town,

Striking the leafless poplar boughs as he went by,

Like some poor, stray dog by the wayside lying dead,

We left behind us the old world of dread,

I and the wind as we strode whistling on under the Winter sky.

And then in Spring for three days came the Fair

Just as the planes were starting into bud

Above the caravans: you saw the dancing bear

Pass on his chain; and heard the jingle and the thud.

Only four days ago

They let you out of this dull show

To slither down the montagne russe and chaff the man à la tête de veau—

Hit, slick, the bull’s eye at the tir,

Spin round and round till your head went queer

On the porcs-roulants. Oh! là là! la fête!

Va pour du vin, et le tête-a-tête

With the girl who sugars the quafres! Pauvrette,

How thin she was; but she smiled, you bet,

As she took your tip—“One does not forget

The good days, Monsieur.” Said with a grace,

But sacrébleu! what a ghost of a face!

And no fun too for the demoiselles

Of the pensionnat, who were hurried past,

With their “Oh, que c’est beau—Ah, qu’elle est belle!”

A lap-dog’s life from first to last!

The good nights are not made for sleep, nor the good days for dreaming in,

And at the end in the big Circus tent we sat and shook and stewed like sin!

Some children there had got—but where?

Sent from the south, perhaps—a red bouquet

Of roses, sweetening the fetid air

With scent from gardens by some far away blue bay.

They threw one at the dancing bear;

The white clown caught it. From St. Rémy’s tower

The deep, slow bell tolled out the hour;

The black clown, with his dirty grin

Lay, sprawling in the dust, as She rode in.

She stood on a white horse—and suddenly you saw the bend

Of a far-off road at dawn, with knights riding by,

A field of spears—and then the gallant day

Go out in storm, with ragged clouds low down, sullen and grey

Against red heavens: wild and awful, such a sky

As witnesses against you at the end

Of a great battle; bugles blowing, blood and dust—

The old Morte d’Arthur, fight you must—.

It died in anger. But it was not death

That had you by the throat, stopping your breath.

She looked like Victory. She rode my way.

She laughed at the black clown and then she flew

A bird above us, on the wing

Of her white arms; and you saw through

A rent in the old tent, a patch of sky

With one dim star. She flew, but not so high—

And then she did not fly;

She stood in the bright moonlight at the door

Of a strange room, she threw her slippers on the floor—

Again, again

You heard the patter of the rain,

The starving rain—it was this Thing,

Summer was this, the gold mist in your eyes;—

Oh God! it dies,

But after death—,

To-night the splendour and the sting

Blows back and catches at your breath,

The smell of beasts, the smell of dust, the scent of all the roses in the world, the sea, the Spring,

The beat of drums, the pad of hoofs, music, the dream, the dream, the Enchanted Thing!

At first you scarcely saw her face,

You knew the maddening feet were there,

What called was that half-hidden, white unrest

To which now and then she pressed

Her finger tips; but as she slackened pace

And turned and looked at you it grew quite bare:

There was not anything you did not dare:—

Like trumpeters the hours passed until the last day of the Fair.

In the Place d’Armes all afternoon

The building birds had sung “Soon, soon,”

The shuttered streets slept sound that night,

It was full moon:

The path into the wood was almost white,

The trees were very still and seemed to stare:

Not far before your soul the Dream flits on,

But when you touch it, it is gone

And quite alone your soul stands there.

Mother of Christ, no one has seen your eyes: how can men pray

Even unto you?

There were only wolves’ eyes in the wood—

My Mother is a woman too:

Nothing is true that is not good,

With that quick smile of hers, I have heard her say;—

I wish I had gone back home to-day;

I should have watched the light that so gently dies

From our high window, in the Paris skies,

The long, straight chain

Of lamps hung out along the Seine:

I would have turned to her and let the rain

Beat on her breast as it does against the pane;—

Nothing will be the same again;—

There is something strange in my little Mother’s eyes,

There is something new in the old heavenly air of Spring—

The smell of beasts, the smell of dust—The Enchanted Thing!

All my life long I shall see moonlight on the fern

And the black trunks of trees. Only the hair

Of any woman can belong to God.

The stalks are cruelly broken where we trod,

There had been violets there,

I shall not care

As I used to do when I see the bracken burn.

BESIDE THE BED

Someone has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded

The wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet breast:

So, smoothed and silenced you lie, like a child, not again to be questioned or scolded;

But, for you, not one of us believes that this is rest.

Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden

The blue beyond: or to screen the wavering flame subdue its breath:

Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, like dawn, would quiver and redden,

Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death.

Because all night you have not turned to us or spoken

It is time for you to wake; your dreams were never very deep:

I, for one, have seen the thin, bright, twisted threads of them dimmed suddenly and broken,

This is only a most piteous pretence of sleep!

IN NUNHEAD CEMETERY

It is the clay that makes the earth stick to his spade;

He fills in holes like this year after year;

The others have gone; they were tired, and half afraid,

But I would rather be standing here;

There is nowhere else to go. I have seen this place

From the windows of the train that’s going past

Against the sky. This is rain on my face—

It was raining here when I saw it last.

There is something horrible about a flower;

This, broken in my hand, is one of those

He threw in just now: it will not live another hour;

There are thousands more: you do not miss a rose.

One of the children hanging about

Pointed at the whole dreadful heap and smiled

This morning, after THAT was carried out;

There is something terrible about a child.

We were like children, last week, in the Strand;

That was the day you laughed at me