Of this first American edition of Gipsy-Night and Other Poems, with a special proof of the Lithograph Portrait by Pamela Bianco, sixty-three copies, each signed by both author and artist, have been issued, of which thirty are for sale in America and twenty-four in England.

Number 46

Gipsy-Night and Other Poems

Pamela Bianco

GIPSY-NIGHT

and Other Poems

by

Richard Hughes

Chicago
WILL RANSOM
1922

Copyright 1922 by Will Ransom

Some of these pieces have appeared in England in The Athenæum, London Mercury, Spectator, Saturday Westminster Gazette, Oxford Review, Free Oxford, Oxford Outlook, Poetry Review, and Oxford Poetry; and in America in The Dial, the New York Evening Post Literary Review, The Bookman, and Poetry.

The Author offers the usual acknowledgments.

CONTENTS

Preface

Probably the most important contribution to modern poetical theory is Mr. Robert Graves’ book On English Poetry. He grounds it upon Man as a Neurotic Animal. Poetry is to the poet, he argues, what dreams are to the ordinary man: a symbolical way, that is, of resolving those complexes which deadlock of emotion has produced. If this book meets with the success it deserves, it is probable that there will be a great deal of psycho-analytical criticism afloat, that the symbolic test will become the sole criterion of distinguishing the true from the fake poem; until some sort of ‘Metamorphic’ school arise, who defeat this by consciously faking their symbolism. I do not wish to oppose this thesis, but only to suggest that though true, it is only a partial truth: and that to make it the sole criterion of poetry would be damning: that as well as being a neurotic animal, Man is a Communicative Animal, and a Pattern-making Animal: that poetry cannot be traced simply to a sort of automatic psycho-therapy, but that these and many other causes are co-responsible. Indeed, though many of these poems may still prove poems within the meaning of Mr. Graves’ Act, I should be sorry that they should be read with no other purpose than indecently to detect my neuroses.

R. H.

North Wales, 1922

Gipsy-Night

When the feet of the rain tread a dance on the roofs,

And the wind slides through the rocks and the trees,

And Dobbin has stabled his hoofs

In the warm bracken-litter, noisy about his knees;

And when there is no moon, and the sodden clouds slip over;

Whenever there is no moon, and the rain drips cold,

And folk with a shilling of money are bedded in houses,

And pools of water glitter on Farmer’s mould;

Then pity Sally’s girls, with the rain in their blouses:

Martha and Johnnie, who have no money:

The small naked puppies who whimper against the bitches,

The small sopping children who creep to the ditches.

But when the moon is run like a red fox

Cover to cover behind the skies;

And the breezes crack in the trees on the rocks,

Or stoop to flutter about the eyes

Of one who dreams in the scent of pines

At ease:

Then would you not go foot it with Sarah’s Girls

In and out the trees?

Or listen across the fire

To old Tinker-Johnnie, and Martha his Rawnee,

In jagged Wales, or in orchard Worcestershire?

The Horse Trough

Clouds of children round the trough

Splash and clatter in the sun:

Their clouted shoes are mostly off,

And some are quarrelling, and one

Cools half her face, nose downward bubbling,

Wetting her clo’es and never troubling;

Bobble, bobble, bobble there

Till bubbles like young earthquakes heave

The orange island of her hair,

And tidal waves run up her sleeve;

Another’s tanned as brown as bistre;

Another ducks his little sister,

And all are mixed in such a crowd

And tell their separate joys so loud

That who can be this silent one,

This dimpled, pensive, baby one?

—She sits the sunny steps so still

For hours, trying hard to kill

One fly at least of those that buzz

So cannily ...

And then she does.

Martha
(Gipsies on Tilberstowe: 1917)

Small child with the pinched face,

Why do you stare

With screwed-up eyes under a shock

Of dull carrot hair?

—Child in the long, torn frock,

Crouched in the warm dust:

Why do you stare, as if

Stare you must?

Fairies in gossamer,

Hero and warrior,

Queens in their cherry gowns,

Wizards and witches:

Dream you of such as these?

Palaces? Orange-trees?

Dream you of swords and crowns,

Child of the ditches?

Still in the warm dust

Sits she and stares; as if

Stare she must,

Pale eyes that see through:

Soon I must stare too:

Soon through the fierce glare

Loom things that are not there:

Out of the blind Past

Savages grim:

Negroes and muleteers,

Saxons and wanderers

Tall as a ship’s mast,

Spectral and dim.

Stirring the race’s dust,

Stares she as stare she must.

Fade they: but still the glare

Shimmers her copper hair.

Eight years of penury,

Whining and beggary,

Famine and cursing,

Hunger and sharp theft:

Death comes to such as these

Under the sobbing trees.

The cold stars nursing

Those that are left.

Angel and devil peers

Through those pale eyes of hers,

Child of the Wide Earth,

Born at the World’s birth,

Grave with the World’s pain,

Mirthless and tearless:

Widowed from babyhood,

Child without childhood,

Stained with an earthy stain,

Loveless and fearless:

My God is overhead:

Yours must be cold. Or dead.

—Child with the pinched face

Why do you stare

With so much knowledge under your shock

Of wild matted hair?

Gratitude

Eternal gratitude—a long, thin word:

When meant, oftenest left unheard:

When light on the tongue, light in the purse too;

Of curious metallurgy: when coined true

It glitters not, is neither large nor small:

More worth than rubies—less, times, than a ball.

Not gift, nor willed: yet through its wide range

Buys what it buys exact, and leaves no change.

Old Gurney had it, won on a hot day

With ale, from glib-voiced Gipsy by the way.

He held it lightly: for ’twas a rum start

To find a hedgeling who had still a heart:

So put it down for twist of a beggar’s tongue ...

He had not felt the heat: how the dust stung

A face June-roasted: he saw not the look

Aslant the gift-mug; how the hand shook ...

Yet the words filled his head, and he grew merry

And whistled from the Boar to Wrye-brook ferry,

And chaffed with Ferryman when the hawser creaked,

Or slipping bilge showed where the planks leaked;

—Lent hand himself, till doubly hard the barge

Butted its nose in mud of the farther marge.

When Gurney leapt to shore, he found—dismay!

He had no tuppence—(Tuppence was to pay

To sulky Ferryman).—‘Naught have I,’ says he,

‘Naught but the gratitude of Tammas Lee

Given one hour.’—Sulky Charon grinned:

‘Done,’ said he, ‘done: I take it—all of it, mind.’

‘Done,’ cries Jan Gurney. Down the road he went,

But by the ford left all his merriment.

This is the tale of midday chaffering:

How Charon took, and Gurney lost the thing:

How Ferryman gave it for his youngest daughter

To a tall lad who saved her out of the water—

(Being old and mean, had none of his own to give,

So passed on Tammas’, glad to see her live):

How the young farmer paid his quarter’s rent

With that one coin, when all else was spent,

And how Squire kept it for some goldless debt ...

For aught I know, it wanders current yet.

But Tammas was no angel in disguise:

He stole Squire’s chickens—often: he told lies,

Robbed Charon’s garden, burnt young Farmer’s ricks

And played the village many lousy tricks.

No children sniffled, and no dog cried,

When full of oaths and smells, he died.

Vagrancy

When the slow year creeps hay-ward, and the skies

Are warming in the summer’s mild surprise,

And the still breeze disturbs each leafy frond

Like hungry fishes dimpling in a pond,

It is a pleasant thing to dream at ease

On sun-warmed thyme, not far from beechen trees.

A robin flashing in a rowan-tree,

A wanton robin, spills his melody

As if he had such store of golden tones

That they were no more worth to him than stones:

The sunny lizards dream upon the ledges:

Linnets titter in and out the hedges,

Or swoop among the freckled butterflies.

Down to a beechen hollow winds the track

And tunnels past my twilit bivouac:

Two spiring wisps of smoke go singly up

And scarcely tremble in the leafy air.

—There are more shadows in this loamy cup

Than God could count: and oh, but it is fair:

The kindly green and rounded trunks, that meet

Under the soil with twinings of their feet

And in the sky with twinings of their arms:

The yellow stools: the still ungathered charms

Of berry, woodland herb, and bryony,

And mid-wood’s changeling child, Anemone.

Quiet as a grave beneath a spire

I lie and watch the pointed climbing fire,

I lie and watch the smoky weather-cock

That climbs too high, and bends to the breeze’s shock,

And breaks, and dances off across the skies

Gay as a flurry of blue butterflies.

But presently the evening shadows in,

Heralded by the night-jar’s solitary din

And the quick bat’s squeak among the trees;

—Who sudden rises, darting across the air

To weave her filmy web in the Sun’s bright hair

That slowly sinks dejected on his knees ...

Now is he vanished: the bewildered skies

Flame out a desperate and last surmise;

Then yield to Night, their sudden conqueror.

From pole to pole the shadow of the world

Creeps over heaven, till itself is lit

By the very many stars that wake in it:

Sleep, like a messenger of great import,

Lays quiet and compelling hands athwart

The easy idlenesses of my mind.

—There is a breeze above me, and around:

There is a fire before me, and behind:

But Sleep doth hold me, and I hear no sound.

In the far West the clouds are mustering,

Without hurry, noise, or blustering:

And soon as Body’s nightly Sentinel

Himself doth nod, I open furtive eyes ...

With darkling hook the Farmer of the Skies

Goes reaping stars: they flicker, one by one,

Nodding a little; tumble—and are gone.

Storm: to the Theme of Polyphemus

Mortal I stand upon the lifeless hills

That jut their craggèd bones against the sky:

I crawl upon their naked ebony,

And toil across the scars of Titan ills

Dealt by the weaponing of gods and devils:

I climb their uppermost deserted levels,

And see how Heaven glowers his one eye

Blood-red and black-browed in the sullen sky,

While all his face is livid as a corpse

And wicked as a snake’s: see how he warps

His sultry beam across the misted sea,

As if he grudged its darkling ministry.

He looks so covetous, I think he hides

—Jetsam of the slow ethereal tides—

Some cursed and battered Sailor of the Spheres:

All night he ravens on him and his peers,

But with the day he straddles monstrously

Across the earth in churlish shepherdry,

A-hungered for his hideous nightly feast.

But storms are gathering in the whitened East:

The day grows darker still, and suddenly

That lone and crafty Prisoner of the Sky

Plunges his murky torch in Heaven’s Eye:

The blinded, screaming tempest trumpets out

His windy agonies: Oh, he will spout

His boiling rains upon the soggy air

And heave great rocking planets: he will tear

And snatch the screeching comets by the hair

To fling them all about him in the sea,

And blast the wretch’s fatal Odyssey!

The great convulsions of the Deity

Rumble in agony across the sky:

His thunders rattle in and out the peaks:

His lightnings jab at every word He speaks:

—At every heavenly curse the cloud is split

And daggered lightnings crackle out of it.

Like a steep shower of snakes the hissing rain

Flickers its tongues upon the muddied plain,

Writhing and twisting on the gutted rocks

That tremble at the heavy thunder-shocks:

Soon from the hub on Heaven’s axel-tree

The frozen hail flies spinning, and the sea

Is lashed beneath me to a howling smoke

As if the frozen fires of hell had woke

And cracked their icy flames in the face of Heaven.

Withered and crouching and scarce breathing even,

And battered as a gnat upon a wall

I cling and gasp—climb to my feet, and fall,

And crawl at last beneath a lidded stone,

Careless if all the earth’s foundations groan