Counter-Attack and Other Poems | Page 8

with wonder. In your gaze?Show me the vanquished vigil of my days.?Mute in that golden silence hung with green,?Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes?Remembrance of all beauty that has been,?And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
REPRESSION OF WAR EXPERIENCE
Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;?What silly beggars they are to blunder in?And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame--?No, no, not that,--it's bad to think of war,?When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you; And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad?Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts?That drive them out to jabber among the trees.
Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand,?Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen,?And you're as right as rain...
Why won't it rain? ...?I wish there'd be a thunder-storm to-night,?With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,?And make the roses hang their dripping heads.
Books; what a jolly company they are,?Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves,?Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green,?And every kind of colour. Which will you read??Come on; O do read something; they're so wise.?I tell you all the wisdom of the world?Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet?You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,?And listen to the silence: on the ceiling?There's one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters;?And in the breathless air outside the house?The garden waits for something that delays.?There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,--?Not people killed in battle,--they're in France,--?But horrible shapes in shrouds--old men who died?Slow, natural deaths,--old men with ugly souls,?Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins.

You're quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You'd never think there was a bloody war on! ...
O yes, you would ... why, you can hear the guns.
Hark! Thud, thud, thud,--quite soft ... they never cease--
Those whispering guns--O Christ, I want to go out
And screech at them to stop--I'm going crazy;
I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.
THE TRIUMPH
When life was a cobweb of stars for Beauty who came?In the whisper of leaves or a bird's lone cry in the glen, On dawn-lit hills and horizons girdled with flame?I sought for the triumph that troubles the faces of men.
With death in the terrible flickering gloom of the fight?I was cruel and fierce with despair; I was naked and bound; was stricken: and Beauty returned through the shambles of night; In the faces of men she returned; and their triumph I found.
SURVIVORS
No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain?Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.?Of course they're "longing to go out again,"--?These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk,?They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed?Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,--?Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud?Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride ...?Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;?Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
CRAIGLOCKART,?Oct. 1917.
JOY-BELLS
Ring your sweet bells; but let them be farewells?To the green-vista'd gladness of the past?That changed us into soldiers; swing your bells?To a joyful chime; but let it be the last.
What means this metal in windy belfries hung?When guns are all our need? Dissolve these bells?Whose tones are tuned for peace: with martial tongue?Let them cry doom and storm the sun with shells.
Bells are like fierce-browed prelates who proclaim?That "if our Lord returned He'd fight for us."?So let our bells and bishops do the same,?Shoulder to shoulder with the motor bus.
REMORSE
Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit,?He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knows?Each flash, and spouting crash,--each instant lit?When gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goes?Heavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders,?"Could anything be worse than this!"--he wonders,?Remembering how he saw those Germans run,?Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees:?Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was one?Livid with terror, clutching at his knees...?Our chaps were sticking 'em like pigs... "O hell!"?He thought--"there's things in war one dare not tell?Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads?Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds."
DEAD MUSICIANS
I
From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart,?The substance of my dreams took fire.?You built cathedrals in my heart,?And lit my pinnacled desire.?You were the ardour and the bright?Procession of my thoughts toward prayer.?You were the wrath of storm, the light?On distant citadels aflare.
II
Great names, I cannot find you now?In these loud years of youth that strives?Through doom toward peace: upon my brow?I wear a wreath of banished lives.?You have no part with lads who fought?And laughed and suffered at my side.?Your fugues and symphonies have brought?No memory of my friends who died.
III
For when my brain is on their track,?In slangy speech I call them back.?With fox-trot tunes their ghosts I charm.
_"Another little drink won't do us any harm."?I think of rag-time; a bit of