Georgian Poetry 1918-19 | Page 3

it!--And all the same?I'll pay him out for sidling off from me.?But I'll have supper first.
When she was gone,?Their talk could scarcely raise itself again?Above a grumble. But at last a cry?Sharp-pitcht came startling in from the street: at once?Their moody talk exploded into flare?Of swearing hubbub, like gunpowder dropt?On embers; mugs were clapt down, out they bolted?Rowdily jostling, eager for the event.
All down the street the folk throng'd out of doors,?But left a narrow track clear in the middle;?And there a man came running, a tall man?Running desperately and slowly, pounding?Like a machine, so evenly, so blindly;?And regularly his trotting body wagg'd.?Only one foot clatter'd upon the stones;?The other padded in his dogged stride:?The boot was gone, the sock hung frayed in shreds?About his ankle, the foot was blood and earth;?And never a limp, not the least flinch, to tell?The wounded pulp hit stone at every step.?His clothes were tatter'd and his rent skin showed,?Harrowed with thorns. His face was pale as putty,?Thrown far back; clots of drooping spittle foamed?On his moustache, and his hair hung in tails,?Mired with sweat; and sightless in their sockets?His eyeballs turned up white, as dull as pebbles.?Evenly and doggedly he trotted,?And as he went he moaned. Then out of sight?Round a corner he swerved, and out of hearing.
--'The law should have a say to that, by God!'

GORDON BOTTOMLEY
LITTLEHOLME
(To J.S. and A.W.S.)
In entering the town, where the bright river?Shrinks in its white stone bed, old thoughts return?Of how a quiet queen was nurtured here?In the pale, shadowed ruin on the height;?Of how, when the hoar town was new and clean?And had not grown a part of the gaunt fells?That peered down into it, the burghers wove?On their small, fireside looms green, famous webs?To cling on lissome, tower-dwelling ladies?Who rode the hills swaying like green saplings,?Or mask tall, hardy outlaws from pursuit?Down beechen caverns and green under-lights,?(The rude, vain looms are gone, their beams are broken;?Their webs are now not seen, but memory?Still tangles in their mesh the dews they swept?Like ruby sparks, the lights they took, the scents?They held, the movement of their shapes and shades);?Of how the Border burners in cold dawns?Of Summer hurried North up the high vales?Past smoking farmsteads that had lit the night?And surf of crowding cattle; and of how?A laughing prince of cursed, impossible hopes?Rode through the little streets Northward to battle?And to defeat, to be a fading thought,?Belated in dead mountains of romance.
A carver at his bench in a high gable?Hears the sharp stream close under, far below?Tinkle and rustle, and no other sound?Arises there to him to change his thoughts?Of the changed, silent town and the dead hands?That made it and maintained it, and the need?For handiwork and happy work and work?To use and ease the mind if such sweet towns?Are to be built again or live again.
The long town ends at Littleholme, where the road?Creeps up to hills of ancient-looking stone.?Under the hanging eaves at Littleholme?A latticed casement peeps above still gardens?Into a crown of druid-solemn trees?Upon a knoll as high as a small house,?A shapely mound made so by nameless men?Whose smoothing touch yet shows through the green hide.?When the slow moonlight drips from leaf to leaf?Of that sharp, plumy gloom, and the hour comes?When something seems awaited, though unknown,?There should appear between those leaf-thatched piles?Fresh, long-limbed women striding easily,?And men whose hair-plaits swing with their shagged arms;?Returning in that equal, echoed light?Which does not measure time to the dear garths?That were their own when from white Norway coasts?They landed on a kind, not distant shore,?And to the place where they have left their clothing,?Their long-accustomed bones and hair and beds?That once were pleasant to them, in that barrow?Their vanished children heaped above them dead:?For in the soundless stillness of hot noon?The mind of man, noticeable in that knoll,?Enhances its dark presence with a life?More vivid and more actual than the life?Of self-sown trees and untouched earth. It is seen?What aspect this land had in those first eyes:?In that regard the works of later men?Fall in and sink like lime when it is slaked,?Staid, youthful queen and weavers are unborn,?And the new crags the Northmen saw are set?About an earth that has not been misused.

FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
INVOCATION
Whither, O, my sweet mistress, must I follow thee??For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing,?And wait on thy appearing,?Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.
Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers,?Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers; Alas! her presence lingers?No longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.
Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after; Cold and remote were they, and there, possessed?By a strange unworldly rest,?Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.
The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.?Yet when their secret