Georgian Poetry 1918-19 | Page 3

does he know the road or not:

The strain I put on his mind will keep him going
Right as a
homing-pigeon.
First Man:
Devilry I call it.
The Woman:
And you're welcome.
Second Man:
But the law should have a say here.
The Woman:
What, isn't he mine,
My own? There's naught but what I please about
it.
Third Man:
Why did you let him go?
The Woman:
To fetch him back!
For I enjoy this, mind. There's many a one

Would think, to see me, There goes misery!
There's a queer starveling
for you!--and I do
A thing that makes me like a saint in glory,
The
life of me the sound of a great tune
Your flesh could never hear: I can
send power
Delighting out of me! O, the mere thought
Has made
my blood go smarting in my veins,
Such a flame glowing along
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