Georgian Poetry 1918-19 | Page 5

fishing
box
Adown the road to Lettermore,
And wide seas tarnish in the
sun.
And so you'll think of Lettermore
As a lost island of the blest:
With
peasant lovers in a blue
Dim dusk, with heather drench'd in dew,

And the sweet peace of Lettermore
Remote and dreaming in the
West.
SONG
Why have you stolen my delight
In all the golden shows of Spring

When every cherry-tree is white
And in the limes the thrushes sing,
O fickler than the April day,
O brighter than the golden broom,
O
blither than the thrushes' lay,
O whiter than the cherry-bloom,
O sweeter than all things that blow ...
Why have you only left for me


The broom, the cherry's crown of snow,
And thrushes in the
linden-tree?
THE LEANING ELM
Before my window, in days of winter hoar
Huddled a mournful wood:

Smooth pillars of beech, domed chestnut, sycamore,
In stony sleep
they stood:
But you, unhappy elm, the angry west
Had chosen from
the rest,
Flung broken on your brothers' branches bare,
And left you
leaning there
So dead that when the breath of winter cast
Wild
snow upon the blast,
The other living branches, downward bowed,

Shook free their crystal shroud
And shed upon your blackened trunk
beneath
Their livery of death....
On windless nights between the beechen bars
I watched cold stars

Throb whitely in the sky, and dreamily
Wondered if any life lay
locked in thee:
If still the hidden sap secretly moved
As water in the
icy winterbourne
Floweth unheard:
And half I pitied you your
trance forlorn:
You could not hear, I thought, the voice of any bird,

The shadowy cries of bats in dim twilight
Or cool voices of owls
crying by night ...
Hunting by night under the hornéd moon:
Yet
half I envied you your wintry swoon,
Till, on this morning mild, the
sun, new-risen
Steals from his misty prison;
The frozen fallows
glow, the black trees shaken
In a clear flood of sunlight vibrating
awaken:
And lo, your ravaged bole, beyond belief
Slenderly
fledged anew with tender leaf
As pale as those twin vanes that break
at last
In a tiny fan above the black beech-mast
Where no blade
springeth green
But pallid bells of the shy helleborine.
What is this
ecstasy that overwhelms
The dreaming earth? See, the embrownéd
elms

Crowding purple distances warm the depths of the wood:
A
new-born wind tosses their tassels brown,
His white clouds dapple
the down:
Into a green flame bursting the hedgerows stand.
Soon,
with banners flying, Spring will walk the land....

There is no day for thee, my soul, like this,
No spring of lovely words.
Nay, even the kiss
Of mortal love that maketh man divine
This light
cannot outshine:
Nay, even poets, they whose frail hands catch
The
shadow of vanishing beauty, may not match
This leafy ecstasy. Sweet
words may cull
Such magical beauty as time may not destroy;
But
we, alas, are not more beautiful:
We cannot flower in beauty as in joy.

We sing, our muséd words are sped, and then
Poets are only men

Who age, and toil, and sicken.... This maim'd tree
May stand in
leaf when I have ceased to be.

WILLIAM H. DAVIES
LOVELY DAMES
Few are my books, but my small few have told
Of many a lovely
dame that lived of old;
And they have made me see those fatal
charms
Of Helen, which brought Troy so many harms;
And lovely
Venus, when she stood so white
Close to her husband's forge in its
red light.
I have seen Dian's beauty in my dreams,
When she had
trained her looks in all the streams
She crossed to Latmos and
Endymion;
And Cleopatra's eyes, that hour they shone
The brighter
for a pearl she drank to prove
How poor it was compared to her rich
love:
But when I look on thee, love, thou dost give
Substance to
those fine ghosts, and make them live.
WHEN YON FULL MOON
When yon full moon's with her white fleet of stars,
And but one bird
makes music in the grove;
When you and I are breathing side by side,

Where our two bodies make one shadow, love;
Not for her beauty will I praise the moon,
But that she lights thy purer
face and throat;
The only praise I'll give the nightingale
Is that she
draws from thee a richer note.

For, blinded with thy beauty, I am filled,
Like Saul of Tarsus, with a
greater light;
When he had heard that warning voice in Heaven,

And lost his eyes to find a deeper sight.
Come, let us sit in that deep silence then,
Launched on love's rapids,
with our passions proud
That makes all music hollow--though the
lark
Raves in his windy heights above a cloud.
ON HEARING MRS. WOODHOUSE PLAY THE
HARPSICHORD
We poets pride ourselves on what
We feel, and not what we achieve;

The world may call our children fools,
Enough for us that we
conceive.
A little wren that loves the grass
Can be as proud as any
lark
That tumbles in a cloudless sky,
Up near the sun, till he
becomes
The apple of that shining eye.
So, lady, I would never dare
To hear your music ev'ry day;
With
those great bursts that send my nerves
In waves to pound my heart
away;
And those small notes that run like mice
Bewitched by light;
else