Miscellany of Poetry | Page 9

thyme
Clash cymbals and beat gongs,
The shepherd's words once
more are faint,
The shepherd's song once more is thinned
Upon the
long course of the wind,
He sings, he sings no more.
Ah, now the sweet monotonies
Of bells that jangle on the sheep
To
the low limit of the hills!
Till the blue cup of music spills
Into the
boughs of lowland trees;
Till thence the lowland singings creep
Into
the silenced shepherd's head,
Creep drowsily through his blood:

The young thrush fluting all he knows,
The ring-dove moaning his
false woes,
Almost the rabbit's tiny tread,
The last unfolding bud.
But now,
Now a cool word spreads out along the sea.
Now the day's
violet is cloud-tipped with gold.
Now dusk most silently
Fills the
hushed day with other wings than birds'.
Now where on foam-crest
waves the seagulls rock,
To their cliff-haven go the seagulls thence.

So too the shepherd gathers in his flock,
Because birds journey to
their dens,
Tired sheep to their still fold.
A dark first bat swoops
low and dips
About the shepherd who now sings
A song of timeless
evenings;
For dusk is round him with wide wings,
Dusk murmurs
on his moving lips.
_There is not mortal man who knows
From whence the, shepherd's
song arose:
It came a thousand years ago.
Once the world's shepherds woke to lead
The folded sheep that they
might feed
On green downs where winds blow.
One shepherd sang a golden word.

A thousand miles away one heard.

One sang it swift, one sang it slow._
_Three skylarks heard, three skylarks told
All shepherds this same

song of gold
On all downs where winds blow.
This is the song that shepherds must
Sing till the green downlands be
dust
And tide of sheep-drift no more flow:
The song three skylarks told again
To all the sheep and shepherd men

On green downs where winds blow._
THE SINGER OF HIGH STATE
On hills too harsh for firs to climb,
Where eagle dare not hatch her
brood,
Upon the peak of solitude,
With anvils of black granite
crude
I forge austerities of rhyme.
Such godlike stuff my spirit drinks
I make grand odes of tempests
there.
The steel-winged eagle, if he dare
To cleave these tracts of
frozen air,
Hearing such music, swoops and sinks.
Stark clangours of forgotten wars,
Tumults of primal love and hate,

Through crags of song reverberate.
Held by the Singer of High State,

Battalions of the midnight pause.
On hills uplift from Space and Time,
Upon the peak of Solitude,

With stars to give my furnace food,
On anvils of black granite crude

I forge austerities of rhyme.

GERALD GOULD
FREEDOMS
1
Those were our freedoms, and we come to this:
The climbing road
that lures the climbing feet
Is lost: there lies no mist above the wheat,


Where-thro' to glimpse the silver precipice,
Far off, about whose
base the white seas hiss
In spray; the world grows narrow and
complete;
We have lost our perils in the certain sweet;
We have
sold our great horizon for a kiss.
To every hill there is a lowly slope,
But some have heights beyond all
height--so high
They make new worlds for the adventuring eye.
We
for achievement have forgone our hope,
And shall not see another
morning ope,
Nor the new moon come into the new sky.
2
Where is our freedom sought, and where to seek?
The voices of the
various world agree
The future's ours: to hope is to be free:
Only to
doubt, to fear, is to be weak.
Have you not felt upon your calm clear
cheek
The kiss of the bright wind of liberty?
What more is there to
ask, what more to be?
Peace, peace, my soul, and let the silence
speak!
To hope is to be free? Nay, hope's a slave
To every chance; hope is
the same as fear;
Hope trembles at the wind, the star, the wave,
The
voice, the mood, the music; hope stands near
The chilly threshold of
the waiting grave,
And when the silence speaks, hope does not hear.
3
In the old days came freedom with a sword.
Ev'n so; but also freedom
came with wings
Fanning the faint and purple bloom that clings
To
the great twilight where our dreams are stored.
Freedom was what the
waters would afford
That yet obeyed the white moon's whisperings,

And freedom leapt and listened in the strings
Of dulcimer and lute
and clavichord.
In the old days? But those old days are now.
O merciful, O bright, O
valiant brow,
Can you seek freedom that way and I this?
Not in the

single note is music free,
But where creation's climbing fires agree

In multitudes, in nights, in silences.
4
Shall we mark off our little patch of power
From time's compulsive
process? Shall we sit
With memory, warming our weak hands at it,

And say: "So be it; we have had one hour"?
Surely the mountains are
a better dower,
With their dark scope and cloudy infinite,
Than
small perfection, trivial exquisite;
'Mid all that dark the brightness of
a flower!
Lovers are not themselves: they are more, they are all:
For them are
past and future spread together
Like a green landscape lit by golden
weather:
For them the rhythmic change conjectural
Of time and
place is but the question whether
Their God shall stand (as