Poems | Page 4

for ever. Perhaps?I may love other hills yet more?Than this: the future and the maps?Hide something I was waiting for.
One thing I know, that love with chance?And use and time and necessity?Will grow, and louder the heart's dance?At parting than at meeting be.
HEAD AND BOTTLE
THE downs will lose the sun, white alyssum?Lose the bees' hum;?But head and bottle tilted back in the cart?Will never part?Till I am cold as midnight and all my hours?Are beeless flowers.?He neither sees, nor hears, nor smells, nor thinks,?But only drinks,?Quiet in the yard where tree trunks do not lie?More quietly.
AFTER YOU SPEAK
AFTER you speak?And what you meant?Is plain,?My eyes?Meet yours that mean--?With your cheeks and hair--?Something more wise,?More dark,?And far different.?Even so the lark?Loves dust?And nestles in it?The minute?Before he must?Soar in lone flight?So far,?Like a black star?He seems--?A mote?Of singing dust?Afloat?Above,?That dreams?And sheds no light.?I know your lust?Is love.
SOWING
IT was a perfect day?For sowing; just?As sweet and dry was the ground?As tobacco-dust.
I tasted deep the hour?Between the far?Owl's chuckling first soft cry?And the first star.
A long stretched hour it was;?Nothing undone?Remained; the early seeds?All safely sown.
And now, hark at the rain,?Windless and light,?Half a kiss, half a tear,?Saying good-night.
WHEN WE TWO WALKED
WHEN we two walked in Lent?We imagined that happiness?Was something different?And this was something less.
But happy were we to hide?Our happiness, not as they were?Who acted in their pride?Juno and Jupiter:
For the Gods in their jealousy?Murdered that wife and man,?And we that were wise live free?To recall our happiness then.
IN MEMORIAM (Easter, 1915)
THE flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood?This Eastertide call into mind the men,?Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should?Have gathered them and will do never again.
FIFTY FAGGOTS
THERE they stand, on their ends, the fifty faggots?That once were underwood of hazel and ash?In Jenny Pinks's Copse. Now, by the hedge?Close packed, they make a thicket fancy alone?Can creep through with the mouse and wren. Next
Spring?A blackbird or a robin will nest there,?Accustomed to them, thinking they will remain?Whatever is for ever to a bird:?This Spring it is too late; the swift has come.?'Twas a hot day for carrying them up:?Better they will never warm me, though they must?Light several Winters' fires. Before they are done?The war will have ended, many other things?Have ended, maybe, that I can no more?Foresee or more control than robin and wren.
WOMEN HE LIKED
WOMEN he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob,?Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he?Loved horses. He himself was like a cob,?And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree.
For the life in them he loved most living things,?But a tree chiefly. All along the lane?He planted elms where now the stormcock sings?That travellers hear from the slow-climbing train.
Till then the track had never had a name?For all its thicket and the nightingales?That should have earned it. No one was to blame.?To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails.
Many years since, Bob Hayward died, and now?None passes there because the mist and the rain?Out of the elms have turned the lane to slough?And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob's Lane.
EARLY ONE MORNING
EARLY one morning in May I set out,?And nobody I knew was about.
I'm bound away for ever,?Away somewhere, away for ever.
There was no wind to trouble the weathercocks.?I had burnt my letters and darned my socks.
No one knew I was going away,?I thought myself I should come back some day.
I heard the brook through the town gardens run.?O sweet was the mud turned to dust by the sun.
A gate banged in a fence and banged in my head.?"A fine morning, sir." a shepherd said.
I could not return from my liberty,?To my youth and my love and my misery.
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,?The only sweet thing that is not also fleet.
I'm bound away for ever,?Away somewhere, away for ever.
THE CHERRY TREES
THE cherry trees bend over and are shedding?On the old road where all that passed are dead,?Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding?This early May morn when there is none to wed.
IT RAINS
IT rains, and nothing stirs within the fence?Anywhere through the orchard's untrodden, dense?Forest of parsley. The great diamonds?Of rain on the grassblades there is none to break,?Or the fallen petals further down to shake.
And I am nearly as happy as possible?To search the wilderness in vain though well,?To think of two walking, kissing there,?Drenched, yet forgetting the kisses of the rain:?Sad, too, to think that never, never again,
Unless alone, so happy shall I walk?In the rain. When I turn away, on its fine stalk?Twilight has fined to naught, the parsley flower?Figures, suspended still and ghostly white,?The past hovering as it revisits the light.
THE HUXTER
HE has a hump like an ape on his back;?He has of money a plentiful lack;?And but for a gay coat of double his girth?There is not a plainer thing on the