Poems | Page 7

the two behind?Seemed pursued by tempests overpast;?And the morrow with fear that it could not last?Was spoiled. To-day ere the stones were warm?Five minutes of thunderstorm?Dashed it with rain, as if to secure,?By one tear, its beauty the luck to endure.
At mid-day then along the lane?Old Jack Noman appeared again,?Jaunty and old, crooked and tall,?And stopped and grinned at me over the wall,?With a cowslip bunch in his button-hole?And one in his cap. Who could say if his roll?Came from flints in the road, the weather, or ale??He was welcome as the nightingale.?Not an hour of the sun had been wasted on Jack?"I've got my Indian complexion back"?Said he. He was tanned like a harvester,?Like his short clay pipe, like the leaf and bur?That clung to his coat from last night's bed,?Like the ploughland crumbling red.?Fairer flowers were none on the earth?Than his cowslips wet with the dew of their birth,?Or fresher leaves than the cress in his basket.?"Where did they come from, Jack?" "Don't ask it,?And you'll be told no lies." "Very well:?Then I can't buy." "I don't want to sell.?Take them and these flowers, too, free.?Perhaps you have something to give me??Wait till next time. The better the day . . .?The Lord couldn't make a better, I say;?If he could, he never has done."?So off went Jack with his roll-walk-run,?Leaving his cresses from Oakshott rill?And his cowslips from Wheatham hill.
'Twas the first day that the midges bit;?But though they bit me, I was glad of it:?Of the dust in my face, too, I was glad.?Spring could do nothing to make me sad.?Bluebells hid all the ruts in the copse.?The elm seeds lay in the road like hops,?That fine day, May the twenty-third,?The day Jack Noman disappeared.
THE GLORY
THE glory of the beauty of the morning,--?The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;?The blackbird that has found it, and the dove?That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;?White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;?The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy?Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart:--?The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning?All I can ever do, all I can be,?Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue,?The happiness I fancy fit to dwell?In beauty's presence. Shall I now this day?Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,?Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start?And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,?In hope to find whatever it is I seek,?Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things?That we know naught of, in the hazel copse??Or must I be content with discontent?As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings??And shall I ask at the day's end once more?What beauty is, and what I can have meant?By happiness? And shall I let all go,?Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know?That I was happy oft and oft before,?Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,?How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,?Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.
MELANCHOLY
THE rain and wind, the rain and wind, raved endlessly.?On me the Summer storm, and fever, and melancholy?Wrought magic, so that if I feared the solitude?Far more I feared all company: too sharp, too rude,?Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice.?What I desired I knew not, but whate'er my choice?Vain it must be, I knew. Yet naught did my despair?But sweeten the strange sweetness, while through the
wild air?All day long I heard a distant cuckoo calling?And, soft as dulcimers, sounds of near water falling,?And, softer, and remote as if in history,?Rumours of what had touched my friends, my foes,
or me.
ADLESTROP
YES. I remember Adlestrop--?The name, because one afternoon?Of heat the express-train drew up there?Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.?No one left and no one came?On the bare platform. What I saw?Was Adlestrop--only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,?And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,?No whit less still and lonely fair?Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang?Close by, and round him, mistier,?Farther and farther, all the birds?Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
THE GREEN ROADS
THE green roads that end in the forest?Are strewn with white goose feathers this June,
Like marks left behind by some one gone to the forest?To show his track. But he has never come back.
Down each green road a cottage looks at the forest.?Round one the nettle towers; two are bathed in flowers.
An old man along the green road to the forest?Strays from one, from another a child alone.
In the thicket bordering the forest,?All day long a thrush twiddles his song.
It is old, but the trees are young in the forest,?All but one like a castle keep, in the middle deep.
That oak saw the ages pass in the forest:?They were a host, but their memories are lost,
For the tree is dead: all things forget the forest?Excepting perhaps