Preludes 1921-1922 | Page 6

lived among?Farmers of flax and goatherds and a few?Unhappy men who brought their sorrow to God,?Asking his mercy on the Syrian lord.?And Naaman stood before the prophet of Israel,?And told his grief. And Elisha looked upon him,?Measured his faith, and bade him bathe his body?Seven times in the river of Jordan, and be?Whole. And Naaman questioned, and was wrath,?As was not any river of Damascus?Purer than Jordan, and in more virtue flowing??But, little, his servants said, was this to do,?And, as persuasion led him, he went down?And seven times let Jordan cover him,?And came with a clean body as of old,?A strong man with the tides of blood before him,?With equal limbs for all the spirit could dare,?And into Syria he sang upon his riding.
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And tidings came to the Syrian king of this,?Heralding a Naaman mightier than ever,?With clean flesh and a wisdom all matured,?And all the city rang upon his coming,?The king and his estate, people and priests,?And soldiers glad of their old captain again.?And matrons with their girls, and the rich merchants,?All shouted Naaman, Naaman, through the streets.?And Naaman's wife stood at the king's right hand,?Her slave-borne canopy coloured and spangled,?While the great fans beat upon her pride again,?And Naaman in plumes and plate and mail?Again was master of the Syrian hosts.
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Afar, beyond the barriers of the streets,?Pressing among the crowd for a moment's seeing,?The Israelitish maid, between her duties,?Watched with a proud flush beating down her limbs.?And shyly she had on a faded gown,?Patterned with sprigs of thyme and blades of wheat,?And paling stars and little curling shells.?And as the shouting rose, she watched in silence,?With trembling lips, and Naaman passed by her,?And her hands moved towards him, and fell down,?Then stole upon her bosom, as they would ease?The aching beauty of her loneliness.?And there unnoted as he passed she stood,?With not a thought from all that world upon her.?Only, when service came again, she saw?A glowing hatred in the proud woman's eyes.?And in the night she thought of it, and wept,?But not for any hatred were her tears.
LAKE WINTER
Full summer dusk was round him as he stood?On the hill-top, over the calling sheep?Drifting along the pastured downs. The moon?Far off was rising from the Sussex sea.?Above him, building up into the sky,?Black, and with pointing sails now skeletoned,?A windmill gathered strays of evening wind?Whispering through the splitting timbers. Still?The setting sun washed with a fuller gold?The golden sheaves patterned upon a cone?Of downland by him farther from the sea.?So still, he seemed a thing woven of earth,?A life rooted and fixed as were the oaks?Locked in the soil, their bases webbed with fleece?Of sheltering ewes, he watched across the valley,?And the hour passed, and the black mill grew and grew,?And then a light came in a far window?Of a grey farm cresting the hill beyond,?And sudden tides beat on him as he saw?A white dress moving in the distant pines.
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Lake Winter, a five hundred acre man,?Was English, bred far back, a part of England,?With South and North and Midland in his blood.?And somewhere Devon, somewhere Suffolk too.?He had been born of love. They had been lovers,?Who made him, and no more, but they were lovers.?She of a proud house, proud to make it prouder?With wit and beauty, and a young brain glowing,?And a swift body fearless and pitiful;?And he a Cotswold yeoman, thrift and power,?And mastery of earth and herds and flocks,?And knowledge of all seasons and their fruits,?And a heart of meditation, all his birthright;?Ten generations deep from Gloucester stone.?And those two met, and loved, and of their love?Came a new purity of blood and limb,?As of a purpose slowly moulding them.?And long they waited, and then one summer noon,?He, coming northward from his Cotswold home,?Found her by Rydal as she had bidden him,?And proudly stride to stride they took the road,?Sure youth by youth, and to Helvellyn's foot?They came, and climbed up to the brighter air,?And into the wind's ardour still went on,?Until upon the mountain top they stood,?And lake by lake was fading in the dusk.?Out of the plains they saw the moon move up?And over them the deeper blue came on,?The faint stars glowing into mastery.?And in that splendour of a summer hill,?Amid the mellow-breathing night, where yet?The poppies of the valley could not come,?There was conceived a boy....
And sorrow came?Upon their love. Before the moon again?Was full upon Helvellyn, the Cotswold lover?With a great elm was blasted in a storm,?And lay, a burnt thing, in a Cotswold grave.?And she went out, took her inheritance,?And lived apart, and the man-child was born.?She called him Lake, for those fading lakes of dusk,?And gave him her own name. And twenty years?She tended him, and died; and from her substance?Lake Winter now for fifteen years had kept?His Sussex acres in fertility.?Such was the man, so