Songs for a Little House | Page 9

and d----d epaulettes--

Say, do _you_

bleed?
This is _your_ game: it was none of our choosing--
We are the pawns
with whom you have played.
Yours is the winning and ours is the
losing,
But, when the penalties have to be paid,
We who are left,
and our womenfolk, too,
Rulers of Europe, will settle with you--

You, and your trade.
_October_, 1914.
TILL TWISTON WENT
Till Twiston went, the war still seemed
A far-off thing: a nightmare
dreamed,
Some bruit or fable half-believed,
Too hideous to be
conceived.
His letter came: the memories throng
Of days that made the
friendship strong--
The oar he won, the ties he wore,
His love of
china, fairy lore,
(And flappers); and his honest eyes;
His stammer,
his absurdities;
His marmalade, his bitter beer,
And all that made
him quaint and dear.
And though we muckle have to do
Yet love must needs come
breaking through,
And now and then the office hum
Dies like a
mist, ... and there will come
An Oxford breakfast scene: the quad

All blue and grey outside--O God--
And there sits Twiston at the
feast
Proclaiming he will be a priest!
I see his eyes, his homely
neb--
Ring, telephones, and cut the web!
And when it's over, will there be
In his grey house above the Dee
A
mug to drain? Will we renew
The dreams of all we hoped to do?

Our Cotswold tramps? And will there still
Be flappers in the surf at
Rhyl?
O how I counted on the hour
When he would see the
Woolworth Tower,
And how we set our hearts upon
The steep grey
walls of Carcassonne!
TO RUDYARD KIPLING

For His Fiftieth Birthday (December 30, 1915)
Lord of our noble English tongue,
Who holdest seizin of our speech,

Whose epic Mowgli first did reach
The valves of all our hearts
when young--
Master of every grace and ire,
Wide as the salt-winged fulmar gulls

That circle England's battle hulls,
Your songs have fanned the
Imperial fire.
By Oak and Ash and Thorns, by all
Old memories of Sussex sod,

To you we pile the altar clod
And ask a new Recessional.
TO A U-BOAT
With Apologies to William Blake
Tiger, tiger of the seas,
King of scarlet butcheries,
What infernal
hand and eye
Planned your dread machinery?
Men of Hamburg, Bremen, Kiel,
Watch the gauge and turn the wheel,

Proud, perhaps, to have defiled
Oceans, to destroy a child.
With your thunderbolt you strike
Cargo, women, all alike--
Stain
with red God's clean green sea,
Call it "naval victory."
U-boat, U-boat, as you grope
With your half-blind periscope,
Lo,
your hateful trail we mark,
Send you to your kin, the shark!
KITCHENER
No man in England slept, the night he died:
The harsh, stern spirit
passed without a pang,
And freed of mortal clogs his message rang.

In every wakeful mind the challenge cried:
_Think not of me: one
servant less or more
Means nothing now: hold fast the greater thing--

Strike hard, love truth, serve England and the King!_

Servant of England, soldier to the core,
What does it matter where his
body fall?
What does it matter where they build the tomb?
Five
million men, from Calais to Khartoum,
These are his wreath and his
memorial.
MARCH 1915
_Pussy willow, pussy willow
Do you bloom in Belgium now?_
Tiny furry little catkins
Where the Meuse runs green and clear,
Do
the children run to pick you
In this springtime of the year?
Do they
stroke you and caress you
Kiss the silky balls of fur,
Take you to
the priest to bless you
And pretend to hear you purr?
Do their small
hot fingers wilt you?
(Sweethearts, you remember how--)
_Pussy willow, pussy willow,
Do you bloom in Belgium now?_
DEAD SHIPS
We are not sudden haters; but by dint
Of many horrors all our hearts
are quick.
We are not ready writers, with the trick
Of rhyming just
to see our words in print.
Nor are we fast forgetters: there remain

Bitter and shameful in our memory
Old murders that made horrible
the sea
And tinged clean water with a red, red stain.
_Titanic_: she
went down for love of speed;
The _Eastland_--curse her!--just for
dirty greed;
But there are ships whose names are yet more rank.
The
years have passed, but still our hearts are sick
To think of the cool
cruelty that sank
The _Lusitania_ and the _Arabic_.
ENGLAND, JULY 1913
To Rupert Brooke
O England, England ... that July
How placidly the days went by!
Two years ago (how long it seems)
In that dear England of my

dreams
I loved and smoked and laughed amain
And rode to
Cambridge in the rain.
A careless godlike life was there!
To spin
the roads with _Shotover_,
To dream while punting on the Cam,
To
lie, and never give a damn
For anything but comradeship
And
books to read and ale to sip,
And shandygaff at every inn
When
_The Gorilla_ rode to Lynn!
O world of wheel and pipe and oar
In
those old days before the War.
O poignant echoes of that time!
I
hear the Oxford towers chime,
The throbbing of those mellow bells

And all the sweet old English smells--
The Deben water, quick with
salt,
The Woodbridge brew-house and the malt;
The Suffolk
villages, serene
With lads at cricket on the green,
And Wytham
strawberries, so ripe,
And _Murray's Mixture_ in my pipe!
In those dear days, in