Poems, 1908-1919

Anthony Crundle of Dorrington Wood
Played on a piccolo. Lord was he,
For seventy years, of sheaves that stood
Under the perry and cider tree;
Anthony Crundle, R.I.P.

And because he prospered with sickle and scythe,
With cattle afield and labouring ewe,
Anthony was uncommonly blithe,
And played of a night to himself and Sue;
Anthony Crundle, eighty-two.

The earth to till, and a tune to play,
And Susan for fifty years and three,
And Dorrington Wood at the end of day ...
May providence do no worse by me;
Anthony Crundle, R.I.P.

MAD TOM TATTERMAN

“Old man, grey man, good man scavenger,
Bearing is it eighty years upon your crumpled back?
What is it you gather in the frosty weather,
Is there any treasure here to carry in your sack?”
. . . . . . . . . .
“I’ve a million acres and a thousand head of cattle,
And a foaming river where the silver salmon leap;
But I’ve left fat valleys to dig in sullen alleys
Just because a twisted star rode by me in my sleep.

“I’ve a brain is dancing to an old forgotten music
Heard when all the world was just a crazy flight of dreams,
And don’t you know I scatter in the dirt along the gutter
Seeds that little ladies nursed by Babylonian streams?

“Mad Tom Tatterman, that is how they call me.
Oh, they know so much, so much, all so neatly dressed;
I’ve a tale to tell you—come and listen, will you?—
One as ragged as the twigs that make a magpie’s nest.

“Ragged, oh, but very wise. You and this and that man,
All of you are making things that none of you would lack,
And so your eyes grow dusty, and so your limbs grow rusty—
But mad Tom Tatterman puts nothing in his sack.

“Nothing in my sack, sirs, but the Sea of Galilee
Was walked for mad Tom Tatterman, and when I go to sleep
They’ll know that I have driven through the acres of broad heaven
Flocks are whiter than the flocks that all your shepherds keep.”

FOR CORIN TO-DAY

Old shepherd in your wattle cote,
I think a thousand years are done
Since first you took your pipe of oat
And piped against the risen sun,
Until his burning lips of gold
Sucked up the drifting scarves of dew
And bade you count your flocks from fold
And set your hurdle stakes anew.

And then as now at noon you ’ld take
The shadow of delightful trees,
And with good hands of labour break
Your barley bread with dairy cheese,
And with some lusty shepherd mate
Would wind a simple argument,
And bear at night beyond your gate
A loaded wallet of content.

O Corin of the grizzled eye,
A thousand years upon your down
You’ve seen the ploughing teams go by
Above the bells of Avon’s town;
And while there’s any wind to blow
Through frozen February nights,
About your lambing pens will go
The glimmer of your lanthorn lights.

THE CARVER IN STONE

He was a man with wide and patient eyes,
Grey, like the drift of twitch-fires blown in June
That, without fearing, searched if any wrong
Might threaten from your heart. Grey eyes he had
Under a brow was drawn because he knew
So many seasons to so many pass
Of upright service, loyal, unabased
Before the world seducing, and so, barren
Of good words praising and thought that mated his.
He carved in stone. Out of his quiet life
He watched as any faithful seaman charged
With tidings of the myriad faring sea,
And thoughts and premonitions through his mind
Sailing as ships from strange and storied lands
His hungry spirit held, till all they were
Found living witness in the chiselled stone.
Slowly out of the dark confusion, spread
By life’s innumerable venturings
Over his brain, he would triumph into the light
Of one clear mood, unblemished of the blind
Legions of errant thought that cried about
His rapt seclusion: as a pearl unsoiled,
Nay, rather washed to lonelier chastity,
In gritty mud. And then would come a bird,
A flower, or the wind moving upon a flower,
A beast at pasture, or a clustered fruit,
A peasant face as were the saints of old,
The leer of custom, or the bow of the moon
Swung in miraculous poise—some stray from the world
Of things created by the eternal mind
In joy articulate. And his perfect mood
Would dwell about the token of God’s mood,
Until in bird or flower or moving wind
Or flock or shepherd or the troops of heaven
It sprang in one fierce moment of desire
To visible form.
Then would his chisel work among the stone,
Persuading it of petal or of limb
Or starry curve, till risen anew there sang
Shape out of chaos, and again the vision
Of one mind single from the world was pressed
Upon the daily custom of the sky
Or field or the body of man.

His people
Had many gods for worship. The tiger-god,
The owl, the dewlapped bull, the running pard,
The camel and the lizard of the slime,
The ram with quivering fleece and fluted horn,
The crested eagle and the doming bat
Were sacred. And the king and his high priests
Decreed a temple, wide on columns huge,
Should top the cornlands to the sky’s far line.
They bade the carvers carve along the walls
Images of their gods, each one to carve
As he desired, his choice to name his god....
And many came; and he among them, glad
Of three leagues’ travel through the singing air
Of dawn among the boughs yet bare of green,
The eager flight of the spring leading his blood
Into swift lofty channels of the air,
Proud as an eagle riding to the sun....
An eagle, clean of pinion—there’s his choice.

Daylong they worked under the growing roof,
One at his leopard, one the staring ram,
And he winning his eagle from the stone,
Until each man had carved one image out,
Arow beyond the portal of the house.
They stood arow, the company of gods,
Camel and bat, lizard and bull and ram,
The pard and owl, dead figures on the wall,
Figures of habit driven on the stone
By chisels governed by no heat of the brain
But drudges of hands that moved by easy rule.
Proudly recorded mood was none, no thought
Plucked from the dark battalions of the mind
And throned in everlasting sight. But one
God of them all was witness of belief
And large adventure dared. His eagle spread
Wide pinions on a cloudless ground of heaven,
Glad with the heart’s high courage of that dawn
Moving upon the ploughlands newly sown,
Dead stone the rest. He looked, and knew it so.

Then came the king with priests and counsellors
And many chosen of the people, wise
With words weary of custom, and eyes askew
That watched their neighbour face for any news
Of the best way of judgment, till, each sure
None would determine with authority,
All spoke in prudent praise. One liked the owl
Because an owl blinked on the beam of his barn.
One, hoarse with crying gospels in the street,
Praised most the ram, because the common folk
Wore breeches made of ram’s wool. One declared
The tiger pleased him best,—the man who carved
The tiger-god was halt out of the womb—
A man to praise, being so pitiful.
And one, whose eyes dwelt in a distant void,
With spell and omen pat upon his lips,
And a purse for any crystal prophet ripe,
A zealot of the mist, gazed at the bull—
A lean ill-shapen bull of meagre lines
That scarce the steel had graved upon the stone—
Saying that here was very mystery
And truth, did men but know. And one there was
Who praised his eagle, but remembering
The lither pinion of the swift, the curve
That liked him better of the mirrored swan.
And they who carved the tiger-god and ram,
The camel and the pard, the owl and bull,
And lizard, listened greedily, and made
Humble denial of their worthiness,
And when the king his royal judgment gave
That all had fashioned well, and bade that each
Re-shape his chosen god along the walls
Till all the temple boasted of their skill,
They bowed themselves in token that as this
Never had carvers been so fortunate.

Only the man with wide and patient eyes
Made no denial, neither bowed his head.
Already while they spoke his thought had gone
Far from his eagle, leaving it for a sign
Loyally wrought of one deep breath of life,
And played about the image of a toad
That crawled among his ivy leaves. A queer
Puff-bellied toad, with eyes that always stared
Sidelong at heaven and saw no heaven there,
Weak-hammed, and with a throttle somehow twisted
Beyond full wholesome draughts of air, and skin
Of wrinkled lips, the only zest or will
The little flashing tongue searching the leaves.
And king and priest, chosen and counsellor,
Babbling out of their thin and jealous brains,
Seemed strangely one; a queer enormous toad
Panting under giant leaves of dark,
Sunk in the loins, peering into the day.
Their judgment wry he counted not for wrong
More than the fabled poison of the toad
Striking at simple wits; how should their thought
Or word in praise or blame come near the peace
That shone in seasonable hours above
The patience of his spirit’s husbandry?
They foolish and not seeing, how should he
Spend anger there or fear—great ceremonies
Equal for none save great antagonists?
The grave indifference of his heart before them
Was moved by laughter innocent of hate,
Chastising clean of spite, that moulded them
Into the antic likeness of his toad
Bidding for laughter underneath the leaves.

He bowed not, nor disputed, but he saw
Those ill-created joyless gods, and loathed,
And saw them creeping, creeping round the walls,
Death breeding death, wile witnessing to wile,
And sickened at the dull iniquity
Should be rewarded, and for ever breathe
Contagion on the folk gathered in prayer.
His truth should not be doomed to march among
This falsehood to the ages. He was called,
And he must labour there; if so the king
Would grant it, where the pillars bore the roof
A galleried way of meditation nursed
Secluded time, with wall of ready stone
In panels for the carver set between
The windows—there his chisel should be set,—
It was his plea. And the king spoke of him,
Scorning, as one lack-fettle, among all these
Eager to take the riches of renown;
One fearful of the light or knowing nothing
Of light’s dimension, a witling who would throw
Honour aside and praise spoken aloud
All men of heart should covet. Let him go
Grubbing out of the sight of these who knew
The worth of substance; there was his proper trade.

A squat and curious toad indeed.... The eyes,
Patient and grey, were dumb as were the lips,
That, fixed and governed, hoarded from them all
The larger laughter lifting in his heart.
Straightway about his gallery he moved,
Measured the windows and the virgin stone,
Till all was weighed and patterned in his brain.
Then first where most the shadow struck the wall,
Under the sills, and centre of the base,
From floor to sill out of the stone was wooed
Memorial folly, as from the chisel leapt
His chastening laughter searching priest and king—
A huge and wrinkled toad, with legs asplay,
And belly loaded, leering with great eyes
Busily fixed upon the void.
All days
His chisel was the first to ring across
The temple’s quiet; and at fall of dusk
Passing among the carvers homeward, they
Would speak of him as mad, or weak against
The challenge of the world, and let him go
Lonely, as was his will, under the night
Of stars or cloud or summer’s folded sun,
Through crop and wood and pastureland to sleep.
None took the narrow stair as wondering
How did his chisel prosper in the stone,
Unvisited his labour and forgot.
And times when he would lean out of his height
And watch the gods growing along the walls,
The row of carvers in their linen coats
Took in his vision a virtue that alone
Carving they had not nor the thing they carved.
Knowing the health that flowed about his close
Imagining, the daily quiet won
From process of his clean and supple craft,
Those carvers there, far on the floor below,
Would haply be transfigured in his thought
Into a gallant company of men
Glad of the strict and loyal reckoning
That proved in the just presence of the brain
Each chisel-stroke. How surely would he prosper
In pleasant talk at easy hours with men
So fashioned if it might be—and his eyes
Would pass again to those dead gods that grew
In spreading evil round the temple walls;
And, one dead pressure made, the carvers moved
Along the wall to mould and mould again
The self-same god, their chisels on the stone
Tapping in dull precision as before,
And he would turn, back to his lonely truth.

He carved apace. And first his people’s gods,
About the toad, out of their sterile time,
Under his hand thrilled and were recreate.
The bull, the pard, the camel and the ram,
Tiger and owl and bat—all were the signs
Visibly made body on the stone
Of sightless thought adventuring the host
That is mere spirit; these the bloom achieved
By secret labour in the flowing wood
Of rain and air and wind and continent sun....
His tiger, lithe, immobile in the stone,
A swift destruction for a moment leashed,
Sprang crying from the jealous stealth of men
Opposed in cunning watch, with engines hid
Of torment and calamitous desire.
His leopard, swift on lean and paltry limbs,
Was fear in flight before accusing faith.
His bull, with eyes that often in the dusk
Would lift from the sweet meadow grass to watch
Him homeward passing, bore on massy beam
The burden of the patient of the earth.
His camel bore the burden of the damned,
Being gaunt, with eyes aslant along the nose.
He had a friend, who hammered bronze and iron
And cupped the moonstone on a silver ring,
One constant like himself, would come at night
Or bid him as a guest, when they would make
Their poets touch a starrier height, or search
Together with unparsimonious mind
The crowded harbours of mortality.
And there were jests, wholesome as harvest ale
Of homely habit, bred of hearts that dared
Judgment of laughter under the eternal eye:
This frolic wisdom was his carven owl.
His ram was lordship on the lonely hills,
Alert and fleet, content only to know
The wind mightily pouring on his fleece,
With yesterday and all unrisen suns
Poorer than disinherited ghosts. His bat
Was ancient envy made a mockery,
Cowering below the newer eagle carved
Above the arches with wide pinion spread,
His faith’s dominion of that happy dawn.

And so he wrought the gods upon the wall,
Living and crying out of his desire,
Out of his patient incorruptible thought,
Wrought them in joy was wages to his faith.
And other than the gods he made. The stalks
Of bluebells heavy with the news of spring,
The vine loaded with plenty of the year,
And swallows, merely tenderness of thought
Bidding the stone to small and fragile flight;
Leaves, the thin relics of autumnal boughs,
Or massed in June....
All from their native pressure bloomed and sprang
Under his shaping hand into a proud
And governed image of the central man,—
Their moulding, charts of all his travelling.
And all were deftly ordered, duly set
Between the windows, underneath the sills,
And roofward, as a motion rightly planned,
Till on the wall, out of the sullen stone,
A glory blazed, his vision manifest,
His wonder captive. And he was content.

And when the builders and the carvers knew
Their labour done, and high the temple stood
Over the cornlands, king and counsellor
And priest and chosen of the people came
Among a ceremonial multitude
To dedication. And, below the thrones
Where king and archpriest ruled above the throng,
Highest among the ranked artificers
The carvers stood. And when, the temple vowed
To holy use, tribute and choral praise
Given as was ordained, the king looked down
Upon the gathered folk, and bade them see
The comely gods fashioned about the walls,
And keep in honour men whose precious skill
Could so adorn the sessions of their worship,
Gravely the carvers bowed them to the ground.
Only the man with wide and patient eyes
Stood not among them; nor did any come
To count his labour, where he watched alone
Above the coloured throng. He heard, and looked
Again upon his work, and knew it good,
Smiled on his toad, passed down the stair unseen
And sang across the teeming meadows home.

ELIZABETH ANN

This is the tale of Elizabeth Ann,
Who went away with her fancy man.

Ann was a girl who hadn’t a gown
As fine as the ladies who walk the town.

All day long from seven to six
Ann was polishing candlesticks,

For Bishops and crapulous Millionaires
To buy for their altars or bed-chambers.

And youth in a year and a year will pass,
But there’s never an end of polishing brass.

All day long from seven to six—
Seventy thousand candlesticks.

So frail and lewd Elizabeth Ann
Went away with her fancy man.

You Bishops and crapulous Millionaires,
Give her your charity, give her your prayers.

THE COTSWOLD FARMERS

Sometimes the ghosts forgotten go
Along the hill-top way,
And with long scythes of silver mow
Meadows of moonlit hay,
Until the cocks of Cotswold crow
The coming of the day.

There’s Tony Turkletob who died
When he could drink no more,
And Uncle Heritage, the pride
Of eighteen-twenty-four,
And Ebenezer Barleytide,
And others half a score.

They fold in phantom pens, and plough
Furrows without a share,
And one will milk a faery cow,
And one will stare and stare,
And whistle ghostly tunes that now
Are not sung anywhere.

The moon goes down on Oakridge lea,
The other world’s astir,
The Cotswold farmers silently
Go back to sepulchre,
The sleeping watchdogs wake, and see
No ghostly harvester.

A MAN’S DAUGHTER

There is an old woman who looks each night
Out of the wood.
She has one tooth, that isn’t too white.
She isn’t too good.

She came from the north looking for me,
About my jewel.
Her son, she says, is tall as can be;
But, men say, cruel.

My girl went northward, holiday making,
And a queer man spoke
At the woodside once when night was breaking,
And her heart broke.

For ever since she has pined and pined,
A sorry maid;
Her fingers are slack as the wool they wind,
Or her girdle-braid.

So now shall I send her north to wed,
Who here may know
Only the little house of the dead
To ease her woe?

Or keep her for fear of that old woman,
As a bird quick-eyed,
And her tall son who is hardly human,
At the woodside?

She is my babe and my daughter dear,
How well, how well.
Her grief to me is a fourfold fear,
Tongue cannot tell.

And yet I know that far in that wood
Are crumbling bones,
And a mumble mumble of nothing that’s good,
In heathen tones.

And I know that frail ghosts flutter and sigh
In brambles there,
And never a bird or beast to cry—
Beware, beware,—

While threading the silent thickets go
Mother and son,
Where scrupulous berries never grow,
And airs are none.

And her deep eyes peer at eventide
Out of the wood,
And her tall son waits by the dark woodside
For maidenhood.

And the little eyes peer, and peer, and peer;
And a word is said.
And some house knows, for many a year,
But years of dread.

THE LIFE OF JOHN HERITAGE

Born in the Cotswolds in eighteen-forty or so,
Bred on a hill-top that seemed the most of the world
Until he travelled the valleys, and found what a wonder
Of leagues from Gloucester lay to Stroud or Ciceter,
John Heritage was a tiler. He split the stone,
After the frosts, and learnt the laying of tiles,
And was famous about the shire. And he was friendly
With Cotswold nature, hearing the hidden rooks
In Golden Vale, and the thin bleat of goats,
And the rattling harness of Trilly’s teams at plough,
And Richard Parker’s scythe for many years,
As he went upon his tiling; and the great landmarks,
As loops of the Severn seen from Bisley Hill,
Were his familiars, something of his religion.

And he prospered, as men do. His little wage
Yet left a little over his wedded needs,
And here a cottage he bought, and there another,
About the Cotswolds, built of the royallest stone
That’s quarried in England, until he could think of age
With an easy mind; and an acre of land was his
Where at hay-harvest he worked a little from tiling,
Making his rick maturely or damning the wind
That scattered the swathes beyond his fork’s controlling.
And he trotted ajog to the town on market Thursdays,
Driving a stout succession of good black geldings,
That cropped his acre some twenty years apiece.
And he was an honest neighbour; and so he grew old,
And five strong sons, grizzled and middle-aged,
Carried him down the hill, and on a stone
The mason cut—“John Heritage, who died,
Fearing the Lord, at the age of seventy-six.”

And I know that some of us shatter our hearts on earth,
With mightier aims than ever John Heritage knew,
And think such things as never the tiler thought,
Because of our pride and our eagerness of mind ...
But a life complete is a great nobility,
And there’s a wisdom biding in Cotswold stone,
While we in our furious intellectual travel
Fall in with strange foot-fellows on the road.

THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON

One of those old men fearing no man,
Two hundred broods his eaves have known
Since they cut on a Sapperton churchyard stone—
“Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton, Yeoman.”

At dusk you can hear the yeomen calling
The cattle still to Sapperton stalls,
And still the stroke of the woodman falls
As Thomas of Tarlton heard it falling.

I walked these meadows in seventeen-hundred,
Seed of his loins, a dream that stirred
Beyond the shape of a yeoman’s word,
So faint that but unawares he wondered.

And now, from the weeds of his tomb uncomely,
I travel again the tracks he made,
And walks at my side the yeoman shade
Of Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton dumbly.

MRS. WILLOW

Mrs. Thomas Willow seems very glum.
Her life, perhaps, is very lonely and hum-drum,
Digging up potatoes, cleaning out the weeds,
Doing the little for a lone woman’s needs.
Who was her husband? How long ago?
What does she wonder? What does she know?
Why does she listen over the wall,
Morning and noon-time and twilight and all,
As though unforgotten were some footfall?

“Good morning, Mrs. Willow.” “Good morning, sir,”
Is all the conversation I can get from her.
And her path-stones are white as lilies of the wood,
And she washes this and that till she must be very good.
She sends no letters, and no one calls,
And she doesn’t go whispering beyond her walls;
Nothing in her garden is secret, I think—
That’s all sun-bright with foxglove and pink,
And she doesn’t hover around old cupboards and shelves
As old people do who have buried themselves;
She has no late lamps, and she digs all day
And polishes and plants in a common way,
But glum she is, and she listens now and then
For a footfall, a footfall, a footfall again,
And whether it’s hope, or whether it’s dread,
Or a poor old fancy in her head,
I shall never be told; it will never be said.

ROUNDELS OF THE YEAR

I caught the changes of the year
In soft and fragile nets of song,
For you to whom my days belong.

For you to whom each day is dear
Of all the high processional throng,
I caught the changes of the year
In soft and fragile nets of song.

And here some sound of beauty, here
Some note of ancient, ageless wrong
Reshaping as my lips were strong,
I caught the changes of the year
In soft and fragile nets of song,
For you to whom my days belong.

I

The spring is passing through the land
In web of ghostly green arrayed,
And blood is warm in man and maid.

The arches of desire have spanned
The barren ways, the debt is paid,
The spring is passing through the land
In web of ghostly green arrayed.

Sweet scents along the winds are fanned
From shadowy wood and secret glade
Where beauty blossoms unafraid,
The spring is passing through the land
In web of ghostly green arrayed
And blood is warm in man and maid.

II

Proud insolent June with burning lips
Holds riot now from sea to sea,
And shod in sovran gold is she.

To the full flood of reaping slips
The seeding-tide by God’s decree,
Proud insolent June with burning lips
Holds riot now from sea to sea.

And all the goodly fellowships
Of bird and bloom and beast and tree
Are gallant of her company—
Proud insolent June with burning lips
Holds riot now from sea to sea,
And shod in sovran gold is she.

III

The loaded sheaves are harvested,
The sheep are in the stubbled fold,
The tale of labour crowned is told.

The wizard of the year has spread
A glory over wood and wold,
The loaded sheaves are harvested,
The sheep are in the stubbled fold.

The yellow apples and the red
Bear down the boughs, the hazels hold
No more their fruit in cups of gold.
The loaded sheaves are harvested,
The sheep are in the stubbled fold,
The tale of labour crowned is told.

IV

The year is lapsing into time
Along a deep and songless gloom,
Unchapleted of leaf or bloom.

And mute between the dusk and prime
The diligent earth resets her loom,—
The year is lapsing into time
Along a deep and songless gloom.

While o’er the snows the seasons chime
Their golden hopes to reillume
The brief eclipse about the tomb,
The year is lapsing into time
Along a deep and songless gloom
Unchapleted of leaf or bloom.

V

Not wise as cunning scholars are,
With curious words upon your tongue,
Are you for whom my song is sung.

But you are wise of cloud and star,
And winds and boughs all blossom-hung,
Not wise as cunning scholars are,
With curious words upon your tongue.

Surely, clear child of earth, some far
Dim Dryad-haunted groves among,
Your lips to lips of knowledge clung—
Not wise as cunning scholars are,
With curious words upon your tongue,
Are you for whom my song is sung.

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