SONG
The heaven is full of the moon's light,
The earth fades below.
In this vast empty world of night
I only know
Pale-shining trees and moonlit fields,
The bird's tune,
And my night-flowering heart that yields
Her fragrance to the moon.
OLD SONG
My window is darkness,
The sighs of the night die in silence;
The lamp on my table
Burns gravely, the walls are withdrawn;
And beneath, in your darkness,
You are sleeping and dreaming forgetful,
But I think of you smiling,
For I'm wakeful and now it is only an hour to the dawn.
When the first throb of light comes
I shall rise and go out to the garden,
And walk the lawn's verdure
Before the wet gossamer goes;
And when you come down, sweet,
All singing and light in the morning,
Delight will break ambush
With your garden's most fragrant and softest and reddest red rose.
EPITAPH IN OLD MODE
The leaves fall gently on the grass,
And all the willow trees, and poplar trees, and elder trees
That bend above her where she sleeps,
O all the willow trees, the willow trees
Breathe sighs upon her tomb.
O pause and pity, as you pass,
She loved so tenderly, so quietly, so hopelessly;
And sometimes comes one here and weeps:
She loved so tenderly, so tenderly,
And never told them whom.
THE MOON
(To Maurice Baring)
I waited for a miracle to-night.
Dim was the earth beneath a star-swept sky,
Her boughs were vague in that phantasmal light,
Her current rippled past invisibly.
No stir was in the dark and windless meadows,
Only the water, whispering in the shadows,
That darkened nature lived did still proclaim.
An hour I stood in that defeat of sight,
Waiting, and then a sudden silver flame
Burned in the eastern heaven, and she came.
The Moon, the Summer Moon, surveys the vale:
The boughs against the dawning sky grow black,
The shades that hid those whispering waters fail,
And now there falls a gleaming, lengthening track
That lies across the wide and tranquil river,
Burnished and flat, not shaken by a quiver.
She rises still: the liquid light she spills
Makes everywhere quick sparkles, patches pale;
And, as she goes, I know her glory fills
The air of all our English lakes and hills.
High over all this England will she ride;
She silvers all the roofs of folded towns,
Her brilliance tips the edge of every tide,
Her shadows make soft caverns in the downs;
Even now, beyond my tree serenely sailing,
She clothes far forests with a gauzy veiling,
And even as here, where now I stare and dream,
Standing my own transfigured banks beside,
On many a quiet wandering English stream
There lies the unshifting image of her beam.
Yes, calm she mounts, and watching her, I know
By many a river other eyes than mine
Turn up to her; and, as of old, they show
Their inward hearts all naked to her shine:
Maids, solitaries, sick and happy lovers,
To whom her dear returning orb discovers
For each the gift he waits for: soft release,
The unsealing of imagination's flow,
Her own sweet pain, or other pain's surcease,
The friendly benediction of her peace.
I too am held: as kind she is, as fair,
As when long since a younger heart drank deep
From that sweet solace, while, through summer air,
Her lucid fingers hushed the world to sleep.
O as I stand this latest moon beholding,
Her forms unresting memory is moulding;
Beneath my enchanted eyelids there arise
Visions again of many moons that were,
Fair, fleeting moons gathered from faded skies,
Greeted and lost by these corporeal eyes.
Unnumbered are those moons of memory
Stored in the backward chambers of my brain:
The moons that make bright pathways on the sea,
The golden harvest moon above the grain;
The moon that all a sleeping village blanches,
The woodland moon that roves beyond the branches,
Filtering through the meshes of the green
To breast of bird and mossy trunk of tree;
Moons dimly guessed-at through a cloudy screen,
The bronze diffusion shed by moons unseen;
Moons that a thin prismatic halo rings,
Looking a hurrying fleecy heaven through;
The fairy moons of luminous evenings,
Phantoms of palest pink in palest blue;
Large orange moons on earth's grey verge suspended,
When trees still slumber from the heat that's ended,
Erect and heavy, and all waters lie
Oily, and there is not a bird that sings.
All these I know, I have seen them born and die,
And many another moon in many a sky.
There was a moon that shone above the ground
Where on a grassy forest height I stood;
Bright was that open place, and all around
The dense discovered tree-tops of the wood,
Line after line, in misty radiance glistened,
Failing away. I watched the scene and listened;
Then, awed and hushed, I turned and saw alone,
Protruding from the middle of the mound,
Fringed with close grass, a moonlit mottled stone,
Rough-carven, of antiquity unknown.
A night there was, a crowd, a narrow street,
Torches that reddened faces drunk with dreams,
An orator exultant in defeat,
Banners, fierce songs, rough cheering, women's screams;
My heart was one with those rebellious people,
Until along a chapel's pointing steeple
My eyes unwitting wandered to a thin
Crescent, and clouds a swift and ragged sheet;
And in my spirit's life all human din
Died, and eternal Silence stood within.
And once, on a far evening, warm and still,
I leant upon a cool stone parapet.
The quays and houses underneath the hill
Twinkled with lights; I heard the sea's faint fret;
And then above the eastern cape's long billow
Silent there welled a trembling line of yellow,
A shred that quickened, then a half that grew
To a full moon, that moved with even will.
The night was long before her, well she knew,
And, as she slowly rose into the blue,
She slowly paled, and, glittering far away,
Flung on the silken waters like a spear,
Her crispèd silver shaft of moonlight lay.
The lighthouse lamp upon the little pier
Burned wanly by that radiance clear and certain.
Waiting I knew not what uplifted curtain,
I watched the unmoving world beneath my feet
Till, without warning, miles across the bay,
Into that silver out of shadows beat,
Dead black, the whole mysterious fishing-fleet.
These moons I have seen, but these and every one
Came each so new it seemed to be the first,
New as the buds that open to the sun,
New as the songs that to the morning burst.
The roses die, each day fresh flowers are springing,
Last year it was another blackbird singing,
Thou only, marvellous blossom, whose pale flower
Beyond mankind's conjecture hath begun,
Retain'st for ever an unwithering power
That stales the loveliest stranger of an hour.
But O, had all my infant nights been dark,
Or almost dark, lit by the stars alone,
Had never a teller of stories bid me hark
The promised splendours of that moon unknown:
How perfect then had been the revelation
When first her gradual gold illumination
Broke on a night upon the conscious child:
My heart had stopped with beauty, seeing her arc
Climbing the heavens, so far and undefiled,
So large with light, so even and so mild.
Most wondrous Light, who bring'st this lovelier earth,
This world of shadows cool with silver fires,
Drawing us higher than our human birth:
To whom our strange twin-natured kind suspires
Its saddest thoughts, and tenderest and most fragrant
Tears, and desires unnameable and vagrant:
Watcher, who leanest quietly from above,
Saying all mortal wars are nothing worth:
Friend of the sorrowful, tranquil as the dove,
Muse of all poets, lamp of all who love.
Alone and sad, alone and kind and sweet,
But always peaceful and removed and proud,
Whether with loveliness revealed complete,
Or veiling from our vision in a cloud:
Our souls' eternal listener, could we wonder
That men who made of sun and storm and thunder
The awful forms of strong divinity,
Heard in each storm the noise of travelling feet,
Should, gazing at thy face with hearts made free,
Have felt a pure, immortal Power in thee?
Selene, Cynthia, and Artemis,
The swift proud goddess with the silver bow,
Diana, she whose downward-bending kiss
One only knew, though all men yearned to know;
The shepherd on a hill his flock was keeping,
The night's pale huntress came and found him sleeping:
She stooped: he woke, and saw her hair that shone,
And lay, drawn up to cool and timeless bliss
Lapt in her radiant arms, Endymion,
All the still night, until the night was gone.
By many names they knew thee, but thy shape
Was woman's always, transient and white:
A flashing huntress leaving hinds agape,
A sweet descent of beauty in the night:
Yet some, more fierce and more distraught their dreaming,
Brooded, until they fashioned from thy seeming,
A lithe and luring queen with fatal breath,
A witch the man who saw might not escape,
A snare that gleamed in shadowy groves of death,
The tall tiaraed Syrian Ashtoreth.
And even to-night in African forests some
There are, possessed by such a blasphemy;
Through branching beams thy fevered votaries come
To appease their brains' distorted mask of thee.
There in the glades the drums pulsate and languish,
Men leap and wail to dim the victim's anguish
In the sad frenzy of the sacrifice.
They are slaves to thee, made mad because thou art dumb,
And dumb thou lookest on them from the skies,
Above their fires and dances, blood and cries.
So these; but otherwhere, at such an hour,
In all the continents, by all the seas,
Men, naming not the goddess, feel thy power,
Adoring her with gentler rites than these:
The thoughts of myriad hearts to thee uplifted
Rise like a smoke above thine altars drifted,
Perpetual incense poured before thy throne
By those whom thou hast given thy secret dower,
Those in whose kindred eyes thy light is known,
Whom thou hast signed and sealed for thine own.
For thee they watch by Asian peaks remote,
Where thy snows gleam above the pointing pines;
Entranced on templed lakes is many a boat
For thee, where clear thy dropt reflection shines;
On the great seas where nothing else is tender,
Rising and setting, unto thee surrender
All lonely hearts in lonely wandering ships;
And, where their warm far-scattered islands float,
Through forests many a flower-crowned maiden slips
To gaze on thee, with parted burning lips.
O thus they do, and thus they did of old;
Our hearts were never secret in thy sight;
Ere our first records were thy shrine was cold
That speechless eyes went seeking in the night;
Beyond the compass of our dim traditions
Thou knewest of men the pitiful ambitions,
Their loves and their despair; within thy ken
All our poor history has been unrolled;
Thou hast seen all races born and die again,
The climbing and the crumbling towers of men.
Black were the hollows of that Emperor's eyes
Who paced with backward arms beyond his tents,
Lone in the night, and felt above him rise
The ancient conqueror's sloping, smooth, immense,
Moon-pointing Pyramid's enduring courses,
Heard not his sentries, nor his stamping horses,
But thought of Egypt dead upon that air,
Fighting with his moon-coloured memories
Of vanished kings who builded, and the bare
Sands in the moon before those builders were.
Restless, he knew that moon who watched him muse,
Had seen a restless Cæsar brood on fame
Amid the Pharaohs' broken avenues.
And, circling round that fixed monition, came
Woven by moonlight, random, transitory,
Fragments of all the dim receding story:
The moonlit water dripping from the oars
Of triremes in the bay of Syracuse;
The opposing bivouacs upon the shores,
That knew dead Hector's and Achilles' wars.
He saw fall'n Carthage, Alexander's grave,
The tomb of Moses in the wilderness,
The moonlight on the Atlantean wave
That covered all a multitude's distress:
Cities and hosts and emperors departed
Under the steady moon. And sullen-hearted
He turned away, and, in a little, died,
Even as he who hunted from his cave
And struck his foe, and stripped the shaggy hide
Under the moon, and was not satisfied.
For in the prime, thy influence was felt;
When eyes first saw, thy beauty was as this;
Thy quiet look bade hope, fear, passion melt
Before men dreamed of empire. The abyss
Of thought yawned through their jungle then, as ever
Dark past, dark future, menaced their endeavour:
Yet, on thy nights, stood some by hill and sea
Naked; and blind impulsive spirits knelt,
Not questioning why they knelt, feeling in thee
Thought's strangest, sweetest, saddest mystery.
Still Moon, bright Moon, compassionate Moon above,
Thou shinedst there ere any life began,
When of his pain or of his powerless love
Thou heardest not from heart of any man;
Though long the earth had shaken off the vapour
Left by the vanished gleams of fire, the shaper,
Old, old, her stony wrinkled face did grow
Whilst only her blind elements did move;
Dumb, bare, and prayerless thou saw'st her go,
And afterwards again shalt see her so.
A time there was when Life had never been,
A time will be, it will have passed away;
Still wilt thou shine, still tender and serene,
When Life which in thy sister's yesterday
Had never flowered, will have drooped and faded;
Passed with the clouds that once her bosom shaded.
She will be barren then as not before,
Bared of her snows and all her garments green;
No darkling sea by any earthly shore
Will take thy rays: thy kin will be no more.
Pale satellite, old mistress of our fires,
Who hast seen so much and been so much to men,
Symbol and goal of all our wild desires,
Not any voice will cry upon thee then;
Dreamer and dream, they will have all gone over,
The sick of heart, the singer and the lover,
An end there will have been to all their lust,
Their sorrow, and the sighing of their lyres;
O all this Life that stained Earth's patient crust,
Time's dying breath will have blown away like dust.
Gone from thine eye that brief confusèd stir,
The rumours and the marching and the strife;
Earth will be still, and all the face of her
Swept of the last remains of moving life;
The last of all men's monuments that defied them,
Like those his valiant gestures that denied them,
Into the waiting elements will fade,
And thou wilt see thy fellow traveller,
A forlorn round of rocky contours made,
A glimmering disk of empty light and shade,
Ah, depth too deep for thought therein to cast;
The old, the cold companions, you will go,
Obeying still some long-forgotten past,
And all our pitiful history none will know;
Still shining, Moon, still peaceful, wilt thou wander,
But on that greater ball no heart will ponder
The thought that rose and nightingale are gone,
And all sweet things but thou; and only vast
Ridges of rock remain, and stars and sun;
O Moon, thou wilt be lovely alone for none.
And so, pale wanderer, so thou leavest me,
Passing beyond imagination's range,
Away into the void where waits for thee
Thy inconceivable destiny of change;
And after all the memories I have striven
To paint, this picture that thyself hast given
Lives, and I watch, to all those others blind,
Thy form, gliding into eternity,
Fading, an unconjectured fate to find,
The last, most wonderful image of the mind.
THE HAPPY NIGHT
I have loved to-night; from love's last bordering steep
I have fallen at last with joy and forgotten the shore;
I have known my love to-night as never before,
I have flung myself in the deep, and drawn from the deep,
And kissed her lightly, and left my beloved to sleep.
And now I sit in the night and my heart is still:
Strong and secure; there is nothing that's left to will,
There is nothing to win but only a thing to keep.
And I look to-night, completed and not afraid,
Into the windy dark where shines no light;
And care not at all though the darkness never should fade,
Nor fear that death should suddenly come to-night.
Knowing my last would be surely my bravest breath,
I am happy to-night: I have laughed to-night at death.
CONSTANTINOPLE
"I suddenly realise that the ambition of my life has been—since I was two—to go on a military expedition against Constantinople."—Letter from Rupert Brooke. (Died at Scyros, April 23rd, 1915.)
JUSTINIAN.
Does the church stand I raised
Against the unchristened East?
Still do my ancient altars bear
The sacrificial feast?
My jewels are they bright,
My marbles and my paint,
Wherewith I glorified the Lord
And many a martyred Saint?
And does my dome still float
Above the Golden Horn?
And do my priests on Christmas Day
Still sing that Christ was born?
EUROPE.
Though dust your house, Justinian,
Still stands your lordliest shrine,
But the dark men who walk therein,
Know not of bread nor wine.
They fell long since upon your stones,
And made your colours dim,
Their priests who pray on Christmas Day
They sing no Christmas hymn.
But a voice at evening goes
From every climbing tower,
Crying a word you never heard,
A name of desert power.
CONSTANTINE PALAEOLOGUS.
For seven hundred years
We gripped a weakening blade,
Keeping the gateway of the West
With none to give us aid.
Till at the last they broke
What Constantine had built,
And by the shattered wall the blood
Of Constantine was spilt.
Do men remember still
The manner of my death,
How after all those failing years
I at the last kept faith?
EUROPE.
They know it for a bygone thing
True but indifferent,
For many a fight has come to pass
Since to the wall you went.
Westward and northward, Emperor,
Poured on that bloody brood,
Till those must turn to save themselves
Who had known not gratitude.
One fought them on the Middle Sea,
One at Vienna's gate,
And then the kings of Christendom
Watched the red tide abate.
Till in the end Byzantium
Heard a returning war;
But still a Mehmet holds your tomb...
Keep silence ... ask no more.
ELEGY
I vaguely wondered what you were about,
But never wrote when you had gone away;
Assumed you better, quenched the uneasy doubt
You might need faces, or have things to say.
Did I think of you last evening? Dead you lay.
O bitter words of conscience
I hold the simple message,
And fierce with grief the awakened heart cries out:
"It shall not be to-day;
It is still yesterday; there is time yet!"
Sorrow would strive backward to wrench the sun,
But the sun moves. Our onward course is set,
The wake streams out, the engine pulses run
Droning, a lonelier voyage is begun.
It is all too late for turning,
You are past all mortal signal,
There will be time for nothing but regret
And the memory of things done!
The quiet voice that always counselled best,
The mind that so ironically played
Yet for mere gentleness forbore the jest.
The proud and tender heart that sat in shade
Nor once solicited another's aid,
Yet was so grateful always
For trifles lightly given,
The silences, the melancholy guessed
Sometimes, when your eyes strayed.
But always when you turned, you talked the more.
Through all our literature your way you took
With modest ease; yet would you soonest pore,
Smiling, with most affection in your look,
On the ripe ancient and the curious nook.
Sage travellers, learned printers,
Divines and buried poets,
You knew them all, but never half your lore
Was drawn from any book.
Stories and jests from field and town and port,
And odd neglected scraps of history
From everywhere, for you were of the sort,
Cool and refined, who like rough company:
Carter and barmaid, hawker and bargee,
Wise pensioners and boxers
With whom you drank, and listened
To legends of old revelry and sport
And customs of the sea.
I hear you: yet more clear than all one note,
One sudden hail I still remember best,
That came on sunny days from one afloat
And drew me to the pane in certain quest
Of a long brown face, bare arms and flimsy vest,
In fragments through the branches,
Above the green reflections:
Paused by the willows in your varnished boat
You, with your oars at rest.
Did that come back to you when you were dying?
I think it did: you had much leisure there,
And, with the things we knew, came quietly flying
Memories of things you had seen we knew not where.
You watched again with meditative stare
Places where you had wandered,
Golden and calm in distance:
Voices from all your altering past came sighing
On the soft Hampshire air.
For there you sat a hundred miles away,
A rug upon your knees, your hands gone frail,
And daily bade your farewell to the day,
A music blent of trees and clouds asail
And figures in some old neglected tale:
And watched the sunset gathering,
And heard the birdsong fading,
And went within when the last sleepy lay
Passed to a farther vale.
Never complaining, and stepped up to bed
More and more slow, a tall and sunburnt man
Grown bony and bearded, knowing you would be dead
Before the summer, glad your life began
Even thus to end, after so short a span,
And mused a space serenely,
Then fell to easy slumber,
At peace, content. For never again your head
Need make another plan.
Most generous, most gentle, most discreet,
Who left us ignorant to spare us pain:
We went our ways with too forgetful feet
And missed the chance that would not come again,
Leaving, with thoughts on pleasure bent, or gain,
Fidelity unattested
And services unrendered:
The ears are closed, the heart has ceased to beat,
And now all proof is vain.
Too late for other gifts, I give you this,
Who took from you so much, so carelessly,
On your far brows a first and phantom kiss,
On your far grave a careful elegy.
For one who loved all life and poetry,
Sorrow in music bleeding,
And friendship's last confession.
But even as I speak that inner kiss
Softly accuses me,
Saying: Those brows are senseless, deaf that tomb,
This is the callous, cold resort of art.
"I give you this." What do I give? to whom?
Words to the air, and balm to my own heart,
To its old luxurious and commanded smart.
An end to all this tuning,
This cynical masquerading;
What comfort now in that far final gloom
Can any song impart?
O yet I see you dawning from some heaven,
Who would not suffer self-reproach to live
In one to whom your friendship once was given.
I catch a vision, faint and fugitive,
Of a dark face with eyes contemplative,
Deep eyes that smile in silence,
And parted lips that whisper,
"Say nothing more, old friend, of being forgiven,
There is nothing to forgive."
WARS AND RUMOURS, 1920
Blood, hatred, appetite and apathy,
The sodden many and the struggling strong,
Who care not now though for another wrong
Another myriad innocents should die.
At candid savagery or oily lie
We laugh, or, turning, join the noisy throng
Which buries the dead with gluttony and song.
Suppose this very evening from on high
Broke on the world that unexampled flame
The choir-thronged sky, and Thou, descending, Lord;
What agony of horror, fear, and shame,
For those who knew and wearied of Thy word,
I dare not even think, who am confest
Idle, malignant, lustful as the rest.
TO A MUSICIAN
Musician, with the bent and brooding face,
White brow and thunderous eyes: you are not playing
Merely the music that dead hand did trace.
Musician, with the lifted resolute face,
And scornful smile about your closed mouth straying,
And hand that moves with swift or fluttering grace,
It is not that man's music you are playing.
The grave and merry tunes he made you are playing,
Each march and dirge and dance he made endures,
But changed and mastered, and these things you're saying,
These joys and sorrows are not his but yours.
You take those notes of his: you seize and fling
His music as a dancer flings her veil,
Toss it and twist it, mould it, make it sing,
Whisper, shout savagely, lament and wail,
Rush like a hurricane, pause and faint and fail:
And as I watch, my body and soul are bound
Helpless, immovable, in thongs of sound.
Lonely and strange musician, standing there,
Your bent ear listening to your own soul speaking,
I hear vibrating on the smitten air
The crying of your suffering and your seeking.
Agonised! raptured! frustrate! you are haunted,
Pursued, beset, beleaguered, filled, possessed
By all you are, all things you have lost and wanted,
Things clear, too clear, things only to be guessed.
I do not know what earlier scenes you knew,
What sweet reproachful memories you hold
Of broken dreams you had before you grew
So conscious and so lonely and so old.
I do not know what women's words have taught
Your heart, and only dimly know by name,
The many wandering cities where you have sought
Splendour, and found the hollowness of fame,
Or where your sad and gentle reveries pass
To family and home—who have for signs
Of all your childhood, only the imagined grass
Of a bright steppe, the wind running in lines,
And only some old fairy-tale of sleighing,
Dark snow-deep forests, endless turning pines,
Bells tinkling, and wolves howling, and hounds baying.
Vague is your past, yet as your violin sings,
Its wildness held in desperate control,
I know them all, that world of bygone things
That have left their wounds and wonders in your soul.
Out in all weathers you have been, my friend,
Climbed into dawn, stood solitary and stark
Against the ashen quiet of twilight's end,
Brooded beneath the night's unanswering dark;
Through battering tempests you have blindly won,
And lived, and found a medicine for your scars
In resolution taken from the sun
And consolation from the unsleeping stars.
And here, in this crowded place an hour staying,
Your dim orchestra measuring off your bars,
So pale and proud, you stand your secrets flaying,
Resolving the tangle, pouring through your song
All your deep ache for Beauty, calm above
Your bitter silent anger and the strong
Ferocity and tenderness of your love,
Loud challenges and sweet and cynic laughter,
Movements of joy spontaneous and pure,
Remorse, and the dull grief that glimmers after
The obstinate sins you know you will not cure.
I see you subtly lying, soberly weighing
Gross questions, jesting at the things you hate,
In apathy, and wild despair, and praying
Bowed down before the shadowy knees of Fate,
And fearfully behind the visible groping
And standing by the heart's bottomless pit, and shrinking,
Who have known the lure and mockery of hoping,
The comic terrible uselessness of thinking.
O gay and passionate, gloomy and serene,
Your quivering fingers laugh and weep and curse
For all the phantoms you have ever been.
Yet would you wish another universe?
Let peace come if it will: your last long note
Dies on the quiet breast of space; and now
They clap: I see again your square frock coat,
Dark, foreign fiddler, you have stopped: you bow.
THE RUGGER MATCH
(OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE—QUEEN'S—DECEMBER)
(To Hugh Brooks)
I
The walls make a funnel, packed full; the distant gate
Bars us from inaccessible light and peace.
Far over necks and ears and hats, I see
Policemen's helmets and cards hung on the ironwork:
"One shilling," "No change given," "Ticket-holders only";
Oh Lord! What an awful crush! There are faces pale
And strained, and faces with animal grins advancing,
Stuck fast around mine. We move, we pause again
For an age, then a forward wave and another stop.
The pressure might squeeze one flat. Dig heels into ground
For this white and terrified woman whose male insists
Upon room to get back. Why didn't I come here at one?
Why come here at all? What strange little creatures we are,
Wedged and shoving under the contemptuous sky!
All things have stopped; the time will never go by;
We shall never get in! ... Yet through the standing glass
The sand imperceptible drops, the inexorable laws
Of number work also here. They are passing and passing,
I can hear the tick of the turnstiles, tick, tick, tick,
A man, a woman, a man, shreds of the crowd,
A man, a man, till the vortex sucks me in
And, squeezed between strangers hurting the flat of my arms,
I am jetted forth, and pay my shilling, and pass
To freedom and space, and a cool for the matted brows.
But we cannot rest yet. Fast from the gates we issue,
Spread conelike out, a crowd of loosening tissue,
All jigging on, and making as we travel
"Pod, pod" of feet on earth, "chix, chix" on gravel.
Heads forward, striding eagerly, we keep
Round to the left in semi-circular sweep
By the back of a stand, excluded, noting the row
Of heads that speck the top, and, caverned below,
The raw, rough, timber back of the new-made mound.
Quicker! The place is swarming! Around, around
Till the edge is reached, and we see a patch of green,
Two masts with a crossbar, tapering, white and clean,
And confluent rows of people that merge and die
In a flutter of faces where the grand-stand blocks the sky.
We hurry along, past ragged files of faces,
Flushing and quick, peering for empty places.
I see one above me, I step and prise and climb,
And stand and turn and breathe and look at the time,
Survey the field, and note with superior glance,
The anxious bobbing fools who still advance.
II
Ah! They are coming still. It is filling up.
It is full. They come. There is almost an hour to go,
Yet all find room, the dribbles of black disappear
In the solid piles around that empty green,
We are packed and ready now. They might as well start,
But two-forty-five was their time, and it's only ten past,
And it's got to be lived through. I haven't a newspaper,
I wish I could steal that little parson's book.
I count three minutes slowly: they seem like an hour;
And then I change feet and loosen the brim of my hat,
And curse the crawling of time. Oh body, body!
Why did I order you here, to stand and feel tired,
To ache and ache when the time will never pass,
In this buzzing crowd, before all those laden housetops,
Around this turf, under the lid of the sky?
I fumble my watch again: it is two-twenty:
Twenty-five minutes to wait. One, two, three, four,
Five, six, seven, eight: what is the good of counting?
It won't be here any quicker, aching hips,
Bored brain, unquiet heart, you are doomed to wait.
Why did I make you come? We have been before,
Struggling with time, fatigued and dull and alone
In all this tumultuous, chattering, happy crowd
That never knew pain and never questions its acts...
Never questions? Do not deceive yourself.
Look at the faces around you, active and gay,
They are lined, there are brains behind them, breasts beneath them,
They have only escaped for an hour, and even now
Many, like you, have not escaped; and away
Across the field those faces ascending in tiers,
Each face is a story, a tragedy and a doubt;
And the teams where they wait, in the sacred place to the right,
Are bewildered souls, who have heard of and brooded on death,
And thought about God. But this is a football match;
And anyhow I don't feel equal to thinking,
And I'm certain the teams don't; they've something better to do.
It is half-past two, and, thank Heaven, a minute over.
We are all here now. The laggards have all booked seats
And stroll in lordly leisure along the front.
What a man! Six foot, silk hat, brown face, moustache!
What a fat complacent parson, snuggling down
In the chair there, among all his cackling ladies!
I have seen that youth before. My neighbour now
On my left shouts out to a college friend below us,
"Tommy! Hallo! Do you think we are going to beat 'em?"
My watch. Twenty-to-three. That lot went quickly;
Five minutes more is nothing; I'm lively now
And fit for a five-mile run. One, two, three, four...
It isn't worth bothering now, it's all but here,
Here, here; a rustle, a murmur, a ready silence,
A billowing cheer—why, here they come, running and passing,
The challenging team! By God, what magnificent fellows!
They have dropped the ball, they pause, they sweep onward again,
And so to the end. Here are the rest of them,
Swingingly up the field and back as they came,
With the cheers swelling and swelling. They disappear,
And out, like wind upon water, come their rivals,
With cheers swelling and swelling, to run and turn
And vanish; and now they are all come out together,
Two teams walking, touch-judges and referee.
And they all line up, dotted about like chessmen,
And the multitude holds its breath, and awaits the start.
III
Whistle! A kick! A rush, a scramble, a scrum,
The forwards are busy already, the halves hover round,
The three-quarters stand in backwards diverging lines,
Eagerly bent, atoe, with elbows back,
And hands that would grasp at a ball, trembling to start,
While the solid backs vigilant stray about
And the crowd gives out a steady resolute roar,
Like the roar of a sea; a scrum, a whistle, a scrum;
A burst, a whistle, a scrum, a kick into touch;
All in the middle of the field. He is tossing it in,
They have got it and downed it, and whurry, oh, here they come,
Streaming like a waterfall, oh, he has knocked it on,
Right at our feet, and the scrum is formed again,
And everything seems to stop while they pack and go crooked.
The scrum-half beats them straight with a rough smack
While he holds the ball, debonair.... How it all comes back,
As the steam goes up of their breath and their sweating trunks!
The head low down, the eyes that swim to the ground,
The mesh of ownerless knees, the patch of dark earth,
The ball that comes in, and wedges and jerks, and is caught,
And sticks, the dense intoxicant smell of sweat,
The grip on the moisture of jerseys, the sickening urge
That seems powerless to help; the desperate final shove
That somehow is timed with a general effort, the sweep
Onward, while enemies reel, and the whole scrum turns
And we torrent away with the ball. Oh, I know it all....
I know it.... Where are they? ... Far on the opposite line,
Aimlessly kicking while the forwards stand gaping about,
Deprived of their work. Convergence. They are coming again,
They are scrumming again below, red hair, black cap,
And a horde of dark colourless heads and straining backs;
A voice rasps up through the howl of the crowd around
(Triumphant now in possession over all the rest
Of crowds who have lost the moving treasure to us)—
"Push, you devils!" They push, and push, and push;
The opponents yield, the fortress wall goes down,
The ram goes through, an irresistible rush
Crosses the last white line, and tumbles down,
And the ball is there. A try! A try! A try!
The shout from the host we are assaults the sky.
Deep silence. Line up by the goal-posts. A man lying down,
Poising the pointed ball, slanted away,
And another who stands, and hesitates, and runs
And lunges out with his foot, and the ball soars up,
While the opposite forwards rush below it in vain,
And curves to the posts, and passes them just outside.
The touch-judge's flag hangs still. It was only a try!
Three points to us. The roar is continuous now,
The game swings to and fro like a pendulum
Struck by a violent hand. But the impetus wanes,
The forwards are getting tired, and all the outsides
Run weakly, pass loosely; there are one or two penalty kicks,
And a feeble attempt from a mark. The ball goes out
Over the heads of the crowd, comes wearily back;
And, lingering about in mid-field, the tedious game
Seems for a while a thing interminable.
And nothing happens, till all of a sudden a shrill
Blast from the whistle flies out and arrests the game.
Half-time ... Unlocking ... The players are all erect,
Easy and friendly, standing about in groups,
Figures in sculpture, better for mud-stained clothes;
Couples from either side chatting and laughing,
And chewing lemons, and throwing the rinds away.