Sonnets and Poems

HE moon upon her watch-tower
With her golden eye
Guarded the quarters
East and West the sky.
Just as midnight
Was stepping past
One drew his first breath,
One drew his last.
The moon upon her watch-tower
Rang a soundless bell—
It might have been for welcome,
It might have been farewell.

A BURYING.

SEE the twelve fair months go by
Bearing a coffin shoulder-high.
What, laughing? Pretty pall-bearers,
Pitiless of the buried years,
Have ye never a tear to shed
Nor sigh to drop for the newly-dead,
Nor marble grief to mark his grave?—
No, none of these; but see, we have
Green seed to mingle with his earth.—
What, is not this a burying?—— Nay, a birth.

“COLIN CLOUT, COME HOME AGAIN!”

HROUGH the grey and heavy air,
Through the January rain,
When old England nipped and bare
Shudders with the load of pain
Wept upon her by the eyes
Of sunless, sun-remembering skies:
When the soul of man is fain
Suddenly abroad to fare,
Questing, questing everywhere
The soul of beauty to regain,
Dreaming like a boy to snare
The great free bird no lure can chain,
Following in a dull despair
That cannot pierce their brief disguise
Random flights of pallid lies
Never fledged in Paradise:—
Comes the sound of gathering cries
Calling down the centuries
Urgently with might and main,
“Colin Clout, O Colin Clout!
Colin, Colin, Colin Clout!
England needs you, Colin Clout!
Colin Clout, come home again!”

Colin, can you never hear?
Colin, will you never rise
From the narrow plot of rest
That sang for joy of such a guest
To fill its dust with melodies,
And to make it year by year
Such a place of golden cheer,
Of flowering deed and jolly jest,
Of pastoral prettiness and the clear
Summons to be sailing West
Over oceans fabulous
Leading on to stranger shores
And distant ports adventurous—
That with its music in your ear,
Drawn from your own imagined stores,
You care to give no heed to us
Whose laughter has been soured by doubt,
Whose hearts are hedged with many a fear,
Who learn to hold our lives so dear
That all their wealth has trickled out,
Who joy and beauty hand in hand
Have driven homeless from the land
And put the old ideals to rout:—
Yet even because, returning here,
You needs must find your England thus,
Let not her children call in vain,
“Colin Clout, O Colin Clout!
Colin Clout, come home again!”

Hark! I hear a shepherd’s pipe
With three notes of music wipe
Discord from this troubled star;
I hear tumultuous gladness shake
The marrows of the land awake,
Wherein old slumbering visions are;
I hear the stirrings of a day
When all the earth will smell of may,
When eager men will fling aside
Their garments of enlightened pride
Where time the moth has had his way,
And don again the homespun dress
Of England’s ancient simpleness—
O piping shepherd-reed at play,
Blown with a poet’s golden breath,
How suddenly a heart as gay,
As innocent, as full of faith
As children’s hearts are, ’gins to beat
In the world’s bosom at my feet!
How all my sisters’ eyes grow strong,
And all my brothers’ eyes grow sweet,
And we who boast so loud to-day
Above our self-created strife
That we have lost our fear of death
Lose suddenly our fear of life,
And go with gladness down the way
To meet whatever is to meet.

Then, Colin! then about your knees
We’ll lie and list such fantasies
As keep the spirit bright and young
And guard the edge of youth as keen
As a new-tempered virgin sword;
We will re-learn the magic tongue,
And where the meadow-rings are green
Re-seek Titania and her lord,
For you will bring a flitting home
Of vanished Folk to English loam;
About our business we will go
With holiday-hearts whose dancing beat
Is measured to your piping sweet,
And on your music great will grow
In the redress of antique wrongs;
And from the richest of your songs,
O dreamer-lover, shepherd-knight,
Spell out a long-forgotten name,
Re-kindling the expiring glow
Of Chivalry’s high beacon-light,
Till by its heaven-pointing flame
Our generations understand
Their England is too fair a land
To suffer ugliness and blight
And the dishonourable bane
Of serfdom’s bowed and broken knee,
Too fine a trading mart to be
Where one may cause the many pain,
And foul self-interest men empowers
To turn to weeds what should be flowers.

For evil must be still to cope
When Colin Clout comes home again,
Because a world devoid of pain
Would be a world made bare of hope,
And both must act together till
Slipt from its spiritual trance
This globe is frozen to good and ill;
But ere the life here bound by chance
Flows to its last significance,
Colin! bring home the dream we lost
Because we grew too old for dreams,
And bring again the golden barque
With which in our high-hearted youth
We sailed wild seas and perilous streams;
And find again a road we crossed
In olden time and failed to mark;
And give us love of beauty back,
And set us on the grassy track
Of many an ancient-simple truth;
Re-teach our voices how to sing
Melodiously; and bring, O bring
The rustless lance of honour in
For men to strive again to win,
As in the days when knightlihood
For life’s most high expression stood,
And man reached forth to touch that goal
Not with his hands but with his soul.

Ah, Colin! ’tis a twice-told tale
How that the woods were heard to wail,
How birds with silence did complain,
And fields with faded flowers did mourn,
And flocks from feeding did refrain,
And rivers wept for your return.
Singer of England’s merriest hour,
Return! return and make her flower,
Charming your pipe unto your peers
As once you did in other years;
For we who wait on you, know this,
Whatever tune your reed shall play
Will hearken with as gladdened ears
As Cuddy and as Thestylis,
As Hobbinol and Lucida
And all the simple shepherd-train,
What time they gathered and ran, a gay
Rejoicing happy-hearted rout,
Across the sweetening meadow-hay
Each calling other:
“Come about!
The time of waiting is run out,
And Colin Clout, O, Colin Clout,
Colin Clout’s come home again!”

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

BRONWEN OF THE FLOWERS.

RONWEN gathered wild-flowers
Up-and-down the lane;
Her gathering touch upon them
Sweeter was than rain.

Now a blossom overblown,
Now a bud begun—
Her eye that lightened on them
Was quicker than the sun.

One by one she named them,
Oh, she did express
In her pretty namings
All their prettiness:

Some were fit for virgins,
Some for merry dames,
And the love with which she named them
Was lovelier than their names.

JESSICA DANCES.

HEN Joy and Molly on the lawn
Danced bare of foot like spirits of dawn
Jessica watched in wonderment
Until delight would not be pent,
And shoe and sock she cast in mirth
And felt her naked toes touch earth.
Swiftly the fresh green joy shot in
Through the fresh young rosy skin,
And in a golden glee the child
Went dancing innocently-wild
Up and down and round and round
Like daisies covering the ground,
Called sunward by the age-long spell
No ages can destroy
Of youth that never sighed or sinned,—
While elfin Molly and fairy Joy
Danced on like lilies in a dell
Or harebells in the wind.

SYLVIA SINGS.

YLVIA said that day,
“I’ll sing if you will play.”
We could deny not anything,
Not even deny to hear her sing
Who like a little spirit lay
Uncertain whether to flutter its wing,
To go or stay.

So though it broke our hearts for pity,
With hidden face one went
To the tinkling instrument,
And one with bended head
Stayed by the bed,
While the small voice sang over and over its ditty:—

“‘Manners make ladies, but not such as these,
Manners make ladies, but not such as these.’
Now again, please!
‘Manners make ladies—
But not such as these.’”

She breathed it long and long
And ah, so low,
Her tiny meaningless song,
For she was pleased to please us so—
But what we said
Sitting beside her bed
I do not know,
There were so many tears to keep unshed.

MYFANWY AMONG THE LEAVES.

YING leaf and dead leaf,
Yellow leaf and red leaf
And white-backed beam,
Lay along the woodland road
As quiet as a dream.

Summer was over,
The year had lost her lover,
Spent with her grief
All along the woodland road
Leaf fell on leaf.

Then came a shuffling,
Such a happy ruffling
Of the dried sweet
Surf of leaves upon the road
Round a baby’s feet.

Year-old leaf ran after
Three-year-old laughter,
Danced through the air
As she caught them from the road
And flung them anywhere.

Old leaf and cold leaf,
Brown leaf and gold leaf
And white-backed beam,
Followed down the woodland road
Myfanwy in a dream.

O being undiscoverable!
Thy name thyself will never spell.
Whate’er thou art, whate’er wilt be,
Man’s tongue will never utter thee;
Towering upon thy inmost throne
Thou shalt of none be known.

We watch in wonder how thy brow
Grows strange and silent in sleep, and how
Even more silent and more strange
Thy waking is that brings no change
When thy dim dreams of slumber press
To dimmer dreamlessness.

But looking with a love that seems
To pierce thy undiscovered dreams,
Within thy small unfolded being
Some dream of our own making seeing,
“All that she feels and dreams,” we say,
“We too will know one day.”

Ah, even when human speech has come
To make thy mouth no longer dumb,
When quickened thought and sympathy
Like angels look from either eye,
Thyself will still be hidden as deep
As now, awake, asleep.

We must our knowledge of thee still
By nothing save by love fulfil,
And with the dreamings of the heart
Still guess at the dream of what thou art
Which only of thee and God is known,
Child whom this day names Joan.

THE SINGER.

HAD a holy hour last night.
The room her presence made so pure
Was shaded in uncertain light,
But oh, the light it held was sure.

There while about her golden head
The shadows and the low light played,
She eagerly and softly read
The shining songs her soul had made.

Flower and shell and sand and sea,
And flight of gulls against the sun,
And many a friend, and many a tree,
And youth begun and age nigh-done,

Death and life, and life and death,
Divinely in her vision smiled;
She spoke them with the silver breath
Half of angel, half of child.

Upon her bed I lay at rest,
But once when kneeling by her chair
I leaned my head beside her breast
And heard the wordless singing there.

THE GIRL WITH THE BALL.

HE ran with her ball in her light dress floating and free, Tossing it, tossing it up in the evening light, She ran with her ball at the edge of the outgoing sea On sand which the dropping sun turned bright.

Over the sea hung birds more white than the skin
Of the last few swimmers who took the waves with their breasts;
The birds dipped straight as her ball when a silver fin
Glanced in the shallow crests.

She ran so swift, and suddenly stopped as swift
To look at a shell, or splash up a pool in rain;
Wind blew, and she in the wind began to drift
Foam-like, and suddenly ran again.

Children who played on the shore in the last of the day
Paused and watched in wonder her rise and fall
Like elders watching a child: she was younger than they
As she ran by the sea with her ball.

Her hair was loose and she had no shoes on her feet,
And her image ran under her feet on the wet gold shore,
She threw up her ball and she caught it, and once laughed sweet
As though the world had never heard laughter before.

THE STORY-TELLER.

VER the hearth on which we burned
Brown beech-nuts, lichen-twigs, and cones,
I sat beside her while she turned
A forkèd wand within the pyre,
Until two little spirts of fire
Sprang from the hazel’s withered bones.

Then, with her eyes upon her branch
Pointed with ruddy nuts of flame,
Like one who has no power to staunch
The heart’s-blood flowing from his side,
She through her mouth undammed a tide
Of legends that I could not name:—

Strange villages where damsels fished
For lovers in a rainbow sea
By night: a crazy man who wished
To act like God, and very soon
Out-freaked the fools that raked the moon:
Gold underneath an apple-tree

Discovered by a thrice-dreamed dream:
Half-tales, half-ballads—until the room
Shook in its shadows with a stream
Of pedlars, witches, cats in crowns,
Denizens of enchanted towns,
And kings confined in forests of gloom.

Her voice went up and down like wind
That wanders lost among the eaves;
The flamelets on her hazel thinned
And dwindled into smouldering eyes;
Her voice failed like the wind that dies,
She threw a handful of black leaves

On the bright litter of the hearth
And thrust her hazel’s double spark
Within. The smell of smoking earth
Rose from the stones where ceased to burn
The fiery lines of cone and fern
And berry: the room was dumb and dark.

THE REFLECTION.

HE had no life except to be what men
Required of her to be.
They came for sympathy, and came again
For sympathy.

She never knew the way her heart to spare
When they were hurt or worn,
Whatever one may for another bear
By her was borne.

They said, you give us of yourself so much!
She heard them with a smile,
Knowing she only gave to such and such
Themselves awhile.

Their interests, their frets, their loneliness,
Their sorrows and despairs,
She wore for them—they saw her in no dress
That was not theirs.

She learned to understand the solitudes
When she by none was sought;
Men of themselves grow sick, and in those moods
Needed her not,

Getting relief of others who gave things
By their own purpose lit;
If she too had some freshness in her springs,
None wanted it.

She grew accustomed to be quietly shut
Away, was used to see
Love limping dutifully in a rut
That once ran free;

She knew the signs when friends began to cast
What they had asked her for—
Some asked for much, some little, all at last
Asked nothing more.

And when she died they sorrowed, it is true,
But not for long, because
They had seen some pale reflection that she threw,
Not what she was.

SOLITARY.

E moved his fellow-men among
And changed with them some forms of speech.
His heart was separate from his tongue,
They would not hear his heart beseech.

Their needs were very like his own,
Quivering in bodies numb and dazed;
They smiled and talked and felt alone.—
Did not their hearts look on amazed?

SPRING-DAWN.

EAVEN, the Spring’s coming true again!
Easterly over the sky’s spring-blue again
Passes a pearly flight of cloud—
Somewhere a dovecote is empty, surely!
And all of its birds have flown in a brood
Over the pure blue purely!

Westerly owl-grey gatherings
Linger a little yet:
Soon, owls! soon you will shrink
Out of the sun, I think,
Who even now turns silver-wet
The last of your ghostly gatherings.

Back to your windy barns again,
To your forsaken granaries,
Haunting, hating breed of the Winter!
For the grass in the mould begins to teem,
By every gate where the cuckoo flies
Primrose and fragile wind-flower enter,
And, lovelier truth than any dream,
Blue light is mirrored in ancient tarns again!