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Sonnets and Poems

Chapter 56: PEACE.
By Eleanor Farjeon
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Poetry

About This Book

A varied collection of formal sonnets and shorter lyrical pieces that meditate on conscience, love, and the costs of emotional restraint before shifting into seasonal songs, lullabies, and pastoral sketches. Poems celebrate childhood, nature, music, and the power of imagination while juxtaposing birth and burial, private feeling and communal ritual. A longer pastoral address summons renewal and a return to simpler, generous living. The language is imagistic and musical, combining moral reflection with bright sensory detail and a persistent longing for beauty and humane steadiness in everyday life.

SAW ye the stars last night, all still,
 Remote, and bitter-cold,
 Who were too passionless to thrill,
 Being so wise and old?

Second Voices.

O SAW ye not one star alight,
 A leap of silver fire,
 Did ye not see it sear the night
 And die of its own desire?

First Voices.

AW ye the ancient stars look on
 Locked in a chilly dream
 Which banished the awakened one
 Beyond their frozen scheme?

Second Voices.

O SAW ye not the ashen band
 Fade in the morning-gold,
 Who long had ceased to understand,
 Being so bitter-old?

All the Voices.

YE petrified on heavenly thrones,
 Was there not chaos once?
 Ye did not keep your ordered zones
 When ye were raging suns!
Once flaming rivers were your breath
 And the wild hairs of your brow—
 Once ye were life, once ye were death!
 Ye are not either now.

PEACE.

I.

AM as awful as my brother War,
 I am the sudden silence after clamour.
 I am the face that shows the seamy scar
 When blood has lost its frenzy and its glamour.
 Men in my pause shall know the cost at last
 That is not to be paid in triumphs or tears,
 Men will begin to judge the thing that’s past
 As men will judge it in a hundred years.
Nations! whose ravenous engines must be fed
 Endlessly with the father and the son,
 My naked light upon your darkness, dread!—
 By which ye shall behold what ye have done:
 Whereon, more like a vulture than a dove,
 Ye set my seal in hatred, not in love.

II.

LET no man call me good. I am not blest.
 My single virtue is the end of crimes,
 I only am the period of unrest,
 The ceasing of the horrors of the times;
 My good is but the negative of ill,
 Such ill as bends the spirit with despair,
 Such ill as makes the nations’ soul stand still
 And freeze to stone beneath its Gorgon glare.
Be blunt, and say that peace is but a state
 Wherein the active soul is free to move,
 And nations only show as mean or great
 According to the spirit then they prove.—
 O which of ye whose battle-cry is Hate
 Will first in peace dare shout the name of Love?

NOW THAT YOU TOO

OW that you too must shortly go the way
 Which in these bloodshot years uncounted men
 Have gone in vanishing armies day by day,
 And in their numbers will not come again:
 I must not strain the moments of our meeting
 Striving each look, each accent, not to miss,
 Or question of our parting and our greeting,
 Is this the last of all? is this—or this?
Last sight of all it may be with these eyes,
 Last touch, last hearing, since eyes, hands, and ears,
 Even serving love, are our mortalities,
 And cling to what they own in mortal fears:—
 But oh, let end what will, I hold you fast
 By immortal love, which has no first or last.

THIS SECOND OF THE INITIATES SERIES OF
 POETRY BY PROVED HANDS, WAS PRINTED
 IN OXFORD AT THE VINCENT WORKS,
 AND FINISHED IN APRIL, MCMXVIII.
PUBLISHED BY B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD
 STREET, OXFORD, AND SOLD IN AMERICA
 BY LONGMANS, GREEN & CO., NEW YORK.

 

NITIATES A SERIES OF POETRY BY PROVED HANDS UNIFORM VOLUMES IN DOLPHIN OLD STYLE TYPE ART BOARDS, THREE SHILLINGS NET.

NOW READY

I.IN THE VALLEY OF VISION BY GEOFFREY FABER, AUTHOR OF “INTERFLOW.”
II. SONNETS AND POEMS BY ELEANOR FARJEON, AUTHOR OF “NURSERY RHYMES OF LONDON TOWN.”
IN PREPARATION
III. THE DEFEAT OF YOUTH, AND OTHER POEMS BY ALDOUS HUXLEY, AUTHOR OF “THE BURNING WHEEL.
IV. SONGS FOR SALE AN ANTHOLOGY OF VERSE, EDITED BY E. B. C. JONES FROM BOOKS ISSUED RECENTLY BY B. H. BLACKWELL.
V. CLOWNS’ HOUSES BY EDITH SITWELL, EDITOR OF “WHEELS.”

HE SHELDONIAN SERIES OF REPRINTS AND RENDERINGS OF MASTERPIECES IN ALL LANGUAGES EDITED BY REGINALD HEWITT, M. A. MEDIUM 16MO, IN DOLPHIN OLD STYLE TYPE, RED AND BLACK, BOARDS, TWO SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE NET.

FIRST THREE BOOKS

SONGS AND SAYINGS OF WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE, MINNESAENGER ENGLISHED BY FRANK BETTS.

THE FUNERAL ORATION OF PERICLES. ENGLISHED BY THOMAS HOBBES OF MALMESBURY.

BALLADES OF FRANCOIS VILLON INTERPRETED INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY PAUL HOOKHAM.

OXFORD B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD ST.

DVENTURERS ALL A SERIES OF YOUNG POETS UNKNOWN TO FAME UNIFORM VOLUMES IN DOLPHIN OLD STYLE TYPE IN ART WRAPPERS TWO SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE NET EACH.

¶. “Beautiful little books ... containing poetry, real poetry.”—The New Witness.

I.THE ESCAPED PRINCESS, AND OTHER POEMS. By Wilfred Rowland Childe. [Out of print].
II.THURSDAY’S CHILD. By Elizabeth Rendall. [Out of print].
III.BOHEMIAN GLASS. By Esther Lilian Duff. [Out of print].
IV.CONTACTS, AND OTHER POEMS. By T. W. Earp. [Out of print].
V.THE IRON AGE. By Frank Betts. With an Introduction by Gilbert Murray.
VI.THE TWO WORLDS. By Sherard Vines.
VII.THE BURNING WHEEL. By A. L. Huxley.
VIII.A VAGABOND’S WALLET. By Stephen Reid-Heyman.
IX.OP. I. By Dorothy L. Sayers. [Out of print].
X.LYRICAL POEMS. By Dorothy Plowman.
XI.THE WITCHES’ SABBATH. By E. H. W. Meyerstein.
XII.A SCALLOP SHELL OF QUIET. Poems by Four Women. Introduced by Margaret L. Woods.
XIII.AT A VENTURE. Poems by Eight Young Writers.
XIV.ALDEBARAN. By M. St. Clare Byrne.
XV.LIADAIN AND CURITHIR. By Moireen Fox.
XVI.LINNETS IN THE SLUMS. By Marion Pryce.
XVII.OUT OF THE EAST. By Vera and Margaret Larminie.
XVIII.DUNCH. By Susan Miles.
XIX.DEMETER AND OTHER POEMS. By Eleanor Hill.
FORTHCOMING
XX.CARGO. By S. B. Gates.
XXI.DREAMS AND JOURNEYS. By Fredegond Shove.
XXII.THE PEOPLE’S PALACE. By Sacheverell Sitwell.

OXFORD B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET