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Tides: A Book of Poems

Chapter 20: PENANCES
By John Drinkwater
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Poetry

About This Book

A sequence of lyric poems that range from intimate rural and seasonal scenes—Cotswold hills, gardens, ploughing—to meditations on love, memory, and wartime loss, with occasional civic and political reflections. The voice uses vivid pastoral imagery and simple, songlike rhythms to register everyday labour, landscape, and personal feeling, moving between quiet domestic observation and memorial or civic address. The collection is organized as short, standalone poems that juxtapose pastoral tranquility with the disruptions of modern conflict.

PENANCES

These are my happy penances. To make
Beauty without a Covenant; to take
Measure of time only because I know
That in death’s market-place I still shall owe
Service to beauty that shall not be done;
To know that beauty’s doctrine is begun
And makes a close in sacrifice; to find
In beauty’s courts the unappeasable mind.
HERE ENDS TIDES A BOOK OF POEMS
by John Drinkwater the Typography and Binding
arranged by Cyril William Beaumont Printed
on his Press in London and Published by
him at 75 Charing Cross Road in the
City of Westminster Completed
on the first day of September
MDCCCCXVII

SIMPLEX MUNDITIIS
THE BEAUMONT PRESS

The Binding has been
executed by F. Sangorski and G. Sutcliffe