Twelve poems

Chapter 8: BATTLE SLEEP [1915]

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About This Book

A sequence of lyrical poems moves between sunlit Mediterranean landscapes and inward, elegiac reflection, using vivid sensory detail to evoke thyme-scented hills, wind-driven seas, and classical ruins. Several pieces celebrate beauty and the transports of sight and song, while others register loss, mourning, and the human costs of conflict, portraying bereavement, domestic desolation, and the persistence of memory. The collection alternates narrative vignettes and compact meditations, shifting tone from exultant natural observation to restrained grief and philosophical acceptance, exploring how art, place, and memory mediate desire, beauty, and mortality.

BATTLE SLEEP
[1915]

Somewhere, O sun, some corner there must be
Thou visitest, where down the strand
Quietly, still, the waves go out to sea
From the green fringes of a pastoral land.

Deep in the orchard-bloom the roof-trees stand,
The brown sheep graze along the bay.
And through the apple-boughs above the sand
The bees’ hum sounds no fainter than the spray.
There through uncounted hours declines the day
To the low arch of twilight’s close,
And, just as night about the moon grows gray,
One sail leans westward to the fading rose.

Giver of dreams, O thou with scatheless wing
Forever moving through the fiery hail,
To flame-seared lids the cooling vision bring
And let some soul go seaward with that sail.