‘Take care!’ she said –
Ages ago.
She startled me, standing quite close
Dressed all in white:
Ages ago I was angry till
20 She passed from sight.
Then the storm burst, and as I crouched
To shelter, how
Beautiful and kind, too, she seemed,
As she does now!
‘’Twill take some getting.’ ‘Sir, I think ’twill so.’
The old man stared up at the mistletoe
That hung too high in the poplar’s crest for plunder
Of any climber, though not for kissing under:
5 Then he went on against the north-east wind –
Straight but lame, leaning on a staff new-skinned,
Carrying a brolly, flag-basket, and old coat, –
Towards Alton, ten miles off. And he had not
Done less from Chilgrove where he pulled up docks.
10 ’Twere best, if he had had ‘a money-box’,
To have waited there till the sheep cleared a field
For what a half-week’s flint-picking would yield.
His mind was running on the work he had done
Since he left Christchurch in the New Forest, one
15 Spring in the ’seventies, – navvying on dock and line
From Southampton to Newcastle-on-Tyne, –
In ’seventy-four a year of soldiering
With the Berkshires, – hoeing and harvesting
In half the shires where corn and couch will grow.
20 His sons, three sons, were fighting, but the hoe
And reap-hook he liked, or anything to do with trees.
He fell once from a poplar tall as these:
The Flying Man they called him in hospital.
‘If I flew now, to another world I’d fall.’
25 He laughed and whistled to the small brown bitch
With spots of blue that hunted in the ditch.
Her foxy Welsh grandfather must have paired
Beneath him. He kept sheep in Wales and scared
Strangers, I will warrant, with his pearl eye
30 And trick of shrinking off as he were shy,
Then following close in silence for – for what?
‘No rabbit, never fear, she ever got,
Yet always hunts. Today she nearly had one:
She would and she wouldn’t. ’Twas like that. The bad one!
35 She’s not much use, but still she’s company,
Though I’m not. She goes everywhere with me.
So Alton I must reach tonight somehow:
I’ll get no shakedown with that bedfellow
From farmers. Many a man sleeps worse tonight
40 Than I shall.’ ‘In the trenches.’ ‘Yes, that’s right.
But they’ll be out of that – I hope they be –
This weather, marching after the enemy.’
‘And so I hope. Good luck.’ And there I nodded
‘Good-night. You keep straight on.’ Stiffly he plodded;
45 And at his heels the crisp leaves scurried fast,
And the leaf-coloured robin watched. They passed,
The robin till next day, the man for good,
Together in the twilight of the wood.
What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph –
5 ‘Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.’ Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
10 Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
15 For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.
A fortnight before Christmas Gypsies were everywhere:
Vans were drawn up on wastes, women trailed to the fair.
‘My gentleman,’ said one, ‘You’ve got a lucky face.’
‘And you’ve a luckier,’ I thought, ‘if such a grace
5 And impudence in rags are lucky.’ ‘Give a penny
For the poor baby’s sake.’ ‘Indeed I have not any
Unless you can give change for a sovereign, my dear.’
‘Then just half a pipeful of tobacco can you spare?’
I gave it. With that much victory she laughed content.
10 I should have given more, but off and away she went
With her baby and her pink sham flowers to rejoin
The rest before I could translate to its proper coin
Gratitude for her grace. And I paid nothing then,
As I pay nothing now with the dipping of my pen
15 For her brother’s music when he drummed the tambourine
And stamped his feet, which made the workmen passing grin,
While his mouth-organ changed to a rascally Bacchanal dance
‘Over the hills and far away’. This and his glance
Outlasted all the fair, farmer and auctioneer,
20 Cheap-jack, balloon-man, drover with crooked stick, and steer,
Pig, turkey, goose, and duck, Christmas corpses to be.
Not even the kneeling ox had eyes like the Romany.
That night he peopled for me the hollow wooded land,
More dark and wild than stormiest heavens, that I searched and scanned
20 Like a ghost new-arrived. The gradations of the dark
Were like an underworld of death, but for the spark
In the Gypsy boy’s black eyes as he played and stamped his tune,
‘Over the hills and far away’, and a crescent moon.
Unless it was that day I never knew
Ambition. After a night of frost, before
The March sun brightened and the South-west blew,
Jackdaws began to shout and float and soar
5 Already, and one was racing straight and high
Alone, shouting like a black warrior
Challenges and menaces to the wide sky.
With loud long laughter then a woodpecker
Ridiculed the sadness of the owl’s last cry.
10 And through the valley where all the folk astir
Made only plumes of pearly smoke to tower
Over dark trees and white meadows happier
Than was Elysium in that happy hour,
A train that roared along raised after it
15 And carried with it a motionless white bower
Of purest cloud, from end to end close-knit,
So fair it touched the roar with silence. Time
Was powerless while that lasted. I could sit
And think I had made the loveliness of prime,
20 Breathed its life into it and were its lord,
And no mind lived save this ’twixt clouds and rime.
Omnipotent I was, nor even deplored
That I did nothing. But the end fell like a bell:
The bower was scattered; far off the train roared.
25 But if this was ambition I cannot tell.
What ’twas ambition for I know not well.
One hour: as dim he and his house now look
As a reflection in a rippling brook,
While I remember him; but first, his house.
Empty it sounded. It was dark with forest boughs
5 That brushed the walls and made the mossy tiles
Part of the squirrels’ track. In all those miles
Of forest silence and forest murmur, only
One house – ‘Lonely!’ he said, ‘I wish it were lonely’ –
Which the trees looked upon from every side,
And that was his.
10 He waved good-bye to hide
A sigh that he converted to a laugh.
He seemed to hang rather than stand there, half
Ghost-like, half like a beggar’s rag, clean wrung
And useless on the briar where it has hung
15 Long years a-washing by sun and wind and rain.
But why I call back man and house again
Is that now on a beech-tree’s tip I see
As then I saw – I at the gate, and he
In the house darkness, – a magpie veering about,
20 A magpie like a weathercock in doubt.
The Past is a strange land, most strange.
Wind blows not there, nor does rain fall:
If they do, they cannot hurt at all.
Men of all kinds as equals range
5 The soundless fields and streets of it.
Pleasure and pain there have no sting,
The perished self not suffering
That lacks all blood and nerve and wit,
And is in shadow-land a shade.
10 Remembered joy and misery
Bring joy to the joyous equally;
Both sadden the sad. So memory made
Parting today a double pain:
First because it was parting; next
15 Because the ill it ended vexed
And mocked me from the Past again,
Not as what had been remedied
Had I gone on, – not that, oh no!
But as itself no longer woe;
20 Sighs, angry word and look and deed
Being faded: rather a kind of bliss,
For there spiritualised it lay
In the perpetual yesterday
That naught can stir or stain like this.
I never had noticed it until
’Twas gone, – the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill.
5 It was not more than a hedge overgrown.
One meadow’s breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as a bone,
And black betwixt two meadows green,
10 Though fresh-cut faggot ends
Of hazel make some amends
With a gleam as if flowers they had been.
Strange it could have hidden so near!
And now I see as I look
15 That the small winding brook,
A tributary’s tributary, rises there.
There never was a finer day,
And never will be while May is May, –
The third, and not the last of its kind;
But though fair and clear the two behind
5 Seemed pursued by tempests overpast;
And the morrow with fear that it could not last
Was spoiled. Today ere the stones were warm
Five minutes of thunderstorm
Dashed it with rain, as if to secure,
10 By one tear, its beauty the luck to endure.
At midday then along the lane
Old Jack Noman appeared again,
Jaunty and old, crooked and tall,
And stopped and grinned at me over the wall,
15 With a cowslip bunch in his button-hole
And one in his cap. Who could say if his roll
Came from flints in the road, the weather, or ale?
He was welcome as the nightingale.
Not an hour of the sun had been wasted on Jack.
20 ‘I’ve got my Indian complexion back’
Said he. He was tanned like a harvester,
Like his short clay pipe, like the leaf and bur
That clung to his coat from last night’s bed,
Like the ploughland crumbling red.
25 Fairer flowers were none on the earth
Than his cowslips wet with the dew of their birth,
Or fresher leaves than the cress in his basket.
‘Where did they come from, Jack?’ ‘Don’t ask it,
And you’ll be told no lies.’ ‘Very well:
30 Then I can’t buy.’ ‘I don’t want to sell.
Take them and these flowers, too, free.
Perhaps you have something to give me?
Wait till next time. The better the day…
The Lord couldn’t make a better, I say;
35 If he could, he never has done.’
So off went Jack with his roll-walk-run,
Leaving his cresses from Oakshott rill
And his cowslips from Wheatham hill.
’Twas the first day that the midges bit;
40 But though they bit me, I was glad of it:
Of the dust in my face, too, I was glad.
Spring could do nothing to make me sad.
Bluebells hid all the ruts in the copse,
The elm seeds lay in the road like hops,
45 That fine day, May the twenty-third,
The day Jack Noman disappeared.
They should never have built a barn there, at all –
Drip, drip, drip! – under that elm tree,
Though then it was young. Now it is old
But good, not like the barn and me.
5 Tomorrow they cut it down.
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