They will leave
The barn, as I shall be left, maybe.
What holds it up? ’Twould not pay to pull down.
Well, this place has no other antiquity.
No abbey or castle looks so old
10 As this that Job Knight built in ’54,
Built to keep corn for rats and men.
Now there’s fowls in the roof, pigs on the floor.
What thatch survives is dung for the grass,
The best grass on the farm. A pity the roof
15 Will not bear a mower to mow it. But
Only fowls have foothold enough.
Starlings used to sit there with bubbling throats
Making a spiky beard as they chattered
And whistled and kissed, with heads in air,
20 Till they thought of something else that mattered.
But now they cannot find a place,
Among all those holes, for a nest any more.
It’s the turn of lesser things, I suppose.
Once I fancied ’twas starlings they built it for.
Not the end: but there’s nothing more.
Sweet Summer and Winter rude
I have loved, and friendship and love,
The crowd and solitude:
5 But I know them: I weary not;
But all that they mean I know.
I would go back again home
Now. Yet how should I go?
This is my grief. That land,
10 My home, I have never seen;
No traveller tells of it,
However far he has been.
And could I discover it,
I fear my happiness there,
15 Or my pain, might be dreams of return
Here, to these things that were.
Remembering ills, though slight
Yet irremediable,
Brings a worse, an impurer pang
20 Than remembering what was well.
No: I cannot go back,
And would not if I could.
Until blindness come, I must wait
And blink at what is not good.
Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.
5 Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry
Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
10 No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.
And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
15 Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
Mother, the root of this little yellow flower
Among the stones has the taste of quinine.
Things are strange today on the cliff. The sun shines so bright,
And the grasshopper works at his sewing-machine
5 So hard. Here’s one on my hand, mother, look;
I lie so still. There’s one on your book.
But I have something to tell more strange. So leave
Your book to the grasshopper, mother dear, –
Like a green knight in a dazzling market-place, –
10 And listen now. Can you hear what I hear
Far out? Now and then the foam there curls
And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s.
Fishes and gulls ring no bells. There cannot be
A chapel or church between here and Devon,
15 With fishes or gulls ringing its bell, – hark! –
Somewhere under the sea or up in heaven.
‘It’s the bell, my son, out in the bay
On the buoy. It does sound sweet today.’
Sweeter I never heard, mother, no, not in all Wales.
20 I should like to be lying under that foam,
Dead, but able to hear the sound of the bell,
And certain that you would often come
And rest, listening happily.
I should be happy if that could be.
I have come a long way today:
On a strange bridge alone,
Remembering friends, old friends,
I rest, without smile or moan,
5 As they remember me without smile or moan.
All are behind, the kind
And the unkind too, no more
Tonight than a dream. The stream
Runs softly yet drowns the Past,
10 The dark-lit stream has drowned the Future and the Past.
No traveller has rest more blest
Than this moment brief between
Two lives, when the Night’s first lights
And shades hide what has never been,
15 Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been.
The skylarks are far behind that sang over the down;
I can hear no more those suburb nightingales;
Thrushes and blackbirds sing in the gardens of the town
In vain: the noise of man, beast, and machine prevails.
5 But the call of children in the unfamiliar streets
That echo with a familiar twilight echoing,
Sweet as the voice of nightingale or lark, completes
A magic of strange welcome, so that I seem a king
Among man, beast, machine, bird, child, and the ghost
10 That in the echo lives and with the echo dies.
The friendless town is friendly; homeless, I am not lost;
Though I know none of these doors, and meet but strangers’ eyes.
Never again, perhaps, after tomorrow, shall
I see these homely streets, these church windows alight,
15 Not a man or woman or child among them all:
But it is All Friends’ Night, a traveller’s good-night.
But these things also are Spring’s –
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;
5 The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung
In splashes of purest white:
All the white things a man mistakes
10 For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter’s ruins
Something to pay Winter’s debts,
While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
15 Keep their spirits up in the mist,
And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.
Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.
5 Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,
Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
10 Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs, and griefs
Not yet begun.
All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
15 But I learnt how the wind would sound
After these things should be.
It stood in the sunset sky
Like the straight-backed down,
Many a time – the barn
At the edge of the town,
5 So huge and dark that it seemed
It was the hill
Till the gable’s precipice proved
It impossible.
Then the great down in the west
10 Grew into sight,
A barn stored full to the ridge
With black of night;
And the barn fell to a barn
Or even less
15 Before critical eyes and its own
Late mightiness.
But far down and near barn and I
Since then have smiled,
Having seen my new cautiousness
20 By itself beguiled
To disdain what seemed the barn
Till a few steps changed
It past all doubt to the down;
So the barn was avenged.
It was a perfect day
For sowing; just
As sweet and dry was the ground
As tobacco-dust.
5 I tasted deep the hour
Between the far
Owl’s chuckling first soft cry
And the first star.
A long stretched hour it was;
10 Nothing undone
Remained; the early seeds
All safely sown.
And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
15 Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.
Here again (she said) is March the third
And twelve hours singing for the bird
’Twixt dawn and dusk, from half-past six
To half-past six, never unheard.
5 ’Tis Sunday, and the church-bells end
When the birds do. I think they blend
Now better than they will when passed
Is this unnamed, unmarked godsend.
Or do all mark, and none dares say,
10 How it may shift and long delay,
Somewhere before the first of Spring,
But never fails, this singing day?
And when it falls on Sunday, bells
Are a wild natural voice that dwells
15 On hillsides; but the birds’ songs have
The holiness gone from the bells.
This day unpromised is more dear
Than all the named days of the year
When seasonable sweets come in,
20 Because we know how lucky we are.
Under the after-sunset sky
Two pewits sport and cry,
More white than is the moon on high
Riding the dark surge silently;
5 More black than earth. Their cry
Is the one sound under the sky.
They alone move, now low, now high,
And merrily they cry
To the mischievous Spring sky,
10 Plunging earthward, tossing high,
Over the ghost who wonders why
So merrily they cry and fly,
Nor choose ’twixt earth and sky,
While the moon’s quarter silently
15 Rides, and earth rests as silently.
Will you come?
Will you come?
Will you ride
So late
5 At my side?
O, will you come?
Will you come?
Will you come
If the night
10 Has a moon,
Full and bright?
O, will you come?
Would you come?
Would you come
15 If the noon
Gave light,
Not the moon?
Beautiful, would you come?
Would you have come?
20 Would you have come
Without scorning,
Had it been
Still morning?
Beloved, would you have come?
25 If you come,
Haste and come.
Owls have cried;
It grows dark
To ride.
30 Beloved, beautiful, come.
Running along a bank, a parapet
That saves from the precipitous wood below
The level road, there is a path. It serves
Children for looking down the long smooth steep,
5 Between the legs of beech and yew, to where
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women
Content themselves with the road and what they see
Over the bank, and what the children tell.
The path, winding like silver, trickles on,
10 Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss
That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk
With gold, olive, and emerald, but in vain.
The children wear it. They have flattened the bank
On top, and silvered it between the moss
15 With the current of their feet, year after year.
But the road is houseless, and leads not to school.
To see a child is rare there, and the eye
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
And underyawns it, and the path that looks
20 As if it led on to some legendary
Or fancied place where men have wished to go
And stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends.
This moonlight makes
The lovely lovelier
Than ever before lakes
And meadows were.
5 And yet they are not,
Though this their hour is, more
Lovely than things that were not
Lovely before.
Nothing on earth,
10 And in the heavens no star,
For pure brightness is worth
More than that jar,
For wasps meant, now
A star – long may it swing
15 From the dead apple-bough,
So glistening.
There once the walls
Of the ruined cottage stood.
The periwinkle crawls
With flowers in its hair into the wood.
5 In flowerless hours
Never will the bank fail,
With everlasting flowers
On fragments of blue plates, to tell the tale.
They met inside the gateway that gives the view,
A hollow land as vast as heaven. ‘It is
A pleasant day, sir.’ ‘A very pleasant day.’
‘And what a view here. If you like angled fields
5 Of grass and grain bounded by oak and thorn,
Here is a league. Had we with Germany
To play upon this board it could not be
More dear than April has made it with a smile.
The fields beyond that league close in together
10 And merge, even as our days into the past,
Into one wood that has a shining pane
Of water. Then the hills of the horizon –
That is how I should make hills had I to show
One who would never see them what hills were like.’
15 ‘Yes. Sixty miles of South Downs at one glance.
Sometimes a man feels proud of them, as if
He had just created them with one mighty thought.’
‘That house, though modern, could not be better planned
For its position. I never liked a new
20 House better. Could you tell me who lives in it?’
‘No one.’ ‘Ah – and I was peopling all
Those windows on the south with happy eyes,
The terrace under them with happy feet;
Girls – ’ ‘Sir, I know. I know. I have seen that house
25 Through mist look lovely as a castle in Spain,
And airier. I have thought: “’Twere happy there
To live.” And I have laughed at that
Because I lived there then.’ ‘Extraordinary.’
‘Yes, with my furniture and family
30 Still in it, I, knowing every nook of it
And loving none, and in fact hating it.’
‘Dear me! How could that be? But pardon me.’
‘No offence. Doubtless the house was not to blame,
But the eye watching from those windows saw,
35 Many a day, day after day, mist – mist
Like chaos surging back – and felt itself
Alone in all the world, marooned alone.
We lived in clouds, on a cliff’s edge almost
(You see), and if clouds went, the visible earth
40 Lay too far off beneath and like a cloud.
I did not know it was the earth I loved
Until I tried to live there in the clouds
And the earth turned to cloud.’ ‘You had a garden
Of flint and clay, too.’ ‘True; that was real enough.
45 The flint was the one crop that never failed.
The clay first broke my heart, and then my back;
And the back heals not. There were other things
Real, too. In that room at the gable a child
Was born while the wind chilled a summer dawn:
50 Never looked grey mind on a greyer one
Than when the child’s cry broke above the groans.’
‘I hope they were both spared.’ ‘They were.
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