Next Spring
A blackbird or a robin will nest there,
Accustomed to them, thinking they will remain
Whatever is for ever to a bird:
This Spring it is too late; the swift has come.
10 ’Twas a hot day for carrying them up:
Better they will never warm me, though they must
Light several Winters’ fires. Before they are done
The war will have ended, many other things
Have ended, maybe, that I can no more
15 Foresee or more control than robin and wren.
This beauty made me dream there was a time
Long past and irrecoverable, a clime
Where any brook so radiant racing clear
Through buttercup and kingcup bright as brass
5 But gentle, nourishing the meadow grass
That leans and scurries in the wind, would bear
Another beauty, divine and feminine,
Child to the sun, a nymph whose soul unstained
Could love all day, and never hate or tire,
10 A lover of mortal or immortal kin.
And yet, rid of this dream, ere I had drained
Its poison, quieted was my desire
So that I only looked into the water,
Clearer than any goddess or man’s daughter,
15 And hearkened while it combed the dark green hair
And shook the millions of the blossoms white
Of water-crowfoot, and curdled to one sheet
The flowers fallen from the chestnuts in the park
Far off. And sedge-warblers, clinging so light
20 To willow twigs, sang longer than the lark,
Quick, shrill, or grating, a song to match the heat
Of the strong sun, nor less the water’s cool,
Gushing through narrows, swirling in the pool.
Their song that lacks all words, all melody,
25 All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.
This was the best of May – the small brown birds
Wisely reiterating endlessly
What no man learnt yet, in or out of school.
I built myself a house of glass:
It took me years to make it:
And I was proud. But now, alas,
Would God someone would break it.
5 But it looks too magnificent.
No neighbour casts a stone
From where he dwells, in tenement
Or palace of glass, alone.
Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
5 As the winds use
A crack in a wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
10 Choose me,
You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
15 Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
20 As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
25 Strange and sweet
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
30 That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, –
As our hills are, old, –
35 Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
40 As the earth which you prove
That we love.
Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
45 Whose nightingales
Have no wings, –
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there, –
50 From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb
55 Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.
There are so many things I have forgot,
That once were much to me, or that were not,
All lost, as is a childless woman’s child
And its child’s children, in the undefiled
5 Abyss of what can never be again.
I have forgot, too, names of the mighty men
That fought and lost or won in the old wars,
Of kings and fiends and gods, and most of the stars.
Some things I have forgot that I forget.
10 But lesser things there are, remembered yet,
Than all the others. One name that I have not –
Though ’tis an empty thingless name – forgot
Never can die because Spring after Spring
Some thrushes learn to say it as they sing.
15 There is always one at midday saying it clear
And tart – the name, only the name I hear.
While perhaps I am thinking of the elder scent
That is like food, or while I am content
With the wild rose scent that is like memory,
20 This name suddenly is cried out to me
From somewhere in the bushes by a bird
Over and over again, a pure thrush word.
When these old woods were young
The thrushes’ ancestors
As sweetly sung
In the old years.
5 There was no garden here,
Apples nor mistletoe;
No children dear
Ran to and fro.
New then was this thatched cot,
10 But the keeper was old,
And he had not
Much lead or gold.
Most silent beech and yew:
As he went round about
15 The woods to view
Seldom he shot.
But now that he is gone
Out of most memories,
Still lingers on
20 A stoat of his,
But one, shrivelled and green,
And with no scent at all,
And barely seen
On this shed wall.
After night’s thunder far away had rolled
The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,
And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,
Like the first gods before they made the world
5 And misery, swimming the stormless sea
In beauty and in divine gaiety.
The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn
With leaves – the holly’s Autumn falls in June –
And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.
10The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit
With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd
Of children pouring out of school aloud.
And in the little thickets where a sleeper
For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper
15 And garden warbler sang unceasingly;
While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee
The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow
As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.
Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown
20 Travelled the road. In the field sloping down,
Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,
Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook
Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood
Without its team, it seemed it never would
25 Move from the shadow of that single yew.
The team, as still, until their task was due,
Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade
That three squat oaks mid-field together made
Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,
30 And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but
Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.
The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,
But still. And all were silent. All was old,
This morning time, with a great age untold,
35 Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,
Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,
A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.
Under the heavens that know not what years be
The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
40 Uttered even what they will in times far hence –
All of us gone out of the reach of change –
Immortal in a picture of an old grange.
Over known fields with an old friend in dream
I walked, but came sudden to a strange stream.
Its dark waters were bursting out most bright
From a great mountain’s heart into the light.
5 They ran a short course under the sun, then back
Into a pit they plunged, once more as black
As at their birth; and I stood thinking there
How white, had the day shone on them, they were,
Heaving and coiling. So by the roar and hiss
10 And by the mighty motion of the abyss
I was bemused, that I forgot my friend
And neither saw nor sought him till the end,
When I awoke from waters unto men
Saying: ‘I shall be here some day again.’
Seated once by a brook, watching a child
Chiefly that paddled, I was thus beguiled.
Mellow the blackbird sang and sharp the thrush
Not far off in the oak and hazel brush,
5 Unseen. There was a scent like honeycomb
From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
A butterfly alighted. From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below.
10 On the hot stone he perched contented so,
As if never a cart would pass again
That way; as if I were the last of men
And he the first of insects to have earth
And sun together and to know their worth.
15 I was divided between him and the gleam,
The motion, and the voices, of the stream,
The waters running frizzled over gravel,
That never vanish and for ever travel.
A grey flycatcher silent on a fence
20 And I sat as if we had been there since
The horseman and the horse lying beneath
The fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath,
The horseman and the horse with silver shoes,
Galloped the downs last. All that I could lose
25 I lost. And then the child’s voice raised the dead.
‘No one’s been here before’ was what she said
And what I felt, yet never should have found
A word for, while I gathered sight and sound.
All day and night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.
5 Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing
Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –
The sounds that for these fifty years have been.
The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
10 And over lightless pane and footless road,
Empty as sky, with every other sound
Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,
A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails
In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
15 In tempest or the night of nightingales,
To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.
And it would be the same were no house near.
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
20 But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.
Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.
Only the sound remains
Of the old mill;
Gone is the wheel;
On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns.
5 Water that toils no more
Dangles white locks
And, falling, mocks
The music of the mill-wheel’s busy roar.
Pretty to see, by day
10 Its sound is naught
Compared with thought
And talk and noise of labour and of play.
Night makes the difference.
In calm moonlight,
15 Gloom infinite,
The sound comes surging in upon the sense:
Solitude, company, –
When it is night, –
Grief or delight
20 By it must haunted or concluded be.
Often the silentness
Has but this one
Companion;
Wherever one creeps in the other is:
25 Sometimes a thought is drowned
By it, sometimes
Out of it climbs;
All thoughts begin or end upon this sound,
Only the idle foam
30 Of water falling
Changelessly calling,
Where once men had a work-place and a home.
An acre of land between the shore and the hills,
Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,
The lovely visible earth and sky and sea,
Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills:
5 A house that shall love me as I love it,
Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash-trees
That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches
Shall often visit and make love in and flit:
A garden I need never go beyond,
10 Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one
Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:
A spring, a brook’s bend, or at least a pond:
For these I ask not, but, neither too late
Nor yet too early, for what men call content,
15 And also that something may be sent
To be contented with, I ask of fate.
What matter makes my spade for tears or mirth,
Letting down two clay pipes into the earth?
The one I smoked, the other a soldier
Of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet
5 Perhaps. The dead man’s immortality
Lies represented lightly with my own,
A yard or two nearer the living air
Than bones of ancients who, amazed to see
Almighty God erect the mastodon,
10 Once laughed, or wept, in this same light of day.
Between a sunny bank and the sun
The farmhouse smiles
On the riverside plat:
No other one
5 So pleasant to look at
And remember, for many miles,
So velvet-hushed and cool under the warm tiles.
Not far from the road it lies, yet caught
Far out of reach
10 Of the road’s dust
And the dusty thought
Of passers-by, though each
Stops, and turns, and must
Look down at it like a wasp at the muslined peach.
15 But another house stood there long before:
And as if above graves
Still the turf heaves
Above its stones:
Dark hangs the sycamore,
20 Shadowing kennel and bones
And the black dog that shakes his chain and moans.
And when he barks, over the river
Flashing fast,
Dark echoes reply,
25 And the hollow past
Half yields the dead that never
More than half hidden lie:
And out they creep and back again for ever.
Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, –
Out of the night, two cocks together crow,
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:
5 And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand,
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,
Each facing each as in a coat of arms:
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.
The green elm with the one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, –
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
5 That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,
Bow down to; and the wind travels too light
To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;
The gossamers wander at their own will.
At heavier steps than birds’ the squirrels scold.
10 The rich scene has grown fresh again and new
As Spring and to the touch is not more cool
Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful,
Were I some other or with earth could turn
15 In alternation of violet and rose,
Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,
And gorse that has no time not to be gay.
But if this be not happiness, – who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
20 And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.
There’s nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
5 Whether on mountain side or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning’s storm drop down
10 Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March’s sun,
Like April’s, or July’s, or June’s, or May’s,
Or January’s, or February’s, great days:
15 And August, September, October, and December
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said –
Or, if I could live long enough, should say –
‘There’s nothing like the sun that shines today.’
20 There’s nothing like the sun till we are dead.
When Winter’s ahead,
What can you read in November
That you read in April
When Winter’s dead?
5 I hear the thrush, and I see
Him alone at the end of the lane
Near the bare poplar’s tip,
Singing continuously.
Is it more that you know
10 Than that, even as in April,
So in November,
Winter is gone that must go?
Or is all your lore
Not to call November November,
15 And April April,
And Winter Winter – no more?
But I know the months all,
And their sweet names, April,
May and June and October,
20 As you call and call
I must remember
What died in April
And consider what will be born
Of a fair November;
25 And April I love for what
It was born of, and November
For what it will die in,
What they are and what they are not,
While you love what is kind,
30 What you can sing in
And love and forget in
All that’s ahead and behind.
The last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm’s shadow.
It is as if everything else had slept
5 Many an age, unforgotten and lost
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live yet and here stand idle over the grave
Where all is buried. Both have liberty
10 To dream what we could do if we were free
To do some thing we had desired long,
The moon and I. There’s none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
15 And nothing is to his mind. If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
20 And I could take and carry them away
I should be rich; or if I had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.
And yet I still am half in love with pain,
25 With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,
With things that have an end, with life and earth,
And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.
This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
5 Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: –
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
10 With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches’ cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
15 And like her mother that died yesterday.
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
20 But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from the dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
25 She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
5 For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
10 Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
15 Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
The clouds that are so light,
Beautiful, swift and bright,
Cast shadows on field and park
Of the earth that is so dark,
5 And even so now, light one!
Beautiful, swift and bright one!
You let fall on a heart that was dark,
Unillumined, a deeper mark.
But clouds would have, without earth
10 To shadow, far less worth:
Away from your shadow on me
Your beauty less would be,
And if it still be treasured
An age hence, it shall be measured
15 By this small dark spot
Without which it were not.
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.
5 Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
On this earth ’tis sure
10 We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:
The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
15 Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.
They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
20 Who is now a dream only.
From dawn’s twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.
25 The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.
Often footsore, never
30 Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary
As it winds on for ever.
Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
35 And the Mabinogion tales,
Is one of the true gods,
Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
40 That by the roadside be,
And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter
45 At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer
Calls back to their own night
50 Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.
Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
55 Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:
Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
60 With their pattering,
Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.
Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made
Little more than the dead ones made of shade.
If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:
But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.
5 Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval –
Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles – but nothing at all,
Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,
Could climb down in to molest me over the wall
That I passed through at either end without noticing.
10 And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring
The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost
With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing
The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,
And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,
15 But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die
And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost.
Men heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw,
A thousand years ago even as now,
Black rooks with white gulls following the plough
So that the first are last until a caw
5 Commands that last are first again, – a law
Which was of old when one, like me, dreamed how
A thousand years might dust lie on his brow
Yet thus would birds do between hedge and shaw.
Time swims before me, making as a day
10 A thousand years, while the broad ploughland oak
Roars mill-like and men strike and bear the stroke
Of war as ever, audacious or resigned,
And God still sits aloft in the array
That we have wrought him, stone-deaf and stone-blind.
I may come near loving you
When you are dead
And there is nothing to do
And much to be said.
5 To repent that day will be
Impossible
For you and vain for me
The truth to tell.
I shall be sorry for
10 Your impotence:
You can do and undo no more
When you go hence,
Cannot even forgive
The funeral.
15 But not so long as you live
Can I love you at all.
Those things that poets said
Of love seemed true to me
When I loved and I fed
On love and poetry equally.
5 But now I wish I knew
If theirs were love indeed,
Or if mine were the true
And theirs some other lovely weed:
For certainly not thus,
10 Then or thereafter, I
Loved ever. Between us
Decide, good Love, before I die.
Only, that once I loved
By this one argument
15 Is very plainly proved:
I, loving not, am different.
No one so much as you
Loves this my clay,
Or would lament as you
Its dying day.
5 You know me through and through
Though I have not told,
And though with what you know
You are not bold.
None ever was so fair
10 As I thought you:
Not a word can I bear
Spoken against you.
All that I ever did
For you seemed coarse
15 Compared with what I hid
Nor put in force.
My eyes scarce dare meet you
Lest they should prove
I but respond to you
20 And do not love.
We look and understand,
We cannot speak
Except in trifles and
Words the most weak.
25 For I at most accept
Your love, regretting
That is all: I have kept
Only a fretting
That I could not return
30 All that you gave
And could not ever burn
With the love you have,
Till sometimes it did seem
Better it were
35 Never to see you more
Than linger here
With only gratitude
Instead of love –
A pine in solitude
40 Cradling a dove.
She is most fair,
And when they see her pass
The poets’ ladies
Look no more in the glass
5 But after her.
On a bleak moor
Running under the moon
She lures a poet,
Once proud or happy, soon
10 Far from his door.
Beside a train,
Because they saw her go,
Or failed to see her,
Travellers and watchers know
15 Another pain.
The simple lack
Of her is more to me
Than others’ presence,
Whether life splendid be
20 Or utter black.
I have not seen,
I have no news of her;
I can tell only
She is not here, but there
25 She might have been.
She is to be kissed
Only perhaps by me;
She may be seeking
Me and no other: she
30 May not exist.
Thinking of her had saddened me at first,
Until I saw the sun on the celandines lie
Redoubled, and she stood up like a flame,
A living thing, not what before I nursed,
5 The shadow I was growing to love almost,
The phantom, not the creature with bright eye
That I had thought never to see, once lost.
She found the celandines of February
Always before us all. Her nature and name
10 Were like those flowers, and now immediately
For a short swift eternity back she came,
Beautiful, happy, simply as when she wore
Her brightest bloom among the winter hues
Of all the world; and I was happy too,
15 Seeing the blossoms and the maiden who
Had seen them with me Februarys before,
Bending to them as in and out she trod
And laughed, with locks sweeping the mossy sod.
But this was a dream: the flowers were not true,
20 Until I stooped to pluck from the grass there
One of five petals and I smelt its juice
Which made me sigh, remembering she was no more,
Gone like a never perfectly recalled air.
Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and
We had seen nothing fairer than that land,
Though strange, and the untrodden snow that made
Wild of the tame, casting out all that was
5 Not wild and rustic and old; and we were glad.
Fair, too, was afternoon, and first to pass
Were we that league of snow, next the north wind.
There was nothing to return for, except need,
And yet we sang nor ever stopped for speed,
10 As we did often with the start behind.
Faster still strode we when we came in sight
Of the cold roofs where we must spend the night.
Happy we had not been there, nor could be,
Though we had tasted sleep and food and fellowship
Together long.
15 ‘How quick’ to someone’s lip
The words came, ‘will the beaten horse run home.’
The word ‘home’ raised a smile in us all three,
And one repeated it, smiling just so
That all knew what he meant and none would say.
20Between three counties far apart that lay
We were divided and looked strangely each
At the other, and we knew we were not friends
But fellows in a union that ends
With the necessity for it, as it ought.
25 Never a word was spoken, not a thought
Was thought, of what the look meant with the word
‘Home’ as we walked and watched the sunset blurred.
And then to me the word, only the word,
‘Homesick’, as it were playfully occurred:
No more.
30 If I should ever more admit
Than the mere word I could not endure it
For a day longer: this captivity
Must somehow come to an end, else I should be
Another man, as often now I seem,
35 Or this life be only an evil dream.
Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.
If I should ever by chance grow rich
I’ll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,
And let them all to my elder daughter.
5 The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each year’s first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises –
She must find them before I do, that is.
But if she finds a blossom on furze
10 Without rent they shall all for ever be hers,
Whenever I am sufficiently rich:
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater, –
I shall give them all to my elder daughter.
If I were to own this countryside
As far as a man in a day could ride,
And the Tyes were mine for giving or letting, –
Wingle Tye and Margaretting
5 Tye, – and Skreens, Gooshays, and Cockerells,
Shellow, Rochetts, Bandish, and Pickerells,
Martins, Lambkins, and Lillyputs,
Their copses, ponds, roads, and ruts,
Fields where plough-horses steam and plovers
10 Fling and whimper, hedges that lovers
Love, and orchards, shrubberies, walls
Where the sun untroubled by north wind falls,
And single trees where the thrush sings well
His proverbs untranslatable,
15 I would give them all to my son
If he would let me any one
For a song, a blackbird’s song, at dawn.
He should have no more, till on my lawn
Never a one was left, because I
20 Had shot them to put them into a pie, –
His Essex blackbirds, every one,
And I was left old and alone.
Then unless I could pay, for rent, a song
As sweet as a blackbird’s, and as long –
25 No more – he should have the house, not I:
Margaretting or Wingle Tye,
Or it might be Skreens, Gooshays, or Cockerells,
Shellow, Rochetts, Bandish, or Pickerells,
Martins, Lambkins, or Lillyputs,
30 Should be his till the cart tracks had no ruts.
What shall I give my daughter the younger
More than will keep her from cold and hunger?
I shall not give her anything.
If she shared South Weald and Havering,
5 Their acres, the two brooks running between,
Paine’s Brook and Weald Brook,
With pewit, woodpecker, swan, and rook,
She would be no richer than the queen
Who once on a time sat in Havering Bower
10 Alone, with the shadows, pleasure and power.
She could do no more with Samarcand,
Or the mountains of a mountain land
And its far white house above cottages
Like Venus above the Pleiades.
15 With so many acres and their lumber,
But leave her Steep and her own world
And her spectacled self with hair uncurled,
Wanting a thousand little things
20That time without contentment brings.
And you, Helen, what should I give you?
So many things I would give you
Had I an infinite great store
Offered me and I stood before
5 To choose. I would give you youth,
All kinds of loveliness and truth,
A clear eye as good as mine,
Lands, waters, flowers, wine,
As many children as your heart
10 Might wish for, a far better art
Than mine can be, all you have lost
Upon the travelling waters tossed,
Or given to me. If I could choose
Freely in that great treasure-house
15 Anything from any shelf,
I would give you back yourself,
And power to discriminate
What you want and want it not too late,
Many fair days free from care
20 And heart to enjoy both foul and fair,
And myself, too, if I could find
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.
Dull-thoughted, walking among the nunneries
Of many a myriad anemones
In the close copses, I grew weary of Spring
Till I emerged and in my wandering
5 I climbed the down up to a lone pine clump
Of six, the tallest dead, one a mere stump.
On one long stem, branchless and flayed and prone,
I sat in the sun listening to the wind alone,
Thinking there could be no old song so sad
10 As the wind’s song; but later none so glad
Could I remember as that same wind’s song
All the time blowing the pine boughs among.
My heart that had been still as the dead tree
Awakened by the West wind was made free.
Like the touch of rain she was
On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:
5 With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her ‘Go now’.
Those two words shut a door
10 Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.
When we two walked in Lent
We imagined that happiness
Was something different
And this was something less.
5 But happy were we to hide
Our happiness, not as they were
Who acted in their pride
Juno and Jupiter:
For the Gods in their jealousy
10 Murdered that wife and man,
And we that were wise live free
To recall our happiness then.
Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.
5 This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.
By the ford at the town’s edge
Horse and carter rest:
The carter smokes on the bridge
Watching the water press in swathes about his horse’s chest.
5 From the inn one watches, too,
In the room for visitors
That has no fire, but a view
And many cases of stuffed fish, vermin, and kingfishers.
I never saw that land before,
And now can never see it again;
Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar
Endeared, by gladness and by pain,
5 Great was the affection that I bore
To the valley and the river small,
The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,
The chickens from the farmsteads, all
Elm-hidden, and the tributaries
10 Descending at equal interval;
The blackthorns down along the brook
With wounds yellow as crocuses
Where yesterday the labourer’s hook
Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze
15 That hinted all and nothing spoke.
I neither expected anything
Nor yet remembered: but some goal
I touched then; and if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
20 As I went on my journeying,
I should use, as the trees and birds did,
A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid
Excepting from those like me made
25 Who answer when such whispers bid.
The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.
It rains, and nothing stirs within the fence
Anywhere through the orchard’s untrodden, dense
Forest of parsley. The great diamonds
Of rain on the grassblades there is none to break,
5Or the fallen petals further down to shake.
And I am nearly as happy as possible
To search the wilderness in vain though well,
To think of two walking, kissing there,
Drenched, yet forgetting the kisses of the rain:
10 Sad, too, to think that never, never again,
Unless alone, so happy shall I walk
In the rain. When I turn away, on its fine stalk
Twilight has fined to naught, the parsley flower
Figures, suspended still and ghostly white,
15 The past hovering as it revisits the light.
Some eyes condemn the earth they gaze upon:
Some wait patiently till they know far more
Than earth can tell them: some laugh at the whole
As folly of another’s making: one
5 I knew that laughed because he saw, from core
To rind, not one thing worth the laugh his soul
Had ready at waking: some eyes have begun
With laughing; some stand startled at the door.
Others, too, I have seen rest, question, roll,
10 Dance, shoot.
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