FOREWORD

THESE poems should not be considered separately, as so many single pieces. They are intended as an essential story, or history, or confession, unfolding one from the other in organic development, the whole revealing the intrinsic experience of a man during the crisis of manhood, when he marries and comes into himself. The period covered is, roughly, the sixth lustre of a man's life

ARGUMENT

After much struggling and loss in love and in the world of man, the protagonist throws in his lot with a woman who is already married. Together they go into another country, she perforce leaving her children behind. The conflict of love and hate goes on between the man and the woman, and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion, they transcend into some condition of blessedness

MOONRISE AND who has seen the moon, who has not seen Her rise from out the chamber of the deep, Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw Confession of delight upon the wave, Littering the waves with her own superscription Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us Spread out and known at last, and we are sure That beauty is a thing beyond the grave, That perfect, bright experience never falls To nothingness, and time will dim the moon Sooner than our full consummation here In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

ELEGY

THE sun immense and rosy Must have sunk and become extinct The night you closed your eyes for ever against me. Grey days, and wan, dree dawnings Since then, with fritter of flowers— Day wearies me with its ostentation and fawnings. Still, you left me the nights, The great dark glittery window, The bubble hemming this empty existence with lights. Still in the vast hollow Like a breath in a bubble spinning Brushing the stars, goes my soul, that skims the bounds like a swallow! I can look through The film of the bubble night, to where you are. Through the film I can almost touch you. EASTWOOD

NONENTITY

THE stars that open and shut Fall on my shallow breast Like stars on a pool. The soft wind, blowing cool Laps little crest after crest Of ripples across my breast. And dark grass under my feet Seems to dabble in me Like grass in a brook. Oh, and it is sweet To be all these things, not to be Any more myself. For look, I am weary of myself!

MARTYR À LA MODE

AH God, life, law, so many names you keep, You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep That does inform this various dream of living, You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving Us out as dreams, you august Sleep Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all time, The constellations, your great heart, the sun Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain; Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon For when at night, from out the full surcharge Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw The harvest, the spent action to itself; Leaves me unburdened to begin again; At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep, Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands Complain of what the day has had them do? Never let it be said I was poltroon At this my task of living, this my dream, This me which rises from the dark of sleep In white flesh robed to drape another dream, As lightning comes all white and trembling From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about

One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over, In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep, And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened. If so the Vast, the God, the Sleep that still grows richer Have said that I, this mote in the body of sleep Must in my transiency pass all through pain, Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude Dull meteorite flash only into light When tearing through the anguish of this life, Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread God To alter my one speck of doom, when round me burns The whole great conflagration of all life, Lapped like a body close upon a sleep, Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep Within the immense and toilsome life-time, heaved With ache of dreams that body forth the Sleep? Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul That slowly labours in a vast travail, To halt the heart, divert the streaming flow That carries moons along, and spare the stress That crushes me to an unseen atom of fire? When pain and all

And grief are but the same last wonder, Sleep Rising to dream in me a small keen dream Of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent— CROYDON

DON JUAN

IT is Isis the mystery Must be in love with me. Here this round ball of earth Where all the mountains sit Solemn in groups, And the bright rivers flit Round them for girth. Here the trees and troops Darken the shining grass, And many people pass Plundered from heaven, Many bright people pass, Plunder from heaven. What of the mistresses What the beloved seven? —They were but witnesses, I was just driven. Where is there peace for me? Isis the mystery Must be in love with me.

THE SEA

You, you are all unloving, loveless, you; Restless and lonely, shaken by your own moods, You are celibate and single, scorning a comrade even, Threshing your own passions with no woman for the threshing-floor, Finishing your dreams for your own sake only, Playing your great game around the world, alone, Without playmate, or helpmate, having no one to cherish, No one to comfort, and refusing any comforter. Not like the earth, the spouse all full of increase Moiled over with the rearing of her many-mouthed young; You are single, you are fruitless, phosphorescent, cold and callous, Naked of worship, of love or of adornment, Scorning the panacea even of labour, Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's goings, Sea, only you are free, sophisticated. You who toil not, you who spin not, Surely but for you and your like, toiling Were not worth while, nor spinning worth the effort! You who take the moon as in a sieve, and sift Her flake by flake and spread her meaning out; You who roll the stars like jewels in your palm,

So that they seem to utter themselves aloud; You who steep from out the days their colour, Reveal the universal tint that dyes Their web; who shadow the sun's great gestures and expressions So that he seems a stranger in his passing; Who voice the dumb night fittingly; Sea, you shadow of all things, now mock us to death with your shadowing. BOURNEMOUTH

HYMN TO PRIAPUS

MY love lies underground With her face upturned to mine, And her mouth unclosed in a last long kiss That ended her life and mine. I dance at the Christmas party Under the mistletoe Along with a ripe, slack country lass Jostling to and fro. The big, soft country lass, Like a loose sheaf of wheat Slipped through my arms on the threshing floor At my feet. The warm, soft country lass, Sweet as an armful of wheat At threshing-time broken, was broken For me, and ah, it was sweet! Now I am going home Fulfilled and alone, I see the great Orion standing Looking down. He's the star of my first beloved Love-making. The witness of all that bitter-sweet Heart-aching. Now he sees this as well, This last commission. Nor do I get any look Of admonition. He can add the reckoning up I suppose, between now and then, Having walked himself in the thorny, difficult Ways of men. He has done as I have done No doubt: Remembered and forgotten Turn and about. My love lies underground With her face upturned to mine, And her mouth unclosed in the last long kiss That ended her life and mine.

She fares in the stark immortal Fields of death; I in these goodly, frozen Fields beneath. Something in me remembers And will not forget. The stream of my life in the darkness Deathward set! And something in me has forgotten, Has ceased to care. Desire comes up, and contentment Is debonair. I, who am worn and careful, How much do I care? How is it I grin then, and chuckle Over despair? Grief, grief, I suppose and sufficient Grief makes us free To be faithless and faithful together As we have to be.

BALLAD OF A WILFUL WOMAN

FIRST PART UPON her plodding palfrey With a heavy child at her breast And Joseph holding the bridle They mount to the last hill-crest. Dissatisfied and weary She sees the blade of the sea Dividing earth and heaven In a glitter of ecstasy. Sudden a dark-faced stranger With his back to the sun, holds out His arms; so she lights from her palfrey And turns her round about. She has given the child to Joseph, Gone down to the flashing shore; And Joseph, shading his eyes with his hand, Stands watching evermore. SECOND PART THE sea in the stones is singing, A woman binds her hair With yellow, frail sea-poppies, That shine as her fingers stir. While a naked man comes swiftly Like a spurt of white foam rent From the crest of a falling breaker, Over the poppies sent. He puts his surf-wet fingers Over her startled eyes, And asks if she sees the land, the land, The land of her glad surmise. THIRD PART AGAIN in her blue, blue mantle Riding at Joseph's side, She says, "I went to Cythera, And woe betide!" Her heart is a swinging cradle That holds the perfect child,

But the shade on her forehead ill becomes A mother mild. So on with the slow, mean journey In the pride of humility; Till they halt at a cliff on the edge of the land Over a sullen sea. While Joseph pitches the sleep-tent She goes far down to the shore To where a man in a heaving boat Waits with a lifted oar. FOURTH PART THEY dwelt in a huge, hoarse sea-cave And looked far down the dark Where an archway torn and glittering Shone like a huge sea-spark. He said: "Do you see the spirits Crowding the bright doorway?" He said: "Do you hear them whispering?" He said: "Do you catch what they say?" FIFTH PART THEN Joseph, grey with waiting, His dark eyes full of pain, Heard: "I have been to Patmos; Give me the child again." Now on with the hopeless journey Looking bleak ahead she rode, And the man and the child of no more account Than the earth the palfrey trode. Till a beggar spoke to Joseph, But looked into her eyes; So she turned, and said to her husband: "I give, whoever denies." SIXTH PART SHE gave on the open heather Beneath bare judgment stars,

And she dreamed of her children and Joseph, And the isles, and her men, and her scars. And she woke to distil the berries The beggar had gathered at night, Whence he drew the curious liquors He held in delight. He gave her no crown of flowers, No child and no palfrey slow, Only led her through harsh, hard places Where strange winds blow. She follows his restless wanderings Till night when, by the fire's red stain, Her face is bent in the bitter steam That comes from the flowers of pain. Then merciless and ruthless He takes the flame-wild drops To the town, and tries to sell them With the market-crops. So she follows the cruel journey That ends not anywhere, And dreams, as she stirs the mixing-pot, She is brewing hope from despair. TRIER

FIRST MORNING

THE night was a failure but why not—? In the darkness with the pale dawn seething at the window through the black frame I could not be free, not free myself from the past, those others— and our love was a confusion, there was a horror, you recoiled away from me. Now, in the morning As we sit in the sunshine on the seat by the little shrine, And look at the mountain-walls, Walls of blue shadow, And see so near at our feet in the meadow Myriads of dandelion pappus Bubbles ravelled in the dark green grass Held still beneath the sunshine— It is enough, you are near— The mountains are balanced, The dandelion seeds stay half-submerged in the grass; You and I together We hold them proud and blithe On our love. They stand upright on our love, Everything starts from us, We are the source. BEUERBERG

"AND OH— THAT THE MAN I AM MIGHT CEASE TO BE—" No, now I wish the sunshine would stop, and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out between two valves of darkness; the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled sound obliterating everything. I wish that whatever props up the walls of light would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down, and it would be thick black dark for ever. Not sleep, which is grey with dreams, nor death, which quivers with birth, but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable. What is sleep? It goes over me, like a shadow over a hill, but it does not alter me, nor help me. And death would ache still, I am sure; it would be lambent, uneasy. I wish it would be completely dark everywhere, inside me, and out, heavily dark utterly. WOLFRATSHAUSEN