APPREHENSION

AND all hours long, the town Roars like a beast in a cave That is wounded there And like to drown; While days rush, wave after wave On its lair. An invisible woe unseals The flood, so it passes beyond All bounds: the great old city Recumbent roars as it feels The foamy paw of the pond Reach from immensity. But all that it can do Now, as the tide rises, Is to listen and hear the grim Waves crash like thunder through The splintered streets, hear noises Roll hollow in the interim.

COMING AWAKE

WHEN I woke, the lake-lights were quivering on the wall, The sunshine swam in a shoal across and across, And a hairy, big bee hung over the primulas In the window, his body black fur, and the sound of him cross. There was something I ought to remember: and yet I did not remember. Why should I? The run- ning lights And the airy primulas, oblivious Of the impending bee—they were fair enough sights.

FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW

THE glimmer of the limes, sun-heavy, sleeping, Goes trembling past me up the College wall. Below, the lawn, in soft blue shade is keeping, The daisy-froth quiescent, softly in thrall. Beyond the leaves that overhang the street, Along the flagged, clean pavement summer-white, Passes the world with shadows at their feet Going left and right. Remote, although I hear the beggar's cough, See the woman's twinkling fingers tend him a coin, I sit absolved, assured I am better off Beyond a world I never want to join.

FLAPPER

LOVE has crept out of her sealéd heart As a field-bee, black and amber, Breaks from the winter-cell, to clamber Up the warm grass where the sunbeams start. Mischief has come in her dawning eyes, And a glint of coloured iris brings Such as lies along the folded wings Of the bee before he flies. Who, with a ruffling, careful breath, Has opened the wings of the wild young sprite? Has fluttered her spirit to stumbling flight In her eyes, as a young bee stumbleth? Love makes the burden of her voice. The hum of his heavy, staggering wings Sets quivering with wisdom the common things That she says, and her words rejoice.

BIRDCAGE WALK

WHEN the wind blows her veil And uncovers her laughter I cease, I turn pale. When the wind blows her veil From the woes I bewail Of love and hereafter: When the wind blows her veil I cease, I turn pale.

LETTER FROM TOWN: THE

ALMOND TREE

YOU promised to send me some violets. Did you forget? White ones and blue ones from under the orchard hedge? Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a pledge Of our early love that hardly has opened yet. Here there's an almond tree—you have never seen Such a one in the north—it flowers on the street, and I stand Every day by the fence to look up for the flowers that expand At rest in the blue, and wonder at what they mean. Under the almond tree, the happy lands Provence, Japan, and Italy repose, And passing feet are chatter and clapping of those Who play around us, country girls clapping their hands. You, my love, the foremost, in a flowered gown, All your unbearable tenderness, you with the laughter Startled upon your eyes now so wide with here- after, You with loose hands of abandonment hanging down.

FLAT SUBURBS, S.W., IN THE

MORNING

THE new red houses spring like plants In level rows Of reddish herbage that bristles and slants Its square shadows. The pink young houses show one side bright Flatly assuming the sun, And one side shadow, half in sight, Half-hiding the pavement-run; Where hastening creatures pass intent On their level way, Threading like ants that can never relent And have nothing to say. Bare stems of street-lamps stiffly stand At random, desolate twigs, To testify to a blight on the land That has stripped their sprigs.

THIEF IN THE NIGHT

LAST night a thief came to me And struck at me with something dark. I cried, but no one could hear me, I lay dumb and stark. When I awoke this morning I could find no trace; Perhaps 'twas a dream of warning, For I've lost my peace.

LETTER FROM TOWN: ON A

GREY EVENING IN MARCH

THE clouds are pushing in grey reluctance slowly northward to you, While north of them all, at the farthest ends, stands one bright-bosomed, aglance With fire as it guards the wild north cloud-coasts, red-fire seas running through The rocks where ravens flying to windward melt as a well-shot lance. You should be out by the orchard, where violets secretly darken the earth, Or there in the woods of the twilight, with northern wind-flowers shaken astir. Think of me here in the library, trying and trying a song that is worth Tears and swords to my heart, arrows no armour will turn or deter. You tell me the lambs have come, they lie like daisies white in the grass Of the dark-green hills; new calves in shed; peewits turn after the plough— It is well for you. For me the navvies work in the road where I pass And I want to smite in anger the barren rock of each waterless brow. Like the sough of a wind that is caught up high in the mesh of the budding trees, A sudden car goes sweeping past, and I strain my soul to hear The voice of the furtive triumphant engine as it

rushes past like a breeze, To hear on its mocking triumphance unwitting the after-echo of fear.

SUBURBS ON A HAZY DAY

O STIFFLY shapen houses that change not, What conjuror's cloth was thrown across you, and raised To show you thus transfigured, changed, Your stuff all gone, your menace almost rased? Such resolute shapes, so harshly set In hollow blocks and cubes deformed, and heaped In void and null profusion, how is this? In what strong aqua regia now are you steeped? That you lose the brick-stuff out of you And hover like a presentment, fading faint And vanquished, evaporate away To leave but only the merest possible taint!