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Title: London Sonnets

Author: Humbert Wolfe

Release date: March 11, 2020 [eBook #61598]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif, MWS and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON SONNETS ***

{1}

“ADVENTURERS ALL” SERIES
No. XXVII.

LONDON SONNETS {2}

Adventurers
All.

A SERIES OF YOUNG POETS
UNKNOWN
TO FAME.

Come my friends.... ’Tis not too late to seek a
newer world. It may be that the gulfs will wash
us down.... It may be we shall touch the happy isles.
Yet our purpose holds ... to sail beyond the sunset.
Ulysses

{3} 

LONDON SONNETS

BY

HUMBERT WOLFE


Oxford
Basil Blackwell, Broad Street,
1920

{4}

DEDICATION.

These were the first anemones—
 God only in his heaven sees
 How moving on their small green feet
 They blossomed in a London street,
 From a cool valley, as I guess,
 Beneath a hill in Lyonesse.
 {5}

CONTENTS.

Page
Dedication4
London Pseudo-Sonnets:
The Old Clothes Dealer9
Coves at Hampton Court10
One Man Returns11
The Bun-Shop12
The Fried Fish-Shop13
The Streets Behind the Tottenham Court Road14
The Yorkshire Grey15
Wardour Street16
The Suburbs17
The Last London Sonnet18
Other Verse:
“Sometimes when I Think of Love”21
Old26
The Song of the Gambucinos28
February 1429
Pierrot30
The Dead Man in the Pool32
Dead Lover35
The Gods of the Copy-Book Headings36
Wheels 191938
The Well41
Judas43
The Night44
Other Sonnets:
Three Sonnets of Love49
The Reply52
God Gave us Bodies53
Ronsard and Hélène54
The Drift of the Lute55
Love and Beauty56
War Verse:
V. D. F.59
England60
The Moon in Flanders61
The Soldier Speaks62
Flowers at Hampton Court63

{7} 

TO J.

LONDON PSEUDO-SONNETS.

{8} 

Some of these verses have appeared in The Saturday Review, The Spectator, The Westminster Gazette, and are republished by the courtesy of the editors of these journals.{9}

THE OLD CLOTHES DEALER.

IT’S not my fault, now is it? I’m a Jew.
 I’d a been born a Christian quick enough
 If only so I could have sold my stuff
 Double the price, and not be called a screw.
 There’s half-day Saturday at Synagogue,
 And when Atonement comes a whole day lost.
 O, I don’t grumble; still one counts the cost
 When on the top I’m treated like a dog.
 And, though a Jew should’nt by rights complain
 Bein’ the chosen, can’t a man have dreams?
 Clothes’ dealing’s not the desert, still it seems
 We all of us are wandering again.
 I often think when the Shemah begins
 “O God o’ Jacob ain’t we paid our sins?”
 {10}

COVES AT HAMPTON COURT.

YOU go by motor-bus from Hammersmith
 And come back loud and cheerful after dark
 Adorned with twigs you’ve plucked in Bushey Park,
 Eating the sandwiches you started with.
 And you don’t care, why should you? when you’re brought
 Into the grimy streets out of the green,
 That, if you’d had the luck, you might have been
 The sort of cove who lives at Hampton Court.
You’ve got the murders and the betting news,
 And slums to bake in and the picture shows.
 Why should you care if somewhere a red rose
 Burns all night through, and the great avenues
 Are lit as though with candles. What’s the odds?
 London’s for you; the summer’s for the gods.
 {11}

ONE MAN RETURNS.

HE wanted me to tear me ’ands to bits
 Along o’ the box-makers, ’stead of which
 I took and bought a basket, struck a pitch
 To sell me flowers by the Hotel Ritz.
 I like ’is cheek. It isn’t ’im wot sits
 Working in darkness till your fingers itch
 And ’arf your side is broken with a stitch—
 ’Im swanking in ’is blessed epaulittes!
 Nor I don’t care, not what you might say care
 If ’e’s gone orf. Not that I’d reely mind
 If, ’earing that I’d got a bit to spare,
 He come back sudden. I should act refined,
 Pin ’im ’is flower in with me ’and quite steady
 And then say proud-like, “Why if it ain’t Freddy.”
 {12}

THE BUN-SHOP.

O DAMN those marble tables: makes me larf
 To think I’ve finished with them. I believe
 If you rubbed hard on each one with your sleeve,
 You’d find cut on them some gel’s epitaph.
 They look like tombstones, don’t they? in a row
 Quietly waiting in a mason’s yard.
 Seein’ them there cruel and white and hard
 One might ha’ guessed, I think, how things would go.
 But we don’t heed no warning, gels like me,
 And so I stayed, and now they’ve got my name
 Carved deep, with something written about shame
 For the next gel (when her turn comes) to see.
 One comfort though, if God damns us who fell
 He can’t find worse to ’urt us, not in ’Ell.
 {13}

THE FRIED FISH-SHOP.

THE upper clawses they don’t like the smell
 Nor they don’t need to. They can pay for food,
 But we who sometimes cawn’t, it does us good.
 Lord, what a life to ’ave fried fish to sell!
 Warm all day long and nuthin’ much to do
 And always a hot bit if you’re inclined.
 Shut all day Sundays and if you’ve a mind
 Always go out and pitch into a Jew.
 But wanting won’t mend ’oles up in your socks
 Nor cure that ’ungry feeling when you stands
 Clappin’ your stummick with your empty ’ands
 And thinking gently of a wooden box
 Where they will lay you at the parish charge
 Straight if you’re small and doubled if you’re large.
 {14}

THE STREETS BEHIND THE TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD.

THE quiet folk who live in Kensington
 Mothers of pleasant girls and worthy wives
 Living at ease their comfortable lives
 Don’t think what roots their homes are built upon,
 Don’t think, or wouldn’t listen if you shewed
 That beyond cure by love or change by hate
 Like hooded lepers at each corner wait,
 The streets behind the Tottenham Court Road.
 Row upon row the phantom houses stain
 The sweetness of the air and not a day
 Dies, but some woman’s child turns down that way
 Along those streets and is not seen again.
 And only God can in his mercy say
 Which is more cruel, Kensington or they.
 {15}

THE YORKSHIRE GREY.

THE Yorkshire Grey like any other pub,
 Quietly blazes till the final shout
 “Time’s-up” sends the companions tumbling out,
 Giving their lips a last reluctant rub.
 And if you’re passing by on any day
 You’ll hear a woman with a barrel organ,
 Sing in a high cracked voice what sounds like “Morgen,
 Morgen kommt nie und heute is mir weh,”
 And every day whether its rain or shine
 She holds an old umbrella with a handle
 Of curiously carved silver. Whether scandal
 Or tragedy, its no affair of mine.
 Why should I care then when some drunken feller
 Sends her to blazes, her and her umbrella.
 {16}

WARDOUR STREET.

THERE’S a small cafe off the Avenue
 Where Alphonse, that old sinner, used to fix
 A five-course dinner up at one and six,
 And trust to luck and youth to pull him through.
 I can’t remember much about the wine
 Except that it was ninepence for the quart
 Called claret and was nothing of the sort,
 Cheap like the rest and like the rest divine.
 But Alphonse, I suppose, is long since sped
 And madame’s knitting needles rusted through
 And even Marguerite, like us she flew
 To wait on, waited on by death instead.
 Well Alphonse, well Madame, well Marguerite
 They’ve no more use for us in Wardour Street.
 {17}

THE SUBURBS.

BECAUSE they are so many and the same,
 The little houses row on weary row;
 Because they are so loveless and so lame
 It were a bitter thing to tell them so.
 And ill to laugh at those who hither came
 Not without hope and not without a glow,
 And who, perchance, by sorrow struck or shame
 Not without tears look back before they go.
Here is no place for laughter nor for blame,
 And not for tears, since none shall ever know
 What here is done and suffered, nor proclaim
 The end to which these myriad spirits grow.
 He understands, whose heart remembereth
 That here is all the tale of life and death.
 {18}

THE LAST LONDON SONNET.

ALL roads in London lead the one last way,
 Like little streams that find a flowing river
 They find the one great road that runs for ever,
 Yet has no London name. They know it, they
 Who when the lamps in Oxford Street are lighted
 And star-strewn Thames through all his bridges moving,
 Velvet assumes, see not for all their loving
 These things they loved, hear not, as uninvited,
 To London revel calling Piccadilly.
 They have gone over to the bitter stranger
 Light-foot and heavy, hug-the-hearth and ranger
 Our streets desert. And under rose and lily
 (Even through Kew were unto lilac setting)
 Sleeping they pass forgotten and forgetting.
 {19}

{20} 

{21} 

OTHER VERSE.

“SOMETIMES WHEN I THINK OF LOVE.”

I.

SOMETIMES when I think of love
 I think of Mimi singing in Boheme,
 Just as the tune across the footlights came
 When we were young, my dear, at Covent Garden!
 Poor music, but before the senses harden
 Puccini’s made for boys and girls to wear
 Spite of sham passion and a poitrinaire.
 For if they looked and didn’t find the key
 At least they found the hearts of you and me.
 That sort of love age thinks of with a smile
 How innocent it was of truth and guile,
 How young perhaps and yet how half-divine
 And how imperishably yours and mine.
 You will not wonder nor will you reprove
 My thoughts of Mimi when I think of love.
 {22}

II.

SOMETIMES when I think of love
 I see a boat upon a river,
 And the rushes suddenly shiver,
 Because of a perilous foot that treads
 The reeds and the flowers into their beds.
 Because of a music that shakes and begins
 A different music and conscious of sins
 A tune was old at the birth of the river
 A tune is asleep in the blood for ever
 Asleep in the blood and loving and hating
 The time and the hour for which it is waiting.
 Puccini yields to a sob in the throat
 A hand round the heart as note answers note
 With the music that wrenches and melts and grips
 The hands hot on hands, the lips close on lips
 Cruelly volleying clearer and stronger
 Till we are a boy and a girl no longer.
 And we struggle in vain as long as we can
 Hating and loving and welcoming Pan,
 And you are a woman and I am a man.
 And you will not wonder and cannot reprove
 If I hear Pan’s pipes when I think of love.
 {23}

III.

SOMETIMES when I think of love
 I hear a heavy voice repeat
 “There’s a good doctor up the street.”
 And either it seems I am hard at hearing
 Or stupid perhaps or terribly fearing.
 For its late of a winter night and raining
 With cry of wind; or is something complaining?
 One lamp in the street and a leafless tree
 And a thing is moving that frightens me,
 With fingers that hover about my nape
 A shape like a hand and yet not a shape.
 Now all that we had in the past is over
 Each lover’s alone, the love from the lover.
 No comforting hand for me in the gloom,
 No voice of mine in the darkened room.
 Where is the music and where are the songs?
 For love has crept off ashamed of his wrongs.
 Poor love has gone off to rail at passion,
 And he will not wait for the night to fashion
 Out of pain and fear and anguish and danger,
 A lover strange with his love a stranger,
 And yet, as they were at the opera
 Incredibly close and familiar,{24}
 Incredibly close as once on the river
 When each is a gift and each is a giver.
 Incredibly close and all they have hoarded
 Of life and of love in this moment rewarded.
 Rewarded! Has love in the darkness heard
 Of the little lost shadow, the small lost third?
 Love is returning—to find them alone,
 And if love be a sinner, who casts a stone?
 Shattered and beaten and blindingly sure
 Of love and themselves and strong to endure
 He finds them, by pain more lastingly crowned
 Than ever by joy and by laughter were bound
 Happier lovers and lovers untaunted
 By the shameful cries these lovers have haunted.
 If this be their love, who out of the pit
 Being a devil challenges it?
 In heaven assayed, in hell-fire priced
 Who casts the first stone? Not I, says Christ.
 You will not wonder nor will you reprove
 If I think of this, when I think of love.

IV.

SOMETIMES when I think of love
 I remember how you stooped down from heaven,{25}
 Because they had told you I was unforgiven,
 To take half of the storm, and share the stripe
 An angel in hell with her guttersnipe.
 I am thinking then of your lighted face
 And your hands and the way your fingers lace
 As you sit quietly reading a book.
 Perhaps I move and you suddenly look
 Across the room and the soul in your eyes
 Is bright as it looks with the old surprise
 Changing for ever, for ever the same
 And you break my heart as you speak my name.
 You must not wonder, you will not reprove
 If sometimes I dare not think of love.
 {26}

OLD.

SO old, so changed, and odd
 Even as God,
 I am, so odd and old,
 That I am bitter cold
 In heart and limb
 Like him.
I might in heaven be,
 Even as He.
 So lonely and so rare
 Beyond the utmost prayer
 My spirit weighs,
 Dead days.
Or I might work in hell
 His miracle.
 Changing from joy to tears,
 To quiet all the years,
 With icy rod,
 Like God.{27}
I might immortal be
 Even as He.
 Saying, as heaven saith,
 What Victory, Oh death,
 What sting can save,
 Oh grave?
As I, alone and dumb,
 What doth not come
 Ever, He waits to see
 And surely, waiting, he
 Must pray ah pray! to die
 Even as I.
 {28}

THE SONG OF THE GAMBUCINOS.

THE little houses in the street
 And the warm blinds at night,
 Outside the copper on his beat
 And the moon so white, so white.
They know what we shall never know,
 See what we cannot see,
 The steady lamplit ways that go
 To the quiet cemetery.
They have not any fear at all
 Of life and of its end.
 They hear church bells, their children call,
 Their wife and death their friend.
But for us the moon is white, so white
 It drowns us and it stings,
 And we must fly throughout the night
 Because of dangerous things.
 {29}

FEBRUARY 14.

LET’S be done with talking,
 Words are half a snare,
 That fools use for stalking
 What was never there.
Let’s be done with weeping,
 Tears are but a sign
 That a doom is creeping
 On what was divine.
Why be broken-hearted?
 Time to break the heart
 If we should be parted
 And not care we part.
Dear, the wind is over
 In the world outside.
 I was once your lover,
 You were once my bride.
Let’s go out together.
 In the quiet air,
 We may find each other
 Waiting as we were.
 {30}

PIERROT.

MY friend Pierrot your sleeves are far too long.
 Look! I can hardly find at all your hands.
 And all your cotton tunic is cut wrong,
 And what your eyes mean no one understands.
Ah yes, Pierrette, my sleeves are far too long.
 Ah yes, Pierrette, you cannot find my hands,
 But better so than Pierrot did you wrong
 By telling you what no one understands.
My friend Pierrot you fear to take the light,
 Look! I can hardly see at all your face.
 And what I see, Pierrot is very white.
 Are you afraid? Ashamed? or in disgrace?
Ah yes, Pierrette, I dare not take the light.
 Ah yes, Pierrette, you cannot see my face.
 My candle died with love, and in the night
 Oh! Harlequin, Pierrette, is my disgrace.{31}
My friend Pierrot it seems that things go ill
 With you. Look! I can hardly hear your word,
 And the dark shadow round grows darker still,
 And a new voice which is not yours is heard.
Ah yes, Pierrette, it seems that things go ill.
 Ah yes, Pierrette, you cannot hear my word.
 And the dark shadow which grows darker still
 Is death, Pierrette, of which you have not heard.
 {32}

THE DEAD MAN IN THE POOL.

ONLY a glance it was,
 Only a word!
 What a romance it was
 All but absurd!
All but absurd, you see,
 Yes but not quite.
 There’s one more word you see
 “Death” we must write!
She had the knack of it
 —Less than a kiss,
 And for the lack of it
 Look he is this.
O what a king he was
 (Drowned in a pool),
 What a brave thing he was
 O what a fool!{33}
While all the rest of us
 Struggle to fame,
 Here is the best of us
 Dead with his shame.
Shame? Oh I wonder now.
 What do you say?
 If you should blunder now
 Choose me your way!
If you’d thrown hope away;
 Well would you care
 Through life to grope a way?
 Or would you dare
Take up the lot of it
 Life, love and fame,
 Make a clean shot of it
 Into the flame?
Ah it was brave of him
 Let them cry “shame.”
 Life made no slave of him!
 But you’ll exclaim,{34}
Was she worth trying for?
 He thought her so.
 Was she worth dying for?
 Yes, and then no.
“No,” for a wiser man.
 “No,” for a less.
 But the heart cries “Amen,”
 When he says “yes.”
There in the pool he was
 Just a dead thing.
 O what a fool he was,
 O what a king!
 {35}

DEAD LOVER.

TELL me, dead lover, you who broke my heart
 (O dead indeed, since love himself is dead).
 Need I remember that we came to part,
 May I forget to whom and why you fled?
Tell me, dead lover, since the grave is strong,
 And those who sleep are cured of joy and pain,
 And now no love may reach you, do I wrong
 If I begin to love you all again?
And see, dead lover, since the shadows fall
 And nothing now is false and nothing true.
 Might I not dream (you would not know at all)
 That I, O love, was loved once more by you.
And since, dead lover, death defeats your pride,
 And ere it dreamed of pride my love awoke,
 O let me think, it was because you died,
 And not because you left me, my heart broke.
 {36}

THE GODS OF THE COPY-BOOK HEADINGS.

A REPLY.

FENRIS the wolf, and Jörmungand the snake
 In the slime and the swamp remorseless wait.
 For not the years nor human hopes can break
 Valhalla’s sentence thus pronounced by Fate.
“These gods that are the children of men’s dreams—
 Virtue and honour, courage and the songs
 Men sing about their hearthstones—stolen gleams
 In the poor heart unbroken by its wrongs,
“These gods, of man’s refusal of the beast
 The half pathetic, wholly fleeting sign
 Who in that tenderness are gods the least
 Where human weakness finds them most divine,
“These pitiful gods, fabric of mankind’s tears
 A dream of what all human hearts have wanted
 The vision at the end of all the years
 The holy ghost that half the world has haunted,{37}
“These gods are mortal as the heart that shaped them
 And in that hour when mankind’s heart must break
 These gods who only by that heart escaped them
 Fall to the wolf and Jörmungand the snake.”
Fate pauses, but from Hela’s halls is heard
 A voice is young when all the gods are dead.
 Balder the beautiful has one more word
 The word that even Fate must leave unsaid.
“True they depart the half-gods, and the snake
 And Fenris come. But in the heart’s defection
 I, Balder, bound in Hell for that heart’s sake
 I am the life and I the resurrection.
“I, love, being loosed, will take my harp up—so—
 Singing what all the world at last will learn
 ‘The devils come because the half-gods go
 But in the end the gods, the gods return.’”
 {38}

WHEELS 1919.

WHY d’you write about Frascati’s
 You who from the balcony leaning
 ’Neath the lure that was Astarte’s
 Find a negroid devil grinning.
Changed indeed and almost stupid
 Yielding to analysis
 Now a Piccadilly cupid
 Hanging on a painted kiss.
Now a toy in two dimensions
 Operated by a string
 In your hand, whose interventions
 Set the object capering.
You who at the higher level
 Know love as he truly is
 Not the fair Assyrian devil,
 Not the poor idolatries,
Of the savage, not the crazes
 Say of Shelley, and his set:
 But you find him (as your phrase is)
 Palm to palm in quiet sweat.{39}
That’s a way, O brother brother
 A new way for verse to move
 There’s an older and another
 Will you listen? way of love.
I from that same terrace waiting
 For the music to begin
 “Amoureuse” anticipating
 Watched a boy who blundered in.
Slim he was, a little stooping
 At the shoulders as it seemed,
 Eyes on which the lids were drooping
 Seeing only what he dreamed.
Where he came was noise and clatter,
 But the pandemonium
 Either didn’t seem to matter
 Where he stood or else grew dumb.
And the waltz the band was creaking,
 Like a cluster, round his head
 Changed to cry “What’s music seeking
 Save what he has left unsaid.{40}”
And like flowers, bourgeois faces
 Overtaken by the tune,
 Pilfered unimagined graces
 From an unimagined June.
And, when once again the Babel
 Rose, though we had never stirred,
 There between us at the table
 At Frascati’s was the third.
What’s the good of all this antic
 You’ll impatiently exclaim,
 Still incurably romantic
 Still incurably the same.
Only this—that at Frascati’s
 If one does not wash one’s hands
 That old magic was Astarte’s
 Goes, before one understands.
 {41}

THE WELL.

AT full afternoon slowly the branches
 Stirred as of old and fragrant with flowers
 Touched with a breath of wind look down and wonder
 To where—far below—is the delicate water.
Here should be peace as was peace and splendour
 Of hearts’ first stirrings, the eye to the hills
 Turned, the call of the perilous margins
 Life just beginning, but life well begun.
 Here by the well we played (you remember)
 (Then too the grasses grew at the edges
 Tempting small hands but tempt now no longer)
 Here by the well we dreamed after playing.
Have you forgotten (or has death no mercy)
 How bright the days were and how the evening
 Softer than sleep laid her mysterious
 Hands on the garden soothing and changing.
 Here at the well side we loved after dreaming
 Since we had played by it, since we had dreamed.
 Here at the well side love that was wakened
 Sank like a stone, but leaving no ripple.{42}
Here are our shapes that play dream love quarrel,
 Here are our dreams (and if there were dreamers,
 If we were not like our visions a dream)
 All is not over—is all then over?
Here is the well and the delicate water
 Far below gleaming, the starred white branches
 Fragrant with flowers. Here is the noontide,
 Even the grasses grow at the edges.
 What then is gone? If we were the dreamers
 (And not a dream) then all must be over.
 I an old man cold, fruitless and lonely,
 Watch by the water, which you cannot see.
But if we two are dreams of a dreamer,
 All is not over, and here together
 Age falls from me, and from you the mantle
 Death seemed to cast, and here by the well side
 Lifted again is the voice of your singing,
 Golden again are the perilous margins,
 Sweet are your eyes and young and immortal
 Our hearts are set to the day and the hills.
 {43}

JUDAS.

NOT I, oh Christ, not I betrayed thee
 But He was traitor, He who made thee
 Born of a village carpenter
 With such immortal longings stir
 As stretched beyond the world and found
 In God himself the final wound.
 Through me thou wast by soldiers taken
 By Him, by Him on the Cross forsaken.
 {44}

THE NIGHT.

BE quiet bird
 Be silent all
 That e’er were heard
 And cease to call.
Drop perfume rose
 And flowers white
 Put off your shows
 For see ’tis night.
Soft creatures slow
 Begin to pass,
 And thousands grow
 From out the grass.
With deep low whirr
 The air is full
 And through the fir
 The moon shines cool.{45}
There is no pain
 Sorrow is dead
 Slow Charles’ wain
 Wheels overhead.
There is no grief
 All things have ease
 No bough or leaf
 Stirs on the trees.
 {47}{46}

{48} 

{49} 

OTHER SONNETS.

THREE SONNETS OF LOVE.

I.

AT NOONTIDE SEEKING.

CAN love being love and therefore magical
 When summer and the roses lie between,
 Find back to spring? Or shall he know at all
 The places where his golden feet have been
 At noontide seeking. Shall he know again
 The tune of dawn, the unconditioned sky,
 The world before the coming of the rain,
 That like a shadow waited and went by,
 Soft like a God and like a God aflame?
 Ah will he find that murmur at your lips,
 Still see you standing, as the morning stands,
 With fingers stretched that touched and fled and came
 To mine again, warm to the tender lips
 Once lilies and now roses—Oh your hands?
 {50}

II.

AN ACCUSATION.

WHAT have you given, love, to those who gave
 All for your sake? What gift to weigh the worth
 Of those who, having all, did nothing save,
 But for a kiss made jetsam of the earth?
 What answer have you for the thronging ghosts—
 Gentlemen of high heart, who were not brave
 Because of you? What for the stricken hosts
 Of those who, seeking truth, embraced the grave
 Your magic sets about the brain? What way
 Of answer have you for the fallen tears
 Of those who heard you calling, and, once strong
 As being pure, became the body’s prey?
 What answer, O sweet God, to all the years
 That worshipped you and crowned you, and were wrong?
 {51}

III.

THE TREMBLING BRIM.

LOVE, if remorseless, needeth no defence,
 (You say) for though he waste our lives it seems
 A moment spent with love is recompense,
 For all the might have beens of all our dreams.
 Yet is there something in the might have been
 Was never yet in love. O trembling brim
 Of the far country, that our eyes have seen,
 Have seen and turned from for the sake of him.
 Are there no pleasant places, no strange deeds
 Waiting the comer? Is there no great sea
 Watched by immaculate angels who attend
 Our sails that linger? No red star that leads
 To where beyond all passion shaken free
 We follow the great road that has no end?
 {52}

THE REPLY.

ALL things are true of love, save these things only,
 That at the long day’s end when love is over,
 He’s of love cheated who was once a lover,
 And she, by love once visited, left lonely.
 The dream is done, but here’s no cause for sorrow
 When beauty’s seal is on the dream descending.
 Beauty is mortal, beauty has an ending,
 Beauty and love alone need no to-morrow.
 All other things—courage and truth and virtue—
 Have the one doom, the lust for the immortal.
 Love only, with lost beauty, life outpaces,
 Cold, though they burn, untroubled, though they hurt you,
 And white, like gods, when through the sculptured portal
 The starshine enter and the moon’s cold graces.
 {53}

GOD GAVE US BODIES....

GOD gave us bodies for suffering and for strangers,
 To have their will of. We divided waken
 To find the heart that won through all its dangers
 By the stained body at the dawn forsaken.
 We said of love “The body, and its langours
 Are but a little thing, though sweet. Unshaken
 Behold the heart!” Fools! Who forgot the angers
 Of blood despised and the heart overtaken
 By the gross hands of lust even at the portal
 Of bliss. And not for any tears is altered
 Love thus betrayed, yet though betrayed, immortal,
 Struggling for ever and for ever haltered.
 God gave us bodies; let them write in heaven
 “Love we forgive, but God is not forgiven.”
 {54}

RONSARD AND HELENE.

YOU sang, Ronsard, in your imperial lay
 Hélène, and sang as only you would dare
 That she would cry, in reading, old and grey
 “Ronsard sang this of me when I was fair.”
 That was youth spoke, Ronsard, who will not stay
 To wonder if his own divine despair
 May not with losing loveliness outweigh
 Kisses, that given, melt upon the air.
 If youth but knew, Ronsard! The things that seem
 Would he not barter for the things that are,
 And leave his mistress to embrace her dream
 Exchange her lips for her lost beauty’s star?
 Losing Hélène youth finds the lovelier truth,
 If youth but knew! But then he were not youth.
 {55}

THE DRIFT OF THE LUTE.

LOVE, lay aside your lute and leave the roses
 That with the bays are twined. No time for sweeping
 The strings now in the hush of the heart, nor reaping
 Summer’s fulfilment. For the daylight closes
 With laying on of hands and the heart shriven,
 And mystical washing away of sorrow,
 So there is neither yesterday nor morrow
 But quiet and the world to healing given.
 And if such peace o’er lute and roses drifted
 Would seem to beggar love of coronation
 Thus in the darkness fallen on an ending,
 See! Than the sun, whose golden hands were lifted
 In heaven, now cloaked, more lovely seek her station,
 The moon consummate in her place ascending.
 {56}

LOVE AND BEAUTY.

EVEN tho’ love were done, shall we complain
 If in the world there’s hidden loveliness
 Born of that love, and not a lost caress
 But makes us poorer to the common gain?
 This beauty may adorn with deeper stain
 The cool first jonquil, or with light redress
 The vision of a star, and thus confess
 That love, though lost, is never lost in vain.
 And if for others we have lit this flame,
 While us the gloom invests of dying embers,
 Being so separate, your heart remembers,
 As mine, the world before the wonder came,
 For that sweet change we spent our hearts in heaven,
 Thus briefly won, thus lost, and thus forgiven.
 {57}

{58} 

{59} 

WAR VERSE.

V. D. F.

(Ave atque Vale.)

YOU from Givenchy, since no years can harden
 The beautiful dead, when holy twilight reaches
 The sleeping cedar and the copper beeches,
 Return to walk again in Wadham Garden.
 We, growing old, grow stranger to the College,
 Symbol of youth, where we were young together,
 But you, beyond the reach of time and weather,
 Of youth in death for ever keep the knowledge.
 We hoard our youth, we hoard our youth, and fear it,
 But you, who freely gave what we have hoarded,
 Are with the final goal of youth rewarded
 The road to travel and the traveller’s spirit.
 And, therefore, when for us the stars go down,
 Your star is steady over Oxford Town.
 {60}

ENGLAND.

DEAR English heart, the open waterways,
 The sea that is aware of liberty,
 And your great ships, her servitors, the sea
 Deep, as your depths, saying of pomp and blaze,
 “These things are not for us,” since other days
 Return, and when the flag is shaken free,
 Cold captains, Drake and Nelson, watch with thee,
 Whose eyes, of boastings cleared and empty praise,
 Beyond the wrecked armadas find the soul
 That unto battle brings our captains’ test:
 “Triumph is good, but honour still is best.
 Conquest of what is evil, and no goal
 Of self-advancement. For the world set free
 The ships of England keep the English sea.”
 {61}

THE MOON IN FLANDERS.

SOLDIERS that after struggle in the night
 See the cold stars assume their shining place,
 Watch the sweet moon and her unaltered grace
 Mocking with peace the battle-tortured sight,
 Think these not careless. These were not less white
 Long years ago upon the upturned face
 Of other soldiers also of your race
 Who on those fields fought such another fight,
 These stars, this moon, in their high citadel
 Of heaven are witness in the Low Country,
 Whose lights are the mere lights of history
 Falling on you, these on your fathers fell.
 See through the reek and horror, shining through,
 Cold lights indeed, but lights of Waterloo!
 {62}

THE SOLDIER SPEAKS.

THIS then was love of women. O how little
 Remembered, being free! Say she was tender
 And had a lure of the hands. Here ruthless splendour
 Outlures that lure. And, look you, love was brittle
 That broke, and none could heal it, being sated.
 But this is lasting, this is always stranger
 Each terrible new dawn, for each new danger
 May be the last of all. O, we have waited
 On love like cowards, and the worshipped woman
 Enslaved and shamed us. But that shame is over.
 We are with death acquainted, and to riot
 And call of blood and tenderness and human
 Regrets, he does succeed this final lover
 Whose love is freedom and whose gift is quiet.
 {63}

FLOWERS AT HAMPTON COURT.

THE chestnut trees in Bushey Park are lit
 This year as always since the spring knows naught
 Of war and death, and still the shadows flit
 Across the dappled grass and burnish it.
 And still at night the moon in stately sort
 Is tranquil with the avenues, and lights
 The sleeping palace, as on other nights
 Of springs long past; but searching for the rose
 In vain, the dawn a little whisper knows:
 “Where are the flowers that were at Hampton Court?”
Two years ago when all the trees were green
 The old red walls were unto to summer brought,
 By joyous bands of lilies and the lean
 Daffodils danced before or ran between.
 Where are they gone these blooms of good report?
 And where the lad and where the laughing maid
 Who came to wonder and to love who stayed?
 For a lost flower is a little thing
 But a lost lover is the end of spring.
 “Where are the flowers that were at Hampton Court?{64}”
Ah! spring these flowers are growing otherwhere,
 In a new soil a changing radiance taught,
 Born of the soul and nourished of the air,
 Sweeter though scentless and unseen more fair.
 Where are they gone these blooms of good report?
 Is it perhaps that where the Tigris flows
 There blooms an unaccustomed English rose?
 And where the guns have killed the spring in France
 The English lilies break a silver lance?
 “Where are the flowers that were at Hampton Court?”
If thus the flowers, where are those who here
 Themselves fresh flowers with the springtime fraught,
 Saw the first leaves in Bushey Park appear
 The dead swept leaves the leaves of yesteryear?
 Where are they gone those lads of good report?
 It may be they are sleeping; it may be
 Strange lands have taken them or a strange sea.
 But wheresoever in the world they lie
 An English voice till that world ends will cry
 “Here are the flowers that were at Hampton Court?”

Printed at The Vincent Works, Oxford.