The Tame Hare

Norman Nicholson

She came to him in dreams — her ears
Diddering like antennae, and her eyes
Wide as dark flowers where the dew
Holds and dissolves a purple hoard of shadow.
The thunder clouds crouched back, and the world opened
Tiny and bright as celandine after rain.
A gentle light was on her, so that he
Who saw the talons in the vetch
Remembered now how buttercup and daisy
Would bounce like springs when a child's foot stepped off them.
Oh, but never dared he touch —
Her fur was still electric to the fingers.

Yet of all the beasts blazoned in gilt and blood
In the black-bound scriptures of his mind,
Pentecostal dove and paschal lamb,
Eagle, lion, serpent, she alone
Lived also in the noon of ducks and sparrows;
And the cleft-mouthed kiss which plugged the night with fever
Was sweetened by a lunch of docks and lettuce.

Liberty Rejected
William Watson

About this heart thou hast
Thy chains made fast,
And think'st thou I would be
Therefrom set free,
And forth unbound be cast?

The ocean would as soon
Entreat the moon
Unsay the magic verse
That seals him hers
From silver noon to noon.

She stooped her pearly head
Seaward, and said:
'Would'st thou I gave to thee
Thy liberty,
In Time's youth forfeited?'

And from his inmost hold
The answer rolled:
'Thy bondman to remain
Is sweeter pain,
Dearer an hundredfold.'                         

Horses
Edwin Muir

Those lumbering horses in the steady plough,
On the bare field - I wonder, why, just now,
They seemed terrible, so wild and strange,
Like magic power on the stony grange.

Perhaps some childish hour has come again,
When I watched fearful, through the blackening rain,
Their hooves like pistons in an ancient mill
Move up and down, yet seem as standing still.

Their conquering hooves which trod the stubble down
Were ritual that turned the field to brown,
And their great hulks were seraphims of gold,
Or mute ecstatic monsters on the mould.

And oh the rapture, when, one furrow done,
They marched broad-breasted to the sinking sun!
The light flowed off their bossy sides in flakes;
The furrows rolled behind like struggling snakes.

But when at dusk with steaming nostrils home
They came, they seemed gigantic in the gloam,
And warm and glowing with mysterious fire
That lit their smouldering bodies in the mire.

Their eyes as brilliant and as wide as night
Gleamed with a cruel apocalyptic light,
Their manes the leaping ire of the wind
Lifted with rage invisible and blind.

Ah, now it fades! It fades! And I must pine
Again for the dread country crystalline,
Where the blank field and the still-standing tree
Were bright and fearful presences to me.

Sudden Light
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before –
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall, – I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death’s despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?

The Kingfisher
Martin Armstrong

Under the bank, close-shadowed from the sun,
By winter freshets spun,
Dry tangled wreckage hung above the shallows
In the long roots of the sallows,
And underneath in cool twilight the stream
Lay calmed to a brown dream.

Then with the gleam and flash of a swift-blue flame
Out from the dusk he came,
And the heart and the breath stood still with delight and wonder,
While in the water under
Shot, swift as he, a streak of blue and green
From unseen to unseen.

O wonder, leaping with sudder flutter of wings
From the litter of common things,
Flash on the inward eye till the soul leaps higher
On the surge of a great desire,
And high in the dim-lit hall of earthly years
Another lamp appears.

Dawn
James McCarroll

With folded wings of dusky light
Upon the purple hills she stands,
An angel between day and night,
With tinted shadows in her hands;

Till suddenly transfigured there,
With all her dazzling plumes unfurled
She climbs the crimson-flooded air,
And flies in glory o'er the world.

When Passion's Trance Is Overpast
Percy Bysshe Shelley

When passion's trance is overpast,
If tenderness and truth could last,
Or live, whilst all wild feelings keep
Some mortal slumber, dark and deep,
I should not weep, I should not weep!

It were enough to feel, to see,
Thy soft eyes gazing tenderly,
And dream the rest--and burn and be
The secret food of fires unseen,
Couldst thou but be as thou hast been, 

After the slumber of the year
The woodland violets reappear;
All things revive in field or grove,
And sky and sea, but two, which move
And form all others, life and love.

This Lunar Beauty
W H Auden

This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early,
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.

This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this,
For time is inches
And the heart's changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

But this was never
A ghost's endeavor
Nor finished this,
Was ghost at ease,
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.                         

 

1914 - Safety

Rupert Brooke

 

Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest

He who has found our hid security,

Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,

And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’

We have found safety with all things undying,

The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,

The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,

And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.

We have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing.

We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.

War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,

Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour;

Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;

And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

The Phantom Horsewoman
Thomas Hardy

Queer are the ways of a man I know:
He comes and stands
In a careworn craze,
And looks at the sands
And in the seaward haze
With moveless hands
And face and gaze,
Then turns to go...
And what does he see when he gazes so?

They say he sees as an instant thing
More clear than today,
A sweet soft scene
That once was in play
By that briny green;
Yes, notes alway
Warm, real, and keen,
What his back years bring-
A phantom of his own figuring.

Of this vision of his they might say more:
Not only there
Does he see this sight,
But everywhere
In his brain-day, night,
As if on the air
It were drawn rose bright-
Yea, far from that shore
Does he carry this vision of heretofore:

A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried,
He withers daily,
Time touches her not,
But she still rides gaily
In his rapt thought
On that shagged and shaly
Atlantic spot,
And as when first eyed
Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.                         

The Fall of the Leaf
Maurice Lindsay

As I rode home through woods that smelled of evening,
my horse reined up on his intuitive will
and stood, ears cocked, hearing his visible breathing,
the only sound alive this side the hill.
Autumn hung by a silence, swollen full
of the year's roundness. Under spars of dusk
the encircling frost moved stealthily to snick
each brittle stalk and shrivel night's black husk.

As if somehow it sensed it's enemy
the tired air leant against the lingering light,
trembling accumulated scents upon
the rearguard shadows backing the sun's flight.
Torn by the last horizon's hedgerow, strips
of straggled brightness littered the rutted track,
glossing a pack of ragged crows who savaged
hunger's edge with their own caw and clack.

It was as if the shorn and trampled season
bared an epiphany with no savioured parts
for we who hanker after permanence
while boredom and desires burn out our hearts:
until his tenseness splintered in a whinney,
acknowledging a cue I could not hear,
and anapaesting down his instinct's treason,
his hoofbeats thumped a rhyme of fear and dare.

 

Strange Perspective

Edmund Blunden

Happy the herd is that in the heat of summer
Wades in the waters where the willows cool them,
From murmuring midday that singes the meadow,
And turns very tansies, fire-flowers, tindery.
Naked at noon there, naughtiness two wantons,
From bank bold jumping, and bough down dandling,
Of chimed hour chainless and churlish duty.
I see the glad set, who am far off sentenced;
Their lily limbs dazzle over long dry pastures;
And rude though ridges are risen between us,
Miles of mountains morosely upthrusting,
And dim and downward my gaze now droops,
My pool beyond pasture by a strange perspective
Is plain, and plunging its playmates gleam,
Hustling the staid herd into hazardous shadows.

There's a Certain Slant of Light - 258
Emily Dickinson

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are--

None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air--

When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--                         

I Have No Life But This
Emily Dickinson

I have no life but this,
To lead it here;
Nor any death, but lest
Dispelled from there;
Nor tie to earths to come,
Nor action new,
Except through this extent,
The Realm of You!                         

Blood Moon
Mine

In beating-heart time,
Rising high into glory,
The full moon appears,
And forsaking her silver,
Blushing, dons her sanguine gown.

Setting Out Early
Du Mu

I hang my whip and give the horse his head.
For several li we hear no cockcrow.
Into the woods, my dreams still linger
and I start from time to time at the flying leaves.
It's frosty, and a lone crane wheels.
The moon still tarries above the distant hills.
My servant speaks no further word of danger;
it is a peaceful time, a peaceful road again.

Indian Summer
Wilfred Campbell

Along the line of smoky hills
The crimson forest stands,
And all the day the blue-jay calls
Throughout the autumn lands.

Now by the brook the maple leans
With all his glory spread,
And all the sumachs on the hills
Have turned their green to red.

Now by great marshes wrapt in mist,
Or past some river's mouth,
Throughout the long, still autumn day
Wild birds are flying south.                         

Miss you,
my darling.
The black dog
comes snarling.
Past links
are breaking,
My fragile heart's
aching.
Fate,
cruel to sever
our,
always together.

Fluctuations
Anne Bronte

What though the sun had left my sky;
To save me from despair
The blessed moon arose on high,
And shone serenely there.
I watched her, with a tearful gaze,
Rise slowly o'er the hill,
While through the dim horizon's haze
Her light gleamed faint and chill.

I thought such wan and lifeless beams
Could ne'er my heart repay,
For the bright sun's most transient gleams
That cheered me through the day:

But as above that mist's control
She rose, and brighter shone,
I felt her light upon my soul;
But now -- that light is gone!

Thick vapours snatched her from my sight,
And I was darkling left,
All in the cold and gloomy night,
Of light and hope bereft:

Until, methought, a little star
Shone forth with trembling ray,
To cheer me with its light afar --
But that, too, passed away.

Anon, an earthly meteor blazed
The gloomy darkness through;
I smiled, yet trembled while I gazed --
But that soon vanished too!

And darker, drearier fell the night
Upon my spirit then; --
But what is that faint struggling light?
Is it the Moon again?

Kind Heaven! increase that silvery gleam,
And bid these clouds depart,
And let her soft celestial beam
Restore my fainting heart!

 



Follower
Seamus Heaney

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.                         

The Magnetic Mountain - 32
Cecil Day-Lewis

You that love England, who have an ear for her music,
 The slow movement of clouds in benediction,
 Clear arias of light thrilling over her uplands,
 Over the chords of summer sustained peacefully;
 Ceaseless the leaves' counterpoint in a west wind lively,
 Blossom and river rippling loveliest allegro,
 And the storms of wood strings brass at year's finale:
 Listen. Can you not hear the entrance of a new theme?

You who go out alone, on tandem or on pillion,
 Down arterial roads riding in April,
 Or sad besides lakes where hill-slopes are reflected
 Making fires of leaves, your high hopes fallen:
 Cyclists and hikers in company, day excursionists,
 Refugees from cursed towns and devastated areas;
 Know you seek a new world, a saviour to establish
 Long-lost kinship and restore the blood's fulfilment.


You who like peace, good sticks, happy in a small way
 Watching birds or playing cricket with schoolboys,
 Who pay for drinks all round, whom disaster chose not;
 Yet passing derelict mills and barns roof-rent
 Where despair has burnt itself out - hearts at a standstill,
 Who suffer loss, aware of lowered vitality;
 We can tell you a secret, offer a tonic; only
 Submit to the visiting angel, the strange new healer.

You above all who have come to the far end, victims
Of a run-down machine, who can bear it no longer;
Whether in easy chairs chafing at impotence
Or against hunger, bullies and spies preserving
The nerve for action, the spark of indignation-
Need fight in the dark no more, you know your enemies.
You shall be leaders when zero hour is signalled,
Wielders of power and welders of a new world.

In Absence
Edward Shanks

My lovely one, be near to me to-night.
For now I need you most, since I have gone
Through the sparse woodland in the fading light,
Where in time past we two have walked alone,
Heard the loud nightjar spin his pleasant note,
And seen the wild rose folded up for sleep,
And whispered, though the soft word choked my throat,
Your dear name out across the valley deep.
Be near to me, for now I need you most.
To-night I saw an unsubstantial flame
Flickering along those shadowy paths, a ghost
That turned to me and answered to your name,
Mocking me with a wraith of far delight.
...My lovely one, be near to me to-night.

The Stranger
Robert Nichols

Never am I so alone
As when I walk among the crowd —
Blurred masks of stern or grinning stone,
Unmeaning eyes and voices loud.

Gaze dares not encounter gaze,…
Humbled, I turn my head aside;
When suddenly there is a face…
Pale, subdued and grievous-eyed.

Ah, I know that visage meek,
Those trembling lips, the eyes that shine
But turn from that which they would seek
With an air piteous, divine!

There is not a line or scar,
Seal of a sorrow or disgrace,
But I know like sigils are
Burned in my heart and on my face.

Speak! O speak! Thou art the one!
But thou hast passed with sad head bowed;
And never am I so alone
As when I walk among the crowd.                         

The Linnet
Walter de la Mare

Upon this leafy bush
With thorns and roses in it,
Flutters a thing of light,
A twittering linnet.
And all the throbbing world
Of dew and sun and air
By this small parcel of life
Is made more fair;
As if each bramble-spray
And mounded gold-wreathed furze,
Harebell and little thyme,
Were only hers;
As if this beauty and grace
Did to one bird belong,
And, at a flutter of wing,
Might vanish in song.                         

I want to talk to thee
Dora Sigerson

I want to talk to thee of many things
Or sit in silence when the robin sings
His littl' song, when comes the winter bleak,
I want to sit beside thee, cheek by cheek.

I want to hear thy voice my name repeat,
To fill my heart with echoes ever sweet;
I want to hear thy love come calling me,
I want to seek and find but thee, but thee.

I want to talk to thee of little things
So fond, so frail, so foolish that one clings
To keep them ours—who could but understand
A joy in speaking them, thus hand in hand

Beside the fire; our joys, our hopes, our fears,
Our secret laughter, or unchidden tears;
Each day old dreams come back with beating wings,
I want to speak of these forgotten things.

I want to feel thy arms around me pressed,
To hide my weeping eyes upon thy breast;
I want thy strength to hold and comfort me
For all the grief I had in losing thee.                         

What Would I Give
Christina Rossetti

What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through,
Instead of this heart of stone ice-cold whatever I do!
Hard and cold and small, of all hearts the worst of all.

What would I give for words, if only words would come!
But now in its misery my spirit has fallen dumb.
O merry friends, go your own way, I have never a word to say.

What would I give for tears! Not smiles but scalding tears,
To wash the black mark clean, and to thaw the frost of years,
To wash the stain ingrain, and to make me clean again.                         

Shore Leave Lorry
Roy Fuller

The gigantic mass, the hard material,
That entering our atmosphere is all
Consumed in an instant in a golden tail,
Is not more alien, nor the moon more pale:
The darkness, countries wide, where muscled beasts
Cannot link fold on fold of mountains, least
Mysterious: the stars are not so still.
Compared with what? In low gear up the hill
The lorry takes its load of strange wan faces,
Which gaze where the loping lion has his bases,
Like busts. Over half the sky a meteor falls;
The gears grind; somewhere a suffering creature calls.

Elegy X: The Dream
John Donne

Image of her whom I love, more than she,
Whose fair impression in my faithful heart,
Makes me her medal, and makes her love me,
As Kings do coins, to which their stamp impart
The value: go, and take my heart from hence,
Which now is grown too great and good for me:
Honours oppress weak spirits, and our sense
Strong objects dull; the more, the less we see.

When you are gone, and Reason gone with you,
Then Fantasy is queen and soul, and all;
She can present joys meaner than you do;
Convenient, and more proportional.
So, if I dream I have you, I have you,
For, all our joys are but fantastical.
And so I 'scape the pain, for pain is true;
And sleep which locks up sense, doth lock out all.

After a such fruition I shall wake,
And, but the waking, nothing shall repent;
And shall to love more thankful sonnets make,
Than if more honour, tears, and pains were spent.
But dearest heart, and dearer image, stay;
Alas, true joys at best are dream enough;
Though you stay here you pass too fast away:
For even at first life's taper is a snuff.

Fill'd with her love, may I be rather grown
Mad with much heart, than idiot with none.                         

The Plains
Roy Fuller

The only blossoms of the plains are black
And rubbery, the spiked spheres of the thorn,
And stuffed with ants. It is before the rains:
The stream is parched to pools, occasional
And green, where tortoise flop; the birds are songless;
Towers of whirling dust glide past like ghosts.
But in the brilliant sun, against the sky,
The river course is vivid and the grass
Flaxen: the strong striped haunches of the zebra,
The white fawn black, like flags, of the gazelles,
Move as emotions or as kindly actions.
The world is nothing but a fairy tale
Where everything is beautiful and good.

At night the stars were faint, the plateau chill;
The great herds gathered, were invisible,
And coughed and made inarticulate noises
Of fear and yearning: sounds of their many hooves
Came thudding quietly. The headlights caught
Eyes and the pallid racing forms. I thought
Of nothing but the word humanity:
And I was there outside the square of warmth,
In darkness, in the crowds and padding, crying.
Suddenly the creamy shafts of light
Revealed the lion. Slowly it swung its great
Maned head, then--loose, suede, yellow--loped away.
O purposeful and unapproachable!
Then later his repugnant hangers-on:
A pair of squint hyenas limping past.
This awful ceremony of the doomed, unknown
And innocent victim has its replicas
Embedded in our memories and in
Our history. The archetypal myths
Stirred in my mind.

                       The next day over all
The sun was flooding and the sky rose tall.
Where rock had weathered through the soil I saw
A jackal running, barking, turning his head.
Four vultures sat upon the rock and pecked,
And when I neared them flew away on wings
Like hair. They left a purple scrap of skin.
Have I discovered all the plains can show me?
The animals gallop, spring, are beautiful,
And at the end of every day is night.

The Heart's Journey XXXIV
Siegfried Sassoon.

A flower has opened in my heart...
What flower is this, what flower of spring,
What simple, secret thing?
It is the peace that shines apart,
The peace of daybreak skies that bring
Clear song and wild swift wing.

Heart's miracle of inward light,
What powers unknown have sown your seed
And your perfection freed?...
O flower within me wondrous white,
I know you only as my need
And my unsealéd sight.

Rainy Summer Alice Meynell There’s much afoot in heaven and earth this year;    The winds hunt up the sun, hunt up the moon, Trouble the dubious dawn, hasten the drear    Height of a threatening noon.

No breath of boughs, no breath of leaves, of fronds,    May linger or grow warm; the trees are loud; The forest, rooted, tosses in her bonds,    And strains against the cloud.

No scents may pause within the garden-fold;    The rifled flowers are cold as ocean-shells; Bees, humming in the storm, carry their cold    Wild honey to cold cells.

I Often Wonder
Rabindranath Tagore

I often wonder where lie hidden
the boundaries of recognition between
man and the beast whose heart knows
no spoken language.
Through what primal paradise in a
remote morning of creation ran the
simple path by which their hearts
visited each other.
Those marks of their constant tread
have not been effaced though their
kinship has been long forgotten.
Yet suddenly in some wordless
music the dim memory wakes up
and the beast gazes into the man's
face with a tender trust, and the
man looks down into its eyes with
amused affection.
It seems that the two friends meet
masked, and vaguely know each other
through the disguise.                         

A Maiden's Secret
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I have written this day down in my heart
As the sweetest day in the season;
From all of the others I've set it apart-
But I will not tell you the reason,
That is my secret---I must not tell;
But the skies are soft and tender,
And never before, I know full well,
Was the earth so full of splendour.

Happy Mayday, James!

In Memoriam (part)

Alfred Lord Tennyson

CXX1X

 

Dear friend, far off, my lost desire,

So far, so near in woe and weal;

O loved the most, when most I feel

There is a lower and a higher;

Known and unknown; human, divine;

Sweet human hand and lips and eye;

Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,

Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine;

Strange friend, past, present, and to be;

Loved deeplier, darklier understood;

Behold, I dream a dream of good,

And mingle all the world with thee.

CXXX

Thy voice is on the rolling air;

I hear thee where the waters run;

Thou standest in the rising sun,

And in the setting thou art fair.

What art thou then? I cannot guess;

But tho’ I seem in star and flower

To feel thee some diffusive power,

I do not therefore love thee less:

My love involves the love before;

My love is vaster passion now;

Tho’ mix’d with God and Nature thou,

I seem to love thee more and more.

Far off thou art, but ever nigh;

I have thee still, and I rejoice;

I prosper, circled with thy voice;

I shall not lose thee tho’ I die.

Omnia Vincit
Anon

Fain would I change that note
To which fond Love hath charm'd me
Long long to sing by rote,
Fancying that that harm'd me:
'Love is the perfect sum
       Of all delight,'
I have no other choice
Either for pen or voice
       To sing or write.

O Love! they wrong you much
That say thy sweet is bitter,
When thy rich fruit is such
As nothing can be sweeter.
Fair house of joy and bliss,
Where truest pleasure is,
       I do adore thee:
I know thee what thou art,
I serve thee with my heart,
       And fall before thee!

The Departure of a Crane
Du Mu

He flies alone, while others flock.
Shafts of six feathers press on the wind.
His sound is lost beyond blue clouds.
A single silhouette crosses the moon.
It's a long way back above green fields
to the empty nest on a red-barked cinnamon.
does he know where his strong wings take him?
There is no end to the sky.