Part 18

Truant there from Time and Pain, What I had, I find again: Sunlight in the boughs above, Sunlight in your hair and dress, The hands too proud for all but Love, The Lips of utter kindliness, The Heart of bravery swift and clean Where the best was safe, I knew, And laughter in the gold and green, And song, and friends, and ever you With smiling and familiar eyes, You--but friendly: you--but true.

And Innocence accounted wise, And Faith the fool, the pitiable. Love so rare, one would swear All of earth for ever well--

Careless lips and flying hair, And little things I may not tell.

It does but double the heart-ache When I wake, when I wake.

1912 (?).

Sonnet: in Time of Revolt

The Thing must End. I am no boy! I am No BOY! I being twenty-one. Uncle, you make A great mistake, a very great mistake, In chiding me for letting slip a "Damn!" What's more, you called me "Mother's one ewe lamb," Bade me "refrain from swearing--for her sake-- Till I'm grown up" . . . --By God! I think you take Too much upon you, Uncle William!

You say I am your brother's only son. I know it. And, "What of it?" I reply. My heart's resolved. Something must be done. So shall I curb, so baffle, so suppress This too avuncular officiousness, Intolerable consanguinity.

January 1908.

A Letter to a Live Poet

Sir, since the last Elizabethan died, Or, rather, that more Paradisal muse, Blind with much light, passed to the light more glorious Or deeper blindness, no man's hand, as thine, Has, on the world's most noblest chord of song, Struck certain magic strains. Ears satiate With the clamorous, timorous whisperings of to-day, Thrilled to perceive once more the spacious voice And serene utterance of old. We heard --With rapturous breath half-held, as a dreamer dreams Who dares not know it dreaming, lest he wake-- The odorous, amorous style of poetry, The melancholy knocking of those lines, The long, low soughing of pentameters, --Or the sharp of rhyme as a bird's cry-- And the innumerable truant polysyllables Multitudinously twittering like a bee. Fulfilled our hearts were with that music then, And all the evenings sighed it to the dawn, And all the lovers heard it from all the trees. All of the accents upon all the norms! --And ah! the stress on the penultimate! We never knew blank verse could have such feet.

Where is it now? Oh, more than ever, now I sometimes think no poetry is read Save where some sepultured Caesura bled, Royally incarnadining all the line. Is the imperial iamb laid to rest, And the young trochee, having done enough?

Ah! turn again! Sing so to us, who are sick Of seeming-simple rhymes, bizarre emotions, Decked in the simple verses of the day, Infinite meaning in the little gloom, Irregular thoughts in stanzas regular, Modern despair in antique meters, myths Incomprehensible at evening, And symbols that mean nothing in the dawn. The slow lines swell. The new styles sighs. The Celt Moans round with many voices.

God! to see Gaunt anapaests stand up out of the verse, Combative accents, stress where no stress should be, Spondee on spondee, iamb on choriamb, The thrill of the all the tribrachs in the world, And all the vowels rising to the E! To hear the blessed mutter of those verbs, Conjunctions passionate toward each other's arms, And epithets like amaranthine lovers Stretching luxuriously to the stars, All prouder pronouns than the dawn, and all The thunder of the trumpets of the noun!

January 1911.

Fragment on Painters

There is an evil which that Race attaints Who represent God's World with oily paints, Who mock the Universe, so rare and sweet, With spots of colour on a canvas sheet, Defile the Lovely and insult the Good By scrawling upon little bits of wood. They'd snare the moon, and catch the immortal sun With madder brown and pale vermilion, Entrap an English evening's magic hush . . .

The True Beatitude (Bouts-Rimes)

They say when the Great Prompter's hand shall ring Down the last curtain upon earth and sea, All the Good Mimes will have eternity To praise their Author, worship love and sing; Or to the walls of Heaven wandering Look down on those damned for a fretful d----, Mock them (all theologians agree On this reward for virtue), laugh, and fling

New sulphur on the sin-incarnadined . . . Ah, Love! still temporal, and still atmospheric, Teleologically unperturbed, We share a peace by no divine divined, An earthly garden hidden from any cleric, Untrodden of God, by no Eternal curbed.

1913.

Sonnet Reversed

Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights.

Ah, the delirious weeks of honeymoon! Soon they returned, and after strange adventures, Settled at Balham by the end of June, Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures, And in Antofagastas. Still he went Cityward daily; still she did abide At home. And both were really quite content With work and social pleasures. Then they died. They left three children (beside George, who drank); The eldest Jane, who married Mr. Bell, William, the head-clerk in the County Bank, And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well.

Lulworth, 1 January 1911.

It's Not Going to Happen Again

I have known the most dear that is granted us here, More supreme than the gods know above, Like a star I was hurled through the sweet of the world, And the height and the light of it, Love. I have risen to the uttermost Heaven of Joy, I have sunk to the sheer Hell of Pain-- But--it's not going to happen again, my boy, It's not going to happen again.

It's the very first word that poor Juliet heard From her Romeo over the Styx; And the Roman will tell Cleopatra in hell When she starts her immortal old tricks; What Paris was tellin' for good-bye to Helen When he bundled her into the train-- Oh, it's not going to happen again, old girl, It's not going to happen again.