GROWTH IN MAY

I enter a daisy-and-buttercup land,

   And thence thread a jungle of grass:

Hurdles and stiles scarce visible stand

   Above the lush stems as I pass.

Hedges peer over, and try to be seen,

   And seem to reveal a dim sense

That amid such ambitious and elbow-high green

   They make a mean show as a fence.

Elsewhere the mead is possessed of the neats,

   That range not greatly above

The rich rank thicket which brushes their teats,

   And HER gown, as she waits for her Love.

158

-o0o-

THE BEAUTY

O do not praise my beauty more,

In such word-wild degree,

And say I am one all eyes adore;

For these things harass me!

But do for ever softly say:

"From now unto the end

Come weal, come wanzing, come what may,

Dear, I will be your friend."

I hate my beauty in the glass:

My beauty is not I:

I wear it: none cares whether, alas,

Its wearer live or die!

The inner I O care for, then,

Yea, me and what I am,

And shall be at the gray hour when

My cheek begins to clam.

-o0o-

A WIFE IN LONDON

I - The Tragedy 

She sits in the tawny vapour 

   That the City lanes have uprolled, 

   Behind whose webby fold on fold 

Like a waning taper 

   The street-lamp glimmers cold. 

A messenger's knock cracks smartly, 

   Flashed news is in her hand 

   Of meaning it dazes to understand 

Though shaped so shortly: 

   He - has fallen - in the far South Land . . . 

II - The Irony 

'Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker, 

   The postman nears and goes: 

   A letter is brought whose lines disclose 

By the firelight flicker 

   His hand, whom the worm now knows: 

Fresh - firm - penned in highest feather - 

   Page-full of his hoped return, 

   And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn 

In the summer weather, 

   And of new love that they would learn.

-o0o-

AFTERWARDS

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, 

And the May month flaps its glad green leaves

like wings, 

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the

neighbours say, 

"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's

soundless blink, 

The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades

to alight 

Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer

may think, 

"To him this must have been a familiar sight." 

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, 

When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, 

One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, 

But he could do little for them; and now he is gone." 

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door, 

Watching the full-starred heavens that

winter sees, 

Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,

"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"? 

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom, 

And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, 

Till they rise again, as they were a new

bell's boom, 

"He hears it not now, but used to notice

such things"?

JUST TREES

A new series which will be known by the full title of the blog

JUST TREES BUT LOVELY TO LOOK AT

begins on Saturday 21st October and will include extra features.

-o0o-

I FOUND HER OUT THERE

I found her out there

On a slope few see,

That falls westwardly

To the sharp-edged air,

Where the ocean breaks

On the purple strand,

And the hurricane shakes

The solid land.

I brought her here,

And have laid her to rest

In a noiseless nest

No sea beats near.

She will never be stirred

In her loamy cell

By the waves long heard

And loved so well.

So she does not sleep

By those haunted heights

The Atlantic smites

And the blind gales sweep,

Whence she often would gaze

At Dundagel's far head,

While the dipping blaze

Dyed her face fire-red;

And would sigh at the tale

Of sunk Lyonnesse,

While a wind-tugged tress

Flapped her cheek like a flail;

Or listen at whiles

With a thought-bound brow

To the murmuring miles

She is far from now.

Yet her shade, maybe,

Will glide underground

Till it catch the sound

Of that western sea

As it swells and sobs

Where she once domiciled,

And joy in its throbs

With the heart of a child. 

154

-o0o-

LOGS ON THE HEARTH

A Memory of a Sister

The fire advances along the log

      Of the tree we felled,

Which bloomed and bore striped apples by the peck

   Till its last hour of bearing knelled.

   The fork that first my hand would reach

      And then my foot

In climbings upward inch by inch, lies now

   Sawn, sapless, darkening with soot.

   Where the bark chars is where, one year,

      It was pruned, and bled -

Then overgrew the wound.  But now, at last,

   Its growings all have stagnated.

   My fellow-climber rises dim

      From her chilly grave -

Just as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb,

   Laughing, her young brown hand awave.

153

-o0o-

THE GOING

 Why did you give no hint that night

That quickly after the morrow's dawn,

And calmly, as if indifferent quite,

You would close your term here, up and be gone

Where I could not follow

With wing of swallow

To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

Never to bid good-bye,

Or lip me the softest call,

Or utter a wish for a word, while I

Saw morning harden upon the wall,

Unmoved, unknowing

That your great going

Had place that moment, and altered all.

Why do you make me leave the house

And think for a breath it is you I see

At the end of the alley of bending boughs

Where so often at dusk you used to be;

Till in darkening dankness

The yawning blankness

Of the perspective sickens me!

You were she who abode

By those red-veined rocks far West,

You were the swan-necked one who rode

Along the beetling Beeny Crest,

And, reining nigh me,

Would muse and eye me,

While Life unrolled us its very best.

Why, then, latterly did we not speak,

Did we not think of those days long dead,

And ere your vanishing strive to seek

That time's renewal?  We might have said,

"In this bright spring weather

We'll visit together

Those places that once we visited."

Well, well!  All's past amend,

Unchangeable.  It must go.

I seem but a dead man held on end

To sink down soon. . . . O you could not know

That such swift fleeing

No soul foreseeing -

Not even I - would undo me so!

 152

Next Post here - THURSDAY

-o0o-

AT RUSHY-POND

On the frigid face of the heath-hemmed pond 

There shaped the half-grown moon: 

Winged whiffs from the north with a husky croon 

Blew over and beyond. 

And the wind flapped the moon in its float on the pool, 

And stretched it to oval form; 

Then corkscrewed it like a wriggling worm; 

Then wanned it weariful. 

And I cared not for conning the sky above 

Where hung the substant thing, 

For my thought was earthward sojourning 

On the scene I had vision of. 

Since there it was once, in a secret year, 

I had called a woman to me 

From across this water, ardently - 

And practised to keep her near; 

Till the last weak love-words had been said, 

And ended was her time, 

And blurred the bloomage of her prime, 

And white the earlier red. 

And the troubled orb in the pond's sad shine 

Was her very wraith, as scanned 

When she withdrew thence, mirrored, and 

Her days dropped out of mine.

151

NEXT POST - TUESDAY

-o0o-

THE FROZEN GREENHOUSE

"There was a frost

Last night!" she said,

"And the stove was forgot

When we went to bed,

And the greenhouse plants

Are frozen dead!"

By the breakfast blaze

Blank-faced spoke she,

Her scared young look

Seeming to be

The very symbol

Of tragedy.

The frost is fiercer

Than then to-day,

As I pass the place

Of her once dismay,

But the greenhouse stands

Warm, tight, and gay,

While she who grieved

At the sad lot

Of her pretty plants -

Cold, iced, forgot -

Herself is colder,

And knows it not.

150

THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY

will be updated on

TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS

-o0o-

THE INTERLOPER

"And I saw the figure and visage of Madness seeking for a home."

There are three folk driving in a quaint old chaise,

And the cliff-side track looks green and fair;

I view them talking in quiet glee

As they drop down towards the puffins' lair

By the roughest of ways;

But another with the three rides on, I see,

Whom I like not to be there!

No: it's not anybody you think of. Next

A dwelling appears by a slow sweet stream

Where two sit happy and half in the dark:

They read, helped out by a frail-wick'd gleam,

Some rhythmic text;

But one sits with them whom they don't mark,

One I'm wishing could not be there.

No: not whom you knew and name. And now

I discern gay diners in a mansion-place,

And the guests dropping wit - pert, prim, or choice,

And the hostess's tender and laughing face,

And the host's bland brow;

I cannot help hearing a hollow voice,

And I'd fain not hear it there.

No: it's not from the stranger you met once. Ah,

Yet a goodlier scene than that succeeds;

People on a lawn - quite a crowd of them. Yes,

And they chatter and ramble as fancy leads;

And they say, "Hurrah!"

To a blithe speech made; save one, mirthless,

Who ought not to be there.

Nay: it's not the pale Form your imagings raise,

That waits on us all at a destined time,

It is not the Fourth Figure the Furnace showed,

O that it were such a shape sublime;

In these latter days!

It is that under which best lives corrode;

Would, would it could not be there!

149

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NEXT POST TUESDAY