Wonderings

OUT of a dateless darkness pictures gleam,
But are they memories or only dream?
One earliest image is a gorge of crags
Drenched in a spray, with rainbows among jags,
Fish-cruising ospreys gleaming, dipping, calling,
And thunder and majesty of water falling,
The endless onwards of a cataract
In terror and exultation of its act.

Over a precipice it streamed, and broke
To gliddery wool and after crashed to smoke,
Uptwisted, and creamed on, and where it drave
A path of wet stones led into a cave.
Within that cavern, sheltered from the gorge,
Men, stripped for effort, hammered at a forge;
At what their hammers beat I cannot tell,
With spurt of spark the fire rose and fell,
The craftsmen’s bodies gleamed, as sparks were blown.
All this was shrewdly seen and inly known.
Cataract, cave and smithy were as clear
As things of home, as places once held dear.

Three strangenesses come next, of sight or thought.
High in the elms, the rooks their cradles wrought,
And there, in sunlight, in an April sky
Three immense floating giants passed me by;
Three figures, linked as one, as one, intent
Eastward, and staring east, at speed they went.
They ware not clouds, as living things they fared,
I marvelled at their life, but was not scared:
Whatever purpose, impulse or design
Drove them, its splendour banished fear of mine.

Then, from behind a curtain, I beheld
The frosty, moonless Heaven, many-stelled,
And heard, that I was looking into Space,
And Everywhere unclosed in any place
But ever Somewhere, going on and on,
On, into Nowhere that had never gone.

This caused the visions that I seemed to see
Streamings of fire flying over me
Rings and ellipses hurtling in their flame
A fire and beauty endlessly the same
Part of me, surely, and myself a part
(Perhaps) of it; a paint-dot in an art.

Then, from a time which happiness made tense,
Come memories of persons long gone hence:
A coachman pulling-up, to bid me mark
The mad-dog frenzy of a fox’s bark:
An old man pointing where three vipers rose:
“They hissed at me, all standing on their toes”.
Then, a most gentle friend, with silver hair,
At lunch, falling asleep upon her chair.
A little yellow chicken lying dead:
And then a gate through which a trackway led
Beside an apple-orchard to a boat
Wherein my pilgrim self went first afloat.

Great floods were out; the hedges in black lines
Wallowed like water-snakes with bony spines,
Within the channel, full of swirl in swill,
A six-mile current romped towards the mill.
I was then three; two half-remembered men
Launched with me forth and brought me back agen,
But half a century later, I was told
What risks beset us in that bliss of old.
The boat was crazy, like her merry crew,
And many drowned men’s deaths that mill-race knew.
Life, looking on her lamb, postponed the slaughter
And stamped within my soul delight in water.

Beauty of water gave delight again: —
The earth was shining after winter rain,
Each little brook was shouting in its run,
Each meadow was a jewel in the sun. And in a midmost grass a foot-high fount
Throbbed and uptumbled its collapsing mount.
Wonder, dissolved, resolved, upspringing, sped,
Beauty, yet never aught, yet never dead.

Terror of water followed, when I saw
The eddies of a flood in torrent draw
The wreckage under, as though hands were there,
Hands, and the will to make a boy beware.
Even in summer when the pools were clear
The quiet depth was brooded-on by fear,
To be within its power was to die,

For all its still, reflected earth and sky.

But exquisite delight, my spirit took
In many a roadside — many a meadow-brook,
One above all so beautiful a thing
I thought God had a cottage at its spring.
And by another once a partridge came
With chicks which I could stroke, they were so tame,
Quick, pecking, peering, all the mottled clutch
Bright-eyed, unfearing, exquisite to touch.

One other water blessed me with her grace,
A deep, calm quiet in a sunny place,
Where yellow flags grew tall and reeds grew gray
As though all time would be a summer day.
Sometimes a ring would spread as a fish rose,
Then, the ring spent, placidity would close,
A skating fly might skim, a shadow flit
As some exulting swallow stooped at it,
But save for these, no other aim there was
Than to be beauty and beauty’s looking-glass.

Near by, within a little field there grew
Clover, dim white, with blushes glowing through,
Great-headed clover, exquisitely sweet,
Wherein the bees went fumbling for their meat —
Wonder, that kept in poise life’s dual thrust,
To red, to white, while being only dust.

Other intense delights of those glad hours
Were scents and colours of the fruits and flowers,
The perfume in the tulip’s waxen shell
Whence the May Moon-Queen gathers hydromel;
The pale blue chicory, with scrubby stalk,
(Uncommon there, that lover of the chalk),
And under dark green leaves, the first deep red
June strawberry with yellow speckles spread,
Each of the three too exquisite a prey
For hand to gather, save to give away,
For to a prodigal, the joy of living
Is not in having for oneself but giving,
For life is emptiness and Nature bare
Lacking the friend to have the larger share.

Mine was a little town of ancient grace,
A long street widened at a market-place,
Crossed, in its length, by two transversal ways
Doubtless the course of brooks in early days.
Within the width, a market-building stood
Propped upon weathered quarres of chestnut-wood.
In near-by lanes, where rotting tan-pits stank,
Prince Rupert’s horse had broken Massey’s rank
And sent him flying, in our Civil War;
Men found the bullets still, in beam and door.
Rude, leaden lumps, last relics to survive
The agony and rage of men alive.

The little town was pleasant to the sight,
Fair, with half-timbered houses, black and white,
Shops, taverns, traffic, market, in the street,
And cobbled paving, painful to the feet.
Slowly, I came to know it, but at first
Judged of it only by its best and worst.

Two things beyond all others were the best;
Someone was felling timber in the west,
And daily up the Bye Street timber-waggons
Dragged the chained scaly butts like slaughtered dragons.
It was delight to see those timber-teams
The iron of their shag-hoofs striking gleams,
Their brasses bright, their mighty crests at strain,
With crack of whip-shot coming up the lane,
And where the narrow lane-end opened wide
The corded carter ran ahead to guide
Seizing the leading horse, who tossed his head
With jingle and snort, disdaining to be led.
Surely, the summit of man’s glory was
To govern mighty horses hung with brass,
And bear a plaited lash with which to stun
The ear with whip-cracks sudden as a gun.

Life’s other glory topped the church’s spire,
A golden vane surveying half the shire,
A weather-cock serene in the assails
Of tree-upsetting, ship-destroying gales.
Pinnacled, plumey, lonely, there he shone,
Swinging to shifts, but never moving on,
Braving, perhaps, the blasts that were to be
Death to the Captain and Eurydice.
Lofty as any clipper’s skysail truck,
Steadfast as life, as certainless as luck,
Seeing him swinging to the wester’s drive
I ever thought that golden bird alive.

Almost at once, a third delight, as great,
Came, bringing bliss to my enchanted state:
The horse-canal, with barges passing by
Bursting the blue of the reflected sky,
Going from towns unknown to quays unconned,
From sunrise to the sunset and beyond.
Whenever happy fortune let me see
Those barges passing, it was bliss to me.

The barges were blunt-ended tanks,
With rub-strakes polished by the banks,
And bearing dingy freight for fee,
But, oh, when they were close to me,
At locks, when, just beneath my eyes
The dreadful eddies made them rise,
When, within touch, I looked into
The darling cabin of the crew
The little house with bunks and stove
For her who steered and him who drove,
Ah, then, to me, each barge became
A fairyland of coloured flame.

Daily I saw them as they crawled
Behind the ribby horse that hauled;
The slug-horse, day-long keeping pace,
Blowing his nose-bag in his face;
Tauting his line so iron-hard
It grooved the bridges’ arches’ guard,
With riven scorings cutted sleek
Smooth as a little baby’s cheek; There, on the path, with pipe or ballad,
The captain looked for eggs or salad,
Or whittled clothes-pegs, or with hand
Polished a holly-plant with sand.
V-like the spreading ripples veered,
A woman with long earrings steered,
An old sun-bonnet on her head,
No log, no latitude, no lead,
Nothing but keeping the same pace
From loading-wharf to mooring-place.
Daily, I saw them pass me by,
Just horse and movement to the eye,
A plodding horse, a gliding sheer,
With chimney-smokings blowing clear,
And colour where the helmsman leant
Against the tiller as she went.

Next to these dear delights, I knew
And loved, my daily western view:
Two fields to the canal, and then
A farm, a mill, and fields agen,
A wood, with yew-trees almost black;
A bridge with railways on its back;
A line of poplar-trees, a white
Steep, hilly roadway just in sight;
A hill, of which the stories told
That it had moved in days of old,
Glid for two days, church, manor, village,
Pump, barton, tavern, crop and tillage.
Beyond this Wonder, distant, dim,
My western vision had its rim,
And yet, when western skies were clear,
The distance hard, and rain was near,
A blueness showed against the sky,
The Welsh Black Mountains, beyond Wye.

All of this westward soil was red as meat,
The blood of life to roses, corn and neat;
A wine of life, from apple and from pear,
Gushed each September in the orchards there;
Red, white-faced cattle browsed there, matched by none,
Visible bread grew golden in the sun.
Near timbered barns the red brick farmsteads stood,
Each with an oast-house like a Welsh crone’s hood;
Each floated over by the shifting flight
Of countless pigeons flashing dark and white;
Each glad with cockcrow, and the laugh of duckling,
The turkies gobbling and the fantails ruckling;
Each tented thick about with builded stacks
Waiting the droning thresher and the sacks;
Each bean-rick dark beneath a strawy dome,
Each moping haystack sweet as honeycomb,
Cut sometimes with the knife for present use,
So honeyful the touch expected juice.
There on the levelled cut the cat would drowse
Forgetting dread of dog and hope of mouse,
Curled on the fragrant bed with hidden claws,
Her neat wee nose just showing beneath paws
While the hot summer’s many noises blurred
Into one warm and self-approving word.
There the cat slept, and on his kennel’s chain
The house-dog dreamed of catching rats again,
Till towards sunset when with plash and moo
The funeral-footed cows to milking drew,
And all the yard was filled with patient eyes,
Great, licking tongues, and tail-tips swishing flies.

Though many pictures of the farms remain,
Of hopyards, apple-orchards, grass and grain,
Of many-coloured poultry harvesting,
And tumbler-pigeons dropping on the wing,
Yet this, of cows returning before dusk,
Smelling of hay and honeycomb and musk,
Strawberry-coloured, or the white and red
Great-bodied cattle that my county bred,
Is still the constant picture, and the chief,
Framed in bare boughs, in buddings, and in leaf.

Three souls of many kindnesses still seem
The kings and empress of that time of dream.
One, an old, goat-toothed Briton, lank and gaunt,
Not to be hurried, not by tip nor taunt,
Slow to begin, but steadfast to the end,
Quiet in trouble, knowing it would mend,
Tender as woman to a thing in pain,
Moved by affection ever more than gain,
Dumb, incoherent, with a startled cry
At beauty of earth or colour in the sky,
One with the earth, unable to give reasons,
But like the earth, forthcoming in her seasons.

Another man, though dimmer, represents
One more of England’s constant elements.
Straying, while still a little child, I found
A slate-gray doorway to a timber-ground
Where piles of new-cut planking smelling good
Lay near a saw-pit in the dust of wood.
A slate-gray stairway led my feet aloft
Into a work-room littered with the soft
White, curling shavings, fragrant, ribbon-thin,
Delightful, yard-long strips of planking-skin.
These the great planes were sweeping as I stared;
Edge, skill and power made those peelings bared
And he, the Master-Craftsman, let me stay
Watching the wonder, then and many a day.
From those forgotten sights, I recollect
That he could both, do day’s work and direct;
So that I think of him as one, indeed,
Whom every England needed and will need,
Who built the churches in the long ago,
And will again, when greed and folly go,
When beauty shines again through blood and bone
And wretched man again makes her his own.

Last of the three, a woman, somewhat frail,
Stunted, and slightly lame, and ever pale,
Yet sturdy ever, to bear many an ache
And many an anguish for devotion’s sake;
Not to be noticed, save by searching eyes
Who seek a heart that quiet has kept wise.
Untaught and humble, she had stumbled on
Hoping for light till something in her shone.
From childhood skilled in simple country things
Possets for fevers, poultices for stings;
Clever at freeing ducklings from the shell;
Her kitchen-garden tended more than well,
Her cottage spotless, free from mouse and moth;
Her pride, her china and her tablecloth.
Her very life a gift or offered loan
To all whose need was greater than her own.
Her rule, the Scriptures, out of which she spelled
Counsel and comfort on the course she held.

Though I was sheltered, yet, when life began,
I learned that men are terrible to man.
I never crossed the town without the sight
Of withered children suffering from blight,
Of women’s heads, like skull-bones, under shawls,
Of drunkards staggering with caterwauls,
And starving groups in rags, with boots unsoled,
Blear-eyed, and singing ballads in the cold.
I saw the filthy alleys, close and dark,
Where few could read or write, but made their mark,
Where men and women lived and died in tetter,
So little human that the dogs were better.

South-westward, as I heard, there lay
Old wharves of darkness tucked away,
Black courtyards thick with ancient inns
Kept by the Seven Deadly Sins.
My elders said, This was the port
Whereto the bargemen made resort.
I never trod those lanes, nor saw
The seven breakers of the law,
Only their washing hung from lines
And dingy, painted, swinging signs,
And empty alleys with none stirring
Save possibly a black cat purring,
Doubtless a cat with Satan’s mark
Who rode a broomstick after dark.

Ah, after dark, when bound for bed,
What images were in my head
Of lamplight in those secret houses
And songs and fiddles and carouses
And earringed bargemen sipping rum
Defying death and kingdom come,
Telling the marvels of the seas
From Maelstrom to the Ramireez.
For who could doubt those swarthy men
Knew Tenedos and Darien,
Had heard the Goan bells and sinned
In Trapalanda and Melind,
And now the Sins themselves, in red,
Were with them as I went to bed.
Oh, how I longed for but one peep
Before the swift annulling sleep.

Though drink and poverty and crime
Poisoned those alleys of old time,
Where wickedness gave little truce,
I knew that energy was loose;
Energy, too, made sudden storms
In farmers’ fields in other forms,
For those whose wits were gathering wool
Would often come upon a bull,
And tales of bulls from every side
Kept little children terrified.
The wolf that scared Red Ridinghood
Could scare less than a red bull could.

From almost every farm, a dreadful tale
Of what a bull had done, made children quail:
How the bull, wrenching, turned upon his lord
Then taking him to drink, and knelt, and gored:
How the bull, loose in meadow, chased and tossed
A little boy, who lived (with reason lost).
How one, pursued across a field, was torn:
“The bull had tatters of him on his horn.”
And other some, who in extreme despair
Just reached the tree, and panted, dodging there.

Too well, a little child imagined them,
Seeing the great horns coming round the stem;
Hearing the great side brushing round the tree,
Knowing the hunted fox’s agony.
But others, leaping at a branch, had just
Caught, and swung clear above the antler thrust,
But huddled in the branches had to stay
Watched by the red beast’s malice all the day,
Watching him horn the tree-bark into grooves,
And snorting try to clamber with his hooves,
Then seeming to go graze, but watching still
The quarry treed that was to be the kill.
That land’s imagination was filled full,
And wisely so, with terror of the bull,
And none who crossed a field was ever free
From dreadful wonder where the bull might be.

Ah, with what mixed adventure and alarm
I crept to see a bull upon a farm.
In the hot June, I crept away alone,
I passed the duckpond and the upping-stone,
I reached the mighty barn’s vast waggon door,
And, scared though eager, entered to explore.

Dim as an abbey’s nave the barton lay,
Its cobwebbed brickwork stuck with scraps of hay,
Its rafters quick with flitting of the birds,
Arrowing swallows crying darting words;
The yellow wreck of an old waggon stood,
Its rusty iron coming from its wood,
Further along, in line, were sunlit stalls,
The horses gone, old harness on the walls.
The little wrens went up the wooden side,
Stall after stall, their sudden peckings pried.

I wandered down the stable, stall by stall,
It was all vast and I was very small,
And still, the hurrying swallows squealed and sped
Athwart the sunbeams up into their bed.
At the barn’s end, a wooden ladder hove
Up, through a hatchway, to a loft above,
And climbing this, I saw that sunlight shone
Along a hayloft stretching on and on,
Cluttered with hay and speckled with a draff
Left by the cutters when they chopped the chaff.

I stepped along that loft of unknown dangers,
I looked down hay-slides into cattle-mangers,
I heard the pigeons chuckling on the roof,
And saw a gray cat shyly glide aloof,
And quaked, lest from behind me, up the stair,
A tip-toe bull should catch me unaware,
With sudden thunder charging to disjoint
My trembling meat upon his piker point,
Yet, none the less, my spirit said, “Explore. . . .
See, try, and know the things unknown before.”

Then, at the final shoot, I saw below,
Alive, close-to, the thing I dreaded so;
There, stamping straw, alone, within his cell,
The thunder-shouldered felon lowered fell,
A cringle in his snout to lead him by
And smoulders of hell-fire in his eye.
All weight, he seemed, yet, when I saw him shift,
His muscles rippled and his soul was swift;
Seeing his evil prisoned thus, I knew
For the first time, the wonder man can do. . . .
Man from the first had faced this peril close, Had penned him in, and ringed him through the nose.
So can Man shackle all the plagues that kill
And wars that slaughter, if he have the will.

Symbol of fruitfulness whose juices yield
The countless meat and butter in the field;
Symbol of weight, of strength, of lusty thighs,
Of everything ungentle and unwise;
Symbol supreme of power without sense,
Of small caprices mixed with much offence;
Image of crowds and what a crowd exalts,
A thing supremely dowered with its faults;
Image of stupid man with front of horn
Lowered to thrust at every wisdom born;
Dull enemy forever in a wrath
Loose in the field where wisdom seeks a path;
Father of calves, whom manhood put in pen,
Eternal enemy and test of men; Curly cow-conqueror, whom dolt and dunce
Pictured and praised as England’s image once;
Light’s living foe in daily recognition
As mob, as war office, as politician,
As anything that heaves opposing mass
Against the One who might make wisdom pass;
As anything whose bellow moves the herd
Against a still small voice speaking the word;
Terror of children, but an image still
Of what man conquers if he have the will,
Leviathan, man-guided by a hook.
To death by axe and burial through a cook.

Though dread of bull was put to rout
More terrors kept the soul in doubt,
This was the worst of these annoys:
That gipsies kidnapped little boys.
Though laws and charities forbid,
I was assured, that gipsies did:
They lured, or snared the boy with noose,
They browned his skin with walnut juice,
And sold him to a life of pain;
He never saw his home again.

I was most solemnly besought
To ponder this that Minnie taught,
Never to trust, never to take
The gipsy’s promises or cake,
Though cake were iced and promise fair
Alike, they led into despair.
For half a dozen years I knew
A terror of the gipsy crew.
And there were many gipsies then,
Dark, passionate, romantic men;
Oh, many campments did I see
Of gipsies surely come for me,
With little fires, felted tents,
Lean ponies wrenching at the bents,
Old, earringed women, smoking clays,
Bold, black-eyed girls with eyes in blaze,
And coats, whose buttons, guinea-gold,
Were blood-money from children sold.
Perhaps, two centuries before,
Dark, human wolves had tapped at door,
Had lured the children forth with tales,
To ships that waited under sails
To bear them west-away, to sell.
The terror left had lasted well.
Minnie believed it; I believed.

A certain tree its darkness heaved
Nor far away, a straggly fir.
It seemed the devil’s minister.
Near it, a house, in evening light,
Looked like a mouth inclined to bite;
And further off, an oast-house stood,
A giantess in witch’s hood;
These three, the gipsies and the bulls,
And waterfalls and water-pools,
Would always set my pulses quick
And sometimes terrify me sick.
Or from beneath my bed, the smile
So jagged, of the crocodile;
Or from within my bed the claw
Of tigers fond of children raw.
These were my dreads, and skulls that grinned
From nightmares trotting on the wind.

I do not know the day, the month, the year:
It was a green time, when the sky was clear;
I was then five or six, in open air,
When suddenly a doorway opened there.
An ecstasy discovered that my mind
Had every wonder that I wished to find,
Limitless strength, to see and to create,
A wealth of phantasy, past telling great,
Power to call at will, to see and sway
Peoples and creatures infinitely gay
Things in perfection, landscapes, forests, seas,
And I, who summoned, king of all of these,
King of a world to enter when I chose,
(O desert spring, O rock-delighting rose).

Instantly then, I summoned, to my joy
The tiny people suited to a boy,
A fairy people, who, in daily dreams
Provisioned ships, and sailed, exploring streams,
Familiar streams, but past the points I knew,
Where undreamed fruits and unseen flowers grew,
Where, in some bay, they purchased priceless things,
Little Green Hairstreaks’, Purple Emperors’ wings,
Crest feathers plucked at night by Indian men,
Scarlet from woodpecker, or gold from wren,
Or blue-green flash, or golden-tawny gleam
Dropped by the ‘fisher skimming down the stream.

Two barren fields I knew,
Where lonely oak-trees grew;
Pale fields, in places rushed
Where trembling trickles gushed;
Poor pastures, with thin bent
O’er which the peewit went,
And small snipe, tumbling after,
Cackled uncanny laughter.

Their loneliness was such
Few people went there much;
Their cupboard was so bare
No cattle fattened there;
But, oh, to me, to me,
What holy mystery.
Still, after sixty years
Their quiet reappears,
Three oaks together: three
Like islands in the sea,
A shallow sea of grass
Wherein a wonder was
A ring, which feet unseen
Had danced to darker green
Almost as dark as yew,
Or foot-prints among dew.
Whose feet had glittered there
When the bright Moon was bare?
What had the white owl known
Floating on wind alone
When midnight’s bee-bell-drone
Wandered like sound-seed sown
And tense fox lifted pad?
A life lighter than ours
A life gayer than flowers,
A life not told by hours
But by things glad.

Sometimes, on sunny afternoons, I heard
A horn in cry, and hoofs a-tittup stirred,
The coach-in-four was coming with the mail.
At trumpet heard, all hurried to give hail;
At easy speed, the four-in-hand appears,
The coachman’s eyes upon his leaders’ ears,
Each horse a special soul, yet, there, a team
With chink of chain, old-leather grunt, and steam,
With foam-fleck rubbing darkness upon skin,
The guard at fanfare on his yard of tin,
Then the swift lash, the coachman’s sudden cry,
The impulse on, and then, the thunder by.

As the coach neared to the appointed place
The guard returned the trumpet to its case,
Picked up his postal packs and pitched them straight
For clever hands to catch at door and gate,
Then sent another flourish laughing gay;
The dust drew by; the hoofs clattered away;
Breathless the horn, now; dead the four-in-hand.
Life’s very pulse once throughout English land.

Another post went out in leather sack,
Borne by a lad upon a pony back.

He rode to quiets never passed by coach
And blew a postman’s horn at his approach.
He came to homes whose dwellers hardly knew
Railways or steam or aught since Waterloo.
Often in tenser times when light was clear
And coming storm made distant noises near,
Then from the western woods the horn-note stirred,
The sunset spoke as through the Phoenix bird.

From March till June, beyond the ash-pole-copse,
A rookery called among the elm-tree-tops,
Harsh, sweet and dear their calling; now and then
At instants, strangely like the speech of men.
One quiet evening, all the rooks in crowd
Swarmed in excitement, more than ever loud.
Somebody said, “A rook is being tried.
Tomorrow, we shall see what they decide.”

Next day, upon a stump above the pool
I saw the wisdom of the assembled fool:
An outlawed rook moped lonely, nearly dead,
Outcast by that black senate overhead.
“Outcast, for being a rogue,” somebody said.

I was less sure in judgment, even then.
Rooks may have light, like wisdom among men.
Had wisdom brought the vengeance of the herd,
Man’s cross or hemlock fitted to a bird?
All day, I watched that brother in disgrace;
I knew the pride and misery of his case.
He knew my sympathy, but also knew,
For all its warmth, its impotence to do.

Still, after sixty years, I see again
That blue-black huddled thing of pride and pain,
Outcast, abandoned, without kind or friend,
Finished with life and yet denied an end,
And still I wonder for what taint or doubt
Or crime or truth its fellows cast it out.
Those looking at it said, “He is not sick.
His plumes are glossy, and his eyes are quick.”
Even with men, an outlawry is rare,
Crime does not make the outcast anywhere.
Crime is too common, crime has friends and kin,
Outlawry comes when wisdom is the sin.

And yet what wisdom had that bird upheld?
Against what themis had his sense rebelled?
He had denied no creed, contemned no church;
Found no plague’s causes after long research;
Exposed no fraud nor robbery of trade
By which death throve and money might be made;
Arraigned no office destitute of sense
For doing nothing at immense expense;
Branded no sport as beastly cruelty;
Taxed no one’s drunkenness as gluttony;
Impeached no cabinet for years of harms,
Inviting war, yet not providing arms;
Denounced no statesman for an idiot course,
Invoking platitude to counter force;
Practised no art, nor read nor written book,
Only been rook, with something not of rook.
There with his pride about him for his shroud
He gripped his stump, awaiting death uncowed.

So the rook died by vote of rooky mind.
Man soon outdid the rooks in being unkind.

There was an old man whom I used to see
Sunning outside a cottage by the lane;
He wore the smock-frock of the antique cut
Gathered at chest with cunning needlery;
His kin were dead; he could not work again;
He waited, till the closing door was shut.
Old as the Flood I thought him, for I knew
That he had helped ring bells for Waterloo.

His one delight in waiting for the end
Was looking at the prospect of the vale,
The cornfields he had reaped when he was hale;
And many an oast-house, many a cider press,
And many a meadow he had helped to tend
Before old age had made his fingers pale;
After such toil, to sit and see the sun
Was no outrageous thank for such an one.

But it was grudged him; he was bidden go
Forth from his sunny cot to smells and dins
In nasty darknesses in kennel row
Down by the coal-wharf and the deadly sins.
I know not who had made this evil be. . . .
But no one stirred, and this was hell to me.

I raged against intolerable wrong.
Why should a wonder among sterling men
Be driven, after toiling nobly long,
To die thus doglike in a stinking den?
Why had no mercy screened him from the hurt?
In a few weeks, he died amid the dirt.

And in a few weeks more, came Sarah’s case,
A kind old woman in infirmity
Sick unto death, and yet denied a grace
And sent into the workhouse ward to die,
Into the “house” against which all her pride
Rebelled in bleakest anguish till she died.

The cruelty of this inhuman deed
To one as loving kind as summer earth,
Made my young heart for very pity bleed.
Whose life deserved, were Sarah’s nothing worth?
Yet people grudged the pennies to provide
That old sick soul with shelter till she died.

Why such large sin, so little penny saved?
What was her need, but shelter for her bed,
And any anodyne her sickness craved,
A little water and a little bread?
The whole could be bought thrice for twenty pound,
(And then bought dear) but still, it was not found.

So kindest Sarah’s spirit passed in grief,
Killed by the bitter gruel of “relief”
In earth’s unkindness and with outraged pride
Her misery beset her till she died.
“I was too young,” they said, “to understand . . .
Not ours to question what the Lord has planned.”
Surely, nor mine, but life had let me see
How cruel, man, how bitter, age, may be,
How savage, life, when hearts have ceased to feel,
When living love no longer turns the wheel,
When to the helpless left to die alone
The heart of sawdust gives the gift of stone.

Then I perceived, that people had a dread
That untaught should be taught, and starving fed.
They were afraid, lest taught and fed should rise
Not on the horrors of their miseries,
Not on their rags, their drunkenness and itch,
Their lice and ignorance, but on the rich.
This common dread amid the general dark
Was social conscience’s expiring spark.

Then, though the drunkards daily darkened lives,
Starving the children sick, and beating wives,
Making a dirty hell within the den
That made the castle of such Englishmen,
Yet all the poisons of their making mad,
Were sold like bread, and with less trouble had.
Why raging madness should be made and sold
Perplexed my childish brain in days of old
But someone said that but for selling drink
Our ship of state would very swiftly sink;
Drink-tax, that built the fleet that rules the waves,
Drink-tax alone made Britons never slaves.
Therefore, to sell or buy drink, was to be
Partner in England’s impulse to be free . . .
This seemed absurd, but on the other hand
Being a child, I could not understand.