Wonderings

Indeed, I sadly gathered as I grew
That human life was odder than I knew,
How odd a measure, to how sad a tune,
I knew not then, but was to gather soon.
But still, already, in those earliest days
Seeing the unfed children in the ways
I longed to help, and to my misery heard
That help meant money, more than will and
word,
And, yet more awful, texts from iron mind
Forbade to change what Providence designed.
And wicked children sinned, to think they knew
Better than age, what would or wouldn’t do.

Two different races trod the English turf,
The (so-called) Norman, and the (not called) serf.
I saw the rich, like tree-twigs in the light,
The poor, like tree-roots buried in the night.
Uncouthly, uncomplainingly, they mined
To send up sap until the twigs had dined.
The twigs in comfort in the sun and air
Proclaimed that things were perfect as they
were
That if the roots were muddy, that must be. . . .
Roots must be under mud to grow the tree;
Let roots be muddy and in darkness dig
Let singing-birds and sunlight come to twig.
The present practice was too good to alter
And those who spoke of change deserved a halter.
Though but a little boy, I argued, then,
That roots and twigs alike were mortal men,
And how shall mortal man in comfort dwell
Seeing his brother mortal shut in hell?

The land retained some ancient pageants still.
Mothers still taught the now forgotten way
To fasten flowers in pyramids of skill
On sticks, for maypoles on the First of May.

With golden burberry and moonlit broom,
The fragrant cowslip that the still-maid knows,
Tulips and hyacinths and apple-bloom,
And button-balls, they made the bravest shows.

With these, the maypole-bearers went in pride,
And people mixed them rich milk-possets sweet,
(The sillabubs) for maypole band and bride,
And gave them pence, and plummy cakes to eat.

And Mummers went at Christmas, with their play,
With Mrs. Vinney who revived the dead;
Men danced a sword-dance still, not far away,
At ploughings still, a mouse’s blood was shed.

Once in the year, the Foresters, in green,
Marched through the town with banners and a band.
Or circuses paraded, with their Queen,
Drawn by pied horses on a golden stand.

But best of all, was the October Fair
When in the market-place the beasts were cooped,
And horses whirled to the steam-organ’s blare,
And many coloured swing-boats hove and swooped;

And shiny stalls were there of painted toys,
Fairyland stalls, all brightly gardened round
With life of man and beast, exciting noise,
And paper zinnias stuck into the ground.

Ah, the October Fair, the hiring-day,
The sunny day, when it could never rain,
When bells were rung for sorrows put away,
And men rejoiced for life begun again.

Abundant water sprang below the hills,
Many clear wells with cresses on their sills,
Yet many cottagers were forced to bring
Water a half-mile daily from the spring.
I well remember Barbara the maiden
Going that weary journey, water-laden,
Bent under yoke and buckets, stepping small,
Lest the bright, precious, lipping drink should fall.
She was a stalwart girl, not yet fifteen
Bearing her household’s honour, to keep clean.
Twice daily she bore buckets to and fro
From her hill-cottage to the well below,
Then back, along the lane, across a clay
In plough or crop, at best a trodden way,
Then up a pathless, steep, short slippery hill
Each step perplexed with effort not to spill,
And so to cottage in the tiny copse
Of crab and hazel under fir-tree-tops.

Long afterwards, remembering her load,
I climbed the hillock by the self-same road,
It was so steep, that footholds had been made
Cut in the pale hill smalmer by the spade,
And climbing up by these, I thought the more
Of Barbara and all the loads she bore.

Often, the moment’s hero is acclaimed,
A nation’s noblest spirit never named.
Spirits there are, who keep a sense of style
Where one least lapse would finally defile,
Who bear, like Barbara, a daily weight
To keep their living bright and make it great,
Who face the uphill drag, whose curse will lie
As steep on every morrow till they die,
Yet lift the load and climb, not knowing ease;
Man in his midnight has his stars in these.

Often, I marvel at those folk of old,
Those upright English poor, those hearts of gold,
Who, through the hardship between birth and dying
Held a true course and kept their colours flying.
In all their work, so honest and so good,
So full of kindness, thought, and hardihood,
So seldom praised, and yet so often glad,
So proud, to keep their children clean and clad,
And somehow fed, for England still to be.
Below, lay hell, above, stupidity,
And in their hearts a star of the divine,
That no cloud dims, that cannot cease to shine.
Not shipping, cotton, iron, wools and coals
Can make a nation’s wealth, but splendid souls.

Under a hedgerow among elm-tree-roots
And fallen branch and green cow-parsley shoots,
A high red bank came sloping to the way
All tangled green with periwinkle spray.
Each living leaf like polished metal shone,
Wetness and light were its caparison,
And spangled in the jungle of the grove
The long, five-petalled trumpets blossomed mauve,
Mauve, for the winter, yet the blossoms knew
That each sun’s shining made them liker blue;
Colour was coming back and summer winning
The blackbird was in voice for spring beginning,
And joy like sunlight through my being clove
That spring was blackbird-wet-and-green-and-
mauve.

While driving once, in some September dead,
By thinning trees with apples gold and red,
Crossing a bridge, we slowly climbed a hill
A broad-wayed village exquisitely still,
Still, as its breath of smoke whose impulse rose,
Drowsed, as its dog with paw-supported nose,
Tranced, by the peace and wealth that summer
brings Into the quiet at the heart of things.
Into a sleep so balmed from any ache
That even the lifting swallow seemed mistake;
Then, suddenly, with bang of bench and shout,
With squeal of joy, the village school came out,
And down the hill towards us rushed the troops
Chasing with shrieks already leaping hoops,
The boys in passing tugging at the hair
(As at a bell-rope) in the pigtails there;

Ere freedom’s ecstasy had ceased to shrill,
Our two, slow, climbing horses topped the hill,
Resumed their trot and left the scene behind;
There memory failed, and I could never And
That broad-wayed hamlet later when I sought.
Those barns had been with many a harvest
fraught,
Those shouting children grown into old men
When, by odd chance, I found the place agen,
The bridge, the sunlit hill, the sunburnt scene,
Fruit growing gold in leaves no longer green,
Some trees the same beginning to be bare
The self-same place’s same enchanted air
Quiet unstirred by voice or dog or tool,
Sleep in the home and holiday at school.

The mountain-turf was slippery with heat
The wind on which the hawks were poising, came
Fragrant with summer, thyme-and-bracken-sweet.

Cheery, the grass, with rockets of delight,
Green people, prone, forever taking aim,
And with a crackle shooting out of sight.

Gladly, they chirred, the heaven droned above,
Blue, empty, save for hawks, yet ever thrilled
By unseen Summer crooning like the dove.

Within the trench, the rampart and the sky
Suddenly darkened on me, the air chilled
Into a warning moaning going by.

Warning, it seemed, that someone not a friend
Some wolf of wickedness that place had killed,
Might suddenly come on me, round the bend.

But, ah, beyond, the giant foxgloves grew,
With white and purple bells expressly set
For black-haired bumble-bees to fumble through

Bells, that the foxes, when the moonlight shone,
When all the grasses glistened with the wet,
Would slip their musky pads in, to try on.

In multitude they grew, purple and white
Out-topping the sun-scented tender fern,
And all the mountain’s heave with brooks was
bright;
Little, bright brooks, each twinkling from a cup
Or rushy dip, in which I could discern
A wrinkling clearness ever trembling up.

The summer now is ghost of summer then.
I had possession in that afternoon
Of all Earth, Sun and Water give to men.
A summer now is echo of the tune.
I cannot smell a sunburnt grass, nor hear
The air’s unnumbered, lifting, droning din,
Now dying into distance and now near,
A hill-sheep’s cry or tinkled drinking-tin,
Without a startling, that the past returns
The hill, the brooks, the foxgloves and the ferns.

Though the new binders swept the cornfields clean,
The farmers still gave gleaners leave to glean;
The gleaners’ stooks were husked and coarsely
ground,
Kneaded to cakes, and with hot embers browned.
(Glowing wood-embers on the hearth-stones white
Chirrupped about by crickets all the night.)
These little loaves held all the red earth’s good,
Earth’s very life and marrow for man’s food.
Four things man needs, (the Spanish proverb tells)
Good air, good bread, good water and good bells.
However dark my growing dusk may fall
Is night’s affair, not mine; I’ve had them all.

Sometimes, when days are happy, there is fear
Lest the great joy should bring the sorrow near,
And many men upon some peak of bliss
Know that the next step leads to the abyss.
Perhaps, upon the day of my delight
The finger moved some fraction from the right.
Somewhere, perhaps, a workman moved a weight
From age-long quiet to the world of fate;
And feet began to move, and feeling stirred,
That might be destine-working, on the word.
Out in the greenwood’s dimness there began
Life, in wild blood, that might afflict a man,
Far out at sea, in gulfs of tropic mood
Some certain phials of the poison brewed.
And yet, already, in man’s flesh and bone
His wrist, his intellect, the seeds were sown,
And work existed, reckoned of the best,
Which met the living, not the dying test,
That was to meet the dying test, and fail.
From many a secret spring and hidden trail
Come the unnumbered causes of man’s woe,
The daily tide of man, at come and go,
The life of beasts, that stray and sniff and pass,
The is of water, stone and earth and grass, The setting of the weather and the light
Are instruments of action infinite.
Six may exist together, hundreds may.

Then a clock strikes upon a destined day
The straying feet converge, the things agree,
There is a tide upon the unseen sea.
Then to the trit-trot of the quiet pace
Come sudden jangle, wrenching and displace,
Irrupted order, and the instant pang
The bite of death with poison in the fang
Which will be spreading in the blood thenceforth
Cold, probing venom coming from the north.
Touching the heart and those who may be near.
Somebody longed for is no longer here.
Then, having dealt the ending to the doomed
The feet diverge, the quiet is resumed,
The evening rain wipes out the little mark,
Some little gossip passes after dark,
Then on the morrow work begins again.
Know in all joy your certainty of pain.
Know that in pain the spirit is alone
As feeling fastened under grinding stone,

The stone may cease; it cannot always grind,
But, ceasing, it leaves numbness on the mind;
Darkness to hope, and apathy to fears,
And spectres, after visionary years
When everlasting skylarks skyward winging
Made man and sky and skylark one with singing.

The senses and the earthly things remain
But magical delight comes not again
Only a shadow of the glory shows
That once went with the water and the rose:
Custom has commoned the unproven strange:
Age calls it wisdom to discredit change.
Bread is no more a star upon the tongue.

Stars, our Passengers Only the stars in heaven still seem young.
Time has not dimmed the seaman-guiding North,
The Guards at watch, Orion striding forth.
Over the sky the burning points deploy
Lanced from their source ere Greeks had taken Troy
Points where the eyes (if eyes there be) behold
On Earth, the day when Helen’s hair was gold.
In ecstasy of energy they burn,
No fickle Fortune guides the wheel they turn
Always, in light and energy they go,
And we, who weigh them, pass like leaves and snow.
Unleaflike, dull; unsnowlike, dark with sin,
We who are one with stars when we begin.

In ecstasy we start, in starry weather,
In beauty and in joy we sing together,
In bright delight of happiness we go,
One with the flowers and the winds that blow, Thoughtless, and often cruel, always frail,
But glad as Maytime with the nightingale,
Gladness like sunlight blesses all our being,
Friendship and folly, touching, tasting, seeing.
Then, shutters are pulled down, and chains are
linked
By energies defunct and lights extinct,
Apothecaries, owl-like, but less wise
Give (from the spikenard) skimmings of dead flies;

The shining spirit, brother to the stars,
Moves, (if he live) in chain, in prison-bars,
She, whom delight made sister to the sun,
Hears un-delight forbid what should be done,
Not living water, not undying bread,
Portions the spirit seeking to be fed,
But mould and puddle of the chosen kind
To keep the question gagged, the vision blind.
I marvel at Man’s power to destroy
The ecstasy of life in girl and boy.
Whether his rollers press or coulter reives
Imagine what he takes, see what he leaves.

Thus I delighted, this beheld,
At that adventured or rebelled,
It is alive in heart and brain.
I would not live that time again,
Though every little scene is bright
With sunlight and with soul-delight.
The harvest of that time is home
The honey in the honeycomb. . . .

I loved the light; the colour, scent and sound
Of all the lovely creatures daily found;
The silver leap of fish, the pride and grace
Of red stags running in a grassy place;
I loved the skill of men with bull and horse,
Or blasting rock, or keeping ship to course,
I loved the world I entered all alone
The world of tiny beings all my own;
I loved to give; joy greater, even then,
To me, a child, than any joy of men.
Such were my harvestings, and one joy more Beautiful water changing evermore.

All these delights were near, and yet, today,
That long dead England seems a land astray.
Backward and blind, and proud of being both,
Toiling to death in fundamental sloth,
Governed by cackle-shops, whose fatal fun
Pretended that scheme cackled was thing done.
Muddled, yet meddling in affairs not ours
With vestry morals and a eunuch’s powers;
Vain of a chaos of mean cities filled
With any squalor any cared to build;
Vain of a drunken untaught multitude
Who breathed not, ate not, drank not, one thing good.

Such seems the England of that distant past: —
Prepared for war, (the war before the last);
Prepared for peace, that should create a race
Of cringing starvelings haggard in the face;
Unlettered, unimpassioned and unled
Want in the heart and clap-trap in the head;
Working at games, despising art and thought,
Its over-toiling millions making naught,
Naught, for their lives’ exhaustions put in pay,
That thinking man would wish to see today.
Such the life’s fruit of many millions, most
Born with life’s gifts, blithe body and glad ghost.

Mark ... I say SEEMS, for goodness fruited still,
Despite slack mind and apathetic will;
Much work was truly done, if little worth.
Much energy went from us over earth.
Blight lay on England, but a hope allured
To distant lands with fortunes more assured.
From every station then our men of hope
Put forth abroad in quest of wider scope,
To make new lands of freedom overseas,
In Canada and the Antipodes,
And made them there, new nations who have
wrought
Brave generosities, past thank and thought.

Much meanness mars the tale of selfish man,
Think what those lands hav e done since they began,
Done what no other lands have ever done
To help their suffering brothers under sun.
These, all unasked, unforced, as friends indeed,
Put by their lives to help us in our need,
Put by their all, their country’s hope put by,
To help to save this nation or to die.
Twice in one generation they have given
Their very all for us, like folk of Heaven.

Their gifts to us, past telling royal From Africa, from far Australia,
New Zealand and the vasts of Canada,
Men whom no word of man can fitly praise,
Have, of their own will, died by bitter ways,
For this land’s sake, their mother-country’s cause.
Leonidas obeyed the Spartan laws;
These only felt that kinsmen were in need.
If Earth arraign us, these dominions plead;
They were the fruitings of this people freed.

Even in blackest England, some there were
Whose quiet rightness strove to make her fair.
As always with us, some denounced abuse,
Or mocked at customs palsied out of use;
Or toiled for mercy, decency and sense,
From hope of all these things, not recompense.
If blindness supervised and night controlled
The stupid darkness had a heart of gold,
Small wonder, though, if nations set apart
Seeing the darkness, doubted of the heart.

And yet, how true, how dauntless the heart is,
However much the head may be amiss;
Whatever may be wanting in the state
In patience we endure, in quiet wait;
Others may carve the stone or paint the wall
Or fill the summer day with festival.
Or build some city sought by foreign men
As model home to mortal citizen,
We offer decency and courtesy,
And hope that things may better by and by,
And if they do not, well, instead of cure
Life being lived by courage, we endure.

And yet, an old man caring for the arts
Wishes that these might bless such noble hearts,
Wishes, that on our miles of public walls
Whose whitewash sickens and whose blank appals,
One Council, (for a start) might have the grace
To let our painters play upon the space,
To let their power, fettered now, be freed,
To paint for public joy the English deed,
Our ships, our mariners, our good deeds done
In every land and ocean under sun,
Our English stories, in themselves a joy
Deep and undying as the tale of Troy,
But not yet consecrated to our use.

Then, since enlightened nations chose, and choose
To keep endowed the graces that delight,
Music that links us with the infinite,
Dancing, her sister, and the Tragic Scene
Leading all Arts in chorus as the Queen,
Why should wc lag these centuries behind?
Banish delight and what remains of mind?

These questions have been asked for fifty years,
By better mouths to long, unchanging ears.
Times were to come to shock the land awake.
Danger of death displayed us our mistake.
When death came striding, England let men see
Patience and courage changing destiny.
When death is winning and disaster shews,
Then England lightens and her sign’s the rose.

We, who have seen this England left alone
And felt the nations count us overthrown,
And seen the greedy vultures stretching neck
And gaping beak, for pieces of the wreck,
And heard the exultation of the cur
Yap the hyaenas on to finish her,
We know the nature of the sign we bear
A deathless rose that winter makes more fair.

When our survivors stand among their dead,
At some path’s end where lunacy has led,
When courage learns, it cannot alter fate
Unweaponed, unsupported and too late;
When allies fall, and friends account it wise
To do the biddings of our enemies,
Then our hope shines; within ourselves a star
Gives light and strength, the only helps that are.

Most children born are healthy, glad and wise,
The day too short for all their ecstasies,
Poetry’s self too tedious for their song,
Justice, too, partial, to their sense of wrong.
What night of evil had been forced to go
Had children ruled us sixty years ago?
What skull-like faces tempted to unharden?
What reeking slummage changed to flower-garden?

Peace will bring morning to this night of pain,
A dim new world, with people born again,
Having, like children, little of their own,
Saving the rapture piercing to the bone,
And with the rapture all the bright ado
Of hope alive of England to make new.

What will they do, what will they make
Those betterers of our mistake?
Nothing so devilish to man
As slaughter, torment, smash and ache.
Something more beautiful, I trust,
Than universal money-lust
Such as has blackened brook and brae
And ground our very life to dust.
Something more green with bud and leaf,
With healing for the hour of grief,
With outlet for the hour of glory
And brotherhood for a belief.
Something, from someone who has heard
The new cry of the spirit-bird
The wisdom uttered to the one
Who cannot live among the herd.
Word that denies that man is meat
For hell-begotten war to eat
But cries that man is of the stars
Beauty of light, power of heat.

Men watch, and sometimes pray, for the divine
To come again as living man, to bring
Light, colour, music and the running Spring,
Hope as a daybreak not a planet alone,
A day to live in, not a wandering sign.
At every birth of man a spirit takes
Flesh for a pilgrimage across our night; He comes with beauty, wisdom and delight
And gathers sorrow, folly and misuse,
And if not murdered, dies of our mistakes.

Might not the birth of every man be hailed
As a divine appearance come to lead
Men to the living brotherhood they need?
Each brings a person hitherto unknown,
For want of whom man travails and has ailed.
Might not this reverence for life prepare
A state more worth, wherein each citizen
Should have, for faith, the world of fellow men,
For charity, a paradise on earth,
For hope, the beauty of the singing there?

Once, long ago, I looked upon a wall
Not wholly blank, for markings on it showed
Perished designs, where once the colour glowed
In painted joy of happy festival.
A dull red lattice with a darker scrawl
Still lingered for Time’s acid to corrode;
The wood-louse in the plaster ran his lode,
1 saw the coloured dust of pigment fall.
It bore five centuries of Time’s disgrace,
Yet majesty of man was on the place,
Spirit had triumphed there, as I could see.
Wisdom had put a virtue in the plaster
That still declared “Upon this wall, a Master
Showed forth his power and made beauty be”.

I walked a chaos which the bombing left,
Street after street of doorless, glassless shells,
Paving in splinters, belfries without bells,
Walling split open, rafters flung awry.
No human noises stirred, of foot or cry;
The wind that made a mutter in the cleft,
The dropping of the plaster from a reft,
These only broke the silence, nothing else.
Not even death could give it dignity;
The ruined slum was meaner than the worm.
Here, apathy of mind had reached a term,
A lust for night unequalled by the bat,
Thoughtlessness utter as in summer fly
Five miles from where collective wisdom sat.

Wake, for the darkness is at point to pass;
The midnight on the saltings holds its breath,
The drenching dew is dropping from the grass
An unseen field-mouse nibbles at a stem.
Not yet the morning, but the night is breaking,
The blackness weakens, England is awaking
To life set free, to capitals made fair
And joy a jewel in her diadem.

Wake, for the light already sends a word
Before his flying feet: — “O men, arise”.
A whispered message, but the cock has heard: —
Over the perch he cackles out his gird,
“Awake, bewildered sleepers; up and do,
To it, and do”; and now, on graying skies
The hills take outline that before were blurred.

Awake and do, before the visions fade,
And this thing first observe, that children bring
Each one, an aptitude for some good thing,
Which, being tended and encouraged, bears
Virtue or art, the powers that rebuild.
By England’s children England is remade;
Watch and encourage, then, those skills of theirs
That spires to men’s joy may lift in airs
Topped by the golden wind-vanes never stilled.

And never think, that poets want the moon;
They want an England better than the last,
An England using to the full its skills,
Not the dead England of our discontent
Where life-long weariness just paid the rent
And long dead custom set the dreary tune
Forever thwarting the heroic wills
And rivetting each daybreak to the past.

Wake, for it sometimes happens that the change
Must be profound as waking out of sleep
At cockcrow from some rafter in the grange,
When Spirit is unshackled and set free.
Life is not milling dust in penny trade,
But art to fashion or to be re-made,
Such, that in every village there shall be
Something that future men shall love to see;
When mortals call, immortal thoughts invade.