Читать книгу: «Tides», страница 3

PLOUGH

 
The snows are come in early state,
And love shall now go desolate
If we should keep too close a gate.
 
 
Over the woods a splendour falls
Of death, and grey are the Gloucester walls,
And grey the skies for burials.
 
 
But secret in the falling snow
I see the patient ploughman go,
And watch the quiet furrows grow.
 

POLITICS

 
You say a thousand things,
Persuasively,
And with strange passion hotly I agree,
And praise your zest,
And then
A blackbird sings
On April lilac, or fieldfaring men,
Ghostlike, with loaded wain,
Come down the twilit lane
To rest,
And what is all your argument to me?
 
 
Oh yes – I know, I know,
It must be so —
You must devise
Your myriad policies,
For we are little wise,
And must be led and marshalled, lest we keep
Too fast a sleep
Far from the central world’s realities.
Yes, we must heed —
For surely you reveal
Life’s very heart; surely with flaming zeal
You search our folly and our secret need;
And surely it is wrong
To count my blackbird’s song,
My cones of lilac, and my wagon team,
More than a world of dream.
But still
A voice calls from the hill —
I must away —
I cannot hear your argument to-day.
 

BIRMINGHAM – 1916

 
Once Athens worked and went to see the play,
And Thomas Atkins kissed the girls of Rome,
In council in Victoria Square to-day
Are grey-beard Nazarenes, with shop and home
And counting-house and all the friendly cares
That Joseph knew; in Bull Ring markets meet
Gossips as once at Babylonian fairs,
And Helen walks in Corporation Street.
 
 
Now Troy is Homer; and of Nazareth
Grave histories are of one love that was strong;
Athens is beauty; Rome an immortal death;
And Babylon immortal in a song…
Perplexed as ours these cities were of old;
And shall our name greatly as these be told?
 

INSCRIPTION FOR A WAR MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN

 
They nothing feared whose names I celebrate.
Greater than death they died; and their estate
Is here on Cotswold comradely to live
Upon your lips in every draught I give.
 

TREASON

 
What time I write my roundelays,
I am as proud as princes gone,
Who built their empires in old days,
As Tamburlaine or Solomon;
And wisely though companions then
Say well it is and well I sing,
Assured above the praise of men
I am a solitary king.
 
 
But when I leave that straiter mood,
That lonely hour, and put aside
The continence of solitude,
I fall in treason to my pride,
And if a witling’s word be spent
Upon my song in jealousy,
In anger and in argument
I am as derelict as he.
 

MY ESTATE

 
I have four loves, four loves are mine,
My wife who makes all beauty be,
Tom Squire and Master Candleshine,
And then my grey dog Timothy.
 
 
My wife makes bramble-berry pies,
And she is bright as bramble dew,
She knows the way the weather flies,
And tells me every thing to do.
 
 
Tom Squire he is my neighbour man,
His apples fall upon my grass,
And in the morning, when we can,
We say good-morning as we pass.
 
 
And Master Candleshine the True,
Considering some fault of mine,
Says – “Had it been for me to do,
It had been hard for Candleshine.”
 
 
When I have thought all things that be,
And drop the latch and climb the stair,
And want an eye for company,
My grey dog Timothy is there.
 
 
My loves are one and two and three
And four they are, good loves of mine,
Tom Squire, my grey dog Timothy,
My wife and Master Candleshine.