Georgian Poetry 1920-22 Part 5

And splas.h.i.+ng up--up to the roof tossed fountains of crystal; And Princes in scarlet and green Shot with their bows and arrows, and kneeled with their dishes Of fruits for the Queen;

And we walked in a magical garden with rivers and bowers, And my bed was of ivory and gold; And the Queen breathed soft in my ear a song of enchantment-- And I never grew old....

And I never, never came back to the earth, oh, never and never; How mother would cry and cry!

There'd be snow on the fields then, and all these sweet flowers in the winter Would wither, and die....

Suppose ... and suppose ...

THE CORNER STONE

Sterile these stones By time in ruin laid.

Yet many a creeping thing Its haven has made In these least crannies, where falls Dark's dew, and noonday shade.

The claw of the tender bird Finds lodgment here; Dye-winged b.u.t.terflies poise; Emmet and beetle steer Their busy course; the bee Drones, laden, near.

Their myriad-mirrored eyes Great day reflect.

By their exquisite farings Is this granite specked; Is trodden to infinite dust; By gnawing lichens decked.

Toward what eventual dream Sleeps its cold on, When into ultimate dark These lives shall be gone, And even of man not a shadow remain Of all he has done?

JOHN DRINKWATER

Then I asked: 'Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?'

He replied: 'All Poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.'

Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l'.

PERSUASION

I

At any moment love unheralded Comes, and is king. Then as, with a fall Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread Are withered in untimely burial, So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by, And as a beggar walks unfriended ways, With but remembered beauty to defy The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days.

Or in that later travelling he comes Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells Himself, again, again, forgotten tombs Are all now that love was, and blindly spells His royal state of old a glory cursed, Saying 'I have forgot', and that's the worst.

II.

If we should part upon that one embrace, And set our courses ever, each from each, With all our treasure but a fading face And little ghostly syllables of speech; Should beauty's moment never be renewed, And moons on moons look out for us in vain, And each but whisper from a solitude To hear but echoes of a lonely pain,-- Still in a world that fortune cannot change Should walk those two that once were you and I, Those two that once when moon and stars were strange Poets above us in an April sky, Heard a voice falling on the midnight sea, Mute, and for ever, but for you and me.

III.

This nature, this great flood of life, this cheat That uses us as baubles for her coat, Takes love, that should be nothing but the beat Of blood for its own beauty, by the throat, Saying, you are my servant and shall do My purposes, or utter bitterness Shall be your wage, and nothing come to you But stammering tongues that never can confess.

Undaunted then in answer here I cry, 'You wanton, that control the hand of him Who masquerades as wisdom in a sky Where holy, holy, sing the cherubim, I will not pay one penny to your name Though all my body crumble into shame.'

IV.

Woman, I once had whimpered at your hand, Saying that all the wisdom that I sought Lay in your brain, that you were as the sand Should cleanse the muddy mirrors of my thought; I should have read in you the character Of oracles that quick a thousand lays, Looked in your eyes, and seen accounted there Solomons legioned for bewildered praise.

Now have I learnt love as love is. I take Your hand, and with no inquisition learn All that your eyes can tell, and that's to make A little reckoning and brief, then turn Away, and in my heart I hear a call, 'I love, I love, I love'; and that is all.

V.

When all the hungry pain of love I bear, And in poor lightless thought but burn and burn, And wit goes hunting wisdom everywhere, Yet can no word of revelation learn; When endlessly the scales of yea and nay In dreadful motion fall and rise and fall, When all my heart in sorrow I could pay Until at last were left no tear at all; Then if with tame or subtle argument Companions come and draw me to a place Where words are but the tappings of content, And life spreads all her garments with a grace, I curse that ease, and hunger in my heart Back to my pain and lonely to depart.

VI.

Not anything you do can make you mine, For enterprise with equal charity In duty as in love elect will s.h.i.+ne, The constant slave of mutability.

Nor can your words for all their honey breath Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme, And though my ear deliver them from death One day or two, it is so little time.

Nor does your beauty in its excellence Excel a thousand in the daily sun, Yet must I put a period to pretence, And with my logic's catalogue have done, For act and word and beauty are but keys To unlock the heart, and you, dear love, are these.

VII.

Never the heart of spring had trembled so As on that day when first in Paradise We went afoot as novices to know For the first time what blue was in the skies, What fresher green than any in the gra.s.s, And how the sap goes beating to the sun, And tell how on the clocks of beauty pa.s.s Minute by minute till the last is done.

But not the new birds singing in the brake, And not the buds of our discovery, The deeper blue, the wilder green, the ache For beauty that we shadow as we see, Made heaven, but we, as love's occasion brings, Took these, and made them Paradisal things.

VIII.

The lilacs offer beauty to the sun, Throbbing with wonder as eternally For sad and happy lovers they have done With the first bloom of summer in the sky; Yet they are newly spread in honour now, Because, for every beam of beauty given Out of that cl.u.s.tering heart, back to the bough My love goes beating, from a greater heaven.

So be my love for good or sorry luck Bound, it has virtue on this April eve That shall be there for ever when they pluck Lilacs for love. And though I come to grieve Long at a frosty tomb, there still shall be My happy lyric in the lilac tree.

IX.

When they make silly question of my love, And speak to me of danger and disdain, And look by fond old argument to move My wisdom to docility again; When to my prouder heart they set the pride Of custom and the gossip of the street, And show me figures of myself beside A self diminished at their judgment seat; Then do I sit as in a drowsy pew To hear a priest expounding th' heavenly will, Defiling wonder that he never knew With stolen words of measured good and ill; For to the love that knows their counselling, Out of my love contempt alone I bring.