Georgian Poetry 1916-1917 Part 17

Sing for the sun your lyric, lark, Of twice ten thousand notes; Sing for the moon, you nightingales, Whose light shall kiss your throats; Sing, sparrows, for the soft warm rain, To wet your feathers through; And when a rainbow's in the sky, Sing you, cuckoo--Cuckoo!

Sing for your five blue eggs, fond thrush, By many a leaf concealed; You starlings, wrens, and blackbirds, sing In every wood and field: While I, who fail to give my love Long raptures twice as fine, Will for her beauty breathe this one-- A sigh, that's more divine.

COWSLIPS AND LARKS

I hear it said yon land is poor, In spite of those rich cowslips there-- And all the singing larks it shoots To heaven from the cowslips' roots.

But I, with eyes that beauty find, And music ever in my mind, Feed my thoughts well upon that gra.s.s Which starves the horse, the ox, and a.s.s.

So here I stand, two miles to come To Shapwick and my ten-days-home, Taking my summer's joy, although The distant clouds are dark and low, And comes a storm that, fierce and strong, Has brought the Mendip hills along: Those hills that when the light is there Are many a sunny mile from here.

GORDON BOTTOMLEY

ATLANTIS

What poets sang in Atlantis? Who can tell The epics of Atlantis or their names?

The sea hath its own murmurs, and sounds not The secrets of its silences beneath, And knows not any cadences enfolded When the last bubbles of Atlantis broke Among the quieting of its heaving floor.

O, years and tides and leagues and all their billows Can alter not man's knowledge of men's hearts-- While trees and rocks and clouds include our being We know the epics of Atlantis still: A hero gave himself to lesser men, Who first misunderstood and murdered him, And then misunderstood and wors.h.i.+pped him; A woman was lovely and men fought for her, Towns burnt for her, and men put men in bondage, But she put lengthier bondage on them all; A wanderer toiled among all the isles That fleck this turning star of s.h.i.+fting sea, Or lonely purgatories of the mind, In longing for his home or his lost love.

Poetry is founded on the hearts of men: Though in Nirvana or the Heavenly courts The principle of beauty shall persist, Its body of poetry, as the body of man, Is but a terrene form, a terrene use, That swifter being will not loiter with; And, when mankind is dead and the world cold, Poetry's immortality will pa.s.s.

NEW YEAR'S EVE, 1913

O, Cartmel bells ring soft to-night, And Cartmel bells ring clear, But I lie far away to-night, Listening with my dear;

Listening in a frosty land Where all the bells are still And the small-windowed bell-towers stand Dark under heath and hill.

I thought that, with each dying year, As long as life should last The bells of Cartmel I should hear Ring out an aged past:

The plunging, mingling sounds increase Darkness's depth and height, The hollow valley gains more peace And ancientness to-night:

The loveliness, the fruitfulness, The power of life lived there Return, revive, more closely press Upon that midnight air.

But many deaths have place in men Before they come to die; Joys must be used and spent, and then Abandoned and pa.s.sed by.

Earth is not ours; no cherished s.p.a.ce Can hold us from life's flow, That bears us thither and thence by ways We knew not we should go.

O, Cartmel bells ring loud, ring clear, Through midnight deep and h.o.a.r, A year new-born, and I shall hear The Cartmel bells no more.

IN MEMORIAM, A. M. W.

SEPTEMBER 1910

(For a Solemn Music)

Out of a silence The voice of music speaks.

When words have no more power, When tears can tell no more, The heart of all regret Is uttered by a falling wave Of melody.

No more, no more The voice that gathered us Shall hush us with deep joy; But in this hush, Out of its silence, In the awaking of music, It shall return.

For music can renew Its gladness and communion, Until we also sink, Where sinks the voice of music, Into a silence.

MAURICE BARING

IN MEMORIAM, A. H.

(Auberon Herbert, Captain Lord Lucas, R. F. C. killed November 3, 1916)

[Greek: Nomatai d'en atrugetou chaei]

The wind had blown away the rain That all day long had soaked the level plain.

Against the horizon's fiery wrack, The sheds loomed black.

And higher, in their tumultuous concourse met, The streaming clouds, shot-riddled banners, wet With the flickering storm, Drifted and smouldered, warm With flashes sent From the lower firmament.

And they concealed-- They only here and there through rifts revealed A hidden sanctuary of fire and light, A city of chrysolite.

We looked and laughed and wondered, and I said: That orange sea, those oriflammes outspread Were like the fanciful imaginings That the young painter flings Upon the canvas bold, Such as the sage and the old Make mock at, saying it could never be; And you a.s.sented also, laughingly.

I wondered what they meant, That flaming firmament, Those clouds so grey so gold, so wet so warm, So much of glory and so much of storm, The end of the world, or the end Of the war--remoter still to me and you, my friend.