Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Edited by Robert Bridges

 

 

 

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  • Early Poems
  • Poems 1876-1889
  • Unfinished Poems Fragments
  • St. Winefred's Well

    • Early Poems





    For a Picture of St. Dorothea



    I BEAR a basket lined with grass;
    I am so light, I am so fair,
    That men must wonder as I pass
    And at the basket that I bear,
    Where in a newly-drawn green litter
    Sweet flowers I carry, -- sweets for bitter.

    Lilies I shew you, lilies none,
    None in Caesar's gardens blow, --
    And a quince in hand, -- not one
    Is set upon your boughs below;
    Not set, because their buds not spring;
    Spring not, 'cause world is wintering.

    But these were found in the East and South
    Where Winter is the clime forgot. --
    The dewdrop on the larkspur's mouth
    O should it then be quenchèd not?
    In starry water-meads they drew
    These drops: which be they? stars or dew?

    Had she a quince in hand? Yet gaze:
    Rather it is the sizing moon.
    Lo, linkèd heavens with milky ways!
    That was her larkspur row. -- So soon?
    Sphered so fast, sweet soul? -- We see
    Nor fruit, nor flowers, nor Dorothy.




    Heaven-Haven


    A nun takes the veil

          I HAVE desired to go
            Where springs not fail,
    To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
          And a few lilies blow.

          And I have asked to be
            Where no storms come,
    Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
          And out of the swing of the sea.

    The Habit of Perfection



    ELECTED Silence, sing to me
    And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
    Pipe me to pastures still and be
    The music that I care to hear.

    Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
    It is the shut, the curfew sent
    From there where all surrenders come
    Which only makes you eloquent.

    Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark
    And find the uncreated light:
    This ruck and reel which you remark
    Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

    Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,
    Desire not to be rinsed with wine:
    The can must be so sweet, the crust
    So fresh that come in fasts divine!

    Nostrils, your careless breath that spend
    Upon the stir and keep of pride,
    What relish shall the censers send
    Along the sanctuary side!

    O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet
    That want the yield of plushy sward,
    But you shall walk the golden street
    And you unhouse and house the Lord.

    And, Poverty, be thou the bride
    And now the marriage feast begun,
    And lily-coloured clothes provide
    Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.

    Poems 1876-1889



    The Wreck of the Deutschland


    To the
    happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns
    exiles by the Falk Laws
    drowned between midnight and morning of
    Dec. 7th. 1875


    PART THE FIRST

                   THOU mastering me
                 God! giver of breath and bread;
              World's strand, sway of the sea;
                 Lord of living and dead;
          Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
          And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
              Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
    Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.



                   I did say yes
                 O at lightning and lashed rod;
              Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
                 Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
          Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
          The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
              Hard down with a horror of height:
    And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.


                   The frown of his face
                 Before me, the hurtle of hell
              Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
                 I whirled out wings that spell
          And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
          My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
              Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,
    To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.


                   I am soft sift
                 In an hourglass -- at the wall
              Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
                 And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
          I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,
          But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall
              Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein
    Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ's gift.


                   I kiss my hand
                 To the stars, lovely-asunder
              Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
                 Glow, glory in thunder;
          Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
          Since, tho' he is under the world's splendour and wonder,
              His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
    For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.


                   Not out of his bliss
                 Springs the stress felt
              Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
                 Swings the stroke dealt --
          Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
          That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt --
              But it rides time like riding a river
    (And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).


                   It dates from day
                 Of his going in Galilee;
              Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;
                 Manger, maiden's knee;
          The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat;
          Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be,
              Though felt before, though in high flood yet --
    What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,


                   Is out with it! Oh,
                 We lash with the best or worst
              Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe
                 Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,
          Gush! -- flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,
          Brim, in a flash, full! -- Hither then, last or first,
              To hero of Calvary, Christ, 's feet --
    Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it -- men go.


                   Be adored among men,
                 God, three-numberèd form;
              Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,
                 Man's malice, with wrecking and storm.
          Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,
          Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
              Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:
    Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.


                   With an anvil-ding
                 And with fire in him forge thy will
              Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring
                 Through him, melt him but master him still:
          Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,
          Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill,
              Make mercy in all of us, out of us all
    Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

    PART THE SECOND

                 'Some find me a sword; some
                 The flange and the rail; flame,
              Fang, or flood' goes Death on drum,
                 And storms bugle his fame.
          But wé dream we are rooted in earth -- Dust!
          Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,
              Wave with the meadow, forget that there must
    The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.



                 On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
                 American-outward-bound,
              Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,
                 Two hundred souls in the round --
          O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing
          The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;
              Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing
    Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?


                 Into the snows she sweeps,
                 Hurling the haven behind,
              The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,
                 For the infinite air is unkind,
          And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
          Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
              Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow
    Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.


                 She drove in the dark to leeward,
                 She struck -- not a reef or a rock
              But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her
                 Dead to the Kentish Knock;
          And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel:
          The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;
              And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel
    Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.


                 Hope had grown grey hairs,
                 Hope had mourning on,
              Trenched with tears, carved with cares,
                 Hope was twelve hours gone;
          And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day
          Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone,
              And lives at last were washing away:
    To the shrouds they took, -- they shook in the hurling and
    horrible airs.


                 One stirred from the rigging to save
                 The wild woman-kind below,
              With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave --
                 He was pitched to his death at a blow,
          For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:
          They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro
              Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do
    With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?


                 They fought with God's cold --
                 And they could not and fell to the deck
              (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled
                 With the sea-romp over the wreck.
          Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,
          The woman's wailing, the crying of child without check --
              Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,
    A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.


                 Ah, touched in your bower of bone
                 Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,
              Have you! make words break from me here all alone,
                 Do you! -- mother of being in me, heart.
          O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth,
          Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start!
              Never-eldering revel and river of youth,
    What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?


                 Sister, a sister calling
                 A master, her master and mine! --
              And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling;
                 The rash smart sloggering brine
          Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one;
          Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine
              Ears, and the call of the tall nun
    To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm's brawling.


                 She was first of a five and came
                 Of a coifèd sisterhood.
              (O Deutschland, double a desperate name!
                 O world wide of its good!
          But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,
          Christ's lily and beast of the waste wood:
              From life's dawn it is drawn down,
    Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the same.)


                 Loathed for a love men knew in them,
                 Banned by the land of their birth,
              Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;
                 Surf, snow, river and earth
          Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light;
          Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,
              Thou martyr-master: in thy sight
    Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers -- sweet heaven was astrew in them.


                 Five! the finding and sake
                 And cipher of suffering Christ.
              Mark, the mark is of man's make
                 And the word of it Sacrificed.
          But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,
          Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced --
              Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token
    For lettering of the lamb's fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.


                 Joy fall to thee, father Francis,
                 Drawn to the Life that died;
              With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his
                 Lovescape crucified
          And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters
          And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,
              Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,
    To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.


                 Away in the loveable west,
                 On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
              I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
                 And they the prey of the gales;
          She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
          Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails
              Was calling 'O Christ, Christ, come quickly':
    The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.


                 The majesty! what did she mean?
                 Breathe, arch and original Breath.
              Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been?
                 Breathe, body of lovely Death.
          They were else-minded then, altogether, the men
          Woke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth.
              Or is it that she cried for the crown then,
    The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?


                 For how to the heart's cheering
                 The down-dugged ground-hugged grey
              Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing
                 Of pied and peeled May!
          Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,
          With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,
              What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
    The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?


                 No, but it was not these.
                 The jading and jar of the cart,
              Time's tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease
                 Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart,
          Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds
          The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart:
              Other, I gather, in measure her mind's
    Burden, in wind's burly and beat of endragonèd seas.


                 But how shall I ... make me room there:
                 Reach me a ... Fancy, come faster --
              Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there,
                 Thing that she ... there then! the Master,
          Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head:
          He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her;
              Do, deal, lord it with living and dead;
    Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there.


                 Ah! there was a heart right!
                 There was single eye!
              Read the unshapeable shock night
                 And knew the who and the why;
          Wording it how but by him that present and past,
          Heaven and earth are word of, worded by? --
              The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast
    Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light.


                 Jesu, heart's light,
                 Jesu, maid's son,
              What was the feast followed the night
                 Thou hadst glory of this nun? --
          Feast of the one woman without stain.
          For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done;
              But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,
    Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.


                 Well, she has thee for the pain, for the
                 Patience; but pity of the rest of them!
              Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the
                 Comfortless unconfessed of them --
          No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence
          Finger of a tender of; O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the
              Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and
    Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?


                 I admire thee, master of the tides,
                 Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall;
              The recurb and the recovery of the gulf's sides,
                 The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall;
          Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;
          Ground of being, and granite of it: past all
              Grasp God, throned behind
    Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides;


                 With a mercy that outrides
                 The all of water, an ark
              For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides
                 Lower than death and the dark;
          A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,
          The-last-breath penitent spirits -- the uttermost mark
              Our passion-plungèd giant risen,
    The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.


                 Now burn, new born to the world,
                 Doubled-naturèd name,
              The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
                 Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
          Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!
          Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
              Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
    A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.


                 Dame, at our door
                 Drowned, and among our shoals,
              Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward:
                 Our King back, oh, upon English souls!
          Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
          More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,
              Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
    Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.




    Penmaen Pool


    For the Visitors' Book at the Inn


    WHO long for rest, who look for pleasure
    Away from counter, court, or school
    O where live well your lease of leisure
    But here at, here at Penmaen Pool?
    You'll dare the Alp? you'll dart the skiff? --
    Each sport has here its tackle and tool:
    Come, plant the staff by Cadair cliff;
    Come, swing the sculls on Penmaen Pool.

    What's yonder? -- Grizzled Dyphwys dim:
    The triple-hummocked Giant's stool,
    Hoar messmate, hobs and nobs with him
    To halve the bowl of Penmaen Pool.

    And all the landscape under survey,
    At tranquil turns, by nature's rule,
    Rides repeated topsyturvy
    In frank, in fairy Penmaen Pool.

    And Charles's Wain, the wondrous seven,
    And sheep-flock clouds like worlds of wool,
    For all they shine so, high in heaven,
    Shew brighter shaken in Penmaen Pool.

    The Mawddach, how she trips! though throttled
    If floodtide teeming thrills her full,
    And mazy sands all water-wattled
    Waylay her at ebb, past Penmaen Pool.

    But what's to see in stormy weather,
    When grey showers gather and gusts are cool? --
    Why, raindrop-roundels looped together
    That lace the face of Penmaen Pool.

    Then even in weariest wintry hour
    Of New Year's month or surly Yule
    Furred snows, charged tuft above tuft, tower
    From darksome darksome Penmaen Pool.

    And ever, if bound here hardest home,
    You've parlour-pastime left and (who'll
    Not honour it?) ale like goldy foam
    That frocks an oar in Penmaen Pool.

    Then come who pine for peace or pleasure
    Away from counter, court, or school,
    Spend here your measure of time and treasure
    And taste the treats of Penmaen Pool.


    The Silver Jubilee:


    To James First Bishop of Shrewsbury on the 25th Year of his Episcopate July 28. 1876


    THOUGH no high-hung bells or din
    Of braggart bugles cry it in --
      What is sound? Nature's round
    Makes the Silver Jubilee.


    Five and twenty years have run
    Since sacred fountains to the sun
      Sprang, that but now were shut,
    Showering Silver Jubilee.


    Feasts, when we shall fall asleep,
    Shrewsbury may see others keep;
      None but you this her true,
    This her Silver Jubilee.


    Not today we need lament
    Your wealth of life is some way spent:
      Toil has shed round your head
    Silver but for Jubilee.


    Then for her whose velvet vales
    Should have pealed with welcome, Wales,
      Let the chime of a rhyme
    Utter Silver Jubilee.








    God's Grandeur




    THE world is charged with the grandeur of God.
      It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
      It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
    Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
    Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
      And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
      And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
    Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
    And for all this, nature is never spent;
      There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
    And though the last lights off the black West went
      Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
    Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
      World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.


    The Starlight Night




    LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
      O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
      The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
    Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
    The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
      Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
      Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! --
    Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
    Buy then! bid then! -- What? -- Prayer, patience, aims, vows.
    Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
      Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
    These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
    The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
      Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.








    Spring




    NOTHING is so beautiful as spring --
      When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
      Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
    Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
    The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
      The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
      The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
    With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
    What is all this juice and all this joy?
      A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
    In Eden garden. -- Have, get, before it cloy,
      Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
    Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
      Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.


    The Lantern out of Doors




    SOMETIMES a lantern moves along the night,
      That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
      I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
    With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
    Men go by me whom either beauty bright
      In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
      They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
    Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

    Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
      What most I may eye after, be in at the end
    I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.

    Christ minds: Christ's interest, what to avow or amend
      There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd,
    Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.


    The Sea and the Skylark




    ON ear and ear two noises too old to end
      Trench -- right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
      With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
    Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.
    Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
      His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
      In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
    And pelt music, till none 's to spill nor spend.

    How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
      How ring right out our sordid turbid time,
    Being pure! We, life's pride and cared-for crown,

      Have lost that cheer and charm of earth's past prime:
    Our make and making break, are breaking, down
      To man's last dust, drain fast towards man's first slime.


    The Windhover:


    To Christ our Lord


    I CAUGHT this morning morning's minion, king-
      dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
      Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
    High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
    In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
      As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
      Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
    Stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
    Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
      Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
    Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

      No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
    Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
      Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.


    Pied Beauty




    GLORY be to God for dappled things --
      For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
          For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
      Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
          And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
    All things counter, original, spare, strange;
      Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
          With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                      Praise him.


    Hurrahing in Harvest




    SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
      Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
      Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
    Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
    I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
      Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
      And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
    Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

    And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
      Majestic -- as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! --
    These things, these things were here and but the beholder
      Wanting; which two when they once meet,
    The heart rears wings bold and bolder
      And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.


    The Caged Skylark




    AS a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
      Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells --
      That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
    This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
    Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
      Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
      Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
    Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.

    Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest --
    Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
       But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.

    Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
    But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
      For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.


    In the Valley of the Elwy




    I REMEMBER a house where all were good
      To me, God knows, deserving no such thing:
      Comforting smell breathed at very entering,
    Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood.
    That cordial air made those kind people a hood
      All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing
      Will, or mild nights the new morsels of spring:
    Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should.
    Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
    All the air things wear that build this world of Wales;
      Only the inmate does not correspond:
    God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,
    Complete thy creature dear O where it fails,
      Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.


    The Loss of the Eurydice


    Foundered March 24. 1878


    THE Eurydice -- it concerned thee, O Lord:
    Three hundred souls, O alas! on board,
          Some asleep unawakened, all un-
    warned, eleven fathoms fallen


    Where she foundered! One stroke
    Felled and furled them, the hearts of oak!
          And flockbells off the aerial
    Downs' forefalls beat to the burial.


    For did she pride her, freighted fully, on
    Bounden bales or a hoard of bullion? --
          Precious passing measure,
    Lads and men her lade and treasure.


    She had come from a cruise, training seamen --
    Men, boldboys soon to be men:
          Must it, worst weather,
    Blast bole and bloom together?


    No Atlantic squall overwrought her
    Or rearing billow of the Biscay water:
          Home was hard at hand
    And the blow bore from land.


    And you were a liar, O blue March day.
    Bright sun lanced fire in the heavenly bay;
          But what black Boreas wrecked her? he
    Came equipped, deadly-electric,


    A beetling baldbright cloud thorough England
    Riding: there did stores not mingle? and
          Hailropes hustle and grind their
    Heavengravel? wolfsnow, worlds of it, wind there?


    Now Carisbrook keep goes under in gloom;
    Now it overvaults Appledurcombe;
          Now near by Ventnor town
    It hurls, hurls off Boniface Down.


    Too proud, too proud, what a press she bore!
    Royal, and all her royals wore.
          Sharp with her, shorten sail!
    Too late; lost; gone with the gale.


    This was that fell capsize,
    As half she had righted and hoped to rise
          Death teeming in by her portholes
    Raced down decks, round messes of mortals.


    Then a lurch forward, frigate and men;
    'All hands for themselves' the cry ran then;
          But she who had housed them thither
    Was around them, bound them or wound them with her.


    Marcus Hare, high her captain,
    Kept to her -- care-drowned and wrapped in
          Cheer's death, would follow
    His charge through the champ-white water-in-a-wallow,


    All under Channel to bury in a beach her
    Cheeks: Right, rude of feature,
          He thought he heard say
    'Her commander! and thou too, and thou this way.'


    It is even seen, time's something server,
    In mankind's medley a duty-swerver,
          At downright 'No or yes?'
    Doffs all, drives full for righteousness.


    Sydney Fletcher, Bristol-bred,
    (Low lie his mates now on watery bed)
          Takes to the seas and snows
    As sheer down the ship goes.


    Now her afterdraught gullies him too down;
    Now he wrings for breath with the deathgush brown;
          Till a lifebelt and God's will
    Lend him a lift from the sea-swill.


    Now he shoots short up to the round air;
    Now he gasps, now he gazes everywhere;
          But his eye no cliff, no coast or
    Mark makes in the rivelling snowstorm.


    Him, after an hour of wintry waves,
    A schooner sights, with another, and saves,
          And he boards her in Oh! such joy
    He has lost count what came next, poor boy. --


    They say who saw one sea-corpse cold
    He was all of lovely manly mould,
          Every inch a tar,
    Of the best we boast our sailors are.


    Look, foot to forelock, how all things suit! he
    Is strung by duty, is strained to beauty,
          And brown-as-dawning-skinned
    With brine and shine and whirling wind.


    O his nimble finger, his gnarled grip!
    Leagues, leagues of seamanship
          Slumber in these forsaken
    Bones, this sinew, and will not waken.


    He was but one like thousands more,
    Day and night I deplore
          My people and born own nation,
    Fast foundering own generation.


    I might let bygones be -- our curse
    Of ruinous shrine no hand or, worse,
          Robbery's hand is busy to
    Dress, hoar-hallowèd shrines unvisited;


    Only the breathing temple and fleet
    Life, this wildworth blown so sweet,
          These daredeaths, ay this crew, in
    Unchrist, all rolled in ruin --


    Deeply surely I need to deplore it,
    Wondering why my master bore it,
          The riving off that race
    So at home, time was, to his truth and grace


    That a starlight-wender of ours would say
    The marvellous Milk was Walsingham Way
          And one -- but let be, let be:
    More, more than was will yet be. --


    O well wept, mother have lost son;
    Wept, wife; wept, sweetheart would be one:
          Though grief yield them no good
    Yet shed what tears sad truelove should.


    But to Christ lord of thunder
    Crouch; lay knee by earth low under:
          'Holiest, loveliest, bravest,
    Save my hero, O Hero savest.


    And the prayer thou hearst me making
    Have, at the awful overtaking,
          Heard; have heard and granted
    Grace that day grace was wanted.'


    Not that hell knows redeeming,
    But for souls sunk in seeming
          Fresh, till doomfire burn all,
    Prayer shall fetch pity eternal.








    The May Magnificat




    MAY is Mary's month, and I
    Muse at that and wonder why:
          Her feasts follow reason,
          Dated due to season --
    Candlemas, Lady Day;
    But the Lady Month, May,
          Why fasten that upon her,
          With a feasting in her honour?

    Is it only its being brighter
    Than the most are must delight her?
          Is it opportunest
          And flowers finds soonest?

    Ask of her, the mighty mother:
    Her reply puts this other
          Question: What is Spring? --
          Growth in every thing --

    Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
    Grass and greenworld all together;
          Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
          Throstle above her nested

    Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
    Forms and warms the life within;
          And bird and blossom swell
          In sod or sheath or shell.

    All things rising, all things sizing
    Mary sees, sympathising
          With that world of good,
          Nature's motherhood.

    Their magnifying of each its kind
    With delight calls to mind
          How she did in her stored
          Magnify the Lord.

    Well but there was more than this:
    Spring's universal bliss
          Much, had much to say
          To offering Mary May.

    When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
    Bloom lights the orchard-apple
          And thicket and thorp are merry
          With silver-surfèd cherry

    And azuring-over greybell makes
    Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
          And magic cuckoocall
          Caps, clears, and clinches all --

    This ecstasy all through mothering earth
    Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
          To remember and exultation
          In God who was her salvation.


    Binsey Poplars


    felled 1879


      MY aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
      Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
      All felled, felled, are all felled;
          Of a fresh and following folded rank
                 Not spared, not one
                 That dandled a sandalled
              Shadow that swam or sank
    On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
      O if we but knew what we do
              When we delve or hew --
          Hack and rack the growing green!
              Since country is so tender
          To touch, her being só slender,
          That, like this sleek and seeing ball
          But a prick will make no eye at all,
          Where we, even where we mean
                 To mend her we end her,
              When we hew or delve:
    After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
      Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
          Strokes of havoc únselve
              The sweet especial scene,
          Rural scene, a rural scene,
          Sweet especial rural scene.


    Duns Scotus's Oxford




    TOWERY city and branchy between towers;
    Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
    The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
    Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;
    Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
    That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
    Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
    Rural rural keeping -- folk, flocks, and flowers.

    Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
    He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
    He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

    Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
    Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
    Who fired France for Mary without spot.


    Henry Purcell



      The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man's mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally.


    HAVE, fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
    To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell,
    An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal
    Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy, here.
    Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,
    Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle:
    It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
    Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.

    Let him Oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me! only I'll
    Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage under
    Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever he has walked his while

    The thunder-purple seabeach plumèd purple-of-thunder,
    If a wuthering of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a colossal smile
    Off him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder.


    Peace




    WHEN will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
    Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
    When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
    To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
    That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
    Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
    O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
    Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
    That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
    He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
              He comes to brood and sit.


    The Bugler's First Communion




    A BUGLAR boy from barrack (it is over the hill
    There) -- boy bugler, born, he tells me, of Irish
              Mother to an English sire (he
    Shares their best gifts surely, fall how things will),
    This very very day came down to us after a boon he on
    My late being there begged of me, overflowing
              Boon in my bestowing,
    Came, I say, this day to it -- to a First Communion.

    Here he knelt then ín regimental red.
    Forth Christ from cupboard fetched, how fain I of feet
              To his youngster take his treat!
    Low-latched in leaf-light housel his too huge godhead.

    There! and your sweetest sendings, ah divine,
    By it, heavens, befall him! as a heart Christ's darling, dauntless;
              Tongue true, vaunt- and tauntless;
    Breathing bloom of a chastity in mansex fine.

    Frowning and forefending angel-warder
    Squander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him;
              March, kind comrade, abreast him;
    Dress his days to a dexterous and starlight order.

    How it dóes my heart good, visiting at that bleak hill,
    When limber liquid youth, that to all I teach
              Yields tender as a pushed peach,
    Hies headstrong to its wellbeing of a self-wise self-will!

    Then though I should tread tufts of consolation
    Dáys áfter, só I in a sort deserve to
              And do serve God to serve to
    Just such slips of soldiery Christ's royal ration.

    Nothing élse is like it, no, not all so strains
    Us: fresh youth fretted in a bloomfall all portending
              That sweet's sweeter ending;
    Realm both Christ is heir to and thére réigns.

    O now well work that sealing sacred ointment!
    O for now charms, arms, what bans off bad
              And locks love ever in a lad!
    Let mé though see no more of him, and not disappointment

    Those sweet hopes quell whose least me quickenings lift,
    In scarlet or somewhere of some day seeing
              That brow and bead of being,
    An our day's God's own Galahad. Though this child's drift

    Seems by a divíne doom chánnelled, nor do I cry
    Disaster there; but may he not rankle and roam
              In backwheels though bound home? --
    That left to the Lord of the Eucharist, I here lie by;

    Recorded only, I have put my lips on pleas
    Would brandle adamantine heaven with ride and jar, did
              Prayer go disregarded:
    Forward-like, but however, and like favourable heaven heard these.


    Morning Midday and Evening Sacrifice




    THE dappled die-away
    Cheek and wimpled lip,
    The gold-wisp, the airy-grey
    Eye, all in fellowship --
    This, all this beauty blooming,
    This, all this freshness fuming,
    Give God while worth consuming.
    Both thought and thew now bolder
    And told by Nature: Tower;
    Head, heart, hand, heel, and shoulder
    That beat and breathe in power --
    This pride of prime's enjoyment
    Take as for tool, not toy meant
    And hold at Christ's employment.

    The vault and scope and schooling
    And mastery in the mind,
    In silk-ash kept from cooling,
    And ripest under rind --
    What life half lifts the latch of,
    What hell stalks towards the snatch of,
    Your offering, with despatch, of!


    Andromeda




    NOW Time's Andromeda on this rock rude,
    With not her either beauty's equal or
    Her injury's, looks off by both horns of shore,
    Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon's food.
      Time past she has been attempted and pursued
    By many blows and banes; but now hears roar
    A wilder beast from West than all were, more
    Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.
      Her Perseus linger and leave her tó her extremes? --
    Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs
    His thoughts on her, forsaken that she seems,
      All while her patience, morselled into pangs,
    Mounts; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,
    With Gorgon's gear and barebill, thongs and fangs.


    The Candle Indoors




    SOME candle clear burns somewhere I come by.
    I muse at how its being puts blissful back
    With yellowy moisture mild night's blear-all black,
    Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye.
    By that window what task what fingers ply,
    I plod wondering, a-wanting, just for lack
    Of answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack
    There God to aggrándise, God to glorify. --
    Come you indoors, come home; your fading fire
    Mend first and vital candle in close heart's vault:
    You there are master, do your own desire;
    What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault
    In a neighbour deft-handed? Are you that liar
    And, cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt?


    The Handsome Heart:


    at a Gracious Answer


    'BUT tell me, child, your choice; what shall I buy
    You?' -- 'Father, what you buy me I like best.'
    With the sweetest air that said, still plied and pressed,
    He swung to his first poised purport of reply.
    What the heart is! which, like carriers let fly --
    Doff darkness, homing nature knows the rest --
    To its own fine function, wild and self-instressed,
    Falls light as ten years long taught how to and why.

    Mannerly-hearted! more than handsome face --
    Beauty's bearing or muse of mounting vein,
    All, in this case, bathed in high hallowing grace...

    Of heaven what boon to buy you, boy, or gain
    Not granted? -- Only ... O on that path you pace
    Run all your race, O brace sterner that strain!


    At the Wedding March




    GOD with honour hang your head,
    Groom, and grace you, bride, your bed
    With lissome scions, sweet scions,
    Out of hallowed bodies bred.
    Each be other's comfort kind:
    Déep, déeper than divined,
    Divine charity, dear charity,
    Fast you ever, fast bind.

    Then let the March tread our ears:
    I to him turn with tears
    Who to wedlock, his wonder wedlock,
    Déals tríumph and immortal years.


    Felix Randal




    FELIX Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended,
    Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
    Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some
    Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
    Sickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first, but mended
    Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
    Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
    Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

    This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
    My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
    Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

    How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
    When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
    Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!


    Brothers




    HOW lovely the elder brother's
    Life all laced in the other's,
    Lóve-laced! -- what once I well
    Witnessed; so fortune fell.
    When Shrovetide, two years gone,
    Our boys' plays brought on
    Part was picked for John,
    Young Jóhn: then fear, then joy
    Ran revel in the elder boy.
    Their night was come now; all
    Our company thronged the hall;
    Henry, by the wall,
    Beckoned me beside him:
    I came where called, and eyed him
    By meanwhiles; making my play
    Turn most on tender byplay.
    For, wrung all on love's rack,
    My lad, and lost in Jack,
    Smiled, blushed, and bit his lip;
    Or drove, with a diver's dip,
    Clutched hands down through clasped knees --
    Truth's tokens tricks like these,
    Old telltales, with what stress
    He hung on the imp's success.
    Now the other was bráss-bóld:
    Hé had no work to hold
    His heart up at the strain;
    Nay, roguish ran the vein.
    Two tedious acts were past;
    Jack's call and cue at last;
    When Henry, heart-forsook,
    Dropped eyes and dared not look.
    Eh, how áll rúng!
    Young dog, he did give tongue!
    But Harry -- in his hands he has flung
    His tear-tricked cheeks of flame
    For fond love and for shame.
      Ah Nature, framed in fault,
    There 's comfort then, there 's salt;
    Nature, bad, base, and blind,
    Dearly thou canst be kind;
    There dearly thén, deárly,
    I'll cry thou canst be kind.








    Spring and Fall:


    to a young child


    MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
    Over Goldengrove unleaving?
    Leáves, líke the things of man, you
    With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
    Áh! ás the heart grows older
    It will come to such sights colder
    By and by, nor spare a sigh
    Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
    And yet you wíll weep and know why.
    Now no matter, child, the name:
    Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
    Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
    What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
    It ís the blight man was born for,
    It is Margaret you mourn for.








    Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves




    EARNEST, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, ... stupendous
    Evening strains to be tíme's vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
    Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
    Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us,
    Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-
    tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steepèd and páshed -- qúite
    Disremembering, dísmémbering ' áll now. Heart, you round me right
    With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.
    Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
    Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
    Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ' upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck
    Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds -- black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
    But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
    Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.








    Inversnaid




    THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
    His rollrock highroad roaring down,
    In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
    Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
    A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
    Turns and twindles over the broth
    Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
    It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

    Degged with dew, dappled with dew
    Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
    Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
    And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

    What would the world be, once bereft
    Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
    O let them be left, wildness and wet;
    Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.






    AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;






    AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
    As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
    Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
    Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
    Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
    Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
    Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
    Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
    Í say móre: the just man justices;
    Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
    Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
    Chríst -- for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
    Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
    To the Father through the features of men's faces.


    Ribblesdale




    EARTH, sweet Earth, sweet landscape, with leavés throng
    And louchéd low grass, heaven that dost appeal
    To, with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel;
    That canst but only be, but dost that long --
    Thou canst but be, but that thou well dost; strong
    Thy plea with him who dealt, nay does now deal,
    Thy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel
    Thy river, and o'er gives all to rack or wrong.

      And what is Earth's eye, tongue, or heart else, where
    Else, but in dear and dogged man? -- Ah, the heir
    To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn,
    To thriftless reave both our rich round world bare
    And none reck of world after, this bids wear
    Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern.


    The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo


    (Maidens' song from St. Winefred's Well)

    THE LEADEN ECHO
    HOW to kéep -- is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
    Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, ... from vanishing away?
    Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,
    Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
    No there 's none, there 's none, O no there 's none,
    Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
    Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
    And wisdom is early to despair:
    Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
    To keep at bay
    Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
    Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
    So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
    O there 's none; no no no there 's none:
    Be beginning to despair, to despair,
    Despair, despair, despair, despair.


    THE GOLDEN ECHO
              Spare!
    There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
    Only not within seeing of the sun,
    Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
    Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air,
    Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
    Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
    Where whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that 's fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
    Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
    Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
    The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
    Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
    To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
    Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
    Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace --
    Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
    And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
    Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
    Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
    See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
    Is, hair of the head, numbered.
    Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
    Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
    This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
    What while we, while we slumbered.
    O then, weary then why When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
    Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
    Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
    A care kept. -- Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where. --
    Yonder. -- What high as that! We follow, now we follow. -- Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
    Yonder.


    The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe




    WILD air, world-mothering air,
    Nestling me everywhere,
    That each eyelash or hair
    Girdles; goes home betwixt
    The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
    Snowflake; that 's fairly mixed
    With, riddles, and is rife
    In every least thing's life;
    This needful, never spent,
    And nursing element;
    My more than meat and drink,
    My meal at every wink;
    This air, which, by life's law,
    My lung must draw and draw
    Now but to breathe its praise,
    Minds me in many ways
    Of her who not only
    Gave God's infinity
    Dwindled to infancy
    Welcome in womb and breast,
    Birth, milk, and all the rest
    But mothers each new grace
    That does now reach our race --
    Mary Immaculate,
    Merely a woman, yet
    Whose presence, power is
    Great as no goddess's
    Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
    This one work has to do --
    Let all God's glory through,
    God's glory which would go
    Through her and from her flow
    Off, and no way but so.
          I say that we are wound
    With mercy round and round
    As if with air: the same
    Is Mary, more by name.
    She, wild web, wondrous robe,
    Mantles the guilty globe,
    Since God has let dispense
    Her prayers his providence:
    Nay, more than almoner,
    The sweet alms' self is her
    And men are meant to share
    Her life as life does air.
          If I have understood,
    She holds high motherhood
    Towards all our ghostly good
    And plays in grace her part
    About man's beating heart,
    Laying, like air's fine flood,
    The deathdance in his blood;
    Yet no part but what will
    Be Christ our Saviour still.
    Of her flesh he took flesh:
    He does take fresh and fresh,
    Though much the mystery how,
    Not flesh but spirit now
    And makes, O marvellous!
    New Nazareths in us,
    Where she shall yet conceive
    Him, morning, noon, and eve;
    New Bethlems, and he born
    There, evening, noon, and morn --
    Bethlem or Nazareth,
    Men here may draw like breath
    More Christ and baffle death;
    Who, born so, comes to be
    New self and nobler me
    In each one and each one
    More makes, when all is done,
    Both God's and Mary's Son.
          Again, look overhead
    How air is azurèd;
    O how! nay do but stand
    Where you can lift your hand
    Skywards: rich, rich it laps
    Round the four fingergaps.
    Yet such a sapphire-shot,
    Charged, steepèd sky will not
    Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
    It does no prejudice.
    The glass-blue days are those
    When every colour glows,
    Each shape and shadow shows.
    Blue be it: this blue heaven
    The seven or seven times seven
    Hued sunbeam will transmit
    Perfect, not alter it.
    Or if there does some soft,
    On things aloof, aloft,
    Bloom breathe, that one breath more
    Earth is the fairer for.
    Whereas did air not make
    This bath of blue and slake
    His fire, the sun would shake,
    A blear and blinding ball
    With blackness bound, and all
    The thick stars round him roll
    Flashing like flecks of coal,
    Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
    In grimy vasty vault.
          So God was god of old:
    A mother came to mould
    Those limbs like ours which are
    What must make our daystar
    Much dearer to mankind;
    Whose glory bare would blind
    Or less would win man's mind.
    Through her we may see him
    Made sweeter, not made dim,
    And her hand leaves his light
    Sifted to suit our sight.
          Be thou then, O thou dear
    Mother, my atmosphere;
    My happier world, wherein
    To wend and meet no sin;
    Above me, round me lie
    Fronting my froward eye
    With sweet and scarless sky;
    Stir in my ears, speak there
    Of God's love, O live air,
    Of patience, penance, prayer:
    World-mothering air, air wild,
    Wound with thee, in thee isled,
    Fold home, fast fold thy child.


    To what serves Mortal Beauty?




    TO what serves mortal beauty ' -- dangerous; does set danc-
    ing blood -- the O-seal-that-so ' feature, flung prouder form
    Than Purcell tune lets tread to? ' See: it does this: keeps warm
    Men's wits to the things that are; ' what good means -- where a glance
    Master more may than gaze, ' gaze out of countenance.
    Those lovely lads once, wet-fresh ' windfalls of war's storm,
    How then should Gregory, a father, ' have gleanèd else from swarm-
    ed Rome? But God to a nation ' dealt that day's dear chance.
      To man, that needs would worship ' block or barren stone,
    Our law says: Love what are ' love's worthiest, were all known;
    World's loveliest -- men's selves. Self ' flashes off frame and face.
    What do then? how meet beauty? ' Merely meet it; own,
    Home at heart, heaven's sweet gift; ' then leave, let that alone.
    Yea, wish that though, wish all, ' God's better beauty, grace.








    (The Soldier)




    YES. Why do we áll, seeing of a soldier, bless him? bless
    Our redcoats, our tars? Both these being, the greater part,
    But frail clay, nay but foul clay. Here it is: the heart,
    Since, proud, it calls the calling manly, gives a guess
    That, hopes that, makesbelieve, the men must be no less;
    It fancies, feigns, deems, dears the artist after his art;
    And fain will find as sterling all as all is smart,
    And scarlet wear the spirit of wár thére express.
    Mark Christ our King. He knows war, served this soldiering through;
    He of all can handle a rope best. There he bides in bliss
    Now, and séeing somewhére some mán do all that man can do,
    For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,
    And cry 'O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too:
    Were I come o'er again' cries Christ 'it should be this'.


    (Carrion Comfort)




    NOT, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
    Not untwist -- slack they may be -- these last strands of man
    In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
    Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
    But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
    Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
    With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
    O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
      Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
    Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
    Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
    Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
    Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
    Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

    NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,





    NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
    More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
    Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
    Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
    My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
    Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing --
    Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
    ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
      O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
    Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
    May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
    Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
    Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
    Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.


    Tom's Garland:


    upon the Unemployed


    TOM -- garlanded with squat and surly steel
    Tom; then Tom's fallowbootfellow piles pick
    By him and rips out rockfire homeforth -- sturdy Dick;
    Tom Heart-at-ease, Tom Navvy: he is all for his meal
    Sure, 's bed now. Low be it: lustily he his low lot (feel
    That ne'er need hunger, Tom; Tom seldom sick,
    Seldomer heartsore; that treads through, prickproof, thick
    Thousands of thorns, thoughts) swings though. Commonweal
    Little I reck ho! lacklevel in, if all had bread:
    What! Country is honour enough in all us -- lordly head,
    With heaven's lights high hung round, or, mother-ground
    That mammocks, mighty foot. But no way sped,
    Nor mind nor mainstrength; gold go garlanded
    With, perilous, O nó; nor yet plod safe shod sound;
                      Undenizened, beyond bound
    Of earth's glory, earth's ease, all; no one, nowhere,
    In wide the world's weal; rare gold, bold steel, bare
                   In both; care, but share care --
    This, by Despair, bred Hangdog dull; by Rage,
    Manwolf, worse; and their packs infest the age.








    Harry Ploughman




    HARD as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue
    Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank
    Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank --
              Head and foot, shoulder and shank --
    By a grey eye's heed steered well, one crew, fall to;
    Stand at stress. Each limb's barrowy brawn, his thew
    That onewhere curded, onewhere sucked or sank --
                 Soared or sank -- ,
    Though as a beechbole firm, finds his, as at a roll-call, rank
    And features, in flesh, what deed he each must do --
              His sinew-service where do.
    He leans to it, Harry bends, look. Back, elbow, and liquid waist
    In him, all quail to the wallowing o' the plough: 's cheek crimsons; curls
    Wag or crossbridle, in a wind lifted, windlaced --
              See his wind- lilylocks -laced;
    Churlsgrace, too, child of Amansstrength, how it hangs or hurls
    Them -- broad in bluff hide his frowning feet lashed! raced
    With, along them, cragiron under and cold furls --
              With-a-fountain's shining-shot furls.

    TO seem the stranger lies my lot, my life





    TO seem the stranger lies my lot, my life
    Among strangers. Father and mother dear,
    Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near
    And he my peace my parting, sword and strife.
      England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife
    To my creating thought, would neither hear
    Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I wear-
    y of idle a being but by where wars are rife.
      I am in Ireland now; now I am at a thírd
    Remove. Not but in all removes I can
    Kind love both give and get. Only what word
    Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven's baffling ban
    Bars or hell's spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,
    Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.





    I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day







    I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day.
    What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
    This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
    And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
          With witness I speak this. But where I say
    Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
    Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
    To dearest him that lives alas! away.
      I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
    Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
    Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
      Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
    The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
    As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.






    PATIENCE, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray






    PATIENCE, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,
    But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks
    Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;
    To do without, take tosses, and obey.
      Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,
    Nowhere. Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks
    Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks
    Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.
      We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills
    To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills
    Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.
      And where is he who more and more distils
    Delicious kindness? -- He is patient. Patience fills
    His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.

    MY own heart let me have more have pity on; let





    MY own heart let me have more have pity on; let
    Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
    Charitable; not live this tormented mind
    With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
      I cast for comfort I can no more get
    By groping round my comfortless, than blind
    Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
    Thirst 's all-in-all in all a world of wet.
    Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
    You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
    Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
    At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
    's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather -- as skies
    Betweenpie mountains -- lights a lovely mile.


    That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection




    CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
    built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.
    Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
    Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
    Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
    Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut peel parches
    Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
    Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there
    Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature's bonfire burns on.
    But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
    Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!
    Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
    Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone
    Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark
                   Is any of him at all so stark
    But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
    A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
                   Across my foundering deck shone
    A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
    Fall to the residuary worm; ' world's wildfire, leave but ash:
                   In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
    I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
    This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                   Is immortal diamond.








    In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez Laybrother of the Society of Jesus




    HONOUR is flashed off exploit, so we say;
    And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
    Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
    And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
    On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
    But be the war within, the brand we wield
    Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
    Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
      Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
    Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
    Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
    Could crowd career with conquest while there went
    Those years and years by of world without event
    That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.



    Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum: verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur?

    THOU art indeed just, Lord, if I contend



    THOU art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
    With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
    Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
    Disappointment all I endeavour end?
      Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
    How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
    Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
    Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
    Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
    Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
    With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
    Them; birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain,
    Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
    Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.


    To R. B.




    THE fine delight that fathers thought; the strong
    Spur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame,
    Breathes once and, quenchèd faster than it came,
    Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song.
    Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long
    Within her wears, bears, cares and moulds the same:
    The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim
    Now known and hand at work now never wrong.
      Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this;
    I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
    O then if in my lagging lines you miss
    The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
    My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss
    Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.








    Unfinished Poems Fragments




    Summa




    THE best ideal is the true
      And other truth is none.
    All glory be ascribèd to
      The holy Three in One.



    WHAT being in rank-old nature should earlier have that breath been








    WHAT being in rank-old nature should earlier have that breath been
    That hére pérsonal tells off these heart-song powerful peals? --
    A bush-browed, beetle-brówed bíllow is it?
    With a soúth-wésterly wínd blústering, with a tide rolls reels
    Of crumbling, fore-foundering, thundering all-surfy seas in; seen
    Únderneath, their glassy barrel, of a fairy green.
       . . . . . . . .
    Or a jaunting vaunting vaulting assaulting trumpet telling








    On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People


    A Brother and Sister


    O I admire and sorrow! The heart's eye grieves
    Discovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years.
    A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves,
    And beauty's dearest veriest vein is tears.
    Happy the father, mother of these! Too fast:
    Not that, but thus far, all with frailty, blest
    In one fair fall; but, for time's aftercast,
    Creatures all heft, hope, hazard, interest.

    And are they thus? The fine, the fingering beams
    Their young delightful hour do feature down
    That fleeted else like day-dissolvèd dreams
    Or ringlet-race on burling Barrow brown.

    She leans on him with such contentment fond
    As well the sister sits, would well the wife;
    His looks, the soul's own letters, see beyond,
    Gaze on, and fall directly forth on life.

    But ah, bright forelock, cluster that you are
    Of favoured make and mind and health and youth,
    Where lies your landmark, seamark, or soul's star?
    There's none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth.

    There 's none but good can bé good, both for you
    And what sways with you, maybe this sweet maid;
    None good but God -- a warning wavèd to
    One once that was found wanting when Good weighed.

    Man lives that list, that leaning in the will
    No wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess,
    The selfless self of self, most strange, most still,
    Fast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes.

    Your feast of; that most in you earnest eye
    May but call on your banes to more carouse.
    Worst will the best. What worm was here, we cry,
    To have havoc-pocked so, see, the hung-heavenward boughs?

    Enough: corruption was the world's first woe.
    What need I strain my heart beyond my ken?
    O but I bear my burning witness though
    Against the wild and wanton work of men.
       . . . . . . .

    THE sea took pity: it interposed with doom:





    THE sea took pity: it interposed with doom:
    'I have tall daughters dear that heed my hand:
    Let Winter wed one, sow them in her womb,
    And she shall child them on the New-world strand.'
       . . . . . . . .








    (Ash-boughs)





    a.

    NOT of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,
    Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep
    Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.
    Say it is ashboughs: whether on a December day and furled
    Fast ór they in clammyish lashtender combs creep
    Apart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high.
    They touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep
    The smouldering enormous winter welkin! May
    Mells blue and snowwhite through them, a fringe and fray
    Of greenery: it is old earth's groping towards the steep
              Heaven whom she childs us by.

    (Variant from line 7.) b.

    They touch, they tabour on it, hover on it[; here, there hurled],
              With talons sweep
    The smouldering enormous winter welkin. [Eye,
              But more cheer is when] May
    Mells blue with snowwhite through their fringe and fray
    Of greenery and old earth gropes for, grasps at steep
              Heaven with it whom she childs things by.




    HOPE holds to Christ the mind's own mirror out







       . . . . . . . .
    HOPE holds to Christ the mind's own mirror out
    To take His lovely likeness more and more.
    It will not well, so she would bring about
    An ever brighter burnish than before
    And turns to wash it from her welling eyes
    And breathes the blots off all with sighs on sighs.
    Her glass is blest but she as good as blind
    Holds till hand aches and wonders what is there;
    Her glass drinks light, she darkles down behind,
    All of her glorious gainings unaware.
       . . . . . . . .
    I told you that she turned her mirror dim
    Betweenwhiles, but she sees herself not Him.
       . . . . . . . .




    St. Winefred's Well


    ACT I. SC. I
    Enter Teryth from riding, Winefred following.
    T. WHAT is it, Gwen, my girl? why do you hover and haunt me?
    W. You came by Caerwys, sir?
    T. I came by Caerwys.
    W. There
    Some messenger there might have met you from my uncle.
    T. Your uncle met the messenger -- met me; and this the message:
    Lord Beuno comes to-night.
    W. To-night, sir!
    T. Soon, now: therefore
    Have all things ready in his room.
    W. There needs but little doing.
    T. Let what there needs be done. Stay! with him one companion,
    His deacon, Dirvan Warm: twice over must the welcome be,
    But both will share one cell. -- This was good news, Gwenvrewi.
    W. Ah yes!
    T. Why, get thee gone then; tell thy mother I want her.
    Exit Winefred.

    No man has such a daughter. The fathers of the world
    Call no such maiden 'mine'. The deeper grows her dearness
    And more and more times laces round and round my heart,
    The more some monstrous hand gropes with clammy fingers there,
    Tampering with those sweet bines, draws them out, strains them, strains them;
    Meantime some tongue cries 'What, Teryth! what, thou poor fond father!
    How when this bloom, this honeysuckle, that rides the air so rich about thee,
    Is all, all sheared away, thus!' Then I sweat for fear.
    Or else a funeral, and yet 'tis not a funeral,
    Some pageant which takes tears and I must foot with feeling that
    Alive or dead my girl is carried in it, endlessly
    Goes marching thro' my mind. What sense is this? It has none.
    This is too much the father; nay the mother. Fanciful!
    I here forbid my thoughts to fool themselves with fears.

    Enter Gwenlo.
       . . . . . . . .
    ACT II. -- Scene, a wood ending in a steep bank over a dry dene, Winefred having been murdered within. Re-enter Caradoc with a bloody sword.
    C. My heart, where have we been? What have we seen, my mind?
    What stroke has Caradoc's right arm dealt? what done? Head of a rebel
    Struck off it has; written upon lovely limbs,
    In bloody letters, lessons of earnest, of revenge;
    Monuments of my earnest, records of my revenge,
    On one that went against me whéreas I had warned her --
    Warned her! well she knew. I warned her of this work.
    What work? what harm 's done? There is no harm done, none yet;
    Perhaps we struck no blow, Gwenvrewi lives perhaps;
    To makebelieve my mood was -- mock. O I might think so
    But here, here is a workman from his day's task sweats.
    Wiped I am sure this was; it seems not well; for still,
    Still the scarlet swings and dances on the blade.
    So be it. Thou steel, thou butcher,
    I cán scour thee, fresh burnish thee, sheathe thee in thy dark lair; these drops
    Never, never, never in their blue banks again.
    The woeful, Cradock, O the woeful word! Then what,
    What have we seen? Her head, sheared from her shoulders, fall,
    And lapped in shining hair, roll to the bank's edge; then
    Down the beetling banks, like water in waterfalls,
    It stooped and flashed and fell and ran like water away.
    Her eyes, oh and her eyes!
    In all her beauty, and sunlight to it is a pit, den, darkness,
    Foam-falling is not fresh to it, rainbow by it not beaming,
    In all her body, I say, no place was like her eyes,
    No piece matched those eyes kept most part much cast down
    But, being lifted, immortal, of immortal brightness.
    Several times I saw them, thrice or four times turning;
    Round and round they came and flashed towards heaven: O there,
    There they did appeal. Therefore airy vengeances
    Are afoot; heaven-vault fast purpling portends, and what first lightning
    Any instant falls means me. And I do not repent;
    I do not and I will not repent, not repent.
    The blame bear who aroused me. What I have done violent
    I have like a lion done, lionlike done,
    Honouring an uncontrolled royal wrathful nature,
    Mantling passion in a grandeur, crimson grandeur.
    Now be my pride then perfect, all one piece. Henceforth
    In a wide world of defiance Caradoc lives alone,
    Loyal to his own soul, laying his own law down, no law nor
    Lord now curb him for ever. O daring! O deep insight!
    What is virtue? Valour; only the heart valiant.
    And right? Only resolution; will, his will unwavering
    Who, like me, knowing his nature to the heart home, nature's business,
    Despatches with no flinching. But will flesh, O can flesh
    Second this fiery strain? Not always; O no no!
    We cannot live this life out; sometimes we must weary
    And in this darksome world what comfort can I find?
    Down this darksome world cómfort whére can I find
    When 'ts light I quenched; its rose, time's one rich rose, my hand,
    By her bloom, fast by her fresh, her fleecèd bloom,
    Hideous dashed down, leaving earth a winter withering
    With no now, no Gwenvrewi. I must miss her most
    That might have spared her were it but for passion-sake. Yes,
    To hunger and not have, yét hope ón for, to storm and strive and
    Be at every assault fresh foiled, worse flung, deeper disappointed,
    The turmoil and the torment, it has, I swear, a sweetness,
    Keeps a kind of joy in it, a zest, an edge, an ecstasy,
    Next after sweet success. I am not left even this;
    I all my being have hacked in half with her neck: one part,
    Reason, selfdisposal, choice of better or worse way,
    Is corpse now, cannot change; my other self, this soul,
    Life's quick, this kínd, this kéen self-feeling,
    With dreadful distillation of thoughts sour as blood,
    Must all day long taste murder. What do nów then? Do? Nay,
    Deed-bound I am; one deed treads all down here cramps all doing. What do? Not yield,
    Not hope, not pray; despair; ay, that: brazen despair out,
    Brave all, and take what comes -- as here this rabble is come,
    Whose bloods I reck no more of, no more rank with hers
    Than sewers with sacred oils. Mankind, that mobs, comes. Come!
    Enter a crowd, among them Teryth, Gwenlo, Beuno.
       . . . . . . . .
    After Winefred's raising from the dead and the breaking out of the fountain.

    BEUNO. O now while skies are blue, now while seas are salt,
    While rushy rains shall fall or brooks shall fleet from fountains,
    While sick men shall cast sighs, of sweet health all despairing,
    While blind men's eyes shall thirst after daylight, draughts of daylight,
    Or deaf ears shall desire that lipmusic that 's lost upon them,
    While cripples are, while lepers, dancers in dismal limb-dance,
    Fallers in dreadful frothpits, waterfearers wild,
    Stone, palsy, cancer, cough, lung wasting, womb not bearing,
    Rupture, running sores, what more? in brief; in burden,
    As long as men are mortal and God merciful,
    So long to this sweet spot, this leafy lean-over,
    This Dry Dene, now no longer dry nor dumb, but moist and musical
    With the uproll and the downcarol of day and night delivering
    Water, which keeps thy name, (for not in róck wrítten,
    But in pale water, frail water, wild rash and reeling water,
    That will not wear a print, that will not stain a pen,
    Thy venerable record, virgin, is recorded).
    Here to this holy well shall pilgrimages be,
    And not from purple Wales only nor from elmy England,
    But from beyond seas, Erin, France and Flanders, everywhere,
    Pilgrims, still pilgrims, móre pílgrims, still more poor pilgrims.
       . . . . . . . .
    What sights shall be when some that swung, wretches, on crutches
    Their crutches shall cast from them, on heels of air departing,
    Or they go rich as roseleaves hence that loathsome cáme hither!
    Not now to náme even
    Those dearer, more divine boons whose haven the heart is.
       . . . . . . . .
    As sure as what is most sure, sure as that spring primroses
    Shall new-dapple next year, sure as to-morrow morning,
    Amongst come-back-again things, thíngs with a revival, things with a recovery,
    Thy name...
       . . . . . . . .


    WHAT shall I do for the land that bred me,




    WHAT shall I do for the land that bred me,
    Her homes and fields that folded and fed me? --
    Be under her banner and live for her honour:
    Under her banner I'll live for her honour.
      CHORUS. Under her banner live for her honour.
    Not the pleasure, the pay, the plunder,
    But country and flag, the flag I am under --
    There is the shilling that finds me willing
    To follow a banner and fight for honour.
      CH. We follow her banner, we fight for her honour.

    Call me England's fame's fond lover,
    Her fame to keep, her fame to recover.
    Spend me or end me what God shall send me,
    But under her banner I live for her honour.
      CH. Under her banner we march for her honour.

    Where is the field I must play the man on?
    O welcome there their steel or cannon.
    Immortal beauty is death with duty,
    If under her banner I fall for her honour.
      CH. Under her banner we fall for her honour.


    THE times are nightfall, look, their light grows less



    THE times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
    The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
    They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
    Or bring more or more blazon man's distress.
    And I not help. Nor word now of success:
    All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one --
    Work which to see scarce so much as begun
    Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.
    Or what is else? There is your world within.
    There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
    Your will is law in that small commonweal...


    Cheery Beggar




    BEYOND Mágdalen and by the Bridge, on a place called there the Plain,
          In Summer, in a burst of summertime
          Following falls and falls of rain,
    When the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflower of
    Those goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime;
       . . . . . . . .
          The motion of that man's heart is fine
          Whom want could not make píne, píne
    That struggling should not sear him, a gift should cheer him
    Like that poor pocket of pence, poor pence of mine.
       . . . . . . . .








    DENIS, whose motionable, alert, most vaulting wit



    DENIS, whose motionable, alert, most vaulting wit
    Caps occasion with an intellectual fit.
    Yet Arthur is a Bowman: his three-heeled timber 'll hit
    The bald and bóld blínking gold when áll 's dóne
    Right rooting in the bare butt's wincing navel in the sight of the sun.
       . . . . . . . .








    THE furl of fresh-leaved dogrose down



    THE furl of fresh-leaved dogrose down
    His cheeks the forth-and-flaunting sun
    Had swarthed about with lion-brown
          Before the Spring was done.
    His locks like all a ravel-rope's-end,
      With hempen strands in spray --
    Fallow, foam-fallow, hanks -- fall'n off their ranks,
      Swung down at a disarray.

    Or like a juicy and jostling shock
      Of bluebells sheaved in May
    Or wind-long fleeces on the flock
      A day off shearing day.

    Then over his turnèd temples -- here --
      Was a rose, or, failing that,
    Rough-Robin or five-lipped campion clear
      For a beauty-bow to his hat,
    And the sunlight sidled, like dewdrops, like dandled diamonds
      Through the sieve of the straw of the plait.
       . . . . . . .







    The Woodlark




    TEEVO cheevo cheevio chee:
    O where, what can thát be?
    Weedio-weedio: there again!
    So tiny a trickle of sóng-strain;
    And all round not to be found
    For brier, bough, furrow, or gréen ground
    Before or behind or far or at hand
    Either left either right
    Anywhere in the súnlight.
    Well, after all! Ah but hark --
    'I am the little wóodlark.
       . . . . . . . .
    To-day the sky is two and two
    With white strokes and strains of the blue
       . . . . . . . .
    Round a ring, around a ring
    And while I sail (must listen) I sing
       . . . . . . . .
    The skylark is my cousin and he
    Is known to men more than me
       . . . . . . . .
               ...when the cry within
    Says Go on then I go on
    Till the longing is less and the good gone
    But down drop, if it says Stop,
    To the all-a-leaf of the tréetop
    And after that off the bough
       . . . . . . . .
    I ám so véry, O soó very glad
    That I dó thínk there is not to be had...
       . . . . . . . .
    The blue wheat-acre is underneath
    And the braided ear breaks out of the sheath,
    The ear in milk, lush the sash,
    And crush-silk poppies aflash,
    The blood-gush blade-gash
    Flame-rash rudred
    Bud shelling or broad-shed
    Tatter-tassel-tangled and dingle-a-dangled
    Dandy-hung dainty head.
       . . . . . . . .
    And down ... the furrow dry
    Sunspurge and oxeye
    And laced-leaved lovely
    Foam-tuft fumitory
       . . . . . . . .
    Through the velvety wind V-winged
    To the nest's nook I balance and buoy
    With a sweet joy of a sweet joy,
    Sweet, of a sweet, of a sweet joy
    Of a sweet -- a sweet -- swe