Poems by Sir John Collings Squire Volume I Part 11

SONNET

There was an Indian, who had known no change, Who strayed content along a sunlit beach Gathering sh.e.l.ls. He heard a sudden strange Commingled noise; looked up; and gasped for speech.

For in the bay, where nothing was before, Moved on the sea, by magic, huge canoes, With bellying cloths on poles, and not one oar, And fluttering coloured signs and clambering crews.

And he, in fear, this naked man alone, His fallen hands forgetting all their sh.e.l.ls, His lips gone pale, knelt low behind a stone, And stared, and saw, and did not understand, Columbus's doom-burdened caravels Slant to the sh.o.r.e, and all their seamen land.

SONG

Eyes like flowers and falling hair Seldom seen, nor ever long, Then I did not know you were Destined subject for a song: Sharing your unconsciousness Of your double loveliness, Unaware how fair you were, Peaceful eyes and shadowy hair.

Only, now your beauty falls Sweetly on some other place, Lonely reverie recalls More than anything your face; Any idle hour may find Stealing on my captured mind, Faintly merging from the air, Eyes like flowers and falling hair.

A GENERATION (1917)

There was a time that's gone And will not come again, We knew it was a pleasant time, How good we never dreamed.

When, for a whimsy's sake, We'd even play with pain, For everything awaited us And life immortal seemed.

It seemed unending then To forward-looking eyes, No thought of what postponement meant Hung dark across our mirth;

We had years and strength enough For any enterprise, Our numerous companions.h.i.+p Were heirs to all the earth.

But now all memory Is one ironic truth, We look like strangers at the boys We were so long ago;

For half of us are dead, And half have lost their youth, And our hearts are scarred by many griefs, That only age should know.

UNDER

In this house, she said, in this high second storey, In this room where we sit, above the midnight street, There runs a rivulet, narrow but very rapid, Under the still floor and your unconscious feet.

The lamp on the table made a cone of light That spread to the base of the walls: above was in gloom.

I heard her words with surprise; had I worked here so long, And never divined that secret of the room?

"But how," I asked, "does the water climb so high?"

"I do not know," she said, "but the thing is there; Pull up the boards while I go and fetch you a rod."

She pa.s.sed, and I heard her creaking descend the stair.

And I rose and rolled the Turkey carpet back From the two broad boards by the north wall she had named, And, hearing already the crumple of water, I knelt And lifted the first of them up; and the water gleamed,

Bordered with little frosted heaps of ice, And, as she came back with a rod and line that swung, I moved the other board; in the yellow light The water trickled frostily, slackly along.

I took the tackle, a stiff black rubber worm, That stuck out its pointed tail from a c.u.mbrous hook, "But there can't be fis.h.i.+ng in water like this," I said.

And she, with weariness, "There is no ice there. Look."

And I stood there, gazing down at a stream in spate, Holding the rod in my undecided hand...

Till it all in a moment grew smooth and still and clear, And along its deep bottom of slaty grey sand

Three scattered little trout, as black as tadpoles, Came waggling slowly along the gla.s.s-dark lake, And I swung my arm to drop my pointing worm in, And then I stopped again with a little shake.

For I heard the thin gnat-like voices of the trout --My body felt woolly and sick and astray and cold-- Crying with mockery in them: "You are not allowed To take us, you know, under ten years old."

And the room swam, the calm woman and the yellow lamp, The table, and the dim-glistering walls, and the floor, And the stream sank away, and all whirled dizzily, And I moaned, and the pain at my heart grew more and more.

And I fainted away, utterly miserable.

Falling in a place where there was nothing to pa.s.s, Knowing all sorrows and the mothers and sisters of sorrows, And the pain of the darkness before anything ever was.

RIVERS

Rivers I have seen which were beautiful, Slow rivers winding in the flat fens, With bands of reeds like thronged green swords Guarding the mirrored sky; And streams down-tumbling from the chalk hills To valleys of meadows and watercress-beds, And bridges whereunder, dark weed-coloured shadows, Trout flit or lie.

I know those rivers that peacefully glide Past old towers and shaven gardens, Where mottled walls rise from the water And mills all streaked with flour; And rivers with wharves and rusty s.h.i.+pping, That flow with a stately tidal motion Towards their destined estuaries Full of the pride of power;

n.o.ble great rivers, Thames and Severn, Tweed with his gateway of many grey arches, Clyde, dying at sunset westward In a sea as red as blood; Rhine and his hills in close procession, Placid Elbe, Seine slaty and swirling, And Isar, son of the Alpine snows, A furious turquoise flood.

All these I have known, and with slow eyes I have walked on their sh.o.r.es and watched them, And softened to their beauty and loved them Wherever my feet have been; And a hundred others also Whose names long since grew into me, That, dreaming in light or darkness, I have seen, though I have not seen.

Those rivers of thought: cold Ebro, And blue racing Guadiana, Pa.s.sing white houses, high-balconied, That ache in a sun-baked land, Congo, and Nile and Colorado, Niger, Indus, Zambesi, And the Yellow River, and the Oxus, And the river that dies in sand.

What splendours are theirs, what continents, What tribes of men, what basking plains, Forests and lion-hided deserts, Marshes, ravines and falls: All hues and shapes and tempers Wandering they take as they wander From those far springs that endlessly The far sea calls.

O in reverie I know the Volga That turns his back upon Europe, And the two great cities on his banks, Novgorod and Astrakhan; Where the world is a few soft colours, And under the dove-like evening The boatmen chant ancient songs, The tenderest known to man.

And the holy river Ganges, His fretted cities veiled in moonlight, Arches and b.u.t.tresses silver-shadowy In the high moon, And palms grouped in the moonlight And fanes girdled with cypresses, Their domes of marble softly s.h.i.+ning To the high silver moon.

And that aged Brahmapootra Who beyond the white Himalayas Pa.s.ses many a lama.s.sery On rocks forlorn and frore, A block of gaunt grey stone walls With rows of little barred windows, Where shrivelled young monks in yellow silk Are hidden for evermore....

But O that great river, the Amazon, I have sailed up its gulf with eyelids closed, And the yellow waters tumbled round, And all was rimmed with sky, Till the banks drew in, and the trees' heads, And the lines of green grew higher And I breathed deep, and there above me The forest wall stood high.

Those forest walls of the Amazon Are level under the blazing blue And yield no sound save the whistles and shrieks Of the swarming bright macaws; And under their lowest drooping boughs Mud-banks torpidly bubble, And the water drifts, and logs in the water Drift and twist and pause.

And everywhere, tacitly joining, Float noiseless tributaries, Tall avenues paved with water: And as I silent fly The vegetation like a painted scene, Spars and spikes and monstrous fans And ferns from hairy sheaths up-springing, Evenly pa.s.ses by.

And stealthier stagnant channels Under low niches of drooping leaves Coil into deep recesses: And there have I entered, there To heavy, hot, dense, dim places Where creepers climb and sweat and climb, And the drip and splash of oozing water Loads the stifling air.