Poems by Sir John Collings Squire Volume II Part 1

Poems.

by J. C. Squire.

PREFACE

Three years ago I published a volume called _Poems: First Series_, which contained a collection of what I had written between 1905 and March, 1918.

The present collection contains all that I have written since then.

_The Birds_ and nine shorter poems were published in a small booklet in 1919; _The Moon_ was separately published in 1920; but the majority of the poems here printed appear in book form for the first time, and twelve have never previously been published.

The poems are as nearly as possible in chronological order, except that the group called _An Epilogue_ should have been dated 1917.

J. C. S.

_September_, 1921.

THE BIRDS

(_To Edmund Gosse_)

Within mankind's duration, so they say, Khephren and Ninus lived but yesterday.

Asia had no name till man was old And long had learned the use of iron and gold; And aeons had pa.s.sed, when the first corn was planted, Since first the use of syllables was granted.

Men were on earth while climates slowly swung, Fanning wide zones to heat and cold, and long Subsidence turned great continents to sea, And seas dried up, dried up interminably, Age after age; enormous seas were dried Amid wastes of land. And the last monsters died.

Earth wore another face. O since that prime Man with how many works has sprinkled time!

Hammering, hewing, digging tunnels, roads; Building s.h.i.+ps, temples, multiform abodes.

How, for his body's appet.i.tes, his toils Have conquered all earth's products, all her soils; And in what thousand thousand shapes of art He has tried to find a language for his heart!

Never at rest, never content or tired: Insatiate wanderer, marvellously fired, Most grandly piling and piling into the air Stones that will topple or arch he knows not where.

And yet did I, this spring, think it more strange, More grand, more full of awe, than all that change, And lovely and sweet and touching unto tears, That through man's chronicled and unchronicled years, And even into that unguessable beyond The water-hen has nested by a pond, Weaving dry flags into a beaten floor, The one sure product of her only lore.

Low on a ledge above the shadowed water Then, when she heard no men, as nature taught her, Flas.h.i.+ng around with busy scarlet bill She built that nest, her nest, and builds it still.

O let your strong imagination turn The great wheel backward, until Troy unburn, And then unbuild, and seven Troys below Rise out of death, and dwindle, and outflow, Till all have pa.s.sed, and none has yet been there: Back, ever back. Our birds still crossed the air; Beyond our myriad changing generations Still built, unchanged, their known inhabitations.

A million years before Atlantis was Our lark sprang from some hollow in the gra.s.s, Some old soft hoof-print in a tussock's shade; And the wood-pigeon's smooth snow-white eggs were laid, High amid green pines' sunset-coloured shafts, And rooks their villages of twiggy rafts Set on the tops of elms, where elms grew then, And still the thumbling t.i.t and perky wren Popped through the tiny doors of cosy b.a.l.l.s And the blackbird lined with moss his high-built walls; A round mud cottage held the thrush's young, And straws from the untidy sparrow's hung.

And, skimming forktailed in the evening air, When man first was were not the martins there?

Did not those birds some human shelter crave, And stow beneath the cornice of his cave Their dry tight cups of clay? And from each door Peeped on a morning wiseheads three or four.

Yes, daw and owl, curlew and crested hern, Kingfisher, mallard, water-rail and tern, Chaffinch and greenfinch, wagtail, stonechat, ruff, Whitethroat and robin, fly-catcher and chough, Missel-thrush, magpie, sparrow-hawk and jay, Built, those far ages gone, in this year's way.

And the first man who walked the cliffs of Rame, As I this year, looked down and saw the same Blotches of rusty red on ledge and cleft With grey-green spots on them, while right and left A dizzying tangle of gulls were floating and flying, Wheeling and crossing and darting, crying and crying, Circling and crying, over and over and over, Crying with swoop and hover and fall and recover.

And below on a rock against the grey sea fretted, Pipe-necked and stationary and silhouetted, Cormorants stood in a wise, black, equal row Above the nests and long blue eggs we know.

O delicate chain over all the ages stretched, O dumb tradition from what far darkness fetched: Each little architect with its one design Perpetual, fixed and right in stuff and line, Each little ministrant who knows one thing, One learned rite to celebrate the spring.

Whatever alters else on sea or sh.o.r.e, These are unchanging: man must still explore.

A DOG'S DEATH

The loose earth falls in the grave like a peaceful regular breathing; Too like, for I was deceived a moment by the sound: It has covered the heap of bracken that the gardener laid above him; Quiet the spade swings: there we have now his mound.

A patch of fresh earth on the floor of the wood's renewing chamber: All around is gra.s.s and moss and the hyacinth's dark green sprouts: And oaks are above that were old when his fiftieth sire was a puppy: And far away in the garden I hear the children's shouts.

Their joy is remote as a dream. It is strange how we buy our sorrow For the touch of peris.h.i.+ng things, idly, with open eyes; How we give our hearts to brutes that will die in a few seasons, Nor trouble what we do when we do it; nor would have it otherwise.

A POET TO HIS MUSE

Muse, you have opened like a flower.

Long ago I knew that brown integument, Like a dead husk, had dormant life within it, And waited till a first white point appeared Which shot into a naked stiff pale spike That grew.

I knew this was not all; Nothing I said as greener you grew and taller, But dreamed alone of the day when your bud would unsheathe, And silently swell, and at last your crown would break Filling the air with clouds of colour and fragrance, Radiant waves, odours of immortality.

In a pot of earth I watered and tended you, Breaking the clods and soaking the earth with water That fed your roots and eased your way to the light.

I gave you the sun and the rain But saved you from scorching and drowning: You are mine, and only I know you, And the ways of your growth, and the days.

But you are not from me.

I am but a pen for a hand, A bed for a river, A window for light.

And I bow in awe to that Power That made you a flower.

PROCESSES OF THOUGHT

I

I find my mind as it were a deep water.

Sometimes I play with a thought and hammer and bend it, Till tired and displeased with that I toss it away, Or absently let it slip to the yawning water: And down it sinks, forgotten for many a day.

But a time comes when tide or tempest washes it High on the beach, and I find that shape of mine, Or I haul it out from the depths on some casual rope, Or, pa.s.sing over that spot in quiet s.h.i.+ne,

I see, where my boat's shadow makes deep the water, A patch of colour, far down, from the bottom apart, A wavering sign like the gleam from an ancient anchor, Brown fixing and fleeting flakes; and I feel my heart