Georgian Poetry 1911-1912 Part 4

THE OLD VICARAGE, GRANTCHESTER

[Cafe des Westens, Berlin]

Just now the lilac is in bloom, All before my little room; And in my flower-beds, I think, Smile the carnation and the pink; And down the borders, well I know, The poppy and the pansy blow ...

Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through, Beside the river make for you A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep Deeply above; and green and deep The stream mysterious glides beneath, Green as a dream and deep as death.-- Oh, d.a.m.n! I know it! and I know How the May fields all golden show, And when the day is young and sweet, Gild gloriously the bare feet That run to bathe ...

'Du lieber Gott!'

Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot, And there the shadowed waters fresh Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.

'Temperamentvoll' German Jews Drink beer around; and 'there' the dews Are soft beneath a morn of gold.

Here tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton Where 'das Betreten's' not 'verboten' ...

[Greek: eithe genoimaen] ... would I were In Grantchester, in Grantchester!-- Some, it may be, can get in touch With Nature there, or Earth, or such.

And clever modern men have seen A Faun a-peeping through the green, And felt the Cla.s.sics were not dead, To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head, Or hear the Goat-foot piping low ...

But these are things I do not know.

I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy gra.s.s, Hear the cool lapse of hours pa.s.s, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester ...

Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lords.h.i.+p swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on h.e.l.lespont, or Styx; Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill; Tennyson notes, with studious eye, How Cambridge waters hurry by ...

And in that garden, black and white Creep whispers through the gra.s.s all night; And spectral dance, before the dawn, A hundred Vicars down the lawn; Curates, long dust, will come and go On lissom, clerical, printless toe; And oft between the boughs is seen The sly shade of a Rural Dean ...

Till, at a s.h.i.+ver in the skies, Vanis.h.i.+ng with Satanic cries, The prim ecclesiastic rout Leaves but a startled sleeper-out, Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls, The falling house that never falls.

G.o.d! I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again!

For England's the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridges.h.i.+re, of all England, The s.h.i.+re for Men who Understand; And of 'that' district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester.

For Cambridge people rarely smile, Being urban, squat, and packed with guile; And Royston men in the far South Are black and fierce and strange of mouth; At Over they fling oaths at one, And worse than oaths at Trumpington, And Ditton girls are mean and dirty, And there's none in Harston under thirty, And folks in Shelford and those parts Have twisted lips and twisted hearts, And Barton men make c.o.c.kney rhymes, And Coton's full of nameless crimes, And things are done you'd not believe At Madingley on Christmas Eve.

Strong men have run for miles and miles When one from Cherry Hinton smiles; Strong men have blanched and shot their wives Rather than send them to St. Ives; Strong men have cried like babes, bydam, To hear what happened at Babraham.

But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!

There's peace and holy quiet there, Great clouds along pacific skies, And men and women with straight eyes, Lithe children lovelier than a dream, A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream, And little kindly winds that creep Round twilight corners, half asleep.

In Grantchester their skins are white, They bathe by day, they bathe by night; The women there do all they ought; The men observe the Rules of Thought.

They love the Good; they wors.h.i.+p Truth; They laugh uproariously in youth; (And when they get to feeling old, They up and shoot themselves, I'm told)...

Ah G.o.d! to see the branches stir Across the moon at Grantchester!

To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten Unforgettable, unforgotten River smell, and hear the breeze Sobbing in the little trees.

Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand, Still guardians of that holy land?

The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream, The yet unacademic stream?

Is dawn a secret shy and cold Anadyomene, silver-gold?

And sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley?

And after, ere the night is born, Do hares come out about the corn?

Oh, is the water sweet and cool Gentle and brown, above the pool?

And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill?

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

And Certainty? and Quiet kind?

Deep meadows yet, for to forget The lies, and truths, and pain? ... oh! yet Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?

DUST

When the white flame in us is gone, And we that lost the world's delight Stiffen in darkness, left alone To crumble in our separate night;

When your swift hair is quiet in death, And through the lips corruption thrust Has stilled the labour of my breath-- When we are dust, when we are dust!--

Not dead, not undesirous yet, Still sentient, still unsatisfied, We'll ride the air, and s.h.i.+ne, and flit, Around the places where we died,

And dance as dust before the sun, And light of foot, and unconfined, Hurry from road to road, and run About the errands of the wind.

And every mote, on earth or air, Will speed and gleam, down later days.

And like a secret pilgrim fare By eager and invisible ways,

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie, Till, beyond thinking, out of view, One mote of all the dust that's I Shall meet one atom that was you.

Then in some garden hushed from wind, Warm in a sunset's afterglow, The lovers in the flowers will find A sweet and strange unquiet grow

Upon the peace; and, past desiring, So high a beauty in the air, And such a light, and such a quiring, And such a radiant ecstasy there,

They'll know not if it's fire, or dew, Or out of earth, or in the height, Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue, Or two that pa.s.s, in light, to light,

Out of the garden, higher, higher ...

But in that instant they shall learn The shattering fury of our fire, And the weak pa.s.sionless hearts will burn

And faint in that amazing glow, Until the darkness close above; And they will know--poor fools, they'll know!-- One moment, what it is to love.

THE FISH

In a cool curving world he lies And ripples with dark ecstasies.

The kind luxurious lapse and steal Shapes all his universe to feel And know and be; the clinging stream Closes his memory, glooms his dream, Who lips the roots o' the sh.o.r.e, and glides Superb on unreturning tides.

Those silent waters weave for him A fluctuant mutable world and dim, Where wavering ma.s.ses bulge and gape Mysterious, and shape to shape Dies momently through whorl and hollow, And form and line and solid follow Solid and line and form to dream Fantastic down the eternal stream; An obscure world, a s.h.i.+fting world, Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled, Or serpentine, or driving arrows, Or serene slidings, or March narrows.

There slipping wave and sh.o.r.e are one, And weed and mud. No ray of sun, But glow to glow fades down the deep (As dream to unknown dream in sleep); Shaken translucency illumes The hyaline of drifting glooms; The strange soft-handed depth subdues Drowned colour there, but black to hues, As death to living, decomposes-- Red darkness of the heart of roses, Blue brilliant from dead starless skies, And gold that lies behind the eyes, The unknown unnameable sightless white That is the essential flame of night, l.u.s.treless purple, hooded green, The myriad hues that lie between Darkness and darkness! ...

And all's one, Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun, The world he rests in, world he knows, Perpetual curving. Only--grows An eddy in that ordered falling, A knowledge from the gloom, a calling Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud-- The dark fire leaps along his blood; Dateless and deathless, blind and still, The intricate impulse works its will; His woven world drops back; and he, Sans providence, sans memory, Unconscious and directly driven, Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.

O world of lips, O world of laughter, Where hope is fleet and thought flies after, Of lights in the clear night, of cries That drift along the wave and rise Thin to the glittering stars above, You know the hands, the eyes of love!

The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging, The infinite distance, and the singing Blown by the wind, a flame of sound, The gleam, the flowers, and vast around The horizon, and the heights above-- You know the sigh, the song of love!

But there the night is close, and there Darkness is cold and strange and bare; And the secret deeps are whisperless; And rhythm is all deliciousness; And joy is in the throbbing tide, Whose intricate fingers beat and glide In felt bewildering harmonies Of trembling touch; and music is The exquisite knocking of the blood.

s.p.a.ce is no more, under the mud; His bliss is older than the sun.

Silent and straight the waters run, The lights, the cries, the willows dim, And the dark tide are one with him.