October and Other Poems with Occasional Verses on the War

“TO BURNS”

TOAST FOR THE GREENOCK CLUB DINNER, JANUARY, 1914

 
To Burns! brave Scotia’s laurel’d son
Who drove his plough on Helicon—
Who with his Doric rhyme erewhile
Taught English bards to mend their style—
And by the humour of his pen
Fairly befool’d auld Nickie-ben …
Blithe Robbie Burns! we love thee well
Because thou wert so like thysel’,
And in full cups with festive cheer
We toast thy fame from year to year.
 

POOR CHILD

 
On a mournful day
When my heart was lonely,
O’er and o’er my thought
Conned but one thing only,
 
 
Thinking how I lost
Wand’ring in the wild-wood
The companion self
Of my careless childhood.
 
 
How, poor child, it was
I shall ne’er discover,
But ’twas just when he
Grew to be thy lover,
 
 
With thine eyes of trust
And thy mirth, whereunder
All the world’s hope lay
In thy heart of wonder.
 
 
Now, beyond regrets
And faint memories of thee.
Saddest is, poor child,
That I cannot love thee.
 

TO PERCY BUCK

 
Folk alien to the Muse have hemm’d us round
And fiends have suck’d our blood: our best delight
Is poison’d, and the year’s infective blight
Hath made almost a silence of sweet sound.
But you, what fortune, Percy, have you found
At Harrow? doth fair hope your toil requite?
Doth beauty win her praise and truth her right,
Or hath the good seed fal’n on stony ground?
 
 
Ply the art ever nobly, single-soul’d
Like Brahms, or as you ruled in Wells erewhile,
—Nor yet the memory of that zeal is cold—
Where lately I, who love the purer style,
Enter’d, and felt your spirit as of old
Beside me, listening in the chancel-aisle.
 

1904.

TO HARRY ELLIS WOOLDRIDGE

 
Love and the Muse have left their home, now bare
Of memorable beauty, all is gone,
The dedicated charm of Yattendon,
Which thou wert apt, dear Hal, to build and share.
What noble shades are flitting, who while-ere
Haunted the ivy’d walls, where time ran on
In sanctities of joy by reverence won,
Music and choral grace and studies fair!
 
 
These on some kindlier field may Fate restore,
And may the old house prosper, dispossest
Of her whose equal it can nevermore
Hold till it crumble: O nay! and the door
Will moulder ere it open on a guest
To match thee in thy wisdom and thy jest.
 

October, 1905.

FORTUNATUS NIMIUM

 
I have lain in the sun
I have toil’d as I might
I have thought as I would
And now it is night.
 
 
My bed full of sleep
My heart of content
For friends that I met
The way that I went.
 
 
I welcome fatigue
While frenzy and care
Like thin summer clouds
Go melting in air.
 
 
To dream as I may
And awake when I will
With the song of the birds
And the sun on the hill.
 
 
Or death—were it death—
To what should I wake
Who loved in my home
All life for its sake?
 
 
What good have I wrought?
I laugh to have learned
That joy cannot come
Unless it be earned;
 
 
For a happier lot
Than God giveth me
It never hath been
Nor ever shall be.
 

DEMOCRITUS

 
Joy of your opulent atoms! wouldst thou dare
Say that Thought also of atoms self-became,
Waving to soul as light had the eye in aim;
And so with things of bodily sense compare
Those native notions that the heavens declare,
Space and Time, Beauty and God—Praise we his name!—
Real ideas, that on tongues of flame
From out mind’s cooling paste leapt unaware?
 
 
Thy spirit, Democritus, orb’d in the eterne
Illimitable galaxy of night
Shineth undimm’d where greater splendours burn
Of sage and poet: by their influence bright
We are held; and pouring from his quenchless urn
Christ with immortal love-beams laves the height.
 

1919.

NOTES

Poem 3.—As the metre or scansion of this poem was publicly discussed and wrongly analysed by some who admired its effects, it may be well to explain that it and the three other poems in similar measure, “Flowering Tree,” “In der Fremde,” “The West Front,” are strictly syllabic verse on the model left by Milton in “Samson Agonistes”; except that his system, which depended on exclusion of extra-metrical syllables (that is, syllables which did not admit of resolution by “elision” into a disyllabic scheme) from all places but the last, still admitted them in that place, thereby forbidding inversion of the last foot. It is natural to conclude that, had he pursued his inventions, his next step would have been to get rid of this anomaly; and if that is done, the result is the new rhythms that these poems exhibit. In this sort of prosody rhyme is admitted, like alliteration, as an ornament at will; it is not needed. My four experiments are confined to the twelve-syllable verse. It is probably agreed that there are possibilities in that long six-foot line which English poetry has not fully explored.

Poem 12, “Hell and Hate.”—This poem was written December 16, 1913. It is the description of a little picture hanging in my bedroom; it had been painted for me as a New Year’s gift more than thirty years before, and I described it partly because I never exactly knew what it meant. When the war broke out I remembered my poem and sent it to The Times, where it appeared in the Literary Supplement September 24, 1914.

Poem 13, “Wake up, England!”—This motto is the King’s well-known call to the country in 1901 at the Guildhall.

The verses appeared in The Times on August 8, 1914. There were three other stanzas, which are better omitted; and the last two lines, which were printed in capitals and ran thus,

 
England stands for honour,
May God defend the right,
 

were purposely set out of metre. In the second stanza the words “The fiend” are what I originally wrote, and I think that the friends who persuaded me to substitute “Thy foe” will no longer wish to protest.