Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses

HE FOLLOWS HIMSELF

 
In a heavy time I dogged myself
   Along a louring way,
Till my leading self to my following self
   Said: “Why do you hang on me
      So harassingly?”
 
 
“I have watched you, Heart of mine,” I cried,
   “So often going astray
And leaving me, that I have pursued,
   Feeling such truancy
      Ought not to be.”
 
 
He said no more, and I dogged him on
   From noon to the dun of day
By prowling paths, until anew
   He begged: “Please turn and flee! —
      What do you see?”
 
 
“Methinks I see a man,” said I,
   “Dimming his hours to gray.
I will not leave him while I know
   Part of myself is he
      Who dreams such dree!”
 
 
“I go to my old friend’s house,” he urged,
   “So do not watch me, pray!”
“Well, I will leave you in peace,” said I,
   “Though of this poignancy
      You should fight free:
 
 
“Your friend, O other me, is dead;
   You know not what you say.”
– “That do I!  And at his green-grassed door
   By night’s bright galaxy
      I bend a knee.”
 
 
– The yew-plumes moved like mockers’ beards,
   Though only boughs were they,
And I seemed to go; yet still was there,
   And am, and there haunt we
      Thus bootlessly.
 

THE SINGING WOMAN

 
   There was a singing woman
      Came riding across the mead
   At the time of the mild May weather,
         Tameless, tireless;
This song she sung: “I am fair, I am young!”
      And many turned to heed.
 
 
   And the same singing woman
      Sat crooning in her need
   At the time of the winter weather;
         Friendless, fireless,
She sang this song: “Life, thou’rt too long!”
      And there was none to heed.
 

WITHOUT, NOT WITHIN HER

 
It was what you bore with you, Woman,
   Not inly were,
That throned you from all else human,
   However fair!
 
 
It was that strange freshness you carried
   Into a soul
Whereon no thought of yours tarried
   Two moments at all.
 
 
And out from his spirit flew death,
   And bale, and ban,
Like the corn-chaff under the breath
   Of the winnowing-fan.
 

“O I WON’T LEAD A HOMELY LIFE”
(To an old air)

 
“O I won’t lead a homely life
As father’s Jack and mother’s Jill,
But I will be a fiddler’s wife,
   With music mine at will!
      Just a little tune,
      Another one soon,
   As I merrily fling my fill!”
 
 
And she became a fiddler’s Dear,
And merry all day she strove to be;
And he played and played afar and near,
   But never at home played he
      Any little tune
      Or late or soon;
   And sunk and sad was she!
 

IN THE SMALL HOURS

 
I lay in my bed and fiddled
   With a dreamland viol and bow,
And the tunes flew back to my fingers
   I had melodied years ago.
It was two or three in the morning
   When I fancy-fiddled so
Long reels and country-dances,
   And hornpipes swift and slow.
 
 
And soon anon came crossing
   The chamber in the gray
Figures of jigging fieldfolk —
   Saviours of corn and hay —
To the air of “Haste to the Wedding,”
   As after a wedding-day;
Yea, up and down the middle
   In windless whirls went they!
 
 
There danced the bride and bridegroom,
   And couples in a train,
Gay partners time and travail
   Had longwhiles stilled amain!.
It seemed a thing for weeping
   To find, at slumber’s wane
And morning’s sly increeping,
   That Now, not Then, held reign.
 

THE LITTLE OLD TABLE

 
Creak, little wood thing, creak,
When I touch you with elbow or knee;
That is the way you speak
Of one who gave you to me!
 
 
You, little table, she brought —
Brought me with her own hand,
As she looked at me with a thought
That I did not understand.
 
 
– Whoever owns it anon,
And hears it, will never know
What a history hangs upon
This creak from long ago.
 

VAGG HOLLOW

Vagg Hollow is a marshy spot on the old Roman Road near Ilchester, where “things” are seen. Merchandise was formerly fetched inland from the canal-boats at Load-Bridge by waggons this way.

 
“What do you see in Vagg Hollow,
Little boy, when you go
In the morning at five on your lonely drive?”
“ – I see men’s souls, who follow
Till we’ve passed where the road lies low,
When they vanish at our creaking!
 
 
“They are like white faces speaking
Beside and behind the waggon —
One just as father’s was when here.
The waggoner drinks from his flagon,
(Or he’d flinch when the Hollow is near)
But he does not give me any.
 
 
“Sometimes the faces are many;
But I walk along by the horses,
He asleep on the straw as we jog;
And I hear the loud water-courses,
And the drops from the trees in the fog,
And watch till the day is breaking.
 
 
“And the wind out by Tintinhull waking;
I hear in it father’s call
As he called when I saw him dying,
And he sat by the fire last Fall,
And mother stood by sighing;
But I’m not afraid at all!”
 

THE DREAM IS – WHICH?

 
I am laughing by the brook with her,
   Splashed in its tumbling stir;
And then it is a blankness looms
   As if I walked not there,
Nor she, but found me in haggard rooms,
   And treading a lonely stair.
 
 
With radiant cheeks and rapid eyes
   We sit where none espies;
Till a harsh change comes edging in
   As no such scene were there,
But winter, and I were bent and thin,
   And cinder-gray my hair.
 
 
We dance in heys around the hall,
   Weightless as thistleball;
And then a curtain drops between,
   As if I danced not there,
But wandered through a mounded green
   To find her, I knew where.
 

March 1913.

THE COUNTRY WEDDING
(A FIDDLER’S STORY)

 
Little fogs were gathered in every hollow,
But the purple hillocks enjoyed fine weather
As we marched with our fiddles over the heather
– How it comes back! –  to their wedding that day.
 
 
Our getting there brought our neighbours and all, O!
Till, two and two, the couples stood ready.
And her father said: “Souls, for God’s sake, be steady!”
And we strung up our fiddles, and sounded out “A.”
 
 
The groomsman he stared, and said, “You must follow!”
But we’d gone to fiddle in front of the party,
(Our feelings as friends being true and hearty)
And fiddle in front we did – all the way.
 
 
Yes, from their door by Mill-tail-Shallow,
And up Styles-Lane, and by Front-Street houses,
Where stood maids, bachelors, and spouses,
Who cheered the songs that we knew how to play.
 
 
I bowed the treble before her father,
Michael the tenor in front of the lady,
The bass-viol Reub – and right well played he! —
The serpent Jim; ay, to church and back.
 
 
I thought the bridegroom was flurried rather,
As we kept up the tune outside the chancel,
While they were swearing things none can cancel
Inside the walls to our drumstick’s whack.
 
 
“Too gay!” she pleaded.  “Clouds may gather,
And sorrow come.”  But she gave in, laughing,
And by supper-time when we’d got to the quaffing
Her fears were forgot, and her smiles weren’t slack.
 
 
A grand wedding ’twas!  And what would follow
We never thought.  Or that we should have buried her
On the same day with the man that married her,
A day like the first, half hazy, half clear.
 
 
Yes: little fogs were in every hollow,
Though the purple hillocks enjoyed fine weather,
When we went to play ’em to church together,
And carried ’em there in an after year.
 

FIRST OR LAST
(SONG)

 
   If grief come early
   Joy comes late,
   If joy come early
   Grief will wait;
      Aye, my dear and tender!
 
 
Wise ones joy them early
While the cheeks are red,
Banish grief till surly
Time has dulled their dread.
 
 
 And joy being ours
Ere youth has flown,
   The later hours
   May find us gone;
      Aye, my dear and tender!
 

LONELY DAYS

 
Lonely her fate was,
Environed from sight
In the house where the gate was
Past finding at night.
None there to share it,
No one to tell:
Long she’d to bear it,
And bore it well.
 
 
Elsewhere just so she
Spent many a day;
Wishing to go she
Continued to stay.
And people without
Basked warm in the air,
But none sought her out,
Or knew she was there.
Even birthdays were passed so,
Sunny and shady:
Years did it last so
For this sad lady.
Never declaring it,
No one to tell,
Still she kept bearing it —
Bore it well.
 
 
The days grew chillier,
And then she went
To a city, familiar
In years forespent,
When she walked gaily
Far to and fro,
But now, moving frailly,
Could nowhere go.
The cheerful colour
Of houses she’d known
Had died to a duller
And dingier tone.
Streets were now noisy
Where once had rolled
A few quiet coaches,
Or citizens strolled.
Through the party-wall
Of the memoried spot
They danced at a ball
Who recalled her not.
Tramlines lay crossing
Once gravelled slopes,
Metal rods clanked,
And electric ropes.
So she endured it all,
Thin, thinner wrought,
Until time cured it all,
And she knew nought.
 

Versified from a Diary.

“WHAT DID IT MEAN?”

 
What did it mean that noontide, when
You bade me pluck the flower
Within the other woman’s bower,
   Whom I knew nought of then?
 
 
I thought the flower blushed deeplier – aye,
And as I drew its stalk to me
It seemed to breathe: “I am, I see,
Made use of in a human play.”
 
 
And while I plucked, upstarted sheer
As phantom from the pane thereby
A corpse-like countenance, with eye
That iced me by its baleful peer —
   Silent, as from a bier.
 
 
When I came back your face had changed,
   It was no face for me;
O did it speak of hearts estranged,
   And deadly rivalry
 
 
   In times before
   I darked your door,
   To seise me of
   Mere second love,
Which still the haunting first deranged?
 

AT THE DINNER-TABLE

 
I sat at dinner in my prime,
And glimpsed my face in the sideboard-glass,
And started as if I had seen a crime,
And prayed the ghastly show might pass.
 
 
Wrenched wrinkled features met my sight,
Grinning back to me as my own;
I well-nigh fainted with affright
At finding me a haggard crone.
 
 
My husband laughed.  He had slily set
A warping mirror there, in whim
To startle me.  My eyes grew wet;
I spoke not all the eve to him.
 
 
He was sorry, he said, for what he had done,
And took away the distorting glass,
Uncovering the accustomed one;
And so it ended?  No, alas,
 
 
Fifty years later, when he died,
I sat me in the selfsame chair,
Thinking of him.  Till, weary-eyed,
I saw the sideboard facing there;
 
 
And from its mirror looked the lean
Thing I’d become, each wrinkle and score
The image of me that I had seen
In jest there fifty years before.
 

THE MARBLE TABLET

 
There it stands, though alas, what a little of her
   Shows in its cold white look!
Not her glance, glide, or smile; not a tittle of her
   Voice like the purl of a brook;
   Not her thoughts, that you read like a book.
 
 
It may stand for her once in November
   When first she breathed, witless of all;
Or in heavy years she would remember
   When circumstance held her in thrall;
   Or at last, when she answered her call!
 
 
Nothing more.  The still marble, date-graven,
   Gives all that it can, tersely lined;
That one has at length found the haven
   Which every one other will find;
   With silence on what shone behind.
 

St. Juliot: September 8, 1916.

THE MASTER AND THE LEAVES

I

 
We are budding, Master, budding,
   We of your favourite tree;
March drought and April flooding
   Arouse us merrily,
Our stemlets newly studding;
   And yet you do not see!
 

II

 
We are fully woven for summer
   In stuff of limpest green,
The twitterer and the hummer
   Here rest of nights, unseen,
While like a long-roll drummer
   The nightjar thrills the treen.
 

III

 
We are turning yellow, Master,
   And next we are turning red,
And faster then and faster
   Shall seek our rooty bed,
All wasted in disaster!
   But you lift not your head.
 

IV

 
– “I mark your early going,
   And that you’ll soon be clay,
I have seen your summer showing
   As in my youthful day;
But why I seem unknowing
   Is too sunk in to say!”
 

1917.

LAST WORDS TO A DUMB FRIEND

 
Pet was never mourned as you,
Purrer of the spotless hue,
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
While you humoured our queer ways,
Or outshrilled your morning call
Up the stairs and through the hall —
Foot suspended in its fall —
While, expectant, you would stand
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
Till your way you chose to wend
Yonder, to your tragic end.
 
 
Never another pet for me!
Let your place all vacant be;
Better blankness day by day
Than companion torn away.
Better bid his memory fade,
Better blot each mark he made,
Selfishly escape distress
By contrived forgetfulness,
Than preserve his prints to make
Every morn and eve an ache.
 
 
From the chair whereon he sat
Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;
Rake his little pathways out
Mid the bushes roundabout;
Smooth away his talons’ mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.
 
 
Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should – by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of his insignificance —
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part, above man’s will,
Of the Imperturbable.
 
 
As a prisoner, flight debarred,
Exercising in a yard,
Still retain I, troubled, shaken,
Mean estate, by him forsaken;
And this home, which scarcely took
Impress from his little look,
By his faring to the Dim
Grows all eloquent of him.
 
 
Housemate, I can think you still
Bounding to the window-sill,
Over which I vaguely see
Your small mound beneath the tree,
Showing in the autumn shade
That you moulder where you played.
 

October 2, 1904.

A DRIZZLING EASTER MORNING

 
And he is risen?  Well, be it so.
And still the pensive lands complain,
And dead men wait as long ago,
As if, much doubting, they would know
What they are ransomed from, before
They pass again their sheltering door.
 
 
I stand amid them in the rain,
While blusters vex the yew and vane;
And on the road the weary wain
Plods forward, laden heavily;
And toilers with their aches are fain
For endless rest – though risen is he.
 

ON ONE WHO LIVED AND DIED WHERE HE WAS BORN

 
When a night in November
   Blew forth its bleared airs
An infant descended
   His birth-chamber stairs
   For the very first time,
   At the still, midnight chime;
All unapprehended
   His mission, his aim. —
Thus, first, one November,
An infant descended
   The stairs.
 
 
On a night in November
   Of weariful cares,
A frail aged figure
   Ascended those stairs
   For the very last time:
   All gone his life’s prime,
All vanished his vigour,
   And fine, forceful frame:
Thus, last, one November
Ascended that figure
   Upstairs.
 
 
On those nights in November —
   Apart eighty years —
The babe and the bent one
   Who traversed those stairs
   From the early first time
   To the last feeble climb —
That fresh and that spent one —
   Were even the same:
Yea, who passed in November
As infant, as bent one,
      Those stairs.
 
 
Wise child of November!
   From birth to blanched hairs
Descending, ascending,
   Wealth-wantless, those stairs;
   Who saw quick in time
   As a vain pantomime
Life’s tending, its ending,
   The worth of its fame.
Wise child of November,
Descending, ascending
      Those stairs!
 

THE SECOND NIGHT
(BALLAD)

 
I missed one night, but the next I went;
   It was gusty above, and clear;
She was there, with the look of one ill-content,
   And said: “Do not come near!”
 
 
– “I am sorry last night to have failed you here,
   And now I have travelled all day;
And it’s long rowing back to the West-Hoe Pier,
   So brief must be my stay.”
 
 
– “O man of mystery, why not say
   Out plain to me all you mean?
Why you missed last night, and must now away
   Is – another has come between!”
 
 
– “O woman so mocking in mood and mien,
   So be it!” I replied:
“And if I am due at a differing scene
   Before the dark has died,
 
 
“’Tis that, unresting, to wander wide
   Has ever been my plight,
And at least I have met you at Cremyll side
   If not last eve, to-night.”
 
 
– “You get small rest – that read I quite;
   And so do I, maybe;
Though there’s a rest hid safe from sight
   Elsewhere awaiting me!”
 
 
A mad star crossed the sky to the sea,
   Wasting in sparks as it streamed,
And when I looked to where stood she
   She had changed, much changed, it seemed:
 
 
The sparks of the star in her pupils gleamed,
   She was vague as a vapour now,
And ere of its meaning I had dreamed
   She’d vanished – I knew not how.
 
 
I stood on, long; each cliff-top bough,
   Like a cynic nodding there,
Moved up and down, though no man’s brow
   But mine met the wayward air.
 
 
Still stood I, wholly unaware
   Of what had come to pass,
Or had brought the secret of my new Fair
   To my old Love, alas!
 
 
I went down then by crag and grass
   To the boat wherein I had come.
Said the man with the oars: “This news of the lass
   Of Edgcumbe, is sharp for some!
 
 
“Yes: found this daybreak, stiff and numb
   On the shore here, whither she’d sped
To meet her lover last night in the glum,
   And he came not, ’tis said.
 
 
“And she leapt down, heart-hit.  Pity she’s dead:
   So much for the faithful-bent!”.
I looked, and again a star overhead
   Shot through the firmament.
 

SHE WHO SAW NOT

 
   “Did you see something within the house
That made me call you before the red sunsetting?
Something that all this common scene endows
With a richened impress there can be no forgetting?”
 
 
   “ – I have found nothing to see therein,
O Sage, that should have made you urge me to enter,
Nothing to fire the soul, or the sense to win:
I rate you as a rare misrepresenter!”
 
 
   “ – Go anew, Lady, – in by the right.
Well: why does your face not shine like the face of Moses?”
“ – I found no moving thing there save the light
And shadow flung on the wall by the outside roses.”
 
 
   “ – Go yet once more, pray.  Look on a seat.”
“ – I go.. O Sage, it’s only a man that sits there
With eyes on the sun.  Mute, – average head to feet.”
“ – No more?” – “No more.  Just one the place befits there,
 
 
   “As the rays reach in through the open door,
And he looks at his hand, and the sun glows through his fingers,
While he’s thinking thoughts whose tenour is no more
To me than the swaying rose-tree shade that lingers.”
 
 
   No more.  And years drew on and on
Till no sun came, dank fogs the house enfolding;
And she saw inside, when the form in the flesh had gone,
As a vision what she had missed when the real beholding.
 

THE OLD WORKMAN

 
“Why are you so bent down before your time,
Old mason?  Many have not left their prime
So far behind at your age, and can still
   Stand full upright at will.”
 
 
He pointed to the mansion-front hard by,
And to the stones of the quoin against the sky;
“Those upper blocks,” he said, “that there you see,
   It was that ruined me.”
 
 
There stood in the air up to the parapet
Crowning the corner height, the stones as set
By him – ashlar whereon the gales might drum
   For centuries to come.
 
 
“I carried them up,” he said, “by a ladder there;
The last was as big a load as I could bear;
But on I heaved; and something in my back
   Moved, as ’twere with a crack.
 
 
“So I got crookt.  I never lost that sprain;
And those who live there, walled from wind and rain
By freestone that I lifted, do not know
   That my life’s ache came so.
 
 
“They don’t know me, or even know my name,
But good I think it, somehow, all the same
To have kept ’em safe from harm, and right and tight,
   Though it has broke me quite.
 
 
“Yes; that I fixed it firm up there I am proud,
Facing the hail and snow and sun and cloud,
And to stand storms for ages, beating round
   When I lie underground.”
 

THE SAILOR’S MOTHER

 
   “O whence do you come,
Figure in the night-fog that chills me numb?”
 
 
“I come to you across from my house up there,
And I don’t mind the brine-mist clinging to me
   That blows from the quay,
For I heard him in my chamber, and thought you unaware.”
 
 
   “But what did you hear,
That brought you blindly knocking in this middle-watch so drear?”
 
 
“My sailor son’s voice as ’twere calling at your door,
And I don’t mind my bare feet clammy on the stones,
   And the blight to my bones,
For he only knows of this house I lived in before.”
 
 
   “Nobody’s nigh,
Woman like a skeleton, with socket-sunk eye.”
 
 
“Ah – nobody’s nigh!  And my life is drearisome,
And this is the old home we loved in many a day
   Before he went away;
And the salt fog mops me.  And nobody’s come!”
 

From “To Please his Wife.”

OUTSIDE THE CASEMENT
(A REMINISCENCE OF THE WAR)

 
   We sat in the room
   And praised her whom
We saw in the portico-shade outside:
   She could not hear
   What was said of her,
But smiled, for its purport we did not hide.
 
 
   Then in was brought
   That message, fraught
With evil fortune for her out there,
   Whom we loved that day
   More than any could say,
And would fain have fenced from a waft of care.
 
 
   And the question pressed
   Like lead on each breast,
Should we cloak the tidings, or call her and tell?
   It was too intense
   A choice for our sense,
As we pondered and watched her we loved so well.
 
 
   Yea, spirit failed us
   At what assailed us;
How long, while seeing what soon must come,
   Should we counterfeit
   No knowledge of it,
And stay the stroke that would blanch and numb?
 
 
   And thus, before
   For evermore
Joy left her, we practised to beguile
   Her innocence when
   She now and again
Looked in, and smiled us another smile.