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WASTE PAPER PHILOSOPHY 
 
 AND 
 
 MAGP IES IN PIC ARDY 
 
 T. P. CAMERON WILSON 
 
WASTE PAPER 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 TO WHICH HAS BEEN ADDED 
 
 MAGPIES IN PICARDY 
 
 AND OTHER POEMS 
 
 '>W^M 
 
 BY 
 
 T>T/t;AMERON WILSON 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 ROBERT NORWOOD 
 
 NEW XS^ YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY, 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1920, 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 m -5 13^0 
 
 \ / 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 g)C!.A60l379 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Not many weeks ago the manuscript of a young 
 English officer, written in pencil and found among 
 his effects after his gallant death, was placed in my 
 hands. Now it is my privilege, thanks to the courtesy 
 of my friend, Mr. George H. Doran, to write a few 
 words of introduction for this same manuscript that 
 is about to be given to the world. 
 
 As the reader meets the personality of Captain T. 
 P. Cameron Wilson, through his published philoso- 
 phy of Life, he will be glad to know that every 
 record concerning him vividly characterizes the im- 
 pression which the reading of his last penciled words 
 gives — the impression of a most unusual spirit who 
 met death, as he lived life, gladly and well. 
 
 Captain Wilson, the son of the Vicar of Little 
 Eaton, enlisted as a private in the Grenadier Guards 
 in 1914, and later received his commission in the 
 Sherwood Foresters. He fell in action on March 24, 
 1918. 
 
 Harold Begbie, writing of him, pays this tribute 
 to the poet and the man : 
 
 "There was a glorious man among our glorious 
 dead in France, a man who loved boys, was loved by 
 boys, and by many was deemed the ideal school- 
 master. Almost in secret, and almost ashamed of it 
 
— for he had no conceit — this glorious man wrote 
 splendid poetry — splendid because it expressed splen- 
 did thoughts freshly, manfully, in a boy's way. He 
 published poems in a little book, and this is it: 
 'Magpies in Picardy'." 
 
 Looking over some of his letters, reading much of 
 the fugitive verse which poured from his facile pen, 
 I am impressed that with his death there passed 
 away from earth a spirit as fine as the spirit of Ru- 
 pert Brooke, and a singer of such lyric rapture, that, 
 had he lived, he would have in time taken his place 
 among the most authentic poets of our day. 
 
 Here is an indication of his mood and power, writ- 
 ten during a bombardment in protest of that hell 
 which the hate of man makes of the world: 
 
 "What did we know of birds. 
 Though the wet woods rang with their blessing. 
 And the trees were awake and aware of wings. 
 And the little secrets of mirth, that have no words. 
 Made even the brambles chuckle like baby things 
 Who find their toes too funny for any expressing." 
 
 Here also are fragments from letters written in the 
 whiles of rest between strenuous hours; read and see 
 what a man was here and has gone: 
 
 "You can think of me armed to the teeth (whatever 
 that may mean) with a vicious looking revolver — 
 your gift — receiving instructions from an enormous 
 Scotchman to 'aim at his stummick, sir, close to 'im. 
 
 vi 
 
A service revolver bullet in the stummick will pull 
 up anything, sir — anything. The stummick is a suf- 
 ficiently delicate nairve-centre to cause a charging 
 man to stop sudden on his receiving a bullet here.' — 
 Very sudden I should imagine!" 
 
 "I keep coming back again and again out here to 
 that funny sort of feeling of unreality I used to get 
 as a kid when I was feverish. Do you know it? As 
 though everything solid, like walls and ceilings and 
 people, were immensely swollen, (almost transpar- 
 ent) bladders! It sounds silly, but I used to feel it 
 often, and I'm getting it again — a sort of idea that 
 we're all making fools of ourselves by pretending the 
 war is real — when, actually, shells and guns and so 
 on are feverish bladders and bubbles." 
 
 "Yesterday one of the officer's servants — a hard 
 bitten old chap who was with us at Lostwitthiel — 
 after gazing out of the door of this farm for some 
 time and listening to those damned shells screaming 
 overhead — said: 'There'll be primroses in Cornwall 
 now!' A mute inglorious Browning!" 
 
 In a more serious mood he writes after an engage- 
 ment: 
 
 "As to my own feelings under fire, I was horribly 
 afraid — sick with fear — not of being hit, but of see- 
 ing other people torn in the way that high explosive 
 tears. It is simply hellish. But, thank God, I didn't 
 show any funk. That's all a man dare ask, I think. 
 I don't care a flip whether I'm killed or not — though 
 I don't think I shall be — the chances are about lOO 
 to I. Out here you must trust yourself to a bigger 
 
 vii 
 
power and leave it at that. You can't face death 
 (I've used the phrase myself about this war.) 
 There's no facing it. It's everywhere. You have to 
 walk through it, and under it, and over it, and past 
 it. Without the sense of God taking up the souls 
 out of those poor torn bodies — even though they've 
 died cursing him — I think one would go mad." 
 
 When I first read "Waste Paper Philosophy," 
 I did not know that the author had been a school- 
 master, but I did know that he understood and loved 
 boys. Like Rupert Brooke, who held it his greatest 
 loss to die without a son, Wilson lets the world feel 
 his longing for the boy to come after him in these 
 his last words. Two stanzas of a poem from "Mag- 
 pies in Picardy," reveal this tender understanding 
 and love of boys which I find so abounding in 
 "Waste Paper Philosophy"; the poem has for its 
 title, "The Mathematical Master to his Dullest 
 Pupil," and the stanzas are these: 
 
 "And when, O little son! within your eyes 
 The light that lives on wings of dragon flies 
 (More delicate than laughter of dead jests) 
 Is drowned beneath your pedagogue's requests, 
 I go and swear and smoke and drink 
 And dream of vested interests, and think 
 Of all the poets' fire we might have won 
 Had you and I been pals, O little son." 
 
 An individual was liere in the person of this 
 schoolmaster, this soldier, this poet, this lover of 
 man; and, as one reads what he wrote and in read- 
 
 viii 
 
ing realizes what he would have done had he lived 
 there is nothing more to do than to think 
 "Of all the poets' fire wc might have won." 
 
 ROBERT NORWOOD. 
 Philadelphia, 
 
 September, IQBO, 
 
 iz 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 V 
 
 Introduction by Robert Norwood .... 
 Waste Paper Philosophy 
 
 TO MY SON IS 
 
 Magpies in Picardy 
 
 MAGPIES IN PICARDY 45 
 
 SONG OF AMIENS 47 
 
 DURING THE BOMBARDMENT 48 
 
 SPORTSMEN IN PARADISE 49 
 
 A SOLDIER 50 
 
 ON LEAVE 52 
 
 AN OLD BOOT IN A DITCH 55 
 
 THE MAD OWL 57 
 
 A FUNERAL AT PRINCETOWN 58 
 
 STANZAS WRITTEN OUTSIDE A FRIED-FISH SHOP ... 59 
 
 THE SUICIDE 61 
 
 ST. JOHN VIII, 6 63 
 
 KNIGHT-ERRANT 64 
 
 DEAR, IF YOUR BLINDED EYES 65 
 
 THE DEAD MARCH IN "SAUL" 66 
 
 CAPTAIN OATES 67 
 
 THE FEAR OF GOD 68 
 
 FARMHOUSE 69 
 
 PISKIES 70 
 
 FRANCE, 1917 71 
 
 LIGHT 76 
 
 BATTLEFIELD 77 
 
 THE WIND-BLAWN DOWN 78 
 
 xi 
 
PAGE 
 
 LONDON 81 
 
 THE CITY TRAMP 83 
 
 LIFE 8s 
 
 THE SILENT CITY 87 
 
 VIOLIN 88 
 
 VALUES 89 
 
 THE ENGLISH REVIEW 91 
 
 THE THRUSH 93 
 
 THE SILVER FAIRY 94 
 
 LYING AWAKE IN THE NIGHT 96 
 
 DULCE ET DECORUM 98 
 
 The Sentimental Schoolmaster 
 
 TO AN EXCEEDINGLY SMALL NEW BOY loi 
 
 TO THE SCHOOL RADICAL 103 
 
 THE MATHEMATICAL MASTER TO HIS DULLEST PUPIL . 104 
 
 TO HIS BLACKBOARD 105 
 
 TO A BOY WHO READ POETRY FOR HIS PLEASURE . 106 
 
 TO THE FOOTBALL CAPTAIN 107 
 
 TO A BOY WHO LAUGHED AT HIM 108 
 
 HEAVEN no 
 
 L'ENVOI Ill 
 
 Xll 
 
WASTE PAPER PHILOSOPHY 
 
WASTE PAPER PHILOSOPHY 
 TO MY SON 
 
 WHEN a man begins to be certain he begins to 
 be a fool. Nevertheless those moments in his 
 life when he has seemed to catch a glimpse of truth 
 may have had their value. We are like lost dogs in 
 a field of corn — seeing nothing but the Doric splen- 
 dor of stalks before our eyes (because we are so near 
 to the ground) and sometimes a few perfect weeds, 
 and sometimes an exciting rabbit, but knowing noth- 
 ing of our direction or of where our masters are, un- 
 til we leap, and see for a moment a sliding glimpse 
 of trees and sky and other fields. . . . The worst of 
 us goes round and round and is glad of poppies. 
 The best of us jumps and runs blundering along, 
 jumps and runs, jumps and runs. . . Here, my son, 
 are some of the blurred things seen as I have jumped. 
 In most of them the tangle of stalks and weeds was 
 half between my eyes, and the beauty of earth. I 
 am a very little dog and I did not always jump. Also 
 there were too many rabbits. And I am still in the 
 corn. I saw my Master once, standing by the gate, 
 looking towards me. That was a long time ago. . . . 
 And all this I thought and wrote in France, among 
 the entanglements of War. 
 
 15 
 
The most valuable thing in the world is a friend, 
 and the next most valuable thing is another friend. 
 Make friendship as you would make a house, care- 
 fully and very surely. But do not acidly select your 
 material as a schoolmistress does. Be like Kim, "lit- 
 tle friend of all the world." Only despise the man 
 who loves people for their clothes, or money, or 
 titles. The rest are your brothers. But many of them 
 will despise you (unless you are successful, when 
 they will hate you). And these you must pity, be- 
 cause they keep their windows shut. 
 
 i6 
 
II 
 
 A man must have something in his life more im- 
 portant than himself. Usually he has a wife. But 
 that takes time and often money. Sometimes it is a 
 book or a motor bicycle, or a dog. But whatever it 
 is, a man is damned without it because he lives in the 
 house of mirrors and will go mad (or blind) with 
 the sheer horror of himself. But above all, is he 
 happy if he thinks he knows something of God, and 
 does not permit the evil of his own heart to scare 
 away the thought of that great Sympathy. For God 
 must understand evil perfectly and know more evil 
 things than you. 
 
 17 
 
Ill 
 
 Now of God, argument is futile, though it may 
 profit you to beat out a thought thereby like a blade 
 on an anvil. If God exists, He is made of all beauty, 
 and all beauty is but part of God. Colour and life 
 and sun-washed air, and the smell of wild mint on 
 lonely hills, the love of women and small children, 
 music and great tears, and the grace of healthy men, 
 the lonely bravery of Christ, and of all great men, 
 friendship which cannot speak but in the grip of 
 hands, the calling of birds . . . they are little threads 
 in the stuff which is the mind of God. And if God 
 does not exist, or if He is to human thought utterly 
 inconceivable, what have we lost by weaving all 
 beauty into the idea of Someone who understands us? 
 We have but given a sympathy and outside strength 
 to the joy of living. 
 
 i8 
 
IV 
 
 But what shall a man say of evil, of crime and 
 filth and ugliness? Are we to believe that old legend 
 of some huge Rebel against God? Are we to be- 
 lieve the more subtle dilution of ethics? Or is evil 
 nothing at all, or at most a point of view? Of my 
 own experience I know that in the dim room of my 
 mind — against all love of beauty, against all ar- 
 ranged plans and builded creeds, against love, and 
 knowledge, and hope, and the full strength of my 
 conscious will, something has risen and taken me by 
 the throat and shaken the sense of God from me. I 
 am willing to believe that this evil is conscious. And 
 if evil does not, after all, exist, if it is some mys- 
 terious reflection or perversion of the nature of God, 
 what have we lost by weaving all filth into the idea 
 of someone who hates the beauty of living? What 
 have we lost by writing down the failures, the sick- 
 ening falls, the damned old weaknesses and shames, 
 as due to a kind of huge and spiteful Hatred? We 
 have but added a little to the very human joy of 
 conquest. 
 
 19 
 
And if suddenly you know that everything is ut- 
 ter vanity and that God is not, and that life is a blind 
 ^l^^Y) go quickly and get drunk, for then at least 
 you will be human and little, and you may shake off 
 from you the taint of those vasty cold hells which 
 have no horizon, where nothing personal or think- 
 ing is except yourself, where life and death and love 
 and hate are formless and imbecile, like one great 
 Face, without eyes or nose or mouth, a thing to make 
 you mad if you think of it long enough. Oh! get 
 very drunk then, and near to the earth, for she is 
 warm and fragrant. Lie sometimes on your back 
 and stare at the stars, and when you are nearly mad 
 with the horror of them turn and tear apart the grass 
 roots and bury your silly nose, like a dog in the very 
 stuff of earth. It is good physic and should heal you 
 of that horror of immensity. For if God is very 
 great, He is also very little. . . . And when you 
 have done this go indoors and wash your nose and 
 play a game of Bridge lest you become a prig. 
 
 20 
 
VI 
 
 Pain is sometimes Heaven's kick at the hinder 
 parts of man to wake up the fool. But sometimes it 
 is a deep and awful mystery which little minds must 
 leave alone, for pain is nearly always birth. 
 
 21 
 
VII 
 
 If you ever have to face death, to live for weeks 
 expecting it hourly, you will be surprised how com- 
 monplace the prospect of it becomes. But if fear 
 come, I counsel you to side-step from its bewilder- 
 ing blows. Do not try hastily to fix your mind on 
 some ready-made philosophy or religion which shall 
 stiffen you to meet your enemy, for fear has a way of 
 scattering your marshalled thoughts and leaving you 
 dry-mouthed and wet in the hand, with no defences. 
 But concern yourself with something different from 
 danger — either trivial or great. Lift a comrade or 
 sharpen a pencil, and do it well and with all con- 
 sciousness. It is for this that the aristocrats of the 
 French Revolution made play before the guillotine 
 with snuff boxes and canes. It is for this that the sol- 
 dier lights his cigarette. . . . And for your thoughts, 
 think only of one thing steadfastly and let it be beau- 
 tiful — a field, a woman, a wood at Springtime, a dog, 
 rain over the hills, the smile of your friend, children, 
 or little birds or the mad sea, or silver drowned in a 
 green still water. ... Of your beastly past I pray 
 you to forget it utterly, lest you make hastily a sort 
 of repentant panic as a gloss for that which you know 
 may not be forgiven by yourself and can only be par- 
 doned by God, who is love. If you can think at all, 
 hope. And so — should death cut short your thinking 
 
 22 
 
— either you will sleep utterly or go forward, as a 
 man should. For it is wise to think backward and 
 forward, seeing life as a swift high-flying bird must 
 see one field below. But if you have already — in 
 more spacious hours — made for yourself a philoso- 
 phy or religion which will withstand the shock of 
 naked and bloody reality and not be shattered, then 
 God has indeed been good to you, and you will die 
 without greater difficulty than that offered by the 
 body, which clings too naturally to continuity. 
 
 23 
 
VIII 
 
 God is never sudden. When the "Do this" or "Do 
 that" of His destiny seems to you abrupt, remember 
 that you have already done — (or failed to do) — ^what 
 He requires, by the habit of your will. You have 
 moved to an event. That is all. You have not been 
 dropped into it from a celestial aeroplane. If you 
 could look back you would see your path, and know 
 that you chose it yourself. 
 
 24 
 
IX 
 
 God gives to each man, however beset he may be 
 with the world, a few minutes at least daily, when he 
 is utterly alone. I have read Shelley in a Public 
 Lavatory, and learnt Rupert Brooke's war sonnets 
 by heart while I was doing my morning duty to this 
 body. 
 
 25 
 
Always lead a double life. Keep in your heart a 
 secret room. In the midst of traffic, at tennis, in res- 
 taurants and offices, exult that there wait for you 
 somewhere great ghosts of your own creation. And 
 when you shut the door of your bedroom let them 
 crowd round you — the splendid brothers of the mind. 
 Then you will go out to the world again clothed 
 head to foot in the armour of beauty that they have 
 put on you in secret. And someone passing you in 
 the street will catch benediction from you and go on 
 his way not knowing why a glimpse at your eyes has 
 made him almost merry in a world of little content. 
 Moreover, when life slaps you in the face, you may 
 remember your hid haven, and laugh at the rowdy 
 world, and so go rejoicing, as a philosopher should, 
 to the things that matter. 
 
 26 
 
XI 
 
 Let Heaven sometimes sweat offence from you. 
 If you feel grossness swell in you, let the sun burn it 
 out and the rain wash you clean again. 
 
 27 
 
XII 
 
 When you first go into a room make it instantly 
 a shrine, for if you live there it is well that you live 
 with nothing ugly. And thoughts clothe an empty 
 room more certainly than wall-paper. 
 
 28 
 
XIII 
 
 Do not fall too easily into the fallacy that a deed 
 is somehow more final than a thought. It is neither 
 more nor less than a step on a road, a link in a chain. 
 To think that a line of thought is ended or broken by 
 an act is as foolish as to suppose the chain of neck- 
 lace finished by the first bead it threads. There have 
 been men who set themselves to build a wall of habit 
 let us say in thinking, and who pushed an evil 
 thought aside and went on with the building, but at 
 an evil action threw down the trowel, gave them- 
 selves up as useless, and kicked their good work 
 level with the mud again. Go on building, my son, 
 go on building, for nothing on earth begins or ends 
 suddenly, and he that is not for God is against Him. 
 One brick upon another may be as great a work as a 
 cathedral. 
 
 20 
 
XIV 
 
 When you read take the hammer of your brain 
 and break apart all liches. They are r©und-shot at 
 the foot of thought, and lead you to suppose it dead. 
 So you leave it to drown in seas of dreadful print, 
 and Truth mourns another son. 
 
 ^o 
 
XV 
 
 When you pray I dare advise you break away 
 from arranged titles, such as the Church has hung 
 round the neck of its God, though you may find some 
 of them more beautiful than any you can think your- 
 self. But words such as "Almighty" may drug the 
 keenness of your senses when you try to touch God. 
 I have prayed to Him as the Great Calm Spirit, as 
 Father, as King, as Friend, and all the titles meant 
 nothing, and fluttered like dead leaves on to the mov- 
 ing stream of love. . . . Once as I walked along a 
 road I spoke to Him as the Splendid Friend, and 
 saw the huge sea, green and silent against the clouds, 
 and near me the laughing pines, and very far away 
 a sail like a speck of foam but which was a great 
 ship, full of men. And I knew I was a fool, and 
 could not call Him anything, but said, "Make me 
 big, and less a fool," and then I ran, and met my 
 friends and linked an arm through the warm arm 
 of one and sang a silly song. 
 
 31 
 
XVI 
 
 You will find that the hardest of all things to bear 
 is tyranny. An uncle of yours once lived to tell the 
 Scotch Manager of a Sugar Plantation exactly what 
 he thought of him, but he was a great man, and did 
 things given to few to do. You will find tyranny 
 crushing the beauty of life from you, feeding in you 
 a slow fire which burns out love and leaves you a 
 revengeful husk. You will meet it at school, where 
 the wrong sort of master can crush the little wings 
 of your mind as he would crush a fly. You will meet 
 it wherever men are in authority over you. Above 
 all, you will meet it if the curse of God descends 
 again on this world and you have to join the army. 
 There (unless you are soulless) your soul will be 
 fainting sometimes at the foot of tyranny, as those 
 two beautiful bodies lie at the foot of Watt's Mam- 
 mon. Only it will not be Mammon who sits above 
 you. It will be nothing with so awful and vacant a 
 dignity. Only a purple and strutting complacency 
 which was surely made for man to kick, but which 
 is hedged about with the barbed wire of discipline. 
 God help you, little son, if you are trodden under 
 those well satisfied hoofs of authority. Either you 
 will give up life then and let bitterness eat you like a 
 cancer, or you will pity your persecutor and be in 
 danger of becoming a prig, or else you will possess 
 
 32 
 
your soul and talk quietly in its inmost rooms with 
 God, who does not boss, but lets us work out our own 
 salvation. In any case, it is then that you must go and 
 find the right sort of woman — your mother when the 
 masters have soiled you, and some other woman when 
 you are a man. Let her sympathise with you, and 
 make a fool of you and pretend that you are splen- 
 did, so you may be healed a little. 
 
 Yet I am not sure that patronage is not more dif- 
 ficult to bear than tyranny, for tyranny has some- 
 thing of the dramatic about it, and the dramatic is 
 never depressing. Whereas patronage is like a mos- 
 quito — it irritates, but its sting arouses small sym- 
 pathy. It is like toothache, or a broken finger-nail 
 — torture without dignity. 
 
 33 
 
XVII 
 
 "Manners maketh man" is a lying proverb, which 
 has been bound too long round the eyes of man, and 
 particularly of women. Manners are simply the 
 shoehorn of society. They assist man to fit comfort- 
 ably into his surroundings — but they are no more a 
 man than his socks are. People who believe that pro- 
 verb — and there are many who do so honestly — will 
 believe that the colour of a tie condemns or justifies 
 a man, that a straw hat worn with a frock-coat means 
 eternal, instead of merely social damnation; and that 
 a man who drops his aitches, drops with them his 
 claim to respect. I have heard a woman say that a 
 man who wore a "made-up tie" with evening dress 
 was beneath contempt, and she meant it. No man is 
 beneath contempt, my son, not even if it is his mind 
 that seems to you little, cheap and artificial — quite 
 unlike your own carefully constructed and expen- 
 sively intellectual affair — and his tie matters as little 
 as the number of buttons on his underclothes. But 
 you will find it very diffcult to believe that. In fact, 
 you may never do so, and go down to the grave with 
 an awful fear least your father had long hair and 
 wore red ties. 
 
 34 
 
XVIII 
 
 Big words, of which too much writing has made us 
 afraid, become real among the beastliness of war. 
 Love, friendship, honour, courage . . . are words 
 which soldiers do not use. They are too much like 
 tin labels hung round the necks of the gods. Love 
 stands up knee-deep out of the manure of war, a real 
 presence, like the sun-white clouds and the trees, but 
 we affect not to notice it just as we appear not to see 
 the clouds or the trees. Love of man for man, pass- 
 ing the love of women, is common in the tangle of 
 battles as mud and sunlight. You accept it as you 
 accept the weather. Courage is as common as rain. 
 You see men do great things in face of death, and 
 you discuss your favourite brand of cigarette while 
 you observe. The modesty "V. C. heroes" which 
 journalists have smeared over them like a kind of 
 vulgar grease-paint, is not modesty but an absolute 
 unconsciousness of anything unusual, since courage 
 is as much a part of a fighting man's equipment as 
 his water bottle. Modesty simpers a little. Uncon- 
 sciousness of merit never simpers. The hero beloved 
 of journalists has courage woven into him, and is as 
 honestly surprised and annoyed at all the people who 
 gush on him for what he has done, as he would be if 
 they played the band because his feet were small. 
 But make no mistake. War is not good because good 
 
 35 
 
comes out of it. You might as well argue that be- 
 cause a great man was horsewhipped as a little boy, 
 all little boys should be horsewhipped that they may 
 become great. You might as reasonably hold that 
 since roses grow from manure you should strew the 
 whole sweet smelling earth with dung. War is filth. 
 Simply that. 
 
 36 
 
XIX 
 
 The thought of death for yourself may conceiv- 
 ably be welcome — certainly it is not always terrible. 
 But the sight of death for others is always fearful and 
 all the philosophies of the world will not make it 
 otherwise. Pity a dead man as you will — you will 
 always fear him a little. Unless you are wholly a 
 brute you will fear a little his still and awful dig- 
 nity, his utter harmlessness. . . . There is a sort of 
 ghastly innocence about a dead man armed, an inno- 
 cence, and a mocking wisdom. The living feel some- 
 thing of that kind of injured gloom which falls on 
 excited children when one of them steps back and 
 says "I will not play." Pity him, be reverent to the 
 clay that can no more resist your touch, cover him 
 deep from all your senses, and stand up straight into 
 the sun again with your head beyond the high clouds. 
 Live, and forget utterly his clay, save as you knew it 
 formerly, shone through by spirit like a lantern by 
 flame. Live hard, and let alone the two great mys- 
 teries of birth and death, lest you chase your own tail 
 like a kitten and go but giddily to God in your ap- 
 pointed time. 
 
 37 
 
XX 
 
 You are less beautiful than flowers, less clean than 
 wild beasts, not so patient as horses, weaker than 
 trees, less faithful than dogs. The bees work harder 
 (and are female), the ant is cleverer, little birds mind 
 their own business. . . . Why, then, are you of 
 greater value than sparrows? You have a will, 
 which is the greatest thing on earth, which flashes 
 over matter like Excalibur across the marshes. And 
 if you do not use it — one way or another — you are less 
 than the apes, my son, less than the garden spider. 
 Use it as you use your muscles, not only for the little 
 half conscious movements of the day, but for great 
 and difficult overcomings. Do hard things for the 
 sheer cussed joy of doing them. Sweat mentally. 
 Feel the good ache in your spiritual muscles. But do 
 not bawl "Fight the good fight" all day, or smile 
 widely on another's sorrow, or hit pale people be- 
 tween the shoulder blades before breakfast for that 
 is an awful and brazen selfishness and men will 
 rightly wish you dead for it. 
 
 38 
 
XXI 
 
 Look at strangers with carefully concealed inter- 
 est, not with that cold resentment which is a fool's 
 armor against feeling a fool. Your greatest friend 
 will be a stranger when you first meet him. Like the 
 statue in Michael Angelo's lump of marble there is a 
 friend hidden in every passer-by, and in one there 
 may be a new Christ. 
 
 ^9 
 
XXII 
 
 I saw a man, once, fall from an aeroplane, and 
 realized, suddenly, that until then I had thought of 
 the machine wrongly. I had conceived it as a ma- 
 chine, turning and rising, and moving where it 
 wished to go, whereas it was a man and a machine, 
 but most of all a man. We fall too easily into that 
 fallacy. We see a distant sail and think of it as a 
 thing like a white butterfly, with its will woven into 
 it. We forget that it is men and a ship and most 
 of all men. We talk of cars "turning" or "swerv- 
 ing" or "racing" but we mean — if we think — that 
 men have made them do these things. Look for the 
 soul of things, son. Don't see just tramps and pros- 
 titutes, kings and magistrates. There is a man or a 
 woman under the trappings, and there is divinity in 
 human kind which you must reverence. When the 
 "damn-those-fellers" attitude has fallen away from 
 man like the last dead leaf from a tree, we shall be- 
 gin to solve our little economic problems, and each 
 of us who sees a pal that might have been, in the 
 eyes of the foulest criminal, is bringing the old earth 
 nearer to the new earth. 
 
 40 
 
XXIII 
 
 Nearly all "comfortable words" spoken to mourn- 
 ers squeeze the last drops of hope from the sup- 
 posed saintliness of the dead. "He was good and he 
 must be happy now." But what of the cases where 
 a man was not good? What of the case where a dead 
 son was a "wrong un"? The philosophy of comfort 
 breaks down there, and men yap vaguely of the Di- 
 vine Will. Few of us are good. Most men are un- 
 doubtedly bad, and the fact that the mothers and 
 wives of hundreds of bad men have suddenly to be 
 comforted, has produced a happy doctrine which 
 once gave courage to the Dervishes but which hesi- 
 tates a little before our old Western creed which 
 says "as you make your bed, so must you lie on it." I 
 mean the doctrine which holds that death in war 
 atones for all crime. It may be so, but quite apart 
 from that I think that sometimes the most loyal of 
 women must doubt her man, must think herself false 
 to his memory because she cannot fit a halo to his 
 funny old head. I know those who live among the 
 naked truths of war cannot pretend that the man 
 they have loved and who has been killed by their 
 side was a saint because he was dead. They know 
 that men die sometimes swearing, or mad, or full of 
 bitter hatred, and they would be less than the men 
 they are if they talked of them as godly or even 
 
 41 
 
"good," except in that wide sense of "good fellow," 
 simply because they lie now in the awful silence of 
 death. Look down from the very far above on this 
 one life, this field on a chequered plain of fields, and 
 remember that man can never cease to struggle. He 
 is a fighter against odds, he sweats to get out of the 
 entanglements of life, to do something, to be some- 
 thing. He grasps always at the definite, the com- 
 plete, and nothing is definite or complete. He wants 
 to round off a life prettily, and the end of every life 
 is like the reverse of an embroidery — all tags and 
 straggled ends. He loves to draw a hard outline 
 round every fact of life, and all things have a misty 
 side where they merge with the eternal. Think of 
 your dead friend (of your dead father, my son, when 
 the time comes) as moving, sweating, struggling al- 
 ways, his sins, his laughter, his nastiness, his kindness, 
 his stupidities as much part of him as the colour of 
 his eyes. Never complete, always developing in one 
 direction or another, moving, moving, moving. 
 "Working out his own salvation." Condemn no sins 
 but your own, and remember, if you can, that every 
 man goes on. Expect no man to be a saint, but when 
 you find a saint reverence him as you love the sun. 
 And because death has closed his hand over a sinner 
 do not think that his sins have been frozen on him 
 for eternity. He is not petrified like the corpses of 
 Pompeii. He goes on, my son, — surely he goes on. 
 
 42 
 
MAGPIES IN PICARDY 
 
 AND OTHER POEMS 
 
MAGPIES IN PICARDY 
 
 THE magpies in Picardy 
 Are more than I can tell. 
 They flicker down the dusty roads 
 And cast a magic spell 
 On the men who march through Picardy, 
 Through Picardy to hell. 
 
 (The blackbird flies with panic, 
 The swallow goes like light, 
 The finches move like ladies, 
 The owl floats by at night; 
 But the great and flashing magpie 
 He flies as artists might.) 
 
 A magpie in Picardy 
 Told me secret things — 
 Of the music in white feathers, 
 And the sunlight that sings 
 And dances in deep shadows — 
 He told me with his wings. 
 
 (The hawk is cruel and rigid, 
 He watches from a height; 
 The rook is slow and sombre, 
 The robin loves to fight; 
 But the great and flashing magpie 
 He flies as lovers might.) 
 45 
 
He told me that in Picardy, 
 
 An age ago or more, 
 
 While all his fathers still were eggs, 
 
 These dusty highways bore 
 
 Brown singing soldiers marching out 
 
 Through Picardy to war. 
 
 He said that still through chaos 
 Works on the ancient plan, 
 And two things have altered not 
 Since first the world began — 
 The beauty of the wild green earth 
 And the bravery of man. 
 
 (For the sparrow flies unthinking 
 
 And quarrels in his flight. 
 
 The heron trails his legs behind, 
 
 The lark goes out of sight; 
 
 But the great and flashing magpie 
 
 He flies as poets might.) 
 
 46 
 
SONG OF AMIENS 
 
 LORD! How we laughed in Amiens! 
 For here were lights and good French drink, 
 And Marie smiled at everyone, 
 And Madeleine's new blouse was pink, 
 And Petite Jeanne (who always runs) 
 Served us so charmingly, I think 
 That we forgot the unsleeping guns. 
 
 Lord! How we laughed in Amiens! 
 
 Till through the talk there flashed the name 
 
 Of some great man we left behind. 
 
 And then a sudden silence came, 
 
 And even Petite Jeanne (who runs) 
 
 Stood still to hear, with eyes aflame, 
 
 The distant mutter of the guns. 
 
 Ah! How we laughed in Amiens! 
 For there were useless things to buy, 
 Simply because Irene, who served. 
 Had happy laughter in her eye; 
 And Yvonne, bringing sticky buns. 
 Cared nothing that the eastern sky 
 Was lit with flashes from the guns. 
 
 And still we laughed in Amiens, 
 
 As dead men laughed a week ago. 
 
 What cared we if in Delville Wood 
 
 The splintered trees saw hell below? 
 
 We cared . . . We cared . . . But laughter runs 
 
 The cleanest stream a man may know 
 
 To rinse him from the taint of guns. 
 
 47 
 
DURING THE BOMBARDMENT 
 
 WHAT did we know of birds? 
 Though the wet woods rang with their 
 blessing, 
 And the trees were awake and aware with wings, 
 And the little secrets of mirth, that have no words, 
 Made even the brambles chuckle, like baby things 
 Who find their toes too funny for any expressing. 
 
 What did we know of flowers? 
 
 Though the fields were gay with their flaming 
 
 Poppies, like joy itself, burning the young green 
 
 maize. 
 And spreading their crinkled petals after the 
 
 showers — 
 Cornflower vieing with mustard; and all the three 
 
 of them shaming 
 The tired old world with its careful browns and 
 
 greys. 
 
 What did we know of summer, 
 The larks, and the dusty clover, 
 And the little furry things that were busy and starry- 
 eyed? 
 Each of us wore his brave disguise, like a mummer, 
 Hoping that no one saw, when the shells came over, 
 The little boy who was funking — somewhere inside! 
 
 48 
 
SPORTSMEN IN PARADISE 
 
 THEY left the fury of the fight, 
 And they were very tired. 
 The gates of Heaven were open, quite 
 Unguarded, and unwired. 
 There v^as no sound of any gun ; 
 The land was still and green: 
 Wide hills lay silent in the sun, 
 Blue valleys slept between. 
 
 They saw far off a little wood 
 
 Stand up against the sky. 
 
 Knee-deep in grass a great tree stood . . , 
 
 Some lazy cows went by . . . 
 
 There were some rooks sailed overhead — 
 
 And once a church-bell pealed. 
 
 "God! but it's England," someone said, 
 
 "And there's a cricket field 1" 
 
 49 
 
A SOLDIER 
 
 HE laughed. His blue eyes searched the morning, 
 Found the unceasing song of the lark 
 In a brown twinkle of wings, far out. 
 Great clouds, like galleons, sailed the distance. 
 The young spring day had slipped the cloak of dark 
 And stood up straight and naked with a shout. 
 Through the green wheat, like laughing schoolboys, 
 Tumbled the yellow mustard flowers, uncheck'd. 
 The wet earth reeked and smoked in the sun . . . 
 He thought of the waking farm in England. 
 The deep thatch of the roof — all shadow-fleck'd — 
 The clank of pails at the pump . . . the day begun. 
 "After the war ..." he thought. His heart beat 
 faster 
 
 WITH a new love for things familiar and plain. 
 The Spring leaned down and whispered to 
 him low 
 Of a slim, brown-throated woman he had kissed . . . 
 He saw, in sons that were himself again. 
 The only immortality that man may know. 
 
 And then a sound grew out of the morning. 
 And a shell came, moving a destined way. 
 Thin and swift and lustful, making its moan. 
 
 50 
 
A moment his brave white body knew the Spring, 
 The next, it lay- 
 In a red ruin of blood and guts and bone. 
 
 Oh! nothing was tortured there! Nothing could 
 
 know 
 How death blasphemed all men and their high birth 
 With his obscenities. Already moved, 
 Within those shattered tissues, that dim force, 
 Which is the ancient alchemy of Earth, 
 Changing him to the very flowers he loved. 
 
 ''Nothing was tortured there!" Oh, pretty thought! 
 When God Himself might well how down His head 
 And hide His haunted eyes before, the dead. 
 
 .?l 
 
ON LEAVE 
 {ToR.H.andV.H.L.D.) 
 
 IT was not the white cliff at the rim of the sea, 
 Nor Folkestone, with its roofs all bless'd with 
 smoke; 
 Nor the shrill English children at the quay; 
 Nor even the railway-bank alight with primrose 
 
 fire, 
 Nor the little fields of Kent, and the woods, and the 
 
 far church spire — 
 It was not these that spoke. 
 
 It was the red earth of Devon that called to me, 
 ''*So youm back, you li'l boy that us used to know!" 
 It was the deep, dim lanes that wind to the sea. 
 And the Devon streams that turn and twist and run. 
 And the Devon hills that stretch themselves in the 
 
 sun. 
 Like drowsy green cats watching the world below. 
 
 There were herons stalked the salty pools that day, 
 Where the sea comes laughing up to the very 
 
 rails . . . 
 At Newton I saw Dartmoor far away. 
 By Paignton there was one I saw who ploughed, 
 With the red dust round him like a sunset cloud. 
 And beyond in the bay was Brixham with her sails. 
 
 52 
 
How could I fail to mourn for you, the brave, 
 
 Who loved these things a little year before? 
 
 In each unshattered field I saw a grave, 
 
 And through the unceasing music of the sea 
 
 The screams of shells came back, came back to me. 
 
 It was a green peace that suddenly taught me war. 
 
 Out of the fight you found the shorter way 
 
 To those great silences where men may sleep. 
 
 We follow by the paths of every day. 
 
 Blind as God made us, hoping that the end 
 
 May hear that laughter between friend and friend 
 
 Such as through death the greater-hearted keep. 
 
 We are not weary yet. The fight draws out, 
 And sometimes we have sickened at the kill. 
 And sometimes in the night comes slinking doubt 
 To whisper that peace cometh not through Hell. 
 But yet we want to hear God's anger tell 
 The guns to cease their fury and be still. 
 
 We are not weary yet, though here the rain 
 
 Beats without shame upon the shattered dead. 
 
 And there I see the lazy waves again. 
 
 And in the weedy pools along the beach 
 
 The brown-legged boys, with their dear Devon 
 
 speech. 
 Are happier than the gay gulls overhead. 
 
 Up the wet sand a spaniel sputters by. 
 Soused like a seal, and laughing at their feet; 
 There is a gull comes slanting down the sky, 
 Kisses the sea, and mews, and flies away. 
 And, like flat jewels set against the grey, 
 The roofs of Brixham glitter through the heat. 
 
 53 
 
It was for this you died : this, through the earth, 
 Peace and the great men peace shall make, 
 And dogs and children and careless mirth . . . 
 Beauty be with you now — and of this land 
 In bloody travail for the world you planned, 
 God give you deep oblivion when you awake. 
 
 54 
 
AN OLD BOOT IN A DITCH 
 
 THERE is an epic of the winding path 
 That might be sung by you — 
 Mornings when Earth came glowing from her bath 
 And shook her drowsy laughter into dew, 
 And little ways your younger brothers made 
 Went up the hills and danced into the blue. 
 
 Noons when the great sun hammered out a blade 
 Upon the silent anvil of the downs, 
 And in divine inconsequence you strayed 
 Over the hill kings, with their bramble-crowns 
 And saw, across the meadow-patterned plain, 
 The far still smoke of little valley towns. 
 
 And evenings, when the Earth gave thanks for rain, 
 
 And all the washen soil of her did seem 
 
 Sweeter than little children who have lain 
 
 All night among the roses of a dream; 
 
 And great white clouds went up the stairs of God 
 
 And gnats danced out above the misty stream. 
 
 Yet most, I think, the broad high road you trod 
 Would weave its marching splendour with your 
 
 song — 
 The weariness that held the feet you shod. 
 The weariness that makes all roads too long. 
 Until the spirit trails its beaten wings 
 And finds the whole earth given to the strong, 
 
 55 
 
And all the thousand crushed and broken things 
 Whose hope has snapped beneath the feet of Gold 
 Peer upward through the dust His passing flings 
 And see Him watch the hopeless road unfold — 
 Staring across the passion at His feet 
 With yellow eyes that glitter, and are cold. 
 
 It is not so, but when our spirits meet 
 Old Weariness, with his rust-eaten knife. 
 There is no corner of our house kept sweet 
 That is not trampled bloody by the strife, 
 Until with hungry fingers he lays bare 
 A rawness hidden in the quick of life. 
 
 It is not so. In your green silence there 
 You see the world pass like a lean old witch. 
 You watch the stars at night, and you may share 
 That small, fierce love wherein the soil is rich, 
 And know that half the gifts of God are won 
 By centipedes and fairies in the ditch. 
 
 •;(> 
 
THE MAD OWL 
 
 STAY near me, oh! stay near me in the dark! 
 The Fear is crawling in the shadows now, 
 The old vague fear thou speakest of as mad . . . 
 Stay near me while we hunt. I catch again 
 That swift wild glimpse beneath the staring moon, 
 Of something owl-like in the very soil — 
 As though the rotten wood-reek of the earth. 
 The ravenous weeds, the life-betraying grass, 
 (All the strange stuff of the soil) were quick 
 With that same living that our feathers know. 
 Stay near me, oh! stay near me as we hunt, 
 I almost fear the field mouse when he screams, 
 Because his shrill, thin tenor speaks to me 
 Of life that is as ours. I watch the earth, 
 I watch the small food stirring in the grass, 
 And cannot fall in silent death to it, 
 Because it seems as some wild brotherhood 
 Had caught my wings and held them from the kill. 
 Oh, listen! I have even dared to doubt 
 That God was all an owl. ... I have seen Him 
 Without a beak, without his silent wings . . . 
 Speaking another voice . . . nor calling wide 
 Over the dim earth with that mellow scream 
 Such as we know He hunts with. . . . 
 
 .?7 
 
A FUNERAL AT PRINCETOWN 
 
 {Written in 191 2.) 
 
 IT was a bleak road from the gaol, was the road 
 we trod, 
 Tugging at something heavy under the slanted rain. 
 And the moor there was twisted and scarred with 
 
 pain, 
 Like a tear-stained face, staring defiance at God. 
 
 It was the father walked in front, and he read in a 
 
 book 
 With little Latin words flung under grieving skies, 
 And the warders there with death asleep in their 
 
 eyes. 
 And the Mother of Churches little beneath their 
 
 look. 
 
 And we dropped him into the little clean-cut hole 
 That smelled of rain, and the clay whereof we are 
 
 made, 
 And one of us laughed, and one of us shouldered a 
 
 spade, 
 And one of us spat, while the father prayed for his 
 
 soul. 
 
 And the mist over the moor, crawling and dim. 
 Was blind like the great beast Man with his thousand 
 
 necks 
 Who mouths through a gloom of laws, nor ever recks 
 Of a dead face, staring defiance at him. 
 
STANZAS WRITTEN OUTSIDE A 
 FRIED-FISH SHOP 
 
 O MOTHER Earth! Whose sweetest visions 
 move 
 Through the blue night in silver nakedness, 
 What awful laughter mingled with your love 
 That here my sense should feel the wild caress 
 Of knowledge breaking common walls of sight 
 To see the hills march cloudward and grow less? 
 
 Here is no splendour of the wistful night 
 
 Staring wide-eyed beneath the stars' disdain 
 
 Only a fallen sister of their light 
 
 Offers her beauty to the careless rain. 
 
 Only between the houses in the dark 
 
 Is something of your loneliness — and pain. 
 
 Yet here you told my senses to embark 
 
 And sail the seas whose smallest isle is Space, 
 
 To touch far beaches near the Sun, and mark 
 
 Baby Eternity under Heaven's face; 
 
 And lo! the wind that bent my sunlit sail 
 
 Was this foul fish-breath from a cursed place! 
 
 I saw men stirring while the dawn was pale — 
 A low green ribbon in the waking east — 
 I heard the waters beating with their flail, 
 
 '59 
 
And felt the hate that links unto the beast 
 All soulless things of yours when Man is near, 
 Lusting to make your rebel son their feast. 
 
 I saw the stubborn face men set to fear, 
 
 The dogs of toil that gnawed their bleeding hands; 
 
 I saw brine-sodden ropes slip through and sear 
 
 Their frozen fingers as with white-hot brands. 
 
 I saw them face the hardness of all hells 
 
 That men might eat dead things in foreign lands. 
 
 Deep in the green and silver mass that swells 
 
 The dripping nets of those who find fate good. 
 
 I saw the awful war of hidden cells, 
 
 The dim primaeval tissues seeking food; 
 
 And all their armies, mouthing through the gloom, 
 
 Called to their kinsmen in the fishers' blood. 
 
 I saw all History and her pageant-doom, 
 Mocking to-day with an, eternal mirth, 
 While the old threads were twisted on your loom, 
 The fraying threads of life and death and birth: 
 Their woof a moment rough beneath my hand, 
 As though I dared to test the weaver's worth; 
 
 As though a moment in the fickle sand 
 
 I saw the steps of Fate go up the beach, 
 
 And some vague purpose in this plan unplanned 
 
 Leapt into sight — yea almost into speech. 
 
 Before the evil reek that brought it me 
 
 Swept it again with laughter out of reach. 
 
 60 
 
THE SUICIDE 
 
 {August Bank Holiday.) 
 
 THERE must be some wild comedy in Hell, 
 For men will laugh because their souls have 
 died 
 And beauty is become a silly shell 
 With old, decaying, sexual jests inside. 
 They laugh aloud, although their eyes have seen 
 The passionate beauty of the broken spray. 
 The stealthy shadows creeping through the green, 
 The footprints of the wind when he is gay. 
 They look upon the sea with her desire — 
 Like a green woman, hungry though she sleeps, 
 While her swift dreams, on pinions of white fire. 
 Call with the gulls above her slumbering deep . . . 
 They laugh, they laugh, and throw things every- 
 where — 
 Stones at the sea, at bottles in the sand 
 ("You see that bloody gull, Bill, over there? 
 Well, watch me hit him, here from where I stand.") 
 
 God! what ugly fools we are! 
 
 1 will stand up and strip these clothes away — 
 One real white body shining like a star 
 
 Out of the coloured dark of their array — 
 Give myself fiercely to the sea's embrace, 
 Sink on her bed nor let my life arise; 
 Feel her salt lips upon my drowned face. 
 
 6i 
 
Her eyes . . . the growing greenness of her eyes! 
 Then when the empty white shell that was I 
 Shall float again within their affrighted reach 
 The laughter in their thousand throats will die 
 And they will hear the waves along the beach, 
 Hear the curv'd waves in broken song unroU'd, 
 And look a moment at the eternal sea 
 In wonder at the triumph my eyes have told. 
 For wisdom will be whispered unto me, 
 The wisdom that may not be said with words, 
 Which little fishes know who swim the deep. 
 And rabbits in the hedge, and little birds, 
 And little children smiling in their sleep. 
 
 62 
 
ST. JOHN viii, 6 
 
 THE troubled dust, 
 Torn from the stolid world; 
 Sleepless as lust, 
 
 Rain-sodden, tempest-hurled; 
 Hating its lowly birth, 
 
 And beating ghost wings to arise 
 From its scornful mother, the Earth, 
 
 To the laughter of watching skies . . . 
 He wrote in it — God who knew 
 
 The dreary sickness of things. 
 The straining to reach the blue 
 
 With broken and bloody wings. . . . 
 
 Did He (even He) grope in a sudden dark, 
 And scrawl in the dust — a question mark? 
 
 63 
 
KNIGHT-ERRANT 
 
 WHEN I put on my morning tie 
 The souls of ladies come to me; 
 Their faces through a mist I spy 
 Like silver drown'd in a green sea. 
 
 And all about their necks I find 
 
 (Their necks, like children's, sweet and white) 
 Dim colours that they take and bind 
 
 About my arm before the fight. 
 
 But never while the daylight runs 
 
 Does shadowy armour break the grey. 
 
 Only a gleam of foreign suns 
 
 Strikes a veiled sword, and dies away. 
 
 Only behind the walls of sense 
 
 Some magic laughter breaks its chain 
 
 And like a bird, with pinions tense, 
 Hovers . . . then falls to flight again. 
 
 64 
 
DEAR, IF YOUR BLINDED EYES 
 
 DEAR, if your blinded eyes could see 
 The paths my thoughts have worn to you. 
 The trodden roads from you to me, 
 I wonder, would some sweet surprise. 
 Or scorn, make dim those sunlit eyes. 
 As winds, beneath a tent of blue, 
 Make dusk the gold with passing feet 
 Silently over the laughing wheat. 
 
 6s 
 
THE DEAD MARCH IN ''SAUL" 
 
 A MELODY of birth, 
 A cry of little life, 
 Torn from the sons of Earth, 
 And faint with weariness of unfulfilling strife 
 Beats its frail hands against the wings of Death. 
 Vast and invisible are they, throbbing the troubled 
 
 air 
 With storm-pulsed waves of thundered ecstasy. 
 And yet a breath, 
 Fainter than laughter of dead jests is there. 
 
 As when in Spring beneath a rainy soil 
 
 The dead things stir and move toward the sun. 
 
 So from the deeps of unproductive toil 
 
 Moves the faint breath of something that was done. 
 
 So faint, so little, that to those that sweat 
 
 To wrench achievement from the iron of thought. 
 
 There comes a knowledge (and their eyes are wet) 
 
 Of eagle-wings by trailing cobwebs caught. 
 
 And then. 
 
 Riving the heart of things, 
 Crashes tfie laughter of Death, 
 Poising on thunderous wings, 
 "Little my fools," he saith, 
 "Ye that have given me hate. 
 And loathing and bitter fear. 
 He whom ye mourn at the gate 
 Laughs with me here." 
 
 66 
 
CAPTAIN GATES 
 
 WE lifted up our eyes, 
 Up from the multitudinous trouble of the 
 sands 
 That fringe the quieter trouble of Time's sea, 
 And saw, behind the centuries, old calm gods arise 
 To whom our fathers raised undoubting hands — 
 Saw them arise, yet could not bow the knee. 
 
 Ours was a wisdom which was somehow sad. 
 Sad with the knowledge that divinity was dead, 
 Or that our sight was grown too clear to mark 
 God's builded wall between the good and bad. 
 With shattered certainties our temple steps are red: 
 We wait, to hear His laughter through the dark. 
 
 Yet here the old divinity broke through, 
 The old dumb heroism strove, 
 Towering in mountainous silence over pain, 
 The old proud scorn of death's dramatic due, 
 The fear of such eternal words as love. — 
 
 We nod him greeting. Then to work again. 
 
 67 
 
THE FEAR OF GOD 
 
 THEY worshipped God, and all about them 
 flung 
 A beauty of blue smoke, and down far aisles 
 The fainting gold of lamps was hung. 
 They worshipped God with heart and tongue. 
 
 As little rabbits run when men pass by, 
 And crouch wide-eyed beneath the scented sod, 
 So all that dim world turned to fly 
 When past the pillars rang a cry. 
 
 God's friendly right hand to the roof he reared. 
 His laugh shot all the smoky dusk with sun: 
 They ran when God Himself appeared, 
 For God was naked, and they feared. 
 
 6g 
 
FARMHOUSE 
 
 THE white wall, the cob wall, about my Devon 
 farm. 
 The oak door, the black door, that opens to the wold. 
 Down the grey flagstones, and out in the gloaming, 
 (And all across my shoulder her milk-splashed 
 
 arm.) 
 Out in the cool dusk to watch the rooks homing. 
 (And all across the grey floor a slant of gold.) 
 
 The oak door, the black door, that opens to the skies. 
 The dim hall, the grey hall, when all the work is 
 
 done. 
 Where the great bolt is our hands make a meeting; 
 (And all across my laughter her love-lit eyes.) 
 There at the closed door we hear our hearts beating. 
 (And all across the red west a fiery sun.) 
 
 The dim hall, the grey hall, wherein our soul is 
 
 guest. 
 The black door, the dread door, that opens to the 
 
 night. 
 Down the worn flagstones our two lives together. 
 (And all across our wonder, whispers of rest.) 
 3ut from the firelight to face windy weather. 
 (And all across the rain-clouds a dawning light.) 
 
 69 
 
PISKIES 
 {Writ in Devon.) 
 
 THERE'S piskies up to Dartymoor, 
 An' tidden gude yew zay there hain't. 
 I've felt 'em grawpin' at my heart, 
 I've heard their voices callin' faint, 
 I've knawed a man be cruec down — 
 His soul fair stogged an' heavy-like — 
 Climb up to brawken Zaddle Tor 
 An' bare his head vor winds to strike. 
 An' all the gert black mawky griefs, 
 An' all the pain an' vog an' grime, 
 Have blawed away and left en clear 
 Like vuzz-bush vires in swalin' time. 
 An' what med do so brave a thing 
 As thic' white spells to tak an' weave, 
 But li'l piskies' vitty hands. 
 Or God Himself as give 'em leave? 
 But tidden Him would stop an' spy 
 From Widdicombe to Cranmer Pule, 
 To maze the schemin' li'l heart 
 Of every Jacky-Lantern fulel 
 For mebbe 'tis a lonesome rod 
 Or heather blooth, or peaty ling. 
 Or nobbut just a rainy combe — 
 The spell that meks 'ee tek an' sing. 
 An' this I knaw, the li'l tods 
 Be ever callin' silver faint. 
 There's piskies up to Dartymoor, 
 An' tidden gude yew zay there hain't. 
 
 70 
 
FRANCE, 1917 
 
 INTO the meadows of heaven one of the great 
 dead came 
 As a man comes home to the old boy-haunted hills. 
 The little hills of heaven climb 
 From the green sea, and smell of mint and thyme. 
 And he found the whole land gay with the blue that 
 
 fills 
 Evening and cups of harebells and young eyes 
 And the glooms and hollows of Autumn where 
 
 woodsmoke lies. 
 
 The great dead greeted him with a schoolboy shout, 
 *'You have been long from the hills of heaven," 
 
 they said, 
 "And you reek of Space, and the things that may 
 
 never be small. 
 The vast, cold fields that reach in vain for a wall, 
 The plains where never a cloud gets overhead, 
 And the hills without horizon . . . 
 
 Get you clean 
 In the little brooks of heaven, that run through 
 
 friendly green." 
 
 He said, "I have passed through the fringe of space, 
 Where the lit worlds lie like fallen fruit in the grass; 
 And, passing, I saw in the dusk a world apart. 
 
 71 
 
Like a remembered friend it tuagfit my heart, 
 Held me, and would not let me pass. 
 Saying, *I am the Earth. You must remember me: 
 The clouds are mine, and woods, and the restive 
 
 sea.' " 
 
 Like starlight came a wonder to their eyes. 
 "Of all worlds I have loved it best," said one. 
 "I know a holy city. . . ." 
 
 "There were towns . . ." 
 "There was a dog that loved me . . ." 
 
 "Do the downs 
 Still, with their lazy roads and hawthorns, sleep in 
 
 the sun?" 
 "I made a garden. . . . After Summer showers 
 Moths swam like ghosts above the drenched flowers." 
 
 He said, "I saw the cloud-shadow of the land 
 Lie on the green sea, ragged with cape and bay. 
 And I saw the dark of woods that were spilled like 
 
 wine; 
 Spires and white roads and a river's silver line. 
 And beaten leaves of gold where the cornfields lay. 
 There were two sails like linnets — swift and brown, 
 Making the harbour of a little town. 
 
 The port was sprinkled dark with moving men, 
 Whose thoughts above their toil flashed in the blue, 
 Swift and more beautiful than dragon-flies . . . 
 Up from a lonely church I saw arise 
 The prayers of women — fiercer than they knew, 
 Full of the fear which great love makes too strong; 
 Half-threatening God to save their men from wrong. 
 
 72 
 
The quays were heaped with all the stuff of war; 
 Not the gay colours that laugh to Eastern suns, 
 No spices and spill'd cloths of purple and milk, 
 No blue and cinnamon bales of scented silk, 
 But the grim iron and the great beast-snouted guns, 
 And oil-engines passing with their loads 
 Of white unpainted wood that smelled of forest 
 roads. 
 
 And round them slept the cornfields in the sun. 
 I passed great roads straight as a strong man's prayer, 
 Villages drowning in the blue of trees, 
 Gardens whose colour seemed to sing with bees. 
 Courage and hope and bitter love were there, 
 And I saw proud sorrow lie like a mist of the soil 
 About the women of France at their stubborn toil. 
 
 Very lonely they seemed — the women of France; 
 And the children, holding in leash the giant Earth, 
 Like insects on the vast, indifferent lands. 
 Yet changing the face of the soil with their careful 
 
 hands. 
 Nature might watch them with a contemptuous 
 
 mirth. 
 But the fields were rich with food as I went by. 
 And the gathered shocks stood shaggy against the 
 
 sky. 
 
 On every road War spilled her hurried men. 
 And I saw their courage, young and eagle strong. 
 They were sick for home — for far-off valley or moor. 
 For the little fields and lanes, and the lamp-red door; 
 For the lit town and the traffic's husky song. 
 Great love I saw, though these men feared the name 
 And hid their greatness as a kind of shame. 
 
 73 
 
Man makes a town as God makes man himself, 
 Not suddenly, but adding cell to cell, 
 Till through the never-finished clay upsprings 
 The reluctant beauty of familiar things. 
 A dead town and the body's broken shell 
 Are for the night to cover and earth to hide . . . 
 There were wooden crosses there, by a town's 
 pierced side. 
 
 Nothing was in the graves but the stuff of flowers. 
 I saw gay daffodils there, awaiting birth. 
 And over them, like a cloak on children asleep, 
 The love of all the women who hope or weep. 
 There were wounds here in the green flesh of the 
 
 earth; 
 The hungry weeds had come to their own in the 
 
 corn, 
 And even the beauty of trees was raped and torn. 
 
 The guns were there in the green and wounded wild, 
 
 Hurling death as a boy may throw a stone. 
 
 And the man who served them, with unquickened 
 
 breath, 
 Dealt, like a grocer, with their pounds of death. 
 Thunderous over the fields their iron was thrown. 
 And beyond the horizon men who could laugh and 
 
 feel 
 Lay in the wet dust, red from brow to heel. 
 
 The bodies of men lay down in the dark of the 
 
 earth : 
 Young flesh, through which life shines a friendly 
 
 flame, 
 Was crumbled green in the fingers of decay. . . . 
 
 74 
 
Among the last year's oats and thistles lay 
 A forgotten boy, who hid as though in shame 
 A face that the rats had eaten. . . . Thistle seeds 
 Danced daintily above the rebel weeds. 
 
 Old wire crept through the grass there like a snake, 
 
 Orange-red in the sunlight, cruel as lust. 
 
 And a dead hand groped up blindly from the 
 
 mould . . . 
 A dandelion flamed through ribs — like a heart of 
 
 gold, 
 And a stink of rotten flesh came up from the 
 
 dust . . . 
 With a twinkle of little wings against the sun 
 A lark praised God for all that he had done. 
 
 There was nothing here that moved but a lonely 
 
 bird, 
 And the wind over the grass. Men lived in mud; 
 Slept as their dead must sleep, walled in with clay, 
 Yet staring out across the unpitying day, 
 Staring hard-eyed like hawks that hope for blood. 
 The still land was a witch who held her breath, 
 And with a lidless eye kept watch for death. 
 
 I found honour here at last on the Earth, where man 
 
 faced man; 
 It reached up like a lily from the filth and flies. 
 It grew from war as a lily from manure. 
 Out of the dark it burst — undaunted, sure, 
 As the crocus, insolent under slaty skies. 
 Strikes a green sword-blade through the stubborn 
 
 mould, 
 And throws in the teeth of Winter its challenge of 
 
 gold." 
 
 75 
 
LIGHT 
 
 A BIRD flew low across the golden West 
 Its sweeping pinions black as starless night, 
 But when the full sun beat upon its breast, 
 Above the flaming tapestry of light, 
 It lay one moment sunlit, and at rest, 
 And lo! the gleaming wings were silver white. 
 
 And once a sorrow flung against the glare 
 
 Of one wide canopy of cloudless hours, 
 
 Was blacker than the silent frozen stare 
 
 Of waters under ice, till Time's strong powers 
 
 Beat sunlit on it, and it flashed more fair 
 
 Than God's own robe-embroidered with His flowers. 
 
 76 
 
BATTLEFIELD 
 
 I MAY not tell to anyone 
 The huge indifference of the sun, 
 There is no man can read aright 
 The awful cruelty of light. 
 Like a great eye that cannot see 
 The sky looks on man's misery 
 On dung that once could laugh and love 
 It goggles blindly from above, 
 And not a star goes in at night 
 To hide its eyes from such a sight. 
 So little are we? Yet you know 
 That God was man some years ago. 
 
 Found among his papers from the trenches and 
 unpublished. 
 
 71 
 
THE WIND-BLAWN DOWN 
 
 US be bidin' here in Devon 
 In green fields an' ail 
 Where the land's so gude as Heaven 
 When the gold leaves fall. 
 
 Where the land's so gude as Heaven 
 Wi' its shade-strown lanes 
 An' the brave red soil o' Devon 
 Scentin' sweet o' the rains. 
 
 An' far out 'pon the heather 
 Where the wind roared strong, 
 There was God and man together, 
 An' I writ this song. 
 
 For the wind from th' East blawed free, 
 An' he shouted fine, 
 "I ha' corned from the girt salt sea 
 All drippin' wi' brine. 
 
 I creept from my home on th' down 
 Afore the world woke 
 An' I stormed to the girt black town 
 All reekin' wi' smoke." 
 
 78 
 
"An' the folk" quoth I, "i' the town 
 Be they witless fules? 
 Do they love this wind-blawn down 
 Wi' its sun-kissed pools? 
 
 They be mazed to bide i' th' reek 
 O' the girt black town, 
 Where there's life an' love so sweet 
 On the wind-blawn down I" 
 
 "Nay, the world be a whist like place 
 An' its fashioned queer 
 For 'tis truth that the girt town's face 
 Sees God wi' a sneer. 
 
 An' 'tis truth that the breath o' ling 
 Which the gude down gives 
 Do lift a man's heart to his King 
 For joy that he lives. 
 
 But the blest blooth ofttimes bursts 
 From the blackest soil. 
 An' the town man dearly thirsts 
 When he tires o' toil. 
 
 He thirsts for God an' the green 
 An' the peacefu' moon. 
 For the wheedlin' voice o' the stream 
 An' the sleepfu' moon; 
 
 But there's devils ill for to right 
 r the wars o' Life 
 An' the bravest man will fight 
 I' the thickest strife. 
 
 79 
 
So the man i' the girt black town 
 Wi' its smoke an' reek 
 Is braver than thee on the down 
 Wi' its life so sweet!" 
 
 And the strong wind stormed an' blawed 
 Far over the Ian', 
 *'I ha' teached a lesson," he roared, 
 "To a witless man!'* 
 
 80 
 
LONDON 
 
 OH I London town, you are grim and grey, 
 Like a sad old monk in his sober gown, 
 Yet you touch — in your solemn surly way 
 The hearts of your children, London townl 
 
 You take them into your gaunt old hand, 
 And your stern eyes look with a darkening frown 
 At the cleanly air they bring from the land, 
 For it stirs up memories, London town! 
 
 You fling them into your squalid deeps 
 And whiten the faces that suns made brown, 
 You listen unmoved to the heart that weeps 
 For the quaint old homestead, London town! 
 
 You crush them into your moulds like clay 
 And you plaster and thump and knead them down, 
 Till they grow too weary with toil to pray 
 For the hand of death, oh! London town! 
 
 Your cold old heart is as hard as steel 
 While your pale lips smile — like a painted clown, 
 Yet deep beneath is a love that can feel 
 For your toiling children, London town! 
 
 8i 
 
Ah! London town, in your soiled old glove 
 Like a jewel set in an iron crown, 
 You hold the heart of a girl that I love — 
 Oh! keep it unharmed, dear London town! 
 
 Written for and sent to his sister (now Mrs. 
 Arthur Thorne) when she was in London. 
 
 82 
 
THE CITY TRAMP 
 
 YOU call to the boundless wild, 
 You sing of the windy heath, 
 The ripple of shadows on sunlit hills 
 And the winding road beneath; 
 
 The lonely heart o' the moor 
 And the strong wind's boisterous ire, 
 The crimson of heath and flaming fern, 
 And gorse with its sprinkled fire. 
 
 You long for the salt wave's shock. 
 For deep skies over your head, 
 And under the beeches a carpet of gold 
 And a lonely path to tread. 
 
 But I could sing you a song, 
 
 Of the soul of a great town, 
 
 Whispers and dreams in her shadowy streets 
 
 When the red sun sinketh down. 
 
 Give me the murmur of men — 
 
 Grimed with the woof of their task. 
 
 Who have moulded the pliant heart of things 
 
 Under the town's grey mask. 
 
 Give me the glamour of lights. 
 The tangle of browns and greys, 
 
 83 
 
The thunder and dazzle of things alive 
 And the magic of misty ways. 
 
 The shout of a thousand throats, 
 The roar of a thousand feet 
 Aye! even the swirl of the yellow fog 
 And glint of the rainy street. 
 
 Give me a laughing face 
 
 Caught as it were from the brink 
 
 Of the ragged tideway of passive masks, 
 
 Smeared on a canvas of ink. 
 
 The slow black folds of the smoke 
 The secret river asleep, 
 With a mystic trouble of golden lights 
 Quivering out of the deep. 
 
 Give me the puzzle of things, 
 
 The great dim drama of Man 
 
 The deafening clank of the wheels of life 
 
 Threading through chaos a plan. 
 
 You may call to the boundless wild, 
 You may sing of the windy heath, 
 The ripple of shadow on sunlit hills 
 And the winding road beneath. 
 
 But I could match you a song, 
 Of the soul of a great grey town — 
 Whispers and dreams in her shadowy streets 
 When the red sun sinketh down. 
 
 84 
 
LIFE 
 
 WHAT is life? 
 Is it a faded rose and a kiss 
 And a starlit past? 
 
 Is it a sob and a laugh of bliss, with a grave 
 at last? 
 
 Is it good-bye and a turn of the road 
 To worlds beyond sight? 
 Is it dragging uphill a weary load 
 In a scorching light? 
 
 It is magic of morning when mist is afield, 
 And the drowsy sea croons to the beach, 
 It is bracing of muscles and breasting of waves 
 With the strong hand of God within reach. 
 
 It is splendour of noonday when hills are at rest. 
 And calm valleys sleep in the sun, 
 It is silence unbroken that sings with a lilt 
 "There are strenuous wars to be won." 
 
 It is glamour of evening when hedges grow dim 
 And the angel's hands colour the West 
 It is sadness of dreaming and glory of love 
 And a tired child's longing for rest. 
 
 85 
 
It is wonder of night-time when stars are awake, 
 And the misty world mutters in fear, 
 It is silently closing the door of the soul 
 That none other but God may be near. 
 
 It is morning^ and evening^ and noonday and night 
 With their shadowy paths to be trod. 
 It is climbing up from the valleys of man 
 To the wind-swept mountains of God. 
 
 86 
 
THE SILENT CITY 
 
 THERE is a city where the still green streets 
 Teem with no hurrying passers-by, 
 Drowsily, drowsily. 
 The pulse of its traffic beats. 
 
 Wild was the brain of the builder that planned 
 Its low dim roads, and its quiet ways, 
 
 Patiently, patiently 
 Turned he the stubborn land. 
 
 Strange are the dwellers therein — calm and wise, 
 Holding no trade in the marts of men, 
 
 Silently, silently. 
 Each in his dark house lies. 
 
 Black is the night that is close round each form. 
 Opens no casement to the sun, 
 
 Wearily, wearily, 
 Waits the great city for dawn. 
 
 87 
 
VIOLIN 
 
 You played, 
 
 And the wall paper rushed back 
 
 To become dawn. 
 
 You ceased, 
 
 And we were vulgar again. 
 
 Found among his papers from the trenches and 
 unpublished. 
 
 88 
 
VALUES 
 (To R. G. H., since killed in actiony 
 
 \\T HAT if death were the goal, after all, and the 
 ^ * grave a throne? 
 
 What if Hell were the prize? 
 If fear and filth endured for a cause that is not your 
 
 own, 
 And pain and hate — if these were God in disguise? 
 
 • ••••••• 
 
 Here there are pigeons, drowned in the green all 
 
 day. 
 And crooning drowsily, half-asleep in the heat. . . . 
 And the woods are blue with Summer, a mile away; 
 And flames of butterflies go dancing over the wheat. 
 
 There are books on the table, blessed under the blue; 
 And the bees go by with peace in their singing wings. 
 The grasshoppers fiddle a secret tune or two. 
 And are still, in the hush that a sunlit noonday 
 brings. 
 
 And there, over the earth's edge, are flies, and the 
 
 smell of the dead, 
 Where you, who love the colours of life, are walled 
 
 with the clay you hate, 
 
 89 
 
Where the whine of death goes wearily overhead, 
 And God asks nothing of man but to stiffen his heart 
 and wait. 
 
 The great men went before us with laughter on their 
 
 lips. 
 They loved earth's careless loveliness — swift 
 
 shadows on a hill, 
 And rain, and birds, and apples, and dogs and great 
 
 white ships. . . . 
 But they taught themselves to kill. 
 
 The waves of dreadful sound crashed on their heads 
 
 unbowed; 
 Like gods, the dusty shambles saw them bright. 
 Through blood and guts and lice they kept them 
 
 proud. 
 Staring across the dark with eyes that saw the light. 
 
 90 
 
THE ENGLISH REVIEW 
 
 THEY laughed. ... Oh I suddenly the mask 
 here falls, 
 And idiot pigeons croon in the warm trees. 
 There is empty madness in every bird that calls, 
 And a song of slow decay in the wings of the bees. 
 
 The books are suddenly mad and white, and 
 
 scrabbled with frantic print, 
 And a female fool stares out from the magazine 
 
 cover — 
 All teeth and imbecile smile, and sexual hint — 
 Most damnably sure that the whole world is her 
 
 lover. 
 
 There are dreadful signs in the woods and the 
 
 Summer haze 
 Of a God who is vast and vegetable and still. 
 Whose law is, "Sleep for the greater part of thy 
 
 days," 
 And "Thou shalt not clean the rust from thy scab- 
 
 barded will." 
 
 We have known a joy that the heart could scarce 
 
 endure, 
 So drenched with beauty was the earth we trod. 
 But there are hours when War stands up secure, 
 Naked and bloody, as the only God. 
 
 91 
 
They meet in the troubled heart. Beauty and anger 
 
 meet, 
 And the filth of war is food for many a flower. 
 Up through the beaten earth — stamped hard to an 
 
 army's feet — 
 The green swords of Springtime shall strike with 
 
 their ancient power. 
 
 But what, meanwhile, if pain is the only end? 
 
 What if Hell is the prize? 
 
 If alone the lover of peace who fights, shall find as 
 
 a friend 
 God, in a foul disguise? 
 
 92 
 
THE THRUSH 
 
 OF all the birds in tree and field 
 The thrush is earliest with his call 
 While yet my window is a shield 
 Of dullest silver on the wall. 
 
 Three arrows tipped with poet's gold 
 Twice hurled the misty dark along 
 Wake all the sleeping birds and hold 
 The morning with their net of song. 
 
 Last echo of the laugh of God 
 Before the world with dusk is drowned 
 Lightly above the scented sod 
 Blow down his petal-wings of sound. 
 
 O little fool, to dare to see the dawn 
 Before the tips of its ghost-wings can shine 
 And even while the mist across the lawn 
 Are red with evening, little fool divine! 
 
 Found among his papers sent home from the 
 trenches, and unpublished. 
 
 93 
 
THE SILVER FAIRY 
 
 LISTEN to me, my son, 
 Yesterday night when work was done, 
 And the earth was smelling of mould, 
 And the sun was coppery-gold, 
 And mists came over the wold — 
 The wold is a sort of a kind of a land 
 Where little low hills on tiptoe stand. 
 Or cover theirselfs with a quilt of field 
 Like you in bed, as a sort of shield 
 From the dark and the — I dunno what — 
 (Well the worst of me is that I talk such a lot!) 
 
 Well, yesterday night when work was done, 
 
 And I was smoking a pipe in the sun, 
 
 I saw you breasting the bank at a run, 
 
 I mean the bank where the turf goes down. 
 
 Goes down and up till it ends in a crown 
 
 Of yellow chrysanthemums nodding their heads 
 
 Over the last of the garden beds, 
 
 I say the last because just beyond 
 
 Is weeds and snails and the duckety pond. 
 
 (Well the worst of me is that I talk such a lot!) 
 
 Just as you came to the very same spot 
 Where the biggest chrysanthemum — tousled and 
 bold— 
 
 94 
 
Shook in their qiiiVer his arrows of gold, 
 
 I saw a fairy astride your neck 
 
 Like a man on a war-horse held in check, 
 
 His silver hands were tugging your hair 
 
 His slim little arms were all silver and bare 
 
 And his silver legs were a-kicking the air, 
 
 His wings were exactly like dragon-flies 
 
 And what do you think were his shining eyes? 
 
 Why bits of laughter cut from the skies 
 
 With the scissors used for trimming the stars! 
 
 And just as the clouds like nursery bars 
 
 (I mean the nursery window bars) 
 
 Were stretching purple and low and long 
 
 Over a sun too tired to be strong 
 
 Your silver fairy started a song, 
 
 And just at this minute he caught sight of me — 
 
 (Now I'm as grown up as grown up can be) 
 
 And fairies are things I seldom see, 
 
 Yet he made a face, yes a face at me 
 
 And floated away in misty blue 
 
 Just where the night begins to be true, 
 
 And left me alone, my son, with you. 
 
 I felt like you when you feel a clutch 
 
 And somebody shouts "you mustn't touch." 
 
 (The worst of me is that I talk so much!) 
 
 95 
 
LYING AWAKE IN THE NIGHT 
 
 YOU who lie in the night awake now, 
 It is England that you hear. 
 The cattle under your window, — strangely near, 
 Are tearing the wet grass. There will break nbw 
 From the farmyard over the wall. 
 The cock's first insolent call. 
 
 On Hindhead they hear now the pines singing. 
 And a late car go up the Portsmouth Road. 
 Deep laughter from the little owl's abode 
 Across the moor at Manaton comes ringing. 
 And over Becky Falls, the whole night long. 
 White water goes in a great shouted song. 
 
 Under the stars at Exeter the great towers glisten, 
 And the voice of ancient bells is always there. 
 In Combe Hay now, the ghost creaks up the stair; 
 And the sea at Paignton laughs to those who listen. 
 While swift past Little Eaton, — gay with light 
 The Scotch Express goes roaring up the night. 
 
 It is England that you hear in the night now. 
 
 But the child of France may not hear France when 
 
 he wakes. 
 For through the song of her nightingales there 
 
 breaks 
 
 96 
 
The stutter of death from the long unbroken fight 
 
 now; 
 And over the earth's rim like a fire there runs 
 The sullen thunder of Man with his hungry guns. 
 
 Oh! keep the quiet of England yet unbroken, 
 God of the birds that nest in Collaton wood! 
 Let men who wake in the night find all things good — 
 The dog that shouts to the stars his love unspoken; 
 The mouse in the wall ; the board that moves on the 
 
 stair. . . . 
 God whom they badged with Battles, let never a 
 
 battle be there! 
 
 97 
 
DULCE ET DECORUM 
 
 O YOUNG and brave, it is not sweet to die, 
 To fall and leave no record of the race, 
 A little dust trod by the passers-by, 
 
 Swift feet that press your lonely resting-place; 
 Your dreams unfinished, and your song unheard — 
 Who wronged your youth by such a careless word? 
 
 All life was sweet — veiled mystery in its smile; 
 
 High in your hands you held the brimming cup ; 
 Love waited at your bidding for a while, 
 
 Not yet the time to take its challenge up ; 
 Across the sunshine came no faintest breath 
 To whisper of the tragedy of death. 
 
 And then, beneath the soft and shining blue. 
 Faintly you heard the drum's insistent beat; 
 
 The echo of its urgent note you knew. 
 
 The shaken earth that told of marching feet; 
 
 With quickened breath you heard your country's 
 call, 
 
 And from your hands you let the goblet fall. 
 
 You snatched the sword, and answered as you went, 
 For fear your eager feet should be outrun. 
 
 And with the flame of your bright youth unspent 
 Went shouting up the pathway to the sun. 
 
 O valiant dead, take comfort where you lie. 
 
 So sweet to live? Magnificent to die! 
 
 98 
 
THE SENTIMENTAL SCHOOL- 
 MASTER 
 
TO AN EXCEEDINGLY SMALL NEW BOY 
 
 O LITTLE and untutored, we have won! 
 In shadow-glamoured deeps you caught our 
 words, 
 In silent spaces freckled with the sun 
 And sweet with love, and hushed with wings of 
 birds. 
 
 You raised bright eyes and, like all little things 
 That play about the feet of laughing gods. 
 
 You dressed our speech with swift imaginings 
 Of giant engines moving giant rods. 
 
 And like all little things that sleep and wake 
 
 Held close with starry silences, as with an arm. 
 You shrank from ice-brained fools who reached to 
 take 
 Your frightened mind from haunts all mother- 
 warm. 
 
 What bait of ours has won them from your side 
 To play the traitor and forget your due? 
 
 The Swimming-bath? Our Colours in their pride? 
 Our titled Parent? Or our Soccer Blue? 
 
 For lo, O little cub, you are dragged forth! 
 And all your hushed retreats are far away, 
 
 lOI 
 
And fairies wring their silver hands in wrath, 
 And bow their heads and weep for you to-day. 
 
 They know that in a month you will unlearn 
 The thousand laughing melodies of Pan, 
 
 And unto such as me for guidance turn. 
 And I — my God! — what am I but a man? 
 
 102 
 
TO THE SCHOOL RADICAL 
 
 THEY moved in that unhallowed corridor 
 (Whence to my study come far sounds of war) ; 
 And through a broken net of sound there beat 
 The song of your defeat. 
 
 Olympian scorn to which your name gave birth 
 Had touched you with its little stings of mirth, 
 And though (I learned) your heart is brave to fight, 
 You sob, sometimes, at night. 
 
 Could not the great blunt fingers of the Day 
 Push back the guards that held your tears in sway. 
 And yet Night kiss them from their stubborn line, 
 O little friend of mine? 
 
 From whose rough-welded faith have you unslipp'd 
 A badge of such small honour that it stripp'd 
 Your soul of careless friendships, and the joys 
 That are belov'd of boys? 
 
 Does he, to-night — the sire whose creed you own — 
 Think of the splendid sorrow he has sown? 
 Are any (save the fool that teaches you) 
 Praying as fathers do? 
 
 103 
 
THE MATHEMATICAL MASTER TO HIS 
 DULLEST PUPIL 
 
 I CAME to you and caught your eagle wings 
 And gloomed your soul with Algebra and things, 
 And cast a net of pale Geometry 
 Wherein your laughter struggled to be free. 
 
 They say that mental discipline is grand 
 For teaching little striplings how to stand. 
 They say I cannot fit your soul for life 
 Without continual pruning with a knife. 
 
 And they are clever men, who come from schools 
 Where they were made successful by these rules, 
 And where they gained that weight of flesh and bone, 
 Which I would give my oldest pipe to own. 
 
 And so they must be right and I be wrong, 
 Yet when I see sweet thoughts around you throng 
 Like honey-bees above the tousled gorge 
 In smoke-blue valleys under Devon tors, 
 
 And when, O little son! within your eyes 
 The light that lives on wings of dragon-flies 
 (More delicate than laughter of dead jests) 
 Is drowned beneath your pedagogue's requests, 
 
 I go and swear and smoke and drink 
 And dream of vested interests, and think 
 Of all the poets' fire we might have won 
 Had you and I been pals, O little son! 
 
 104 
 
TO HIS BLACKBOARD 
 
 OYOU whose eyes inscrutable have known 
 The tortured sons of learning in this room, 
 And noted blandly from your tripod-throne 
 Their grapplings with a hydra-headed gloom : 
 
 Give me some tithe of your tranquillity, 
 Of that calm scorn wherewith your soul is filled. 
 
 That, even as you, I may but coldly see 
 
 Bleak wisdom taught and understanding killed. 
 
 And, even as you, stare Sphinx-like into space, 
 Nor march the chalky floor all tousle-haired, 
 
 When bright boys mention with a cheerful face 
 That {a -f a) is written down a^. 
 
 Nor turn my face fierce-eyed towards the stars, 
 And bite my reeking pipe-stem till it snaps. 
 
 To think of all the hopes a pedant mars, — 
 The winged dreams that die within his traps. 
 
 105 
 
TO A BOY WHO READ POETRY FOR HIS 
 
 PLEASURE 
 
 WHAT would your courtly father say? — 
 That sun-burned man whose gods are twain, 
 Who kneels to Bridge from dark till day, 
 And worships Golf till dusk again; 
 
 Who finds the Devil kind enough, 
 And knows no Hell but Social Scorn; 
 
 Who likes a boy of pliant stuff, 
 With all his instincts gently born. 
 
 And all his soul a shallow pool 
 
 (Reflecting manufactured creeds) 
 Wherein the dreams that tempt a fool 
 
 Are caught and drowned by kindly weeds; 
 
 What would he turn and say to me, 
 
 If looking in your serious eyes — 
 He saw strange ships across a sea 
 
 Set sail for dim infinities? 
 
 1 06 
 
TO THE FOOTBALL CAPTAIN 
 
 YOUR eyes have told me that your mind is clean, 
 For through their sapphire casements I have 
 seen 
 A great god prefect (such as Heaven hath) 
 Watching that no small thought forget its bath. 
 
 And not a man on all the grimy earth 
 But envies you your god's complacent girth, 
 His Sandow biceps, and his sporting soul. 
 His swift and tricky dribbling into goal. 
 
 And yet when you have grown and come to years 
 Of ripened indiscretion, I have fears 
 Lest Mammon teach your thoughts to go untubbed, 
 And cast away the god who saw them scrubbed; 
 
 Yet leave your emptied life to dribble round 
 From goal to goal across a footer ground, 
 Whereon the ghosts of strenuous hacks go by, 
 Kicking at nothing for eternity. 
 
 107 
 
TO A BOY WHO LAUGHED AT HIM 
 
 YOU found the uplands of my thought so flat 
 That always when speech wandered from my 
 mind 
 Your friendliness stood up and took its hat, 
 And sauntered forth, and left a smile behind. 
 
 And first my self-sufficiency could float 
 Above a light contempt so lightly born. 
 
 Until one day there caught me by the throat 
 The sudden godhead of that very scorn. 
 
 For Poetry with her bare white feet, 
 
 And laughing eyes by tears alit. 
 Walks sometimes in a miry street. 
 
 But lives a million miles from it. 
 
 And while I searched her passing sign, 
 
 And spoke of her as vulgars do. 
 She mourned the days when she was mine. 
 
 And watched me through the eyes of — you. 
 
 You know her not. She will move slow 
 
 Along your sleeping staircase soon, 
 And lift a silent latch, and go 
 
 Her way beneath the watching moon. 
 
 io8 
 
And you shall wake, nor find her gone, 
 But work your work with eagerness, 
 
 And only when your toil is done 
 Find it a moment somehow less. 
 
 And now when you have marked my style 
 Within these lines of little worth, 
 
 Will dawn that faint, contemptuous smile 
 Which bumps my music back to earth 1 
 
 109 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 {Found in his pocket after death.) i 
 
 SUDDENLY one day 
 The last ill shall fall away; 
 The last little beastliness that is in our blood 
 Shall drop from us as the sheath drops from the bud, 
 And the great spirit of man shall struggle through, 
 And spread huge branches underneath the blue. 
 In any mirror, be it bright or dim, 
 Man will see God staring back at him. 
 
 no 
 
L'ENVOI 
 
 To Tony — Aged Three 
 In Memory (T.P.C.W.) 
 
 GEMMED with white daisies was the great 
 green world 
 Your restless feet have pressed this long day 
 
 through — 
 Come now and let me whisper to your dreams 
 A little song grown from my love for you. 
 
 There was a man once loved green fields like you, 
 He drew his knowledge from the wild birds' songs, 
 And he had praise for every beauteous thing, 
 And he had pity for all piteous wrongs. . . . 
 
 A lover of earth's forests — of her hills. 
 And brother to her sunlight — to her rain — 
 Man with a boy's fresh wonder. He was great 
 With greatness all too simple to explain. 
 
 He was a dreamer, and a poet, and brave 
 To face and hold what he alone found true. 
 He was a comrade of the old — a friend 
 To every little laughing child like you. 
 
 And when across the peaceful English land 
 Unhurt by war, the light is growing dim 
 
 III 
 
And you remember by your shadowed bed 
 
 All those — the brave — you must remember him; 
 
 And know it was for you who bear his name 
 And such as you that all his joy he gave, 
 His love of quiet fields, his youth, his life, 
 To win that heritage of peace you have. 
 
 Marjorie Wilson. 
 
 112 
 

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