New Poems

Excerpt

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APPREHENSION

AND all hours long, the town  Roars like a beast in a caveThat is wounded thereAnd like to drown;  While days rush, wave after waveOn its lair.

An invisible woe unseals  The flood, so it passes beyondAll bounds: the great old cityRecumbent roars as it feels  The foamy paw of the pondReach from immensity.

But all that it can do  Now, as the tide rises,Is to listen and hear the grimWaves crash like thunder through  The splintered streets, hear noisesRoll hollow in the interim.

COMING AWAKE

WHEN I woke, the lake-lights were quivering on the     wall,The sunshine swam in a shoal across and across,And a hairy, big bee hung over the primulasIn the window, his body black fur, and the sound     of him cross.

There was something I ought to remember: and yet I did not remember. Why should I? The run- ning lights And the airy primulas, oblivious Of the impending bee—they were fair enough sights.

FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW

THE glimmer of the limes, sun-heavy, sleeping,   Goes trembling past me up the College wall.Below, the lawn, in soft blue shade is keeping,   The daisy-froth quiescent, softly in thrall.

Beyond the leaves that overhang the street,  Along the flagged, clean pavement summer-white,Passes the world with shadows at their feet   Going left and right.

Remote, although I hear the beggar's cough,   See the woman's twinkling fingers tend him a      coin,I sit absolved, assured I am better off   Beyond a world I never want to join.

FLAPPER

LOVE has crept out of her sealéd heart  As a field-bee, black and amber,  Breaks from the winter-cell, to clamberUp the warm grass where the sunbeams start.

Mischief has come in her dawning eyes,  And a glint of coloured iris brings  Such as lies along the folded wingsOf the bee before he flies.

Who, with a ruffling, careful breath,  Has opened the wings of the wild young sprite?  Has fluttered her spirit to stumbling flightIn her eyes, as a young bee stumbleth?

Love makes the burden of her voice.  The hum of his heavy, staggering wings  Sets quivering with wisdom the common      thingsThat she says, and her words rejoice.

BIRDCAGE WALK

WHEN the wind blows her veil  And uncovers her laughterI cease, I turn pale.When the wind blows her veilFrom the woes I bewail  Of love and hereafter:When the wind blows her veilI cease, I turn pale.

LETTER FROM TOWN: THE ALMOND TREE

YOU promised to send me some violets. Did you     forget?  White ones and blue ones from under the orchard     hedge?  Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a     pledgeOf our early love that hardly has opened yet.

Here there's an almond tree—you have never seen  Such a one in the north—it flowers on the street,     and I stand  Every day by the fence to look up for the flowers     that expandAt rest in the blue, and wonder at what they mean.

Under the almond tree, the happy lands  Provence, Japan, and Italy repose,  And passing feet are chatter and clapping of     thoseWho play around us, country girls clapping their     hands....