Chapter III: The Little Sleeper

This little sleeper, who was overtaken
By death, as one child overtakes another,
Dreams by his side all night and will not waken
Till the dawn comes in heaven with his mother.

TO HIM WHOM THE CAP FITS.

_“What sword is left?” sighs England. Answer her_
_(For you must answer) “This--Excalibur.”_

I.

That is the sword of England. Arthur drew
The blade at that last battle when he failed,
(Shadow among the shadows, who prevailed
Victorious in disaster). Harold knew
Its point in his heart at Hastings, and it flew
Out of the scabbard when King Richard sailed
And did not reach Jerusalem. It wailed
In the false hand that on the scaffold slew
Charles, and proud Balliol saw the light on it
Shining for Ridley through the flame; was seen
When Mary, Queen of Scotland, was a queen
On earth no longer, and when William Pitt
“England! O how I leave thee,” failing cried,
The sword, the sword, was with him when he died.

II.

The line at Mons were privy to the blade,
When God and England seemed together lost,
And riding by the far Pacific coast
Admiral Cradock took its accolade.
These are its victories--to be afraid,
To hear thin bugles sounding “The Last Post,”
Until the blood creeps noiseless as a ghost
And cold, and all we cherished is betrayed.
That is the sword’s way. Those who lose shall have;
And only those who in defeat have known
The bitterness of death, and stood alone
In darkness, shall have worship in the grave.
Swordsman, go into battle, and record
How one more English knight has found his sword!

FRANCE.

To-day you’ll find by field and ditch
The small invasion of the vetch:
And where they sleep rest-harrow will
Follow upon the daffodil.

These in their soft disordered ranks
Withstand and overcome the Tanks;
And the small unconsidered grass
Cries to the gunner “On ne passe.”

The corn outlasts the bayonet,
Whose blades no blood nor rust can fret,
Or only the immortal rust
Of poppies failing in their thrust.

The line these hold no force can break,
Nor their platoons advancing shake,
Whose wide offensive wave on wave
Doth make a garden of a grave.

These with the singing lark conspire
To veil with loveliness the wire,
While he ascending cleans the stain
In heaven of the aeroplane.

These in the fields and open sky
Reverse the errors of Versailles,
Who with a natural increase
From year to year establish peace.

For all the living these will cloak
The things they spoiled, the hearts they broke;
And where these heal the earth will be
For all the dead indemnity.

ALCHEMY.

When Kew found spring, and we found Kew,
Gold was the London that we knew--
The gold of gold whose metal is
As yellow as the primroses.

London’s Lord Mayor, Dick Whittington,
In heaven heard the carillon
“Turn again;” London after all
Is paved with gold by Chiswick Mall.

But afterwards the town was sold
To a mad alchemist for gold,
Who used his art to change, instead
Of lead to gold, the gold to lead.

If where the streets to Hampstead twist
You meet a doting alchemist
Seeking lost gold, refuse him pity;
He changed us when he changed the city!

ORPHEUS.

What Orpheus whistled for Eurydice
(While all the shades were silent, achingly
Holding out hands, and hands stretched evermore
In a vain longing for the further shore).

The blue smoke floats
Lazily in the dawn above the white
Flat roof you knew, and somewhere out of sight
A child is singing the old Linus song,
Sweeter because the baby voice goes wrong
--The little goatherd calling to her goats.

There’s a small hill
On which the olive trees you used to call
Athene’s little sisters, now grown tall,
Watch all day long the coming of the child,
And you’ll remember how the brook, else wild,
About these pastures suddenly grows still.

There’s such a peace,
Save where a wandering beast shakes on its bell,
You’d almost think the trees had learned a spell
From their wise sister (or from you) to bless
A baby frightened of the loneliness,
Tending her herd and waiting by the trees.

Ah! certainly
There are two things are stronger than the fates--
A lover’s song in Hell, a child that waits.
The shadows lengthen. Ere the night descend
On earth, O sweetheart, Mother, friend
Win out of Hell! Return Eurydice!

THE WIND.

What is there left? The wind makes answer
“I saw the green leaves grow brown and fall;
I danced with the shadows, I the dancer
Among bare branches. For I,” he saith,
“Hear the thin music whistle and call,
Music, horn-music, the music of death.”

“There stands at the edge of the wood the player
Dark in the darkness, but I have seen,
Ere my feet were lifted, the branches stir.
Darker than dark, than light more fair,
Before I have come he slips between;
But I, the dancer,” wind saith, “do not care.”

“The leaves have fallen and who shall discover
What there is left in the blackened tree?
And who will know when the years are over,
Among bare branches if I,” wind saith,
“Dance where the shadows and music be,
Music, horn-music, the music of death?”

GABRIEL.

Suppose I gave you what my heart has given--
A door to dreams, a little road to heaven.
Would you pass through the door, my dreams forgetting,
And turn the corner when my sun is setting?

So I should only have (as I have only)
Your hair remembered, eyes that left me lonely,
A mouth as cold as roses, and the kiss
Of Gabriel, sealing love’s defeat with this!

OPALS AND AMBER.

Call it an age, call it a day,
What’s in the world with love away?
The sun a round and golden ghost,
The moon the shadow he has lost;
And spring herself for all her green
The bare and brown a pause between.
Call it an age, call it a day,
When love is gone, what’s there to say?

Opal or gold, amber or gray,
What’s in the world with love away?
Opal a pool of changeling fires,
Where the gold angel stirs desires
That do not heal Bethesda way
But only turn the amber gray.
Call it an age, call it a day,
When love is gone, what’s there to say?

Call it a dream, call it a play,
What’s in the world with love away?
With love away can a man clamber
To heaven by a rope of amber?
Or can an opal stretch a wire
To lead a girl to her desire?

Amber and opal--but I remember
Love that was better than opal or amber.
Call it an age, call it a day,
What’s in the world with love away?

AFTER BATTLE.

After the fighting
Comes not sudden peace, but weariness;
A gloom no lighting
Of little lamps of jest or speech unravels,
But for the brain and body endless travels,
Twisting and turning like the lovers hurled
For punishment athwart the underworld,
Twisting and turning and no respite sighting.

After the living
Comes not relief, but a grey level gloom,
When the heart beats as in a padded room
With wild shapes moving--
Silence imploring and from silence flying,
Praying to life and all athirst for dying.
Tearing lost dreams and for the torn dreams weeping,
Fearing to wake, tumultuously sleeping.

* * * * *

Death’s a poor leech with worn-out simples striving
To heal in vain the malady of living.

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN.

When the stir and the movement are over,
When you that had the lightness of a wind
Or the poise of some swift bird
Burn no longer in any man’s mind,
And your voice in no man’s heart is heard,
Who in the world will dare to be a lover?

Would any being hurt in the night be crying
“O God! her little mouth that with a kiss
Drank all a man; and--God! her weaving fingers!”
Would any of another dare say this?
Will there be other women, other singers?
I wish with you and me love might be dying.

DU BIST WIE EINE BLUME.

(Version.)

You have the way of a blossom,
Cold petal with April green,
And you melt the heart in the bosom
As your beauty enters in.

I will fold my hands together,
Asking of God for you
Always in April weather
Cold petal and colder dew.

CAMBRIDGE.

All that I know of Cambridge--
The colleges and that indulgent air
Of a great gentleman who is content
That lesser men should make experiment
With life, for which he does not vastly care--
Is that you tell me you were happy there.

All that I’ll say of Cambridge--
Though in her courts Apollo lose the art
Of immortality to find it where
Rupert was used to walk at Grantchester--
Is that for me Cambridge is but a part
Of greater beauties than inform your heart.

A ROOM IN BOHEMIA.

The sun is shining in the August weather
In the little room and, I suppose,
Gilding the painted parrot on the wall,
The truckle-bed, the table and the rose
Of the poor carpet that we bought together.
And from the street the muted voices call
As though we saw, as though we heard it all.

VICTORY.

Let it be written down, while still the wound
Festers and there is horror in the world
At what was done and suffered, while unfurled
The wings of death are dark upon the ground.
Let it be written “Death we have not found
The worst, though death is evil, nor the curled
Fangs of disease, nor yet to ruin hurled
The tracery of old cities, when no sound

Is in their broken streets. But there’s an ape
Out of the slime into the spirit creeping,
That twists mankind back, back into the shape
That mumbles carrion. Here’s the cause for weeping.
Prognathous chin, slant forehead, eyes that rust
As their flame dies and smoulders into lust.”

CLEOPATRA.

Why should I care for love? The urgent rose--
What does she promise the heart and what fulfill?
“Delight, delight” she whispers, and she goes ...
But love the rose outbidding is falser still.

Why should I care for love? But hush, oh hush!
What bird is singing in the dawn “Forget
The spring,” and, you,--have you forgotten, thrush?...
But love the thrush outsinging is falser yet.

Why should I care for love? Love does not care
Whether you care or do not care, says she!
But ask your lips how the rose smells in my hair,
If the thrush beats at my heart--here--Anthony!

MEDUSA.

In your black hair are there not nightingales
Singing in the dark, and when you let it down
Is there no stir in the air of tiniest sails
That ever on lost seas of song were blown?

In your black hair the heart of Hyacinth
Laments the daylight he shall see no more,
And flowers are red as in the labyrinth
The red eyes of the crazy Minotaur.

In your black hair, Medusa, there are snakes
That twine themselves about Laocoon,
How soft, how warm! and how the poor heart breaks
Before they strike and turn it into stone.

THE JUNGLE.

Truth is the fourth dimension. By her grace
Motion, the idiot of time and space,
Grows reasonable, so that the spirit sees
Behind the aimless drag of categories
The moving centuries, whose gestures mirror
And dissipate the cloudy shapes of error.
O there’s the long way back, the dawns that scatter
Like startled birds about the spirit, and chatter
Of animal voices seeking lucid speech
In colonies of darkness. Truth can stretch,
Though motionless, and set a hatchet blazing
A path through the jungle where an ape is gazing
At the edge of a little light, with dripping muzzle,
Black writhing palms, and eyes a drowsy puzzle
Of fears and beastlike hopes. Then the light reaches
His pelt and holds him fast. In vain he snatches
At the sheltering trees, in vain the leafy dance
Down the long avenues of ignorance.
Knowledge and the pain of knowledge fly beside him,
And, where the leaves are darkest, clutch and ride him
Until he sloughs the shape of beast and can
Stand in the dawn upon his feet a man.

But the jungle is not cleared, and still the shapes
Of time and space and error move like apes.

THE PENCIL.

With this golden pencil--write
“Written words must serve for sight.
For the broken lights that stirred
Wedded eyes the complete word.

Written words the trembling nerve
Of the lover’s ear must serve.
Laughter’s done and tears are over--
Written words, instead, my lover.

Words that have no scent must tell
How the secret jonquils smell
In your hair, and words protest
There are jonquils at your breast.

Written words the gift must waste,
When the very air hath taste
Of your lip, the sweets that part
Love’s soft mouth and reach the heart.

Separable these await
For the fifth to consummate,
That are nothing, each alone,
But all heaven joined in one.

This, being lost, had hurt too much,
Here are words instead of touch.”

Therefore write and break the lead
“Love that was alive is dead.”

COLUMBINE.

If any ask, O tell them that the moon
Was lit in heaven when Queen Ashtaroth
Beat at her lamp and fell upon the swoon
Of love that soars in fire to fall a moth.

If any ask, O tell them that for this
Priam’s great city of Troy was sacrificed,
For love that is as bitter as the kiss
Of Judas the Iscariot, slaying Christ.

If any ask, O tell them it is well,
Though love comes like the swallow and flies as soon:
Who has not found his heaven in the Hell
Of love unsatisfied beneath the moon?

THE CROWDER’S TUNE.

The crowder’s tune
Down a street in Babylon--
His fiddle to the moon
With notes like stars that one by one
Glittered upon the empty street,
Glittered and laughed and went
(But there was a lisp of ghostly feet)
To build a firmament.

“Who walks by night in Babylon?
‘I,’ said a lady, ‘because
Of the wonderful thing I was,
And the beautiful things all done,
I walk in Babylon.’

Who seeks for a lady by night?
‘I,’ said a king, ‘My throne
Is empty in Babylon.
She fled from the light to the light,
I seek for a lady by night.’

Who calls by night in Babylon?
‘They,’ answered love, ‘Yes over and over
She calls to her God, but he to his lover,
And each of them walks by night alone,
And they will not meet in Babylon.’”

The crowder played
His little tune, almost
As though he were afraid
Of some forgotten ghost
Awakening,
And crying on the string
Of what was lost
And would not come
Again.
He feared in vain.
For the ghost, the ghost is dumb
Of love that is past over,
And the merciless laughter of the moon
Pursues the ghostly lover,
Till in the empty street
There’s an end of the lisp of feet,
And the crowder breaks his fiddle and the tune,
And all the stars are gone
In Babylon.

ENVOI.

Past Buckhurst Hill the motor-bus
Takes and shakes the three of us.
When first we went, there were but two
In Epping Forest, I and you.

That summer as I understand
A forester from fairyland
Set a notice up, “No road,”
By the ways our feet had trod.

No one came and no one knew,
When the spring returned and blue
Flowers burned, how deep behind
Burned the blossoms of the mind.

No one guessed and no one heard
How beyond the singing bird,
Some one sang in solitude
In the wood within the wood.

No one watched the years go by
(Not even you, not even I),
In the wood alone apart
Green and waiting in the heart.

Till last week the forester
Heard a little footstep stir,
Took his notice down and smiled
At the coming of a child.

Conquering the solitude
A child is laughing in the wood.
Past Buckhurst Hill the motor-bus
Takes us back the three of us.

_Printed at The Vincent Works, Oxford._