Poems by Sir John Collings Squire Volume I Part 2

II

We met again the other night With people; you were quite polite, Shook my hand and spoke a while Of common things with cautious smile; Paid the usual debt men owe To fellows whom they used to know.

But, when our eyes met full, yours dropped, And sudden, resolute, you stopped, Moving with hurried syllables To make remarks to someone else.

I caught them not, to me they said: "Let the dead past bury its dead, Things were very different then, Boys are fools and men are men."

Several times the other night You did your best to be polite; When in the conversation's round You heard my tongue's familiar sound You bent in eager pose my way To hear what I had got to say; Trying, you thought with some success, To hide the chasm's nakedness.

But on your eyes hard films there lay; No mock-interest, no pretence Could veil your blank indifference; And if thoughts came recalling things Far-off, far-off, from those old springs When underneath the moon and sun Our separate pulses beat as one, Vagrant tender thoughts that asked Admittance found the portal masked; You spurned them; when I'd said my say, With laugh and nod you turned away To toss your friends some easy jest That smote my brow and stabbed my breast.

Foolish though it be and vain I am not master of my pain, And when I said good-night to you I hoped we should not meet again, And wondered how the soul I knew Could change so much; have I changed too?

III

There was a man whom I knew well Whose choice it was to live in h.e.l.l; Reason there was why that was so But what it was I do not know.

He had a room high in a tower, And sat there drinking hour by hour, Drinking, drinking all alone With candles and a wall of stone.

Now and then he sobered down, And stayed a night with me in town.

If he found me with a crowd, He shrank and did not speak aloud.

He sat in a corner silently, And others of the company Would note his curious face and eye, His twitching face and timid eye.

When they saw the eye he had They thought, perhaps, that he was mad: I knew he was clear and sane But had a horror in his brain.

He had much money and one friend And drank quite grimly to the end.

Why he chose to die in h.e.l.l I did not ask, he did not tell.

A CHANT

Gently the petals fall as the tree gently sways That has known many springs and many petals fall Year after year to strew the green deserted ways And the statue and the pond and the low, broken wall.

Faded is the memory of old things done, Peace floats on the ruins of ancient festival; They lie and forget in the warmth of the sun, And a sky silver-blue arches over all.

O softly, O tenderly, the heart now stirs With desires faint and formless; and, seeking not, I find Quiet thoughts that flash like azure kingfishers Across the luminous, tranquil mirror of the mind.

THE THREE HILLS

There were three hills that stood alone With woods about their feet.

They dreamed quiet when the sun shone And whispered when the rain beat.

They wore all three their coronals Till men with houses came And scored their heads with pits and walls And thought the hills were tame.

Red and white when day s.h.i.+nes bright They hide the green for miles, Where are the old hills gone? At night The moon looks down and smiles.

She sees the captors small and weak, She knows the prisoners strong, She hears the patient hills that speak: "Brothers, it is not long;

"Brothers, we stood when they were not Ten thousand summers past.

Brothers, when they are clean forgot We shall outlive the last;

"One shall die and one shall flee With terror in his train, And earth shall eat the stones, and we Shall be alone again."

AT NIGHT

Dark fir-tops foot the moony sky, Blue moonlight bars the drive; Here at the open window I Sit smoking and alive.

Wind in the branches swells and breaks Like ocean on a beach; Deep in the sky and my heart there wakes A thought I cannot reach.

LINES

When London was a little town Lean by the river's marge, The poet paced it with a frown, He thought it very large.

He loved bright s.h.i.+p and pointing steeple And bridge with houses loaded And priests and many-coloured people...

But ah, they were not woaded!

Not all the walls could shed the spell Of meres and marshes green, Nor any chaffering merchant tell The beauty that had been:

The crying birds at fall of night, The fisher in his coracle, And, grim on Ludgate's windy height, An oak-tree and an oracle.

Sick for the past his hair he rent And dropt a tear in season; If he had cause for his lament We have much better reason.

For now the fields and paths he knew Are coffined all with bricks, The lucid silver stream he knew Runs slimy as the Styx;

North and south and east and west, Far as the eye can travel, Earth with a sombre web is drest That nothing can unravel.

And we must wear as black a frown, Wail with as keen a woe That London was a little town Five hundred years ago.

Yet even this place of steamy stir, This pit of belch and swallow, With chrism of gold and gossamer The elements can hallow.

I have a room in Chancery Lane, High in a world of wires, Whence fall the roofs a ragged plain Wooded with many spires.

There in the dawns of summer days I stand, and there behold A city veiled in rainbow haze And spangled all with gold.

The breezes waft abroad the rays Shot by the waking sun, A myriad chimneys softly blaze, A myriad shadows run.

Round the wide rim in radiant mist The gentle suburbs quiver, And nearer lies the s.h.i.+ning twist Of Thames, a holy river.