Modern British Poetry Part 22

Time, you old gipsy, Why hasten away?

Last week in Babylon, Last night in Rome, Morning, and in the crush Under Paul's dome; Under Paul's dial You tighten your rein-- Only a moment, And off once again; Off to some city Now blind in the womb, Off to another Ere that's in the tomb.

Time, you old gipsy man, Will you not stay, Put up your caravan Just for one day?

THE BIRDCATCHER

When flighting time is on, I go With clap-net and decoy, A-fowling after goldfinches And other birds of joy;

I lurk among the thickets of The Heart where they are bred, And catch the twittering beauties as They fly into my Head.

THE MYSTERY

He came and took me by the hand Up to a red rose tree, He kept His meaning to Himself But gave a rose to me.

I did not pray Him to lay bare The mystery to me, Enough the rose was Heaven to smell, And His own face to see.

_Harold Monro_

The publisher of the various anthologies of Georgian Poetry, Harold Monro, was born in Brussels in 1879. He describes himself as "author, publisher, editor and book-seller." Monro founded The Poetry Bookshop in London in 1912, a unique establishment having as its object a practical relation between poetry and the public, and keeping in stock nothing but poetry, the drama, and books connected with these subjects. His quarterly _Poetry and Drama_ (discontinued during the war and revived in 1919 as _The Monthly Chapbook_), was in a sense the organ of the younger men; and his shop, in which he has lived for the last seven years except while he was in the army, became a genuine literary center.

Of Monro's books, the two most important are _Strange Meetings_ (1917) and _Children of Love_ (1919). "The Nightingale Near the House," one of the loveliest of his poems, is also one of his latest and has not yet appeared in any of his volumes.

THE NIGHTINGALE NEAR THE HOUSE

Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn: It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond Stares. And you sing, you sing.

That star-enchanted song falls through the air From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground; And all the night you sing.

My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee As all night long I listen, and my brain Receives your song; then loses it again In moonlight on the lawn.

Now is your voice a marble high and white, Then like a mist on fields of paradise, Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, Then breaks, and it is dawn.

EVERY THING

Since man has been articulate, Mechanical, improvidently wise, (Servant of Fate), He has not understood the little cries And foreign conversations of the small Delightful creatures that have followed him Not far behind; Has failed to hear the sympathetic call Of Crockery and Cutlery, those kind Reposeful Teraphim Of his domestic happiness; the Stool He sat on, or the Door he entered through: He has not thanked them, overbearing fool!

What is he coming to?

But you should listen to the talk of these.

Honest they are, and patient they have kept; Served him without his Thank you or his Please ...

I often heard The gentle Bed, a sigh between each word, Murmuring, before I slept.

The Candle, as I blew it, cried aloud, Then bowed, And in a smoky argument Into the darkness went.

The Kettle puffed a tentacle of breath:-- "Pooh! I have boiled his water, I don't know Why; and he always says I boil too slow.

He never calls me 'Sukie, dear,' and oh, I wonder why I squander my desire Sitting submissive on his kitchen fire."

Now the old Copper Basin suddenly Rattled and tumbled from the shelf, b.u.mping and crying: "I can fall by myself; Without a woman's hand To patronize and coax and flatter me, I understand The lean and poise of gravitable land."

It gave a raucous and tumultuous shout, Twisted itself convulsively about, Rested upon the floor, and, while I stare, It stares and grins at me.

The old impetuous Gas above my head Begins irascibly to flare and fret, Wheezing into its epileptic jet, Reminding me I ought to go to bed.

The Rafters creak; an Empty-Cupboard door Swings open; now a wild Plank of the floor Breaks from its joist, and leaps behind my foot.

Down from the chimney, half a pound of Soot Tumbles and lies, and shakes itself again.

The Putty cracks against the window-pane.

A piece of Paper in the basket shoves Another piece, and toward the bottom moves.

My independent Pencil, while I write, Breaks at the point: the ruminating Clock Stirs all its body and begins to rock, Warning the waiting presence of the Night, Strikes the dead hour, and tumbles to the plain Ticking of ordinary work again.

You do well to remind me, and I praise Your strangely individual foreign ways.

You call me from myself to recognize Companions.h.i.+p in your unselfish eyes.

I want your dear acquaintances, although I pa.s.s you arrogantly over, throw Your lovely sounds, and squander them along My busy days. I'll do you no more wrong.

Purr for me, Sukie, like a faithful cat.

You, my well trampled Boots, and you, my Hat, Remain my friends: I feel, though I don't speak, Your touch grow kindlier from week to week.

It well becomes our mutual happiness To go toward the same end more or less.

There is not much dissimilarity, Not much to choose, I know it well, in fine, Between the purposes of you and me, And your eventual Rubbish Heap, and mine.

STRANGE MEETINGS

If suddenly a clod of earth should rise, And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love, How one would tremble, and in what surprise Gasp: "Can you move?"

I see men walking, and I always feel: "Earth! How have you done this? What can you be?"

I can't learn how to know men, or conceal How strange they are to me.

_T. M. Kettle_

Thomas M. Kettle was born at Artane County, Dublin, in 1880 and was educated at University College, where he won the Gold Medal for Oratory. His extraordinary faculty for grasping an intricate problem and crystallizing it in an epigram, or scoring his adversaries with one bright flash, was apparent even then. He was admitted to the bar in 1905 but soon abandoned the law to devote himself to journalism, which, because of his remarkable style, never remained journalism in his hands. In 1906 he entered politics; in 1910 he was re-elected for East Tyrone. Even his bitterest opponents conceded that Tom Kettle (as he was called by friend and enemy) was the most honorable of fighters; they acknowledged his honesty, courage and devotion to the cause of a United Ireland--and respected his penetrating wit. He once spoke of a Mr. Healy as "a brilliant calamity" and satirized a long-winded speaker by saying, "Mr. Long knows a sentence should have a beginning, but he quite forgets it should also have an end."

"An Irish torch-bearer" (so E. B. Osborn calls him), Kettle fell in action at Ginchy, leading his Fusiliers in September, 1916. The uplifted poem to his daughter was written shortly before his death.

TO MY DAUGHTER BETTY, THE GIFT OF G.o.d

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown To beauty proud as was your mother's prime, In that desired, delayed, incredible time, You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own, And the dear heart that was your baby throne, To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme And reason: some will call the thing sublime, And some decry it in a knowing tone.

So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor, Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,-- But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed, And for the secret Scripture of the poor.