When I heard the cheerful shout of rooksIn the bare, prophetic trees.Bare trees, prophetic of new birth,You lift your branches clean and freeTo be a beacon to the earth,A flame of wrath for all to see.And the rooks in the branches laugh and shoutTo those that can hear and understand:‘Walk through the gloomy ways of…
Yellowing afid all but dead on the patient trees.Nor is there any hope in me. I walkSlowly homeward. Night is as empty and darkBehind my eyes as it is dark withoutAnd empty round about me and over me.Spring is past and over these many days;But, looking up, suddenly I seeLeaves in the upthrown light of…
(From the French of Rimbaud).When the child’s forehead, full of torments red,Cries out for sleep and its pale host of dreams,His two big sisters come unto his bed,Having long fingers, tipped with silvery gleams.They set him at a casement, open wideOn seas of flowers that stir in the blue airs,And through his curls, all wet…
Hard and sharp on the bottles: the wineStands firmly solid in the glasses,Smooth yellow ice, through which there passesThe lamp’s bright pencil of down-struck light.The fruits metallically gleam,Globey in their heaped-up bowl,And there are faces against the nightOf the outer room- faces that seemPart of this still, still life … they’ve lost their soul.And amongst…
Of panic revellers, whose criesAffront the quiet of the skies;Whose dancing lights contract the deepInfinity of night and sleepTo a narrow turmoil of troubled fire.And I have found my heart’s desireIn beechen caverns that autumn fillsWith the blue shadowiness of distant hills;Whose luminous grey pillars bearThe stooping sky: calm is the air,Nor any sound is…
Baffles even the grasp of time.Oh that I might reflect themAs swiftly, as keenly as they shine.But I am a pool of waters, summer-still,And the stars are mirrored across me;Those stabbing points of the skyTurned to a thread of shaken silver,A long fine thread.
Jostling, to wither as the grassSo soon: and (be it heaven’s hope,Or poetry’s kaleidoscope,Or love or wine, at feast, at mass)Each owns a paradise of glassWhere never a yearning heliotropePursues the sun’s ascent or slope;For the sun dreams there, and no time is or was.Like fauns embossed in our domain,We look abroad, and our calm…
And blazing flowers: the very shadowsTranslucent are and bright.It seems a glory that nought surpasses-Passion of angels in form and hue-When, lo! from the jewelled heaven of the grassesLeaps a lightning of sudden blue.Dimming the sun-drunk petals,Bright even unto pain,The grasshopper flashes, settles,And then is quenched again.
The many times I have told it of old,And all the worked-up phrases, and the dying fallOf voice, well timed in the crisis, the noteOf mock-heroic ingeniously struck-The whole thing sticks in my throat,And my face all tingles and pricks with shameFor myself and my hearers.These are the social pleasures, my God!But I finish the…
Sit and drowse like sleeping dogsIn the equipoise of all desire,Sit and listen to the stillSmall hiss and whisper of green logsThat burn away, that burn awayWith the sound of a far-off falling streamOf threaded water blown to steam,Grey ghost in the mountain world of grey.Vapours blue as distance riseBetween the hissing logs that showA…
