Shaking the noonday sunshineThe guns lunge out awhile,And then are still awhile.We amble along the highway;The reeking, powdery dustAscends and cakes our facesWith a striped, sweaty crust.Under the still sky’s violetThe heat throbs on the air….The white road’s dusty radianceAssumes a dark glare.With a head hot and heavy,And eyes that cannot rest,And a black heart…
The stonecrop’s fire and beyond the precipiceHow huge, how hushed the primrose evenfall!How softly, too, the white crane voyagesYon honeyed height of warmth and silence,whenceHe can look down on islet, lake and shoreAnd crowding woods and voiceless promontoriesOr, further gazing, view the magnificenceOf cloud- like mountains and of mountainous cloudOr ghostly wrack below the horizon…
How heavy is thy wing,Desperately whirrëd that thy throat may flingSong to the tingling silences remote!Thine eye whose ruddy sparkBurned fiery of late,How dead and dark!Why so soon didst thou sing,And with such turbulence of love and hate?Learn that there is no singing yet can bringThe expected dawn more near;And thou art spent already, though…
What is it to my eye appears?What sound rings in my stricken ears?Not even the voice of any friendOr eyes beloved-world-without-end,But scenes and sounds of the country-sideIn far England across the tide:An upland field when spring’s begun,Mellow beneath the evening sun….A circle of loose and lichened wallOver which seven red pines fall….An orchard of wizen…
All day the wide earth aches, the keen wind cries,The melancholy clouds drive on above.There, separate from him by a little spanTwo eagle cousins, generous, reckless, free,Two Grenfells, lie, and my boy is made man,One with these elder knights of chivalry.Boy, who expected not this dreadful day,Yet leaped, a soldier, at the sudden call,Drank as…
That flanks the road we amble downToward far trenches through the town.The dark, snow-slushy, empty street….Tingle of frost in brow and feet….Horse-breath goes dimly up like smoke.No sound but the smacking strokeAs a sergeant flings each armOut and across to keep him warm,And the sudden splashing crackOf ice-pools broken by our track.More dark houses, yet…
The ceiling tremble in its giddy smoke,And on the wall the agile spider spread,To hear the reverberate vault of silence shakeBeneath the hollow crash of midnight’s toil,Whose profound strokes waned impotent to breakThe charnel stillness of the city’s soul.These I remember, but would more forgetWhat is most fixed, whereby I am undone,How white, how still…
Shaken across the midnight sky;Though the wind roars, and Victory,A virgin fierce, on vans of goldStoops through the cloud’s white smother rolledOver the armies’ shock and flowAcross the broad green hills below,Yet hovers and will not circle downTo cast t’ward one the leafy crown;Though men drive galleys’ golden beaksTo isles beyond the sunset peaks,And cities…
in hung glistering..And he could not stay his handFrom moving to the barbed wire’s broken strand.A rifle cracked.He fell.Night waned. He was alone. A heavy shellWhispered itself passing high, high overhead.His wound was wet to his hand: for still it bledOn the glimmering ground.Then with a slow, vain smile his wound be bound,Knowing, of course,…
Put by the wine, now for long yearsWe must be thirsty with salt tears;Put by the rose, bind thou insteadThe fiercest thorns about thy head;Put by the courteous tire, we needBut the poor pilgrim’s blackest weed;Put by — a’beit with tears — thy lute,Sing but to God or else be mute.Take leave of friends save…
