Tides

Bright gems of green that, fallen there,
Seem fixed and glowing on the air.

Until a flutter of blackbird wings
Shakes and makes the boughs alive,
And the gems are now no frozen things,
But apple-green buds to thrive
On sap of my May garden, how well
The green September globes will tell.

Also my pear tree has its buds,
But they are silver yellow,
Like autumn meadows when the floods
Are silver under willow,
And here shall long and shapely pears
Be gathered while the autumn wears.

And there are sixty daffodils
Beneath my wall…
And jealousy it is that kills
This world when all
The spring’s behaviour here is spent
To make the world magnificent.

PLOUGH

The snows are come in early state,
And love shall now go desolate
If we should keep too close a gate.

Over the woods a splendour falls
Of death, and grey are the Gloucester walls,
And grey the skies for burials.

But secret in the falling snow
I see the patient ploughman go,
And watch the quiet furrows grow.

POLITICS

You say a thousand things,
Persuasively,
And with strange passion hotly I agree,
And praise your zest,
And then
A blackbird sings
On April lilac, or fieldfaring men,
Ghostlike, with loaded wain,
Come down the twilit lane
To rest,
And what is all your argument to me?

Oh yes – I know, I know,
It must be so —
You must devise
Your myriad policies,
For we are little wise,
And must be led and marshalled, lest we keep
Too fast a sleep
Far from the central world’s realities.
Yes, we must heed —
For surely you reveal
Life’s very heart; surely with flaming zeal
You search our folly and our secret need;
And surely it is wrong
To count my blackbird’s song,
My cones of lilac, and my wagon team,
More than a world of dream.
But still
A voice calls from the hill —
I must away —
I cannot hear your argument to-day.

BIRMINGHAM – 1916

Once Athens worked and went to see the play,
And Thomas Atkins kissed the girls of Rome,
In council in Victoria Square to-day
Are grey-beard Nazarenes, with shop and home
And counting-house and all the friendly cares
That Joseph knew; in Bull Ring markets meet
Gossips as once at Babylonian fairs,
And Helen walks in Corporation Street.

Now Troy is Homer; and of Nazareth
Grave histories are of one love that was strong;
Athens is beauty; Rome an immortal death;
And Babylon immortal in a song…
Perplexed as ours these cities were of old;
And shall our name greatly as these be told?

INSCRIPTION FOR A WAR MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN

They nothing feared whose names I celebrate.
Greater than death they died; and their estate
Is here on Cotswold comradely to live
Upon your lips in every draught I give.

TREASON