Poems, 1908-1919

That it was even so,
That it must be even so
With death.
I knew
That no harm could have touched me out of my fear,
Because I had no grudge against anything,
Because I had desired
In the darkness, when fear came,
Love only, and pity, and fellowship,
And it would have been a thing monstrous,
Something defying nature
And all the simple universal fitness
For any force there to have come evilly
Upon me, who had no evil in my heart,
But only trust, and tenderness
For every presence about me in the air,
For the very shadow about me,
Being a little child for no one’s envy.
And I knew that God
Must understand that we go
To death as little children,
Desiring love so simply, and love’s defence,
And that he would be a barren God, without humour,
To cheat so little, so wistful, a desire,
That he created
In us, in our childishness …
And I may never again be sure of this,
But there, for a moment,
In the candle-light,
Standing at the door,
I knew.

TO ALICE MEYNELL

I too have known my mutinies,
Played with improvident desires,
Gone indolently vain as these
Whose lips from undistinguished choirs
Mock at the music of our sires.

I too have erred in thought. In hours
When needy life forbade me bring
To song the brain’s unravished powers,
Then had it been a temperate thing
Loosely to pluck an easy string.

Yet thought has been, poor profligate,
Sin’s period. Through dear and long
Obedience I learn to hate
Unhappy lethargies that wrong
The larger loyalties of song.

And you upon your slender reed,
Most exquisitely tuned, have made
For every singing heart a creed.
And I have heard; and I have played
My lonely music unafraid,

Knowing that still a friendly few,
Turning aside from turbulence,
Cherish the difficult phrase, the due
Bridals of disembodied sense
With the new word’s magnificence.

PETITION

O Lord, I pray: that for each happiness
My housemate brings I may give back no less
Than all my fertile will;

That I may take from friends but as the stream
Creates again the hawthorn bloom adream
Above the river sill;

That I may see the spurge upon the wall
And hear the nesting birds give call to call,
Keeping my wonder new;

That I may have a body fit to mate
With the green fields, and stars, and streams in spate,
And clean as clover-dew;

That I may have the courage to confute
All fools with silence when they will dispute,
All fools who will deride;

That I may know all strict and sinewy art
As that in man which is the counterpart,
Lord, of Thy fiercest pride;

That somehow this beloved earth may wear
A later grace for all the love I bear,
For some song that I sing;
That, when I die, this word may stand for me —
He had a heart to praise, an eye to see,
And beauty was his king.

HARVESTING

Pale sheaves of oats, pocked by untimely rain,