Amores


Tease
   
    
I WILL give you all my keys,   
You shall be my châtelaine,      
You shall enter as you please,      
  As you please shall go again.
      
When I hear you jingling through             
  All the chambers of my soul,      
How I sit and laugh at you   
  In your vain housekeeping rôle.
         
Jealous of the smallest cover,      
  Angry at the simpler door;             
Well, you anxious, inquisitive lover,
  Are you pleased with what’s in store?
      
You have fingered all my treasures,   
  Have you not, most curiously,   
Handled all my tools and measures      
  And masculine machinery?
      
Over every single beauty      
  You have had your little rapture;      
You have slain, as was your duty,      
  Every sin-mouse you could capture.
   
Still you are not satisfied,      
  Still you tremble faint reproach;      
Challenge me I keep aside      
  Secrets that you may not broach.
         
Maybe yes, and maybe no,           
  Maybe there are secret places,      
Altars barbarous below,      
  Elsewhere halls of high disgraces.
         
Maybe yes, and maybe no,      
  You may have it as you please,             
Since I choose to keep you so,      
  Suppliant on your curious knees

The Wild Common
   
   
THE QUICK sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping,      
Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame;      
Above them, exultant, the pee-wits are sweeping:      
They are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim.
         
Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie             
Low-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten down to the quick.      
Are they asleep?—Are they alive?—Now see, when I      
Move my arms the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick.
         
The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes      
Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes;              
There the lazy streamlet pushes      
Its curious course mildly; here it wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes.
   
Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip,      
Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow,      
Naked on the steep, soft lip              
Of the bank I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro.
         
What if the gorse flowers shrivelled and kissing were lost?      
Without the pulsing waters, where were the marigolds and the songs of the brook?      
If my veins and my breasts with love embossed      
Withered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers that the hot wind took.
              
So my soul like a passionate woman turns,      
Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love      
For myself in my own eyes’ laughter burns,      
Runs ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to my belly from the breast-lights above.
         
Over my sunlit skin the warm, clinging air,              
Rich with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad.      
And the soul of the wind and my blood compare      
Their wandering happiness, and the wind, wasted in liberty, drifts on and is sad.
         
Oh but the water loves me and folds me,      
Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me as though it were living blood,             
Blood of a heaving woman who holds me,      
Owning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely good.

Study
   
    
Somewhere the long mellow note of the blackbird      
Quickens the unclasping hands of hazel,      
Somewhere the wind-flowers fling their heads back,      
Stirred by an impetuous wind. Some ways’ll      
All be sweet with white and blue violet.             
    (Hush now, hush. Where am I?—Biuret—)
      
 
   
On the green wood’s edge a shy girl hovers      
From out of the hazel-screen on to the grass,      
Where wheeling and screaming the petulant plovers      
Wave frighted. Who comes? A labourer, alas!          
Oh the sunset swims in her eyes’ swift pool.      
    (Work, work, you fool——!)
      
 
   
Somewhere the lamp hanging low from the ceiling      
Lights the soft hair of a girl as she reads,   
And the red firelight steadily wheeling          
Weaves the hard hands of my friend in sleep.      
And the white dog snuffs the warmth, appealing      
For the man to heed lest the girl shall weep.      
    (Tears and dreams for them; for me      
    Bitter science—the exams are near.              
    I wish I bore it more patiently.      
    I wish you did not wait, my dear,      
    For me to come: since work I must:      
    Though it’s all the same when we are dead.—      
    I wish I was only a bust,        
        All head.)

Discord in Childhood
   
 
Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips,      
And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree      
Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship’s      
Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously.
         
Within the house two voices arose in anger, a slender lash              
Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound      
Of a thick lash booming and bruising, until it drowned      
The other voice in a silence of blood, ’neath the noise of the ash.

Virgin Youth
   
   
Now and again      
All my body springs alive,      
And the life that is polarised in my eyes,      
That quivers between my eyes and mouth,      
Flies like a wild thing across my body,              
Leaving my eyes half-empty, and clamorous,      
Filling my still breasts with a flush and a flame,      
Gathering the soft ripples below my breasts      
Into urgent, passionate waves,      
And my soft, slumbering belly              
Quivering awake with one impulse of desire,   
Gathers itself fiercely together;      
And my docile, fluent arm      
Knotting themselves with wild strength      
To clasp—what they have never clasped.          
Then I tremble, and go trembling      
Under the wild, strange tyranny of my body,      
Till it has spent itself,      
And the relentless nodality of my eyes reasserts itself,      
Till the bursten flood of life ebbs back to my eyes,              
Back from my beautiful, lonely body      
Tired and unsatisfied.

Monologue of a Mother
   
    
This is the last of all, this is the last!   
I must hold my hands, and turn my face to the fire,   
I must watch my dead days fusing together in dross,      
Shape after shape, and scene after scene from my past      
Fusing to one dead mass in the sinking fire              
Where the ash on the dying coals grows swiftly, like heavy moss.
         
Strange he is, my son, whom I have awaited like a loyer,      
Strange to me like a captive in a foreign country, haunting      
The confines and gazing out on the land where the wind is free;   
White and gaunt, with wistful eyes that hover              
Always on the distance, as if his soul were chaunting      
The monotonous weird of departure away from me.
         
Like a strange white bird blown out of the frozen seas,      
Like a bird from the far north blown with a broken wing      
Into our sooty garden, he drags and beats              
From place to place perpetually, seeking release      
From me, from the hand of my love which creeps up, needing      
His happiness, whilst he in displeasure retreats.
         
I must look away from him, for my faded eyes      
Like a cringing dog at his heels offend him now,              
Like a toothless hound pursuing him with my will,      
Till he chafes at my crouching persistence, and a sharp spark flies      
In my soul from under the sudden frown of his brow,      
As he blenches and turns away, and my heart stands still.
   
This is the last, it will not be any more.          
All my life I have borne the burden of myself,      
All the long years of sitting in my husband’s house,      
Never have I said to myself as he closed the door:      
“Now I am caught!—You are hopelessly lost, O Self,      
You are frightened with joy, my heart, like a frightened mouse.”
              
Three times have I offered myself, three times rejected.   
It will not be any more. No more, my son, my son!      
Never to know the glad freedom of obedience, since long ago      
The angel of childhood kissed me and went. I expected      
Another would take me,—and now, my son, O my son,              
I must sit awhile and wait, and never know      
The loss of myself, till death comes, who cannot fail.
         
Death, in whose service is nothing of gladness, takes me:      
For the lips and the eyes of God are behind a veil.      
And the thought of the lipless voice of the Father shakes me           
With fear, and fills my eyes with the tears of desire,      
And my heart rebels with anguish as night draws nigher.

In a Boat
   
    
See the stars, love,      
In the water much clearer and brighter      
Than those above us, and whiter,      
Like nenuphars.
         
Star-shadows shine, love,              
How many stars in your bowl?      
How many shadows in your soul,      
Only mine, love, mine?
         
When I move the oars, love,      
See how the stars are tossed,              
Distorted, the brightest lost.      
—So that bright one of yours, love.
         
The poor waters spill      
The stars, waters broken, forsaken.   
—The heavens are not shaken, you say, love,              
Its stars stand still.
         
There, did you see      
That spark fly up at us; even      
Stars are not safe in heaven.      
—What of yours, then, love, yours?
                 
What then, love, if soon      
Your light be tossed over a wave?      
Will you count the darkness a grave,      
And swoon, love, swoon?

 Week-night Service
   
    
The five old bells      
Are hurrying and eagerly calling,      
Imploring, protesting      
They know, but clamorously falling      
Into gabbling incoherence, never resting,              
Like spattering showers from a bursten sky-rocket dropping      
In splashes of sound, endlessly, never stopping.
         
The silver moon      
That somebody has spun so high      
To settle the question, yes or no, has caught              
In the net of the night’s balloon,      
And sits with a smooth bland smile up there in the sky      
Smiling at naught,      
Unless the winking star that keeps her company      
Makes little jests at the bells’ insanity,              
As if he knew aught!
         
The patient Night      
Sits indifferent, hugged in her rags,      
She neither knows nor cares      
Why the old church sobs and brags;              
The light distresses her eyes, and tears      
Her old blue cloak, as she crouches and covers her face,      
Smiling, perhaps, if we knew it, at the bells’ loud clattering disgrace.
         
The wise old trees      
Drop their leaves with a faint, sharp hiss of contempt,              
While a car at the end of the street goes by with a laugh;      
As by degrees      
The poor bells cease, and the Night is exempt,      
And the stars can chaff      
The ironic moon at their ease, while the dim old church              
Is peopled with shadows and sounds and ghosts that lurch      
In its cenotaph.

Irony
   
        
Always, sweetheart,      
Carry into your room the blossoming boughs of cherry,      
Almond and apple and pear diffuse with light, that very      
Soon strews itself on the floor; and keep the radiance of spring      
Fresh quivering; keep the sunny-swift March-days waiting           5   
In a little throng at your door, and admit the one who is plaiting      
Her hair for womanhood, and play awhile with her, then bid her depart.
         
    A come and go of March-day loves      
    Through the flower-vine, trailing screen;      
      A fluttering in of doves.              
    Then a launch abroad of shrinking doves      
    Over the waste where no hope is seen      
    Of open hands:      
     Dance in and out      
Small-bosomed girls of the spring of love,           15   
With a bubble of laughter, and shrilly shout      
Of mirth; then the dripping of tears on your glove.

Dreams Old and Nascent
   
 
   
Old
   
        
I have opened the window to warm my hands on the sill      
Where the sunlight soaks in the stone: the afternoon      
Is full of dreams, my love, the boys are all still      
In a wistful dream of Lorna Doone.
         
The clink of the shunting engines is sharp and fine,           5   
Like savage music striking far off, and there      
On the great, uplifted blue palace, lights stir and shine      
Where the glass is domed in the blue, soft air.
          
There lies the world, my darling, full of wonder and wistfulness and strange      
Recognition and greetings of half-acquaint things, as I greet the cloud           10   
Of blue palace aloft there, among misty indefinite dreams that range      
At the back of my life’s horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.
         
Over the nearness of Norwood Hill, through the mellow veil      
Of the afternoon glows to me the old romance of David and Dora,      
With the old, sweet, soothing tears, and laughter that shakes the sail           15   
Of the ship of the soul over seas where dreamed dreams lure the unoceaned explorer.
         
All the bygone, hushèd years      
Streaming back where the mist distils      
Into forgetfulness: soft-sailing waters where fears      
No longer shake, where the silk sail fills           20   
With an unfelt breeze that ebbs over the seas, where the storm      
Of living has passed, on and on      
Through the coloured iridescence that swims in the warm      
Wake of the tumult now spent and gone,      
Drifts my boat, wistfully lapsing after           25   
The mists of vanishing tears and the echo of laughter.