The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems of West & East, by Vita Sackville-West

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Title: Poems of West & East

Author: Vita Sackville-West

Release Date: January 4, 2010 [EBook #30842]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS OF WEST & EAST ***

Produced by Cindy Wolfe Boynton, www.cindywolfeboynton.com

Poems

of

West and East

By V. Sackville-West

(The Hon. Mrs. Harold Nicolson)

London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, Vigo St., W.

New York: John Lane Company, MCMXVII

Printed at The Complete Press, West Norwood

To the unkindest of critics H.G.N.

CONTENTS

FOR *** SONG: LET US GO BACK SONG: MY SPIRIT LIKE A SHEPHERD BOY CONVALESCENCE TO KNOLE DISILLUSION THE BANQUET MCMXVIII A CREED TO A POET NOMADS THE GARDEN THE DANCING ELF CONSTANTINOPLE: DHJI-HAN-GHIR LEBLEBIDJI THE MUEZZIN THE GREEK HAN YANGHIN VAR MORNING IN CONSTANTINOPLE RETOUR EN SONGE CONSTANTINOPLE, MARCH MCMXV RESOLUTION

POEMS

FOR ***

  NO eyes shall see the poems that I write
  For you; not even yours; but after long
  Forgetful years have passed on our delight
  Some hand may chance upon a dusty song

  Of those fond days when every spoken word
  Was sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken
  Yet sweeter, and the music half unheard
  Murmured through forests as a charm unbroken.

  It is the plain and ordinary page
  Of two who loved, sole-spirited and clear.
  Will you, O stranger of another age,
  Not grant a human and compassionate tear
  To us, who each the other held so dear?
  A single tear fraternal, sadly shed,
  Since that which was so living, is so dead.

SONG: LET US GO BACK

  LET us go back together to the hills.
  Weary am I of palaces and courts,
  Weary of words disloyal to my thoughts,—
  Come, my beloved, let us to the hills.

  Let us go back together to the land,
  And wander hand in hand upon the heights;
  Kings have we seen, and manifold delights,—
  Oh, my beloved, let us to the land!

  Lone and unshackled, let us to the road
  Which holds enchantment round each hidden bend,
  Our course uncompassed and our whim its end,
  Our feet once more, beloved, to the road!

SONG: MY SPIRIT LIKE A SHEPHERD BOY
"Convalescente di squisiti mali"

  MY spirit like a shepherd boy
  Goes dancing down the lane.
  When all the world is young with joy
  Must I lie here in pain?

  With shepherd's pipe my spirit fled
  And cloven foot of Pan;
  The mortal bondage he has shed
  And shackling yoke of man.

  And though he leave me cold and mute,
  A traitor to his care,
  I smile to hear his honeyed flute
  Hang on the scented air.

CONVALESCENCE

  WHEN I am in the Orient once again,
  And turn into the gay and squalid street,
  One side in the shadow, one in vivid heat,
  The thought of England, fresh beneath the rain,
  Will rise unbidden as a gently pain.
  The lonely hours of illness, as they beat
  Crawling through days with slow laborious feet,
  And I lay gazing through the leaded pane,
  Idle, and listened to the swallows' cry
  After the flitting insect swiftly caught,
  —Those all-too-leisured hours as they went by,
  Stamped as their heritage upon my thought
  The memory of a square of summer sky
  Jagged by the gables of a Gothic court.

TO KNOLE
October 1, 1913

  I
  I LEFT thee in the crowds and in the light,
  And if I laughed or sorrowed none could tell.
  They could not know our true and deep farewell
  Was spoken in the long preceding night.

  Thy mighty shadow in the garden's dip!
  To others dormant, but to me awake;
  I saw a window in the moonlight shake,
  And traced the angle of the gable's lip,

  And knew thy soul, benign and grave and mild,
  Towards me, morsel of morality,
  And grieving at the parting soon to be,
  A patriarch about to lose a child.

  For many come and soon their tale is told,
  And thou remainest, dimly feeling pain,
  Aware the time draws near to don again
  The sober mourning of the very old.

  II
  Pictures and galleries and empty rooms!
  Small wonder that my games were played alone;
  Half of the rambling house to call my own,
  And wooded gardens with mysterious glooms.

  My fingers ran among the tassels faded;
  My playmates moved in arrases brocaded;
  I slept beside the canopied and shaded
  Beds of forgotten kings.
  I wandered shoeless in the galleries;
  I contemplated long the tapestries,
  And loved the ladies for their histories
  And hands with many rings.

  Beneath an oriel window facing south
  Through which the unniggard sun poured morning
       streams,
  I daily stood and laughing drank the beams,
  And, catching fistfuls, pressed them in my mouth.

  This I remember, and the carven oak,
  The long and polished floors, the many stairs,
  Th' heraldic windows, and the velvet chairs,
  And portraits that I knew so well, they almost spoke.

  III
  So I have loved thee, as a lonely child
  Might love the kind and venerable sire
  With whom he lived, and whom at youthful fire
  Had ever sagely, tolerantly smiled;

  In whose old weathered brain a boundless store
  Lay hid of riches never to be spent;
  Who often to the coaxing child unbent
  In hours' enchantment of delightful lore.

  So in the night we parted, friend of years,
  I rose a stranger to thee on the morrow;
  Thy stateliness knows neither joy nor sorrow,—
  I will not wound such dignity by tears.

DISILLUSION

  I WROTE the burning words to you
  That meant so much to me.
  I sent them speeding straight to you,
  To you across the sea;
  I waited with sure reckoning
  For your reply to me.

  I waited, and the counted day