your faces to mine,
I laugh aloud; you bad lots; you are a secret,
That nobody else knows.

And you it was that made me break the procession
(While memory gave me still the power of summons),
And call up all I could of a half-hour's thoughts
To parade them across this proscenium of my skull
In the order they came in, more carefully recognising
The old, and remarking which have developed or changed.
And as for you, you rogues, I am almost certain
There are one or two more of you now than once there were.

*****

Good-bye! Good-bye! Dance through the dark door
In to the life that somewhere else you lead.
And one day I shall all unwittingly call
Some word you know as a signal, or you'll see
Someone else coming my way; you'll suddenly follow,
And you'll appear again, quite possibly
Bringing new friends—who are sure to be just as bad.

III

Into the pits of my heart and brain,
My eyes, ears, nose, tongue, fingers, like five gardeners
Are shovelling sights, sounds, odours, savours, contacts,
While I, their master, casually nod, and most times
Stand idly by, looking at something else,
Forgetting that the work is going on
And only fully conscious of my servants
When something they move is consonant with my mood
And draws my notice; or some other thing,
More strange than usual or stronger in its impact,
Makes them exclaim and call to bid me watch.

And then in a ground of more than our dimensions
Those quietly flowing cascades of things are hid.
They are buried in those illimitable fields,
And ever as they are swallowed by the earth
The steady hours passing in procession
Walk over them and trample them well down
Out of sight, levelling all the soil.

Then some time my returning feet uncover them
(My slaves are all agog with recognition)
Or else perhaps I come and idly dig
To see what thing I can find, and out there comes
Some old form buried twenty years ago
Now called a memory.

Or marking well the place where one was put
Find it and more, drawn thither under the ground,
Tangled with others as flower-roots with roots
Into a new festoon, or one old image,
Wearing others like gems. And that's creation.

AIRSHIP OVER SUBURB

A smooth blue sky with puffed motionless clouds.

Standing over the plain of red roofs and bushy trees
The bright coloured shell of the large enamelled sky.

Out of the distance pointing, a cut dark shape
That moves this way at leisure, then hesitates and turns:
And its darkness suddenly dies as it turns and shows
A gleaming silver, white against even the whitest cloud.

Across the blue and the low small clouds it moves
Level, with a floating cloud-like motion of its own,
Peaceful, sunny and slow, a thing of summer itself,
Above the basking earth, travelling the clouds and the sky.

THE INVOCATION OF LUCRETIUS

BOOK I

Mother of Rome, delight of gods and men,
Beloved Venus, who under the fleeting stars
Fillest the freighted sea and earth's ripe fields,
O since through thee alone all forms of life
Are born, and climb into the sun's sweet light,
Goddess, before whose lovely advancing feet
The winds and towering clouds scatter and flee,
And the labouring earth discloses odorous flowers,
And the sea falls into a shining calm,
And the assuaged heavens mellow with light.
For when the spring-like face of day awakes,
And the West Wind, unloosed, flies procreant forth,
Then first the coursing birds, smitten at heart,
Betray, Lady, thy entrance and thy power,
And then the beasts caper in happy pastures
And swim swift floods; so all created things,
Captive to thee, drawn by their own desire,
Stray through the world where'er thy presence leads.
Through all the seas and hills and swelling streams,
Wing-fluttering woods and green, luxuriant plains,
Thou harryest them with lust, that none shall fail
To carry their eternal races on.

Since then thou art sole queen of all that Is,
And without thee to help can nothing rise
To cross the glorious frontiers of the light,
And nothing grow in gentleness or grace,
Thee do I pray to aid my labouring verse,
Now that of all that Is I strive to sing,
Lady, for my dear Memmian heir, whom thou
Hast blest with every constant excellence;
For his sake, chiefly, fill my words with life.

AN EPILOGUE

I. THE FLUKE

For two years you went
Through all the worst of it,
Men fell around you, but you did not fall.
On the Somme when the air was a sea
Of contesting flashes and clouds of smoke,
Your gunners fell fast but you got never a scratch.
And once when you watched from a village tower
(At Longueval, was it?) between our guns and theirs
As men fought in the houses below,
A shell from an English battery came
And tore a hole in the tower below you,
But you were not hurt and remained observing.

And now,
A casual shell has come
And pierced your head,
And the men who were with you, uninjured,
Carried you back,
And you died on the way.

II. THE CONVERSATION

When we've greeted each other again,
And you've filled your pipe and sat down and stretched your legs,
You will look in the fire for a minute
And then you will say, with a yawn,
"Well, when do you think this damned war will be over?"
And I shall say nothing, or something as empty as nothing.
But I am forgetting.
We shall not greet each other again;
You will not ask that question again.

III. THE DEAF ADDER

Well, it's no good brooding.
The past cannot return.
They have killed him and buried him.
Many men as good as he have gone:
They were good men even if one never knew them.
It is a just and honourable war.
He went in readily at the start, though he hated it,
And one would not have had him do otherwise.
And, thank God, he did the job well
That had to be done.
He has suffered with millions of others
For the sake of the future's peace,
And ungrudgingly laid down his life
In the cleanest of England's wars.
There is no room for regret here, only for pride.

*****

Heart, you fool, lie down.
Cannot you hear
My excellent reasoning?

IV. THE LANDSCAPE

You said, that first winter,
That the landscape around Ypres
Reminded you of Chinese paintings:
The green plain, striped with trenches,
The few trees on the plain,
And the puffs of smoke sprinkled over the plain.
You said, when the war was over,
That you would record that green desolation
In flat colours and lines
As a Chinese artist would.
That is what you were going to do.
The plain is still there.

V.