THE OLD BED

Streaming beneath the eaves, the sunset light

Turns the white walls and ceiling to pure gold,

And gold, the quilt and pillows on the old

Fourposter bed--all day a cold drift-white--

As if, in a gold casket glistering bright,

The gleam of winter sunshine sought to hold

The sleeping child safe from the dark and cold

And creeping shadows of the coming night.

 

Slowly it fades: and stealing through the gloom

Home-coming shadows throng the quiet room,

Grey ghosts that move unrustling, without breath,

To their familiar rest, and closer creep

About the little dreamless child asleep

Upon the bed of bridal, birth and death.

TREES

(To LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE)

The flames half lit the cavernous mystery

Of the over-arching elm that loomed profound

And mountainous above us, from the ground

Soaring to midnight stars majestically,

As, under the shelter of that ageless tree

In a rapt dreaming circle we lay around

The crackling faggots, listening to the sound

Of old words moving in new harmony.

 

And as you read, before our wondering eyes

Arose another tree of mighty girth--

Crested with stars though rooted in the earth,

Its heavy-foliaged branches, lit with gleams

Of ruddy firelight and the light of dreams--

Soaring immortal to eternal skies.

OBLIVION

Near the great pyramid, unshadowed, white,

With apex piercing the white noon-day blaze,

Swathed in white robes beneath the blinding rays

Lie sleeping Bedouins drenched in white-hot light.

About them, searing to the tingling sight

Swims the white dazzle of the desert ways

Where the sense shudders, witless and adaze,

In a white void with neither depth nor height.

 

Within the black core of the pyramid

Beneath the weight of sunless centuries

Lapt in dead night King Cheops lies asleep;

Yet in the darkness of his chamber hid

He knows no black oblivion more deep

Than that blind white oblivion of noon skies.

RETREAT

Broken, bewildered by the long retreat

Across the stifling leagues of southern plain,

Across the scorching leagues of trampled grain,

Half-stunned, half-blinded, by the trudge of feet

And dusty smother of the August heat,

He dreamt of flowers in an English lane,

Of hedgerow flowers glistening after rain--

All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet.

 

All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet--

The innocent names kept up a cool refrain--

All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet,

Chiming and tinkling in his aching brain,

Until he babbled like a child again--

"All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet."

COLOUR

A blue-black Nubian plucking oranges

At Jaffa by a sea of malachite

In red tarboosh, green sash, and flowing white

Burnous--among the shadowy memories

That haunt me yet by these bleak northern seas

He lives for ever in my eyes' delight,

Bizarre, superb in young immortal might--

A god of old barbaric mysteries.

 

Maybe he lived a life of lies and lust:

Maybe his bones are now but scattered dust

Yet, for a moment he was life supreme

Exultant and unchallenged: and my rhyme

Would set him safely out of reach of time

In that old heaven where things are what they seem.

NIGHT

Vesuvius, purple under purple skies

Beyond the purple, still, unrippling sea;

Sheer amber lightning, streaming ceaselessly

From heaven to earth, dazzling bewildered eyes

With all the terror of beauty; thus day dies

That dawned in blue, unclouded innocency;

And thus we look our last on Italy

That soon, obscured by night, behind us lies.

 

And night descends on us, tempestuous night,