Charlotte Mew

“ BESIDE THE BED
SOMEONE has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded
⁠The wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet breast:
So, smoothed and silenced you lie, like a child, not again to be questioned or scolded;
⁠But, for you, not one of us believes that this is rest.
Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden
⁠The blue beyond: or to screen the wavering flame subdue its breath:
Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, like dawn, would quiver and redden,
⁠Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death. ”

“ But no man can move mountains in a day.
⁠So this hard thing is yet to do.
But first I want your life:— before I die I want to see
⁠The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes,
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,
⁠Yet on brown fields there lies
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies
⁠And in grey sea?
⁠I want what world there is behind your eyes,
⁠I want your life and you will not give it me. ”

“ KEN
THE town is old and very steep,
⁠A place of bells and cloisters and grey towers,
And black clad people walking in their sleep—
⁠A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers
⁠To her new grave; and watched from end to end
⁠By the great Church above, through the still hours:⁠
⁠But in the morning and the early dark
The children wake to dart from doors and call
Down the wide, crooked street, where, at the bend,
⁠Before it climbs up to the park,
Ken's is the gabled house facing the Castle wall. ”

“ Then lie you straight on your bed for a short, short weeping
⁠And still, for a long, long rest,
There's never a one in the town so sure of sleeping
⁠As you, in the house on the down with a hole in your breast. ”

“ IT is the clay that makes the earth stick to his spade;
⁠He fills in holes like this year after year;
The others have gone; they were tired, and half afraid,
⁠But I would rather be standing here;
There is nowhere else to go. I have seen this place
⁠From the windows of the train that's going past
Against the sky. This is rain on my face—
⁠It was raining here when I saw it last.
There is something horrible about a flower;
⁠This, broken in my hand, is one of those
He threw in just now: it will not live another hour;
⁠There are thousands more: you do not miss a rose. ”

“ But you.
And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
That nobody can love their way again
While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair. ”

“ For this will stand in our Market-place—
⁠Who'll sell, who'll buy
⁠ (Will you or I
Lie each to each with the better grace) ?
While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face. ”

“ So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing
Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small,
Sapless and lined like a dead leaf,
All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief!
And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair—
Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay—?
Or could—with any one of the old crew,
But oh! these boys! the solemn way
They take you, and the things they say—
This "I have only as long as you"
When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two—
Although at heart perhaps—God! ”

“ I remember the trees, and the high, white walls, and how the sun was always on the towers;
The walls are standing to-day, and the gates: I have been through the gates, I have groped, I have crept
Back, back. There is dust in the streets, and blood; they are empty; darkness is over them ”

“ Oh God! it dies,
But after death—,
To-night the splendour and the sting
Blows back and catches at your breath,
The smell of beasts, the smell of dust, the scent of all the roses in the world, the sea, the Spring,
The beat of drums, the pad of hoofs, music, the dream, the dream, the Enchanted Thing! ”

“ The folded glory of the gorse, the sweet-briar air,
To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do
And the divine, wise trees that do not care
Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair! ”

“ It is dark on the dome-capped hill,
⁠Serenely dark, divinely still,
Yet here is the Man who bought you first
⁠Dying of his immortal smart,
Your Lover, the King with the broken heart,
⁠Who while you, feasting, drink your fill,
⁠Pass round the cup
⁠Not looking up,
Calls down to you, "I thirst."
"A king with a broken heart! Mon Dieu! ”

“ WHITE through the gate it gleamed and slept
In shuttered sunshine: the parched garden flowers
Their fallen petals from the beds unswept,
Like children unloved and ill-kept
Dreamed through the hours. ”

“ Though what it was all about us'll never know.
⁠And there baint no mem'ry in the place
⁠Of th' old man's footmark, nor his face;
⁠Arracombe Wood do think more of a crow—
'Will be violets there in the Spring: in Summer time the spider's lace;
⁠And come the Fall, the whizzle and race
Of the dry, dead leaves when the wind gies chase ”

“ Sat, and were twenty-two?
Give me the key that locks your tired eyes,
And I will lend you this one from my pack,
Brighter than coloured beads and painted books that make men wise:
Take it. No, give it back! ”

“ There is something new in the old heavenly air of Spring—
The smell of beasts, the smell of dust—The Enchanted Thing!
All my life long I shall see moonlight on the fern
And the black trunks of trees. Only the hair
Of any woman can belong to God. ”

“ Till it comes out and does not go in any more.
Along the quay you see it wind,
The slow black line. Someone pulls up the blind
Of the small window just above the narrow door—
"Tiens! que veux-tu acheter?" ”

“ That makes all other music like the music in a dream—
Dumb to the dancing and the marching feet; you know, in dreams, you see
Old pipers playing that you cannot hear,
And ghostly drums that only seem to beat. ”

“ Striking the leafless poplar boughs as he went by,
Like some poor, stray dog by the wayside lying dead,
We left behind us the old world of dread,
I and the wind as we strode whistling on under the Winter sky. ”

“ When the race is run,
And it is forced from us with our last breath
"Thy will be done"?
If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things,
As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings,
Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings!
The temperate, well-worn smile
The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own:
And afterwards the child's, for a little while,
With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes
So soon to change, and make you feel how quick
The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick—
(How does one though?) ”

“ While the best of us are twining twigs and the rest of us are whining
In the hollow by the stream.
Black and chill are Their nights on the wold;
And They live so long and They feel no pain:
I shall grow up, but never grow old,
I shall always, always be very cold,
I shall never come back again! ”

“ Just so the long days come and go,
⁠Yet this one sin I will not tell
Though Mary's heart is as frozen snow
And all nights are cold for one warmed too well.
⁠But, oh! ma Doué! the nights of Hell! ”

“ So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her, fast.
She does the work about the house
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to chat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk keep away.
"Not near, not near!" her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The women say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call. ”

“ We used to pray to Christ to keep
⁠Our small souls safe till morning light—;
I am scared, I am staying with you to-night—
⁠Put me to sleep.
I shall stay here: here you can see the sky;
The houses in the streets are much too high ”

“ Dim, but so waited for; and you know what a smile is, how it calls,
How if I smiled you always ran to me.
Now you must sleep forgetfully, as children do.
There is a Spirit sits by us in sleep
Nearer than those who walk with us in the bright day. ”

“ And Tom crossed Father and was sent away.
After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head,
⁠Poor Father, and he does not care
⁠For people here, or to go anywhere.
To get away to Aunt's for that week-end
⁠Was hard enough ”

“ Contributors: — Lascelles Abercrombie — Gordon Bottomley — Francis Brett Young — W. H. Davies — Walter De La Mare — John Drinkwater — John Freeman — Wilfrid Wilson Gibson — Robert Graves — D. H. Lawrence — Harold Monro — Robert Nichols — J. D. C. Pellow — Siegfried Sassoon — Edward Shanks — Fredegond Shove — J. C. Squire — W. J. Turner.
The object of the volumes of "Georgian Poetry" is to provide a convenient survey of the work of some poets of the newer generation. ”

“ SPRING MORNING. By Frances Cornford. (Woodcuts by G. Raverat.) Second Thousand. 1/3 net. THE OLD SHIPS. By James Elroy Flecker. Third Thousand. 1/- net.
CHILDREN OF LOVE. By Harold Monro. Third Thousand. 8d. net. ”