John Masefield

“ Whose days the planets number with their style,
To whom all earth is slave, all living, food!
O withering man, within whose folded shell
Lies yet the seed, the spirit's quickening corn,
That Time and Sun will change out of the cell
Into green meadows, in the world unborn!
If Beauty be a dream, do but resolve
And fire shall come, that in the stubborn clay
Works to make perfect till the rocks dissolve,
The barriers burst, and Beauty takes her way:
Beauty herself, within whose blossoming Spring
Even wretched man shall clap his hands and sing. ”

“ Look at the grass, sucked by the seed from dust,
Whose blood is the spring rain, whose food the sun,
Whose life the scythe takes ere the sorrels rust,
Whose stalk is chaff before the winter's done.
Even the grass its happy moment has
In May, when glistering buttercups make gold;
The exulting millions of the meadow-grass
Give out a green thanksgiving from the mould.
Even the blade that has not even a blossom
Creates a mind, its joy's persistent soul
Is a warm spirit on the old earth's bosom
When April's fire has dwindled to a coal ”

“ Dust-footed Time will never tell its hour,
Through dusty Time its rose will draw men on,
Through dusty Time its beauty will make plain
Man, and, Without, a spirit-scattering grain.
XIII.
Ah, but Without there is no spirit scattering;
Nothing but Life, most fertile but unwise,
Passing through change in the sun's heat and cloud's watering,
Pregnant with self, unlit by inner eyes.
There is no sower, nor seed for any tillage;
Nothing but the grey brain's pash, and the tense will,
And that poor fool of the Being's little village
Feeling for the truth in the little veins that thrill. ”

“ The house still stands, but the April of its glory
Is gone, long since, with the beauty that has gone;
She wandered away west, it is an old sad story:
It is best not talked upon.
And the man has gone, too, but the quarry that he made,
Whenever April comes as it came in old time,
Is a dear delight to the man who loves a maid,
For the primose comes from the lime....
And the blackbird builds below the catkin shaking,
And the sweet white violets are beauty in the blood,
And daffodils are there, and the blackthorn blossom breaking
Is a wild white beauty in bud. ”

“ Death's unseen seeds are scattered everywhere.
Yet in his iron cage the mind of man
Measures and braves the terrors of all these.
The blindest fury and the subtlest plan
He turns, or tames, or shows in their degrees.
Yet in himself are forces of like power,
Untamed, unreckoned; seeds that brain to brain
Pass across oceans bringing thought to flower,
New worlds, new selves, where he can live again
Eternal beauty's everlasting rose
Which casts this world as shadow as it goes. ”

“ Life is but brute at war upon its kings.
There is no beauty, nor could beauty care
For us, this dust, that men make everywhere.
LX. If all be governed by the moving stars,
If passing planets bring events to be,
Searing the face of Time with bloody scars,
Drawing men's souls even as the moon the sea,
If as they pass they make a current pass
Across man's life and heap it to a tide,
We are but pawns, ignobler than the grass
Cropped by the beast and crunched and tossed aside.
Is all this beauty that doth inhabit heaven
Train of a planet's fire? ”

“ Loosed from their seventy years' adhesion, pass
Each to some joy of changed experience,
Weight in the earth or glory in the grass.
It may be, that we cease; we cannot tell.
Even if we cease, life is a miracle. ”

“ Or Time at trial with Matter for an hour?
Or is it all a body where the cells
Are living things supporting something strange,
Whose mighty heart the singing planet swells
As it shoulders nothing in unending change?
Is this green earth of many-peopled pain
Part of a life, a cell within a brain?
VII.
It may be so; but let the unknown be.
We, on this earth, are servants of the sun:
Out of the sun comes all the quick in me,
His golden touch is life to everyone.
His power it is that makes us spin through space;
His youth is April and his manhood bread ”

“ Then all the beauty will be out of mind,
Part of man's store, that lies outside his brain,
Touch to the dead and vision to the blind,
Drink in the desert, bread, eternal grain,
Part of the untilled field that beauty sows
With flowers untold, where quickened spirit goes.
LV.
Not for the anguish suffered is the slur,
Not for the woman's taunts, the mocks of men ”

“ Then the last cart of stone went away through the wood,
To build the great house for some April of a woman,
Till her beauty stood in stone, as her man's thought made it good,
And the dumb rock was made human. ”

“ Of blood and brain; it has the power to see
Beyond the apparent thing the something else
Which it inspires dust to bring to be.
Both blood and brain are its imperfect tools,
Easily wrecked, soon worn, slow to attain;
Only by years of toil the master rules
To lovely ends those servants, blood and brain.
And Death, a touch, a germ, has still the force
To make him ev'n as the rose, the owl, the horse.
XI.
Not only blood and brain its servants are;
There is a finer power that needs no slaves,
Whose lovely service distance cannot bar,
Nor the green sea with all her hell of waves ”

“ That outlast men, that, though the cockcrow ring,
Is but one peace, of the substance of the rocks;
Is but one space in the now unquickened thing;
Is but one joy, that, though the million tire,
Is one, always the same, one life, one fire? ”

“ Or seed for quickening free from prisoning fruit?
Or an eternal jewel on your robe,
Caught to your heart, one with the April tire
That made me yours as man upon the globe,
One with the spring, a breath in all desire,
One with the primrose, present in all joy?
Or pash that rots, which pismires can destroy?
LX.
Let that which is to come be as it may,
Darkness, extinction, justice, life intense,
The flies are happy in the summer day,
Flies will be happy many summers hence. ”

“ Where the crying night owl waked the corpse,
And the moon on the stilly windows bright
Instead of a dead man's waking light.
The cock on his perch that shook his wing
When the clock struck for the chimes to ring,
A duck that muttered, a rat that ran,
And a horse that stamped, remembering man.
XXI.
Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.
Men are burning the gorse on the down's shoulder ”