Masquerading
	At dawn she unmasked –
	And – oh, heaven! ’twas her sister!
	All her love I had asked
	Ere at dawn she unmasked;
	In her smile I had basked,
	I had coyed her, had kissed her –
	At dawn she unmasked –
	And – oh, heaven! ’twas her sister!

	A Mésalliance
	Is she mine, – and for life, –
	And drinks tea from her saucer!
	She eats with her knife –
	Is she mine – and for life?
	When I asked her to wife
	All her answer was ‘Lor’, sir!’
	Is she mine? and for life?
	And drinks tea from her saucer!

MARY E. COLERIDGE An Insincere Wish Addressed to a Beggar 1896

	We are not near enough to love,
	I can but pity all your woe;
	For wealth has lifted me above,
	And falsehood set you down below.

	If you were true, we still might be
	Brothers in something more than name;
	And were I poor, your love to me
	Would make our differing bonds the same.

	But golden gates between us stretch,
	Truth opens her forbidding eyes;
	You can’t forget that I am rich,
	Nor I that you are telling lies.

	Love never comes but at love’s call,
	And pity asks for him in vain;
	Because I cannot give you all,
	You give me nothing back again.

	And you are right with all your wrong,
	For less than all is nothing too;
	May Heaven beggar me ere long,
	And Truth reveal herself to you!

(1908)

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI Promises Like Pie-crust

	Promise me no promises,
	So will I not promise you;
	Keep we both our liberties,
	Never false and never true:
	Let us hold the die uncast,
	Free to come as free to go;
	For I cannot know your past,
	And of mine what can you know?

	You, so warm, may once have been
	Warmer towards another one;
	I, so cold, may once have seen
	Sunlight, once have felt the sun:
	Who shall show us if it was
	Thus indeed in time of old?
	Fades the image from the glass
	And the fortune is not told.

	If you promised, you might grieve
	For lost liberty again;
	If I promised, I believe
	I should fret to break the chain.
	Let us be the friends we were,
	Nothing more but nothing less:
	Many thrive on frugal fare
	Who would perish of excess.

ERNEST DOWSON Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

	They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
	Love and desire and hate:
	I think they have no portion in us after
	We pass the gate.

	They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
	Out of a misty dream
	Our path emerges for a while, then closes
	Within a dream.

A. E. HOUSMAN from A Shropshire Lad

	XII
	When I watch the living meet,
	And the moving pageant file
	Warm and breathing through the street
	Where I lodge a little while,

	If the heats of hate and lust
	In the house of flesh are strong,
	Let me mind the house of dust
	Where my sojourn shall be long.

	In the nation that is not
	Nothing stands that stood before;
	There revenges are forgot,
	And the hater hates no more;

	Lovers lying two and two
	Ask not whom they sleep beside,
	And the bridegroom all night through
	Never turns him to the bride.

	XL
	Into my heart an air that kills
	From yon far country blows:
	What are those blue remembered hills,
	What spires, what farms are those?’

	That is the land of lost content,
	I see it shining plain,
	The happy highways where I went
	And cannot come again.

	LII
	Far in a western brookland
	That bred me long ago
	The poplars stand and tremble
	By pools I used to know.

	There, in the windless night-time,
	The wanderer, marvelling why,
	Halts on the bridge to hearken
	How soft the poplars sigh.

	He hears: no more remembered
	In fields where I was known,
	Here I lie down in London
	And turn to rest alone.

	There, by the starlit fences,
	The wanderer halts and hears
	My soul that lingers sighing
	About the glimmering weirs.

JOHN DAVIDSON A Northern Suburb

	Nature selects the longest way,
	And winds about in tortuous grooves;
	A thousand years the oaks decay;
	The wrinkled glacier hardly moves.

	But here the whetted fangs of change
	Daily devour the old demesne –
	The busy farm, the quiet grange,
	The wayside inn, the village green.

	In gaudy yellow brick and red,
	With rooting pipes, like creepers rank,
	The shoddy terraces o’erspread
	Meadow, and garth, and daisied bank.

	With shelves for rooms the houses crowd,
	Like draughty cupboards in a row –
	Ice-chests when wintry winds are loud,
	Ovens when summer breezes blow.

	Roused by the fee’d policeman’s knock,
	And sad that day should come again,
	Under the stars the workmen flock
	In haste to reach the workmen’s train.

	For here dwell those who must fulfil
	Dull tasks in uncongenial spheres,
	Who toil through dread of coming ill,
	And not with hope of happier years –

	The lowly folk who scarcely dare
	Conceive themselves perhaps misplaced,
	Whose prize for unremitting care
	Is only not to be disgraced.

1897 ARTHUR SYMONS White Heliotrope

	The feverish room and that white bed,
	The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
	The novel flung half-open, where
	Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints, are spread;

	The mirror that has sucked your face
	Into its secret deep of deeps;
	And there mysteriously keeps
	Forgotten memories of grace;

	And you, half dressed and half awake,
	Your slant eyes strangely watching me,
	And I, who watch you drowsily,
	With eyes that, having slept not, ache;

	This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
	Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
	Ever again my handkerchief
	Is scented with White Heliotrope.

RUDYARD KIPLING Recessional

	1897
	God of our fathers, known of old,
	Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
	Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
	Dominion over palm and pine –
	Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
	Lest we forget – lest we forget!

	The tumult and the shouting dies;
	The Captains and the Kings depart:
	Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
	An humble and a contrite heart.
	Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
	Lest we forget – lest we forget!

	Far-called, our navies melt away;
	On dune and headland sinks the fire:
	Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
	Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
	Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
	Lest we forget – lest we forget!

	If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
	Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
	Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
	Or lesser breeds without the Law –
	Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
	Lest we forget – lest we forget!

	For heathen heart that puts her trust
	In reeking tube and iron shard,
	All valiant dust that builds on dust,
	And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
	For frantic boast and foolish word –
	Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

OSCAR WILDE from The Ballad of Reading Gaol 1898

In Memoriam C. T. W. sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards Obiit H. M. Prison, Reading, Berkshire July 7, 1896

	I
	He did not wear his scarlet coat,
	For blood and wine are red,
	And blood and wine were on his hands
	When they found him with the dead,
	The poor dead woman whom he loved,
	And murdered in her bed.

	He walked amongst the Trial Men
	In a suit of shabby gray;
	A cricket cap was on his head,
	And his step seemed light and gay;
	But I never saw a man who looked
	So wistfully at the day.

	I never saw a man who looked
	With such a wistful eye
	Upon that little tent of blue
	Which prisoners call the sky,
	And at every drifting cloud that went
	With sails of silver by.

	I walked, with other souls in pain,
	Within another ring,
	And was wondering if the man had done
	A great or little thing,
	When a voice behind me whispered low,
	‘That fellow’s got to swing.’

	Dear Christ! the very prison walls
	Suddenly seemed to reel,
	And the sky above my head became
	Like a casque of scorching steel;
	And, though I was a soul in pain,
	My pain I could not feel.

	I only knew what hunted thought
	Quickened his step, and why
	He looked upon the garish day
	With such a wistful eye;
	The man had killed the thing he loved,
	And so he had to die.

*

	Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
	By each let this be heard,
	Some do it with a bitter look,
	Some with a flattering word,
	The coward does it with a kiss,
	The brave man with a sword!

	Some kill their love when they are young,
	And some when they are old;
	Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
	Some with the hands of Gold:
	The kindest use a knife, because
	The dead so soon grow cold.

	Some love too little, some too long,
	Some sell, and others buy;
	Some do the deed with many tears,
	And some without a sigh:
	For each man kills the thing he loves.
	Yet each man does not die.

	He does not die a death of shame
	On a day of dark disgrace,
	Nor have a noose about his neck,
	Nor a cloth upon his face,
	Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
	Into an empty space.

*

	He does not sit with silent men
	Who watch him night and day;
	Who watch him when he tries to weep,
	And when he tries to pray;
	Who watch him lest himself should rob
	The prison of its prey.

	He does not wake at dawn to see
	Dread figures throng his room,
	The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
	The Sheriff stern with gloom,
	And the Governor all in shiny black,
	With the yellow face of Doom.

	He does not rise in piteous haste
	To put on convict-clothes,
	While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes
	Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
	Fingering a watch whose little ticks
	Are like horrible hammer-blows.

	He does not know that sickening thirst
	That sands one’s throat, before
	The hangman with his gardener’s gloves
	Slips through the padded door,
	And binds one with three leathern thongs,
	That the throat may thirst no more.

	He does not bend his head to hear
	The Burial Office read,
	Nor, while the terror of his soul
	Tells him he is not dead,
	Cross his own coffin, as he moves
	Into the hideous shed.

	He does not stare upon the air
	Through a little roof of glass:
	He does not pray with lips of clay
	For his agony to pass;
	Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek
	The kiss of Caiaphas.

W. E. HENLEY To W. R.

	Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
	Death goes dogging everywhere:
	She’s the tenant of the room,
	He’s the ruffian on the stair.

	You shall see her as a friend,
	You shall bilk him once and twice;
	But he’ll trap you in the end,
	And he’ll stick you for her price.

	With his kneebones at your chest,
	And his knuckles in your throat,
	You would reason – plead – protest!
	Clutching at her petticoat;

	But she’s heard it all before,
	Well she knows you’ve had your fun,
	Gingerly she gains the door,
	And your little job is done.

(written 1877)

THOMAS HARDY Neutral Tones

	We stood by a pond that winter day,
	And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
	And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
	– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

	Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
	Over tedious riddles of years ago;
	And some words played between us to and fro
	On which lost the more by our love.

	The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
	Alive enough to have strength to die;
	And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
	Like an ominous bird a-wing….

	Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
	And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
	Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
	And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

(written 1867)

THOMAS HARDY Thoughts of Phena

	At News of Her Death
	Not a line of her writing have I,
	Not a thread of her hair,
	No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby
	I may picture her there;
	And in vain do I urge my unsight
	To conceive my lost prize
	At her close, whom I knew when her dreams were upbrimming with light,
	And with laughter her eyes.

	What scenes spread around her last days,
	Sad, shining, or dim?
	Did her gifts and compassions enray and enarch her sweet ways
	With an aureate nimb?
	Or did life-light decline from her years,
	And mischances control
	Her full day-star; unease, or regret, or forebodings, or fears
	Disennoble her soul?

	Thus I do but the phantom retain
	Of the maiden of yore
	As my relic; yet haply the best of her – fined in my brain
	It may be the more
	That no line of her writing have I,
	Nor a thread of her hair,
	No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby
	I may picture her there.

1900 THOMAS HARDY The Darkling Thrush

	I leant upon a coppice gate
	When Frost was spectre-gray,
	And Winter’s dregs made desolate
	The weakening eye of day.
	The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
	Like strings of broken lyres,
	And all mankind that haunted nigh
	Had sought their household fires.

	The land’s sharp features seemed to be
	The Century’s corpse outleant,
	His crypt the cloudy canopy,
	The wind his death-lament.
	The ancient pulse of germ and birth
	Was shrunken hard and dry,
	And every spirit upon earth
	Seemed fervourless as I.

	At once a voice arose among
	The bleak twigs overhead
	In a full-hearted evensong
	Of joy illimited;
	An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
	In blast-beruffled plume,
	Had chosen thus to fling his soul
	Upon the growing gloom.

	So little cause for carolings
	Of such ecstatic sound
	Was written on terrestrial things
	Afar or nigh around,
	That I could think there trembled through
	His happy good-night air
	Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
	And I was unaware.

WALTER DE LA MARE The Birthnight 1906

	Dearest, it was a night
	That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;
	A sighing wind ran faintly white
	Along the willows, and the cedar boughs
	Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across
	The starry silence of their antique moss:
	No sound save rushing air
	Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,
	And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,
	Thou, lovely thing.

WALTER DE LA MARE Autumn

	There is a wind where the rose was;
	Cold rain where sweet grass was;
	And clouds like sheep
	Stream o’er the steep
	Grey skies where the lark was.

	Nought gold where your hair was;
	Nought warm where your hand was;
	But phantom, forlorn,
	Beneath the thorn,
	Your ghost where your face was.

	Sad winds where your voice was;
	Tears, tears where my heart was;
	And ever with me,
	Child, ever with me,
	Silence where hope was.

WALTER DE LA MARE Napoleon

	‘What is the world, O soldiers?
	It is I:

	I, this incessant snow,
	This northern sky;
	Soldiers, this solitude
	Through which we go
	Is I.’

1908 MARY E. COLERIDGE No Newspapers

	Where, to me, is the loss
	Of the scenes they saw – of the sounds they heard;
	A butterfly flits across,
	Or a bird;
	The moss is growing on the wall,
	I heard the leaf of the poppy fall.

MICHAEL FIELD (KATHERINE BRADLEY and EDITH COOPER) The Mummy Invokes His Soul

	Down to me quickly, down! I am such dust,
	Baked, pressed together; let my flesh be fanned
	With thy fresh breath; come from thy reedy land
	Voiceful with birds; divert me, for I lust
	To break, to crumble – prick with pores this crust! –
	And fall apart, delicious, loosening sand.
	Oh, joy, I feel thy breath, I feel thy hand
	That searches for my heart, and trembles just
	Where once it beat. How light thy touch, thy frame!
	Surely thou perchest on the summer trees…
	And the garden that we loved? Soul, take thine ease,
	I am content, so thou enjoy the same
	Sweet terraces and founts, content, for thee,
	To burn in this immense torpidity.

JOHN DAVIDSON Snow 1909

	I
	‘Who affirms that crystals are alive?’
	I affirm it, let who will deny:–
	Crystals are engendered, wax and thrive,
	Wane and wither: I have seen them die.

	Trust me, masters, crystals have their day
	Eager to attain the perfect norm,
	Lit with purpose, potent to display
	Facet, angle, colour, beauty, form.

	II
	Water-crystals need for flower and root
	Sixty clear degrees, no less, no more;
	Snow, so fickle, still in this acute
	Angle thinks, and learns no other lore:

	Such its life, and such its pleasure is,
	Such its art and traffic, such its gain,
	Evermore in new conjunctions this
	Admirable angle to maintain.

	Crystalcraft in every flower and flake
	Snow exhibits, of the welkin free:
	Crystalline are crystals for the sake,
	All and singular, of crystalry.

	Yet does every crystal of the snow
	Individualise, a seedling sown
	Broadcast, but instinct with power to grow
	Beautiful in beauty of its own.

	Every flake with all its prongs and dints
	Burns ecstatic as a new-lit star:
	Men are not more diverse, finger-prints
	More dissimilar than snow-flakes are.

	Worlds of men and snow endure, increase,
	Woven of power and passion to defy
	Time and travail: only races cease,
	Individual men and crystals die.

	III
	Jewelled shapes of snow whose feathery showers,
	Fallen or falling wither at a breath,
	All afraid are they, and loth as flowers
	Beasts and men to tread the way to death.

	Once I saw upon an object-glass,
	Martyred underneath a microscope,
	One elaborate snow-flake slowly pass,
	Dying hard, beyond the reach of hope.

	Still from shape to shape the crystal changed,
	Writhing in its agony; and still,
	Less and less elaborate, arranged
	Potently the angle of its will.

	Tortured to a simple final form,
	Angles six and six divergent beams,
	Lo, in death it touched the perfect norm
	Verifying all its crystal dreams!

	IV
	Such the noble tragedy of one
	Martyred snow-flake. Who can tell the fate
	Heinous and uncouth of showers undone,
	Fallen in cities! – showers that expiate

	Errant lives from polar worlds adrift
	Where the great millennial snows abide;
	Castaways from mountain-chains that lift
	Snowy summits in perennial pride;

	Nomad snows, or snows in evil day
	Born to urban ruin, to be tossed,
	Trampled, shovelled, ploughed, and swept away
	Down the seething sewers: all the frost

	Flowers of heaven melted up with lees,
	Offal, recrement, but every flake
	Showing to the last in fixed degrees
	Perfect crystals for the crystal’s sake.

	V
	Usefulness of snow is but a chance
	Here in temperate climes with winter sent,
	Sheltering earth’s prolonged hibernal trance:
	All utility is accident.

	Sixty clear degrees the joyful snow,
	Practising economy of means,
	Fashions endless beauty in, and so
	Glorifies the universe with scenes

	Arctic and antarctic: stainless shrouds,
	Ermine woven in silvery frost, attire
	Peaks in every land among the clouds
	Crowned with snows to catch the morning’s fire.

J. M. SYNGE On an Island

	You’ve plucked a curlew, drawn a hen,
	Washed the shirts of seven men,
	You’ve stuffed my pillow, stretched the sheet,
	And filled the pan to wash your feet,
	You’ve cooped the pullets, wound the clock,
	And rinsed the young men’s drinking crock;
	And now we’ll dance to jigs and reels,
	Nailed boots chasing girls’ naked heels,
	Until your father’ll start to snore,
	And Jude, now you’re married, will stretch on the floor.

1910 J. M. SYNGE The ’Mergency Man

	He was lodging above in Coom,
	And he’d the half of the bailiff’s room.

	Till a black night came in Coomasaharn
	A night of rains you’d swamp a star in.

	‘To-night,’ says he, ‘with the devil’s weather
	The hares itself will quit the heather,

	I’ll catch my boys with a latch on the door,
	And serve my process on near a score.’

	The night was black at the fording place
	And the flood was up in a whitened race
	But devil a bit he’d turn his face,

	Then the peelers said, ‘Now mind your lepping,
	How can you see the stones for stepping?

	We’ll wash our hands of your bloody job.’
	‘Wash and welcome,’ says he, ‘begob.’

	He made two leps with a run and dash,
	Then the peelers heard a yell and splash.

	And the ’Mergency man in two days and a bit
	Was found in the ebb tide stuck in a net.

1911 W. H. DAVIES Sheep

	When I was once in Baltimore,
	A man came up to me and cried,
	‘Come, I have eighteen hundred sheep,
	And we will sail on Tuesday’s tide.

	‘If you will sail with me, young man,
	I’ll pay you fifty shillings down;
	These eighteen hundred sheep I take
	From Baltimore to Glasgow town.’

	He paid me fifty shillings down,
	I sailed with eighteen hundred sheep;
	We soon had cleared the harbour’s mouth,
	We soon were in the salt sea deep.

	The first night we were out at sea
	Those sheep were quiet in their mind;
	The second night they cried with fear –
	They smelt no pastures in the wind.

	They sniffed, poor things, for their green fields,
	They cried so loud I could not sleep:
	For fifty thousand shillings down
	I would not sail again with sheep.

THOMAS HARDY The Convergence of the Twain 1912

	(Lines on the loss of the Titanic)
	In a solitude of the sea
	Deep from human vanity,
	And the pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

	Steel chambers, late the pyres
	Of her salamandrine fires,
	Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

	Over the mirrors meant
	To glass the opulent
	The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

	Jewels in joy designed
	To ravish the sensuous mind
	Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

	Dim moon-eyed fishes near
	Gaze at the gilded gear
	And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’…

	Well: while was fashioning
	This creature of cleaving wing,
	The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

	Prepared a sinister mate
	For her – so gaily great –
	A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

	And as the smart ship grew
	In stature, grace, and hue,
	In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

	Alien they seemed to be:
	No mortal eye could see
	The intimate welding of their later history,

	Or sign that they were bent
	By paths coincident
	On being anon twin halves of one august event,

	Till the Spinner of the Years
	Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,
	And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

T. E. HULME Autumn

	A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
	I walked abroad,
	And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
	Like a red-faced farmer.
	I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
	And round about were the wistful stars
	With white faces like town children.

T. E. HULME Image

	Old houses were scaffolding once
	and workmen whistling.

(1960)

EZRA POUND The Return

	See, they return; ah, see the tentative
	Movements, and the slow feet,
	The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
	Wavering!

	See, they return, one, and by one,
	With fear, as half-awakened;
	As if the snow should hesitate
	And murmur in the wind,
	and half turn back;
	These were the ‘Wing’d-with-Awe,’
	Inviolable.

	Gods of the wingèd shoe!
	With them the silver hounds,
	sniffing the trace of air!

	Haie! Haie!
	These were the swift to harry;
	These the keen-scented;
	These were the souls of blood.

	Slow on the leash,
	pallid the leash-men!