EZRA POUND In a Station of the Metro 1913

	The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
	Petals on a wet, black bough.

1914 H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) Oread

	Whirl up, sea –
	whirl your pointed pines,
	splash your great pines
	on our rocks,
	hurl your green over us,
	cover us with your pools of fir.

THOMAS HARDY from Poems of 1912–13

	The Walk
	You did not walk with me
	Of late to the hill-top tree
	By the gated ways,
	As in earlier days;
	You were weak and lame,
	So you never came,
	And I went alone, and I did not mind,
	Not thinking of you as left behind.

	I walked up there to-day
	Just in the former way:
	Surveyed around
	The familiar ground
	By myself again:
	What difference, then?
	Only that underlying sense
	Of the look of a room on returning thence.

	The Voice
	Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
	Saying that now you are not as you were
	When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
	But as at first, when our day was fair.

	Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
	Standing as when I drew near to the town
	Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
	Even to the original air-blue gown!

	Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
	Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
	You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
	Heard no more again far or near?

	Thus I; faltering forward,
	Leaves around me falling,
	Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
	And the woman calling.

	After a Journey
	Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;
	Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?
	Up the cliff, down, till I’m lonely, lost,
	And the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me.
	Where you will next be there’s no knowing,
	Facing round about me everywhere,
	With your nut-coloured hair,
	And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

	Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;
	Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;
	What have you now found to say of our past –
	Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?
	Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?
	Things were not lastly as firstly well
	With us twain, you tell?
	But all’s closed now, despite Time’s derision.

	I see what you are doing: you are leading me on
	To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,
	The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone
	At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,
	And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow
	That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,
	When you were all aglow,
	And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

	Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
	The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
	Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
	For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.
	Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,
	The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
	I am just the same as when
	Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

	At Castle Boterel
	As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
	And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
	I look behind at the fading byway,
	And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
	Distinctly yet

	Myself and a girlish form benighted
	In dry March weather. We climb the road
	Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
	To ease the sturdy pony’s load
	When he sighed and slowed.

	What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
	Matters not much, nor to what it led, –
	Something that life will not be balked of
	Without rude reason till hope is dead,
	And feeling fled.

	It filled but a minute. But was there ever
	A time of such quality, since or before,
	In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
	Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
	By thousands more.

	Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
	And much have they faced there, first and last,
	Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
	But what they record in colour and cast
	Is – that we two passed.

	And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
	In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
	The substance now, one phantom figure
	Remains on the slope, as when that night
	Saw us alight.

	I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
	I look back at it amid the rain
	For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
	And I shall traverse old love’s domain
	Never again.

W. B. YEATS The Cold Heaven

	Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
	That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
	And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
	So wild that every casual thought of that and this
	Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
	With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
	And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
	Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
	Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
	Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
	Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
	By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

W. B. YEATS The Magi

	Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
	In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
	Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
	With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
	And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
	And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
	Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
	The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

CHARLOTTE MEW Fame

	Sometimes in the over-heated house, but not for long,
	Smirking and speaking rather loud,
	I see myself among the crowd,
	Where no one fits the singer to his song,
	Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces
	Of the people who are always on my stair;
	They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places;
	But could I spare
	In the blind Earth’s great silences and spaces,
	The din, the scuffle, the long stare
	If I went back and it was not there?
	Back to the old known things that are the new,
	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!
	God! If I might! And before I go hence
	Take in her stead
	To our tossed bed,
	One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.
	Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence –
	A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white,
	A blot upon the night,
	The moon’s dropped child!

EZRA POUND The Gypsy 1915

	‘Est-ce que vous avez vu des autres – des
	camarades – avec des singes ou des ours?’
	A Stray Gipsy – A.D. 1912

	That was the top of the walk, when he said:
	‘Have you seen any others, any of our lot,
	With apes or bears?’
	– A brown upstanding fellow
	Not like the half-castes,
	up on the wet road near Clermont.
	The wind came, and the rain,
	And mist clotted about the trees in the valley,
	And I’d the long ways behind me,
	gray Arles and Biaucaire,
	And he said, ‘Have you seen any of our lot?’
	I’d seen a lot of his lot…
	ever since Rhodez,
	Coming down from the fair
	of St. John,
	With caravans, but never an ape or a bear.

EZRA POUND from Cathay

from the Chinese of Rihaku

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

	While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
	I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
	You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
	You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
	And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
	Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

	At fourteen I married My Lord you.
	I never laughed, being bashful.
	Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
	Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

	At fifteen I stopped scowling,
	I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
	Forever and forever and forever.
	Why should I climb the look out?

	At sixteen you departed,
	You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
	And you have been gone five months.
	The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
	You dragged your feet when you went out.
	By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
	Too deep to clear them away!
	The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
	The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
	Over the grass in the West garden;
	They hurt me. I grow older.
	If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
	Please let me know beforehand,
	And I will come out to meet you
	As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Lament of the Frontier Guard

	By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
	Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
	Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
	I climb the towers and towers
	to watch out the barbarous land:
	Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
	There is no wall left to this village.
	Bones white with a thousand frosts,
	High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
	Who brought this to pass?
	Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
	Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
	Barbarous kings.
	A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
	A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
	Three hundred and sixty thousand,
	And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
	Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.
	Desolate, desolate fields,
	And no children of warfare upon them,
	No longer the men for offence and defence.
	Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
	With Riboku’s name forgotten,
	And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

RUPERT BROOKE Peace

	Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
	And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
	With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power.
	To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
	Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.
	Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
	And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
	And all the little emptiness of love!

	Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
	Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
	Naught broken save this body, lost but breath:
	Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there
	But only agony, and that has ending:
	And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

RUPERT BROOKE Heaven

	Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
	Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)
	Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
	Each secret fishy hope or fear.
	Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
	But is there anything Beyond?
	This life cannot be All, they swear,
	For how unpleasant, if it were!
	One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
	Shall come of Water and of Mud;
	And, sure, the reverent eye must see
	A Purpose in Liquidity.
	We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
	The future is not Wholly Dry.
	Mud unto mud! – Death eddies near –
	Not here the appointed End, not here!
	But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
	Is wetter water, slimier slime!
	And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
	Who swam ere rivers were begun,
	Immense, of fishy form and mind,
	Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
	And under that Almighty Fin,
	The littlest fish may enter in.
	Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
	Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
	But more than mundane weeds are there,
	And mud, celestially fair;
	Fat caterpillars drift around,
	And Paradisal grubs are found;
	Unfading moths, immortal flies,
	And the worm that never dies.
	And in that Heaven of all their wish,
	There shall be no more land, say fish.

1916 D. H. LAWRENCE Sorrow

	Why does the thin grey strand
	Floating up from the forgotten
	Cigarette between my fingers,
	Why does it trouble me?

	Ah, you will understand;
	When I carried my mother downstairs,
	A few times only, at the beginning
	Of her soft-foot malady,

	I should find, for a reprimand
	To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
	On the breast of my coat; and one by one
	I watched them float up the dark chimney.

CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY

	When you see millions of the mouthless dead
	Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
	Say not soft things as other men have said,
	That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
	Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
	It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
	Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
	Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
	Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
	‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
	Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
	Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
	It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
	Great death has made all his for evermore.

EDWARD THOMAS Cock-Crow

	Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night
	To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, –
	Out of the night, two cocks together crow,
	Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:
	And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand,
	Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,
	Each facing each as in a coat of arms:
	The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.

EDWARD THOMAS Aspens

	All day and night, save winter, every weather,
	Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
	The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
	Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

	Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing
	Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
	The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –
	The sounds that for these fifty years have been.

	The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
	And over lightless pane and footless road,
	Empty as sky, with every other sound
	Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,

	A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails
	In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
	In tempest or the night of nightingales,
	To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.

	And it would be the same were no house near.
	Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
	Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
	But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

	Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
	We cannot other than an aspen be
	That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
	Or so men think who like a different tree.

ANNA WICKHAM The Fired Pot

	In our town, people live in rows.
	The only irregular thing in a street is the steeple;
	And where that points to, God only knows,
	And not the poor disciplined people!

	And I have watched the women growing old,
	Passionate about pins, and pence, and soap,
	Till the heart within my wedded breast grew cold,
	And I lost hope.

	But a young soldier came to our town,
	He spoke his mind most candidly.
	He asked me quickly to lie down,
	And that was very good for me.

	For though I gave him no embrace –
	Remembering my duty –
	He altered the expression of my face,
	And gave me back my beauty.

CHARLOTTE MEW À quoi bon dire

	Seventeen years ago you said
	Something that sounded like Good-bye;
	And everybody thinks that you are dead,
	But I.

	So I, as I grow stiff and cold
	To this and that say Good-bye too;
	And everybody sees that I am old
	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.

CHARLOTTE MEW The Quiet House

	When we were children old Nurse used to say
	The house was like an auction or a fair
	Until the lot of us were safe in bed.
	It has been quiet as the country-side
	Since Ted and Janey and then Mother died
	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; (since then, a year ago,
	He scarcely lets me slip out of his sight –)
	At first I did not like my cousin’s friend,
	I did not think I should remember him:
	His voice has gone, his face is growing dim
	And if I like him now I do not know.
	He frightened me before he smiled –
	He did not ask me if he might –
	He said that he would come one Sunday night,
	He spoke to me as if I were a child.

	No year has been like this that has just gone by;
	It may be that what Father says is true,
	If things are so it does not matter why:
	But everything has burned, and not quite through.
	The colours of the world have turned
	To flame, the blue, the gold has burned
	In what used to be such a leaden sky.
	When you are burned quite through you die.

	Red is the strangest pain to bear;
	In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
	In Summer the roses are worse than these,
	More terrible than they are sweet:
	A rose can stab you across the street
	Deeper than any knife:
	And the crimson haunts you everywhere –
	Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair
	As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.

	I think that my soul is red
	Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower:
	But when these are dead
	They have had their hour.

	I shall have had mine, too,
	For from head to feet,
	I am burned and stabbed half through,
	And the pain is deadly sweet.
	The things that kill us seem
	Blind to the death they give:
	It is only in our dream
	The things that kill us live.

	The room is shut where Mother died,
	The other rooms are as they were,
	The world goes on the same outside,
	The sparrows fly across the Square,
	The children play as we four did there,
	The trees grow green and brown and bare,
	The sun shines on the dead Church spire,
	And nothing lives here but the fire,
	While Father watches from his chair
	Day follows day
	The same, or now and then, a different grey,
	Till, like his hair,
	Which Mother said was wavy once and bright,
	They will all turn white.

	To-night I heard a bell again –
	Outside it was the same mist of fine rain,
	The lamps just lighted down the long, dim street,
	No one for me –
	I think it is myself I go to meet:
	I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be!

T. S. ELIOT The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917

	S’io credessi che mia risposta fosse
	a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
	questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
	Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
	non tornò vivo alcun, si’i’odo il vero,
	senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

	Let us go then, you and I,
	When the evening is spread out against the sky
	Like a patient etherised upon a table;
	Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
	The muttering retreats
	Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
	And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
	Streets that follow like a tedious argument
	Of insidious intent
	To lead you to an overwhelming question…
	Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
	Let us go and make our visit.

	In the room the women come and go
	Talking of Michelangelo.

	The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
	The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
	Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
	Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
	Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
	Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
	And seeing that it was a soft October night,
	Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

	And indeed there will be time
	For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
	Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
	There will be time, there will be time
	To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
	There will be time to murder and create,
	And time for all the works and days of hands
	That lift and drop a question on your plate;
	Time for you and time for me,
	And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
	And for a hundred visions and revisions,
	Before the taking of a toast and tea.

	In the room the women come and go
	Talking of Michelangelo.

	And indeed there will be time
	To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
	Time to turn back and descend the stair,
	With a bald spot in the middle of my hair –
	(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)
	My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
	My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin –
	(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)
	Do I dare
	Disturb the universe?
	In a minute there is time
	For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

	For I have known them all already, known them all –
	Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
	I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
	I know the voices dying with a dying fall
	Beneath the music from a farther room.
	So how should I presume?

	And I have known the eyes already, known them all –
	The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
	And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
	When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
	Then how should I begin
	To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
	And how should I presume?

	And I have known the arms already, known them all –
	Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
	(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
	Is it perfume from a dress
	That makes me so digress?
	Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
	And should I then presume?
	And how should I begin?

…..

	Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
	And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
	Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

	I should have been a pair of ragged claws
	Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

…..

	And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
	Smoothed by long fingers,
	Asleep… tired… or it malingers,
	Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
	Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
	Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
	But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
	Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
	I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter;
	I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
	And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
	And in short, I was afraid.

	And would it have been worth it, after all,
	After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
	Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
	Would it have been worth while,
	To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
	To have squeezed the universe into a ball
	To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
	To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
	Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ –
	If one, settling a pillow by her head,
	Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.
	That is not it, at all.’

	And would it have been worth it, after all,
	Would it have been worth while,
	After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
	After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor –
	And this, and so much more? –
	It is impossible to say just what I mean!
	But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
	Would it have been worth while
	If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
	And turning toward the window, should say:
	‘That is not it at all,
	That is not what I meant, at all.’

…..

	No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
	Am an attendant lord, one that will do
	To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
	Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
	Deferential, glad to be of use,
	Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
	Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
	At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –
	Almost, at times, the Fool.

	I grow old… I grow old…
	I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

	Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
	I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
	I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

	I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
	Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
	When the wind blows the water white and black.

	We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
	By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
	Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T. S. ELIOT Aunt Helen

	Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,
	And lived in a small house near a fashionable square
	Cared for by servants to the number of four.
	Now when she died there was silence in heaven
	And silence at her end of the street.
	The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet –
	He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.
	The dogs were handsomely provided for,
	But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
	The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,
	And the footman sat upon the dining-table
	Holding the second housemaid on his knees –
	Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

ISAAC ROSENBERG Break of Day in the Trenches

	The darkness crumbles away.
	It is the same old druid Time as ever,
	Only a live thing leaps my hand,
	A queer sardonic rat,
	As I pull the parapet’s poppy
	To stick behind my ear.
	Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
	Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
	Now you have touched this English hand
	You will do the same to a German
	Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
	To cross the sleeping green between.
	It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
	Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
	Less chanced than you for life,
	Bonds to the whims of murder,
	Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
	The torn fields of France.
	What do you see in our eyes
	At the shrieking iron and flame
	Hurled through still heavens?
	What quaver – what heart aghast?
	Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
	Drop, and are ever dropping;
	But mine in my ear is safe –
	Just a little white with the dust.

(1922)

ISAAC ROSENBERG August 1914

	What in our lives is burnt
	In the fire of this?
	The heart’s dear granary?
	The much we shall miss?

	Three lives hath one life –
	Iron, honey, gold.
	The gold, the honey gone –
	Left is the hard and cold.

	Iron are our lives
	Molten right through our youth.
	A burnt space through ripe fields,
	A fair mouth’s broken tooth.

(1937)

ISAAC ROSENBERG

	A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,
	Babylon and Rome:
	Not Paris raped tall Helen,
	But this incestuous worm,
	Who lured her vivid beauty
	To his amorphous sleep.
	England! famous as Helen
	Is thy betrothal sung
	To him the shadowless,
	More amorous than Solomon.

(1937)

THOMAS HARDY During Wind and Rain

	They sing their dearest songs –
	He, she, all of them – yea,
	Treble and tenor and bass,
	And one to play;
	With the candles mooning each face.…
	Ah, no; the years O!
	How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

	They clear the creeping moss –
	Elders and juniors – aye,
	Making the pathways neat
	And the garden gay;
	And they build a shady seat.…
	Ah, no; the years, the years;
	See, the white storm-birds wing across.

	They are blithely breakfasting all –
	Men and maidens – yea,
	Under the summer tree,
	With a glimpse of the bay,
	While pet fowl come to the knee….
	Ah, no; the years O!
	And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

	They change to a high new house,
	He, she, all of them – aye,
	Clocks and carpets and chairs
	On the lawn all day,
	And brightest things that are theirs.…
	Ah, no; the years, the years;
	Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

EDWARD THOMAS Old Man

	Old Man, or Lad’s-love, – in the name there’s nothing
	To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man,
	The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree,
	Growing with rosemary and lavender.
	Even to one that knows it well, the names
	Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:
	At least, what that is clings not to the names
	In spite of time. And yet I like the names.

	The herb itself I like not, but for certain
	I love it, as some day the child will love it
	Who plucks a feather from the door-side bush
	Whenever she goes in or out of the house.
	Often she waits there, snipping the tips and shrivelling
	The shreds at last on to the path, perhaps
	Thinking, perhaps of nothing, till she sniffs
	Her fingers and runs off. The bush is still
	But half as tall as she, though it is as old;
	So well she clips it. Not a word she says;
	And I can only wonder how much hereafter
	She will remember, with that bitter scent,
	Of garden rows, and ancient damson-trees
	Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door,
	A low thick bush beside the door, and me
	Forbidding her to pick.

	As for myself,
	Where first I met the bitter scent is lost.
	I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
	Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
	Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
	Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
	Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
	With no meaning, than this bitter one.

	I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
	And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
	Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
	For what I should, yet never can, remember:
	No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
	Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside,
	Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
	Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.

EDWARD THOMAS Tall Nettles

	Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
	These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
	Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
	Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

	This corner of the farmyard I like most:
	As well as any bloom upon a flower
	I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
	Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

EDWARD THOMAS Blenheim Oranges

	Gone, gone again,
	May, June, July,
	And August gone,
	Again gone by,

	Not memorable
	Save that I saw them go,
	As past the empty quays
	The rivers flow.

	And now again,
	In the harvest rain,
	The Blenheim oranges
	Fall grubby from the trees,

	As when I was young –
	And when the lost one was here –
	And when the war began
	To turn young men to dung.

	Look at the old house,
	Outmoded, dignified,
	Dark and untenanted,
	With grass growing instead

	Of the footsteps of life,
	The friendliness, the strife;
	In its beds have lain
	Youth, love, age and pain:

	I am something like that;
	Only I am not dead,
	Still breathing and interested
	In the house that is not dark: –

	I am something like that:
	Not one pane to reflect the sun,
	For the schoolboys to throw at –
	They have broken every one.

EDWARD THOMAS Rain

	Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
	On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
	Remembering again that I shall die
	And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
	For washing me cleaner than I have been
	Since I was born into this solitude.
	Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
	But here I pray that none whom once I loved
	Is dying tonight or lying still awake
	Solitary, listening to the rain,
	Either in pain or thus in sympathy
	Helpless among the living and the dead,
	Like a cold water among broken reeds,
	Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
	Like me who have no love which this wild rain
	Has not dissolved except the love of death,
	If love it be towards what is perfect and
	Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.