WILFRED OWEN Futility 1918

	Move him into the sun –
	Gently its touch awoke him once,
	At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
	Always it woke him, even in France,
	Until this morning and this snow.
	If anything might rouse him now
	The kind old sun will know.

	Think how it wakes the seeds –
	Woke once the clays of a cold star.
	Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides
	Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
	Was it for this the clay grew tall?
	– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
	To break earth’s sleep at all?

WILFRED OWEN Anthem for Doomed Youth

	What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
	– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
	Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
	Can patter out their hasty orisons.
	No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
	Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
	The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
	And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

	What candles may be held to speed them all?
	Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
	Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
	The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
	Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
	And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

(1920)

WILFRED OWEN The Send-Off

	Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way
	To the siding-shed,
	And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

	Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
	As men’s are, dead.

	Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
	Stood staring hard,
	Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.

	Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
	Winked to the guard.

	So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
	They were not ours:
	We never heard to which front these were sent;

	Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
	Who gave them flowers.

	Shall they return to beating of great bells
	In wild train-loads?
	A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

	May creep back, silent, to village wells,
	Up half-known roads.

(1920)

WILFRED OWEN Maundy Thursday

	Between the brown hands of a server-lad
	The silver cross was offered to be kissed.
	The men came up, lugubrious, but not sad,
	And knelt reluctantly, half-prejudiced.
	(And kissing, kissed the emblem of a creed.)
	Then mourning women knelt; meek mouths they had,
	(And kissed the Body of the Christ indeed.)
	Young children came, with eager lips and glad.
	(These kissed a silver doll, immensely bright.)
	Then I, too, knelt before that acolyte.
	Above the crucifix I bent my head:
	The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead:
	And yet I bowed, yea, kissed – my lips did cling.
	(I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)

(1963)

SIEGFRIED SASSOON Base Details

	If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
	I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
	And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
	You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,
	Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
	Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘Poor young chap,’
	I’d say – ‘I used to know his father well;
	Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.’
	And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
	I’d toddle safely home and die – in bed.

SIEGFRIED SASSOON The General

	‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
	When we met him last week on our way to the line.
	Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
	And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
	‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
	As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
	…..
	But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

1919 SIEGFRIED SASSOON Everyone Sang

	Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
	And I was filled with such delight
	As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
	Winging wildly across the white
	Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

	Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
	And beauty came like the setting sun:
	My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
	Drifted away… O, but Everyone
	Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

IVOR GURNEY To His Love

	He’s gone, and all our plans
	Are useless indeed.
	We’ll walk no more on Cotswold
	Where the sheep feed
	Quietly and take no heed.

	His body that was so quick
	Is not as you
	Knew it, on Severn river
	Under the blue
	Driving our small boat through.

	You would not know him now…
	But still he died
	Nobly, so cover him over
	With violets of pride
	Purple from Severn side.

	Cover him, cover him soon!
	And with thick-set
	Masses of memoried flowers –
	Hide that red wet
	Thing I must somehow forget.

IVOR GURNEY The Silent One

	Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two –
	Who for his hours of life had chattered through
	Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent:
	Yet faced unbroken wires; stepped over, and went
	A noble fool, faithful to his stripes – and ended.
	But I weak, hungry, and willing only for the chance
	Of line – to fight in the line, lay down under unbroken
	Wires, and saw the flashes and kept unshaken,
	Till the politest voice – a finicking accent, said:
	‘Do you think you might crawl through there: there’s a hole.’
	Darkness, shot at: I smiled, as politely replied –
	‘I’m afraid not, Sir.’ There was no hole no way to be seen
	Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes.
	Kept flat, and watched the darkness, hearing bullets whizzing –
	And thought of music – and swore deep heart’s deep oaths
	(Polite to God) and retreated and came on again,
	Again retreated – and a second time faced the screen.

(1954)

RUDYARD KIPLING from Epitaphs of the War. 1914–18

	A Servant
	We were together since the War began.
	He was my servant – and the better man.

	A Son
	My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew
	What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few.

	The Coward
	I could not look on Death, which being known,
	Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.

	The Refined Man
	I was of delicate mind. I went aside for my needs,
	Disdaining the common office. I was seen from afar and killed…
	How is this matter for mirth? Let each man be judged by his deeds.
	I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that I willed.

	Common Form
	If any question why we died
	Tell them, because our fathers lied.

RUDYARD KIPLING Gethsemane

	1914–18
	The Garden called Gethsemane
	In Picardy it was,
	And there the people came to see
	The English soldiers pass.
	We used to pass – we used to pass
	Or halt, as it might be,
	And ship our masks in case of gas
	Beyond Gethsemane.

	The Garden called Gethsemane,
	It held a pretty lass,
	But all the time she talked to me
	I prayed my cup might pass.
	The officer sat on the chair,
	The men lay on the grass,
	And all the time we halted there
	I prayed my cup might pass.

	It didn’t pass – it didn’t pass –
	It didn’t pass from me.
	I drank it when we met the gas
	Beyond Gethsemane!

LAURENCE BINYON For the Fallen (September 1914)

	With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
	England mourns for her dead across the sea.
	Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
	Fallen in the cause of the free.

	Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
	Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
	There is music in the midst of desolation
	And a glory that shines upon our tears.

	They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
	Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
	They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
	They fell with their faces to the foe.

	They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
	Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
	At the going down of the sun and in the morning
	We will remember them.

	They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
	They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
	They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
	They sleep beyond England’s foam.

	But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
	Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
	To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
	As the stars are known to the Night;

	As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
	Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
	As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
	To the end, to the end, they remain.

(1914)

W. B. YEATS The Wild Swans at Coole

	The trees are in their autumn beauty,
	The woodland paths are dry,
	Under the October twilight the water
	Mirrors a still sky;
	Upon the brimming water among the stones
	Are nine-and-fifty swans.

	The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
	Since I first made my count;
	I saw, before I had well finished,
	All suddenly mount
	And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
	Upon their clamorous wings.

	I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
	And now my heart is sore.
	All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
	The first time on this shore,
	The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
	Trod with a lighter tread.

	Unwearied still, lover by lover,
	They paddle in the cold
	Companionable streams or climb the air;
	Their hearts have not grown old;
	Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
	Attend upon them still.

	But now they drift on the still water,
	Mysterious, beautiful;
	Among what rushes will they build,
	By what lake’s edge or pool
	Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
	To find they have flown away?

T. S. ELIOT Sweeney Among the Nightingales

	Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
	Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
	The zebra stripes along his jaw
	Swelling to maculate giraffe.

	The circles of the stormy moon
	Slide westward toward the River Plate,
	Death and the Raven drift above
	And Sweeney guards the horned gate.

	Gloomy Orion and the Dog
	Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
	The person in the Spanish cape
	Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees

	Slips and pulls the table cloth
	Overturns a coffee-cup,
	Reorganised upon the floor
	She yawns and draws a stocking up;

	The silent man in mocha brown
	Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
	The waiter brings in oranges
	Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

	The silent vertebrate in brown
	Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
	Rachel née Rabinovitch
	Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

	She and the lady in the cape
	Are suspect, thought to be in league;
	Therefore the man with heavy eyes
	Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

	Leaves the room and reappears
	Outside the window, leaning in,
	Branches of wistaria
	Circumscribe a golden grin;

	The host with someone indistinct
	Converses at the door apart,
	The nightingales are singing near
	The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

	And sang within the bloody wood
	When Agamemnon cried aloud
	And let their liquid siftings fall
	To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

EZRA POUND from Homage to Sextus Propertius

	VI
	When, when, and whenever death closes our eyelids,
	Moving naked over Acheron
	Upon the one raft, victor and conquered together,
	Marius and Jugurtha together,
	one tangle of shadows.

	Caesar plots against India,
	Tigris and Euphrates shall, from now on, flow at his bidding,
	Tibet shall be full of Roman policemen,
	The Parthians shall get used to our statuary
	and acquire a Roman religion;
	One raft on the veiled flood of Acheron,
	Marius and Jugurtha together.

	Nor at my funeral either will there be any long trail,
	bearing ancestral lares and images;
	No trumpets filled with my emptiness,
	Nor shall it be on an Attalic bed;
	The perfumed cloths shall be absent.
	A small plebeian procession.
	Enough, enough and in plenty
	There will be three books at my obsequies
	Which I take, my not unworthy gift, to Persephone.

	You will follow the bare scarified breast
	Nor will you be weary of calling my name, nor too weary
	To place the last kiss on my lips
	When the Syrian onyx is broken.

	‘He who is now vacant dust
	Was once the slave of one passion:’
	Give that much inscription
	‘Death why tardily come?’

	You, sometimes, will lament a lost friend,
	For it is a custom:
	This care for past men,

	Since Adonis was gored in Idalia, and the Cytharean
	Ran crying with out-spread hair,
	In vain, you call back the shade,
	In vain, Cynthia. Vain call to unanswering shadow,
	Small talk comes from small bones.

EZRA POUND from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 1920

	II
	The age demanded an image
	Of its accelerated grimace,
	Something for the modern stage,
	Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

	Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
	Of the inward gaze;
	Better mendacities
	Than the classics in paraphrase!

	The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster,
	Made with no loss of time,
	A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
	Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme.

	IV
	These fought in any case,
	and some believing,
	pro domo, in any case…

	Some quick to arm,
	some for adventure,
	some from fear of weakness,
	some from fear of censure,
	some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
	learning later…
	some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
	Died some, pro patria,
	non ‘dulce’ non ‘et decor’…
	walked eye-deep in hell
	believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
	came home, home to a lie,
	home to many deceits,
	home to old lies and new infamy;
	usury age-old and age-thick
	and liars in public places.

	Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
	Young blood and high blood,
	fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

	frankness as never before,
	disillusions as never told in the old days,
	hysterias, trench confessions,
	laughter out of dead bellies.

	V
	There died a myriad,
	And of the best, among them,
	For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
	For a botched civilization,

	Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
	Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

	For two gross of broken statues,
	For a few thousand battered books.

W. B. YEATS Easter, 1916

	I have met them at close of day
	Coming with vivid faces
	From counter or desk among grey
	Eighteenth-century houses.
	I have passed with a nod of the head
	Or polite meaningless words,
	Or have lingered awhile and said
	Polite meaningless words,
	And thought before I had done
	Of a mocking tale or a gibe
	To please a companion
	Around the fire at the club,
	Being certain that they and I
	But lived where motley is worn:
	All changed, changed utterly:
	A terrible beauty is born.

	That woman’s days were spent
	In ignorant good-will,
	Her nights in argument
	Until her voice grew shrill.
	What voice more sweet than hers
	When, young and beautiful,
	She rode to harriers?
	This man had kept a school
	And rode our wingèd horse;
	This other his helper and friend
	Was coming into his force;
	He might have won fame in the end,
	So sensitive his nature seemed,
	So daring and sweet his thought.
	This other man I had dreamed
	A drunken, vainglorious lout.
	He had done most bitter wrong
	To some who are near my heart,
	Yet I number him in the song;
	He, too, has resigned his part
	In the casual comedy;
	He, too, has been changed in his turn,
	Transformed utterly:
	A terrible beauty is born.

	Hearts with one purpose alone
	Through summer and winter seem
	Enchanted to a stone
	To trouble the living stream.
	The horse that comes from the road,
	The rider, the birds that range
	From cloud to tumbling cloud,
	Minute by minute they change;
	A shadow of cloud on the stream
	Changes minute by minute;
	A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
	And a horse plashes within it;
	The long-legged moor-hens dive,
	And hens to moor-cocks call;
	Minute by minute they live:
	The stone’s in the midst of all.

	Too long a sacrifice
	Can make a stone of the heart.
	O when may it suffice?
	That is Heaven’s part, our part
	To murmur name upon name,
	As a mother names her child
	When sleep at last has come
	On limbs that had run wild.
	What is it but nightfall?
	No, no, not night but death;
	Was it needless death after all?
	For England may keep faith
	For all that is done and said.
	We know their dream; enough
	To know they dreamed and are dead;
	And what if excess of love
	Bewildered them till they died?
	I write it out in a verse –
	MacDonagh and MacBride
	And Connolly and Pearse
	Now and in time to be,
	Wherever green is worn,
	Are changed, changed utterly:
	A terrible beauty is born.

(written 1916)

T. S. ELIOT Gerontion

Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both.

	Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
	Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
	I was neither at the hot gates
	Nor fought in the warm rain
	Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
	Bitten by flies, fought.
	My house is a decayed house,
	And the Jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,
	Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
	Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
	The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
	Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
	The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
	Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
	I an old man,
	A dull head among windy spaces.
	Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’
	The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
	Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
	Came Christ the tiger

	In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
	To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
	Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
	With caressing hands, at Limoges
	Who walked all night in the next room;
	By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
	By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
	Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
	Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
	Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
	An old man in a draughty house
	Under a windy knob.

	After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
	History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
	And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
	Guides us by vanities. Think now
	She gives when our attention is distracted
	And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
	That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
	What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
	In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
	Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
	Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
	Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
	Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
	Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
	These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

	The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
	We have not reached conclusion, when I
	Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
	I have not made this show purposelessly
	And it is not by any concitation
	Of the backward devils.
	I would meet you upon this honestly.
	I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
	To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
	I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
	Since what is kept must be adulterated?
	I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
	How should I use them for your closer contact?
	These with a thousand small deliberations

	Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
	Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
	With pungent sauces, multiply variety
	In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
	Suspend its operations, will the weevil
	Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
	Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
	In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
	Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn.
	White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
	And an old man driven by the Trades
	To a sleepy corner.

	Tenants of the house,
	Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

A. E. HOUSMAN from Last Poems

	XII
	The laws of God, the laws of man,
	He may keep that will and can;
	Not I: let God and man decree
	Laws for themselves and not for me;
	And if my ways are not as theirs
	Let them mind their own affairs.
	Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
	Yet when did I make laws for them?
	Please yourselves, say I, and they
	Need only look the other way.
	But no, they will not; they must still
	Wrest their neighbour to their will,
	And make me dance as they desire
	With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
	And how am I to face the odds
	Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
	I, a stranger and afraid
	In a world I never made.
	They will be master, right or wrong;
	Though both are foolish, both are strong.
	And since, my soul, we cannot fly
	To Saturn nor to Mercury,
	Keep we must, if keep we can,
	These foreign laws of God and man.

(written c. 1900)

	XXXIII
	When the eye of day is shut,
	And the stars deny their beams,
	And about the forest hut
	Blows the roaring wood of dreams,

	From deep clay, from desert rock,
	From the sunk sands of the main,
	Come not at my door to knock,
	Hearts that loved me not again.

	Sleep, be still, turn to your rest
	In the lands where you are laid;
	In far lodgings east and west
	Lie down on the beds you made.

	In gross marl, in blowing dust,
	In the drowned ooze of the sea,
	Where you would not, lie you must,
	Lie you must, and not with me.

	XXXVII
	Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
	These, in the day when heaven was falling,
	The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
	Followed their mercenary calling
	And took their wages and are dead.

	Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
	They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
	What God abandoned, these defended,
	And saved the sum of things for pay.

	XL
	Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
	What tune the enchantress plays
	In aftermaths of soft September
	Or under blanching mays,
	For she and I were long acquainted
	And I knew all her ways.

	On russet floors, by waters idle,
	The pine lets fall its cone;
	The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
	In leafy dells alone;
	And traveller’s joy beguiles in autumn
	Hearts that have lost their own.

	On acres of the seeded grasses
	The changing burnish heaves;
	Or marshalled under moons of harvest
	Stand still all night the sheaves;
	Or beeches strip in storms for winter
	And stain the wind with leaves.

	Possess, as I possessed a season,
	The countries I resign,
	Where over elmy plains the highway
	Would mount the hills and shine
	And full of shade the pillared forest
	Would murmur and be mine.

	For nature, heartless, witless nature,
	Will neither care nor know
	What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
	And trespass there and go,
	Nor ask amid the dews of morning
	If they are mine or no.

A. E. HOUSMAN

	It is a fearful thing to be
	The Pope.
	That cross will not be laid on me,
	I hope.
	A righteous God would not permit
	It.
	The Pope himself must often say,
	After the labours of the day,
	‘It is a fearful thing to be
	Me.’

(1940)

1922 T. S. ELIOT from The Waste Land

	I The Burial of the Dead
	April is the cruellest month, breeding
	Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
	Memory and desire, stirring
	Dull roots with spring rain.
	Winter kept us warm, covering
	Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
	A little life with dried tubers.
	Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
	With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
	And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
	And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
	Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
	And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
	My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
	And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
	Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
	In the mountains, there you feel free.
	I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

	What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
	Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
	You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
	A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
	And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
	And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
	There is shadow under this red rock,
	(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
	And I will show you something different from either
	Your shadow at morning striding behind you
	Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
	I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
	Frisch weht der Wind
	Der Heimat zu
	Mein Irisch Kind,
	Wo weilest du?
	‘You gave me Hyacinths first a year ago;
	‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
	– Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
	Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
	Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
	Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
	Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
	Oed’ und leer das Meer.

	Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
	Had a bad cold, nevertheless
	Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
	With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
	Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
	(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
	Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
	The lady of situations.
	Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
	And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
	Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
	Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
	The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
	I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
	Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
	Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
	One must be so careful these days.

	Unreal City,
	Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
	A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
	I had not thought death had undone so many.
	Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
	And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
	Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
	To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
	With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
	There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!
	‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
	‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
	‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
	‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
	‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
	‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
	‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!’

	IV Death by Water
	Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
	Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
	And the profit and loss.

	A current under sea
	Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
	He passed the stages of his age and youth
	Entering the whirlpool.

	Gentile or Jew
	O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
	Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

IVOR GURNEY Possessions

	Sand has the ants, clay ferny weeds for play
	But what shall please the wind now the trees are away
	War took on Witcombe steep?
	It breathes there, and wonders at old night roarings;
	October time at all lights, and the new clearings
	For memory are like to weep.
	It was right for the beeches to stand over Witcombe reaches,
	Until the wind roared and softened and died to sleep.

(1934)

IVOR GURNEY The High Hills

	The high hills have a bitterness
	Now they are not known
	And memory is poor enough consolation
	For the soul hopeless gone.
	Up in the air there beech tangles wildly in the wind –
	That I can imagine
	But the speed, the swiftness, walking into clarity,
	Like last year’s bryony are gone.

(1954)

D. H. LAWRENCE Medlars and Sorb-Apples 1923

	I love you, rotten,
	Delicious rottenness.

	I love to suck you out from your skins
	So brown and soft and coming suave,
	So morbid, as the Italians say.

	What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour
	Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:
	Stream within stream.

	Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine
	Or vulgar Marsala.

	Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity
	Soon in the pussyfoot West.

	What is it?
	What is it, in the grape turning raisin,
	In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,
	Wineskins of brown morbidity,
	Autumnal excrementa;
	What is it that reminds us of white gods?

	Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels,
	Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant
	As if with sweat,
	And drenched with mystery.

Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.

	I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,
	Orphic, delicate
	Dionysos of the Underworld.

	A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture,
	Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.
	And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,
	A new gasp of further isolation,
	A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.

	Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,
	The fibres of the heart parting one after the other
	And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied
	Like a flame blown whiter and whiter
	In a deeper and deeper darkness
	Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

	So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples
	The distilled essence of hell.
	The exquisite odour of leave-taking.
	Jamque vale!
	Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.

	Each soul departing with its own isolation,
	Strangest of all strange companions,
	And best.

	Medlars, sorb-apples,
	More than sweet
	Flux of autumn
	Sucked out of your empty bladders

	And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala
	So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its savour to yours,
	Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell
	And the ego sum of Dionysos
	The sono io of perfect drunkenness
	Intoxication of final loneliness.