She walked to the music of her own mind’s making,
The tall, spare spinster in the cheap, drab coat,
And her pale lips, faintly moving, their divine thirst were slaking
At the gods’ own Hippocrene, where bright bubbles float.
As I passed her in the half-light, on a waft of wind I caught the
Words once shaped by mortals beyond all mortal ken.
With Shelley and with Shakespeare she walked, with godlike Milton,
This poorest, palest, shabbiest of the daughters of men.
I looked at the girls, with their silken curls tossing,
Their redder lips than nature, their bright eyes of desire.
Oh, brief is your springtime (I thought) my blossomy darlings,
But hers the authentic, the undying fire.
And I kissed the nearest blossom (was she Daphne? was she Chloë?)
And as betwixt my fingers her soft curls stirred
My thoughts were far from her, my thoughts were on the highway
Where walked the lone, gaunt spinster with the immortal word.
1944
Slipping my self
As a bather strips his clothes,
Nightly I plunge
Into the dark tarn, the lone,
Ebon, glassy, deep,
Sunk beneath cliffs of sleep.
I stumble to it drowsily
Up mazy slopes of dream,
Then plunge, plunge and am
Lost, immersed, drowned,
Beyond reach of sight or sound,
Of consciousness my spark
Dowsed, douted, quenched in the dark.
To the cheerful light,
The sunstream from on high,
This not-I, once more I,
Day’s traffickings, day’s loves
Resumes with sense and sight.
But some day, ah, some day
As yet outwith my ken,
I shall sink to unplumbed deeps
Beyond dredging net of men,
From that underwater world of timeless sleep
Never to rise,
Never to rise to upper day again.
1953
(The marble monument to Penelope Boothby, 1785–1791, Ashbourne Church, Derbyshire)
She lies like a plucked snowdrop, white as she
Whom the glass coffin sheltered from the breath,
The perishing airs of our mortality,
Serene in a sleep like death.
Her soft cheek dints the pillow: lightly curled
Are the nestling hands by her chin, while round her bare
Small feet the hem of her muslin gown is swirled;
Her lips seem to take the air.
She sleeps as on a mattress, in the chill
Half light of the transept, and around her tomb
Run the deep-cut words, in several tongues that tell
Grief for untimely doom.
‘Sorrows for Penelope’ her father wrote,
Seeking through verse to immortalise his child,
And the shipwreck of his hopes in this frail boat:
His love, loss, anguish wild
Still speak to the world in this fair snowdrop maid
At rest on her pillow: touch her gently; she
May wake from the tranced sleep in which she is laid,
Young sweet Penelope!
1963