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EPUB ISBN: 978-0-908328-89-5
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The original publication details are as follows:
Title: She was my spring : poems
Author: Hervey, J. R. (John Russell)
Published: Caxton Press, Christchurch, N.Z., 1954
SHE WAS MY SPRING
SHE WAS MY SPRING
POEMS BY J. R. HER VET
THE CAXTON PRESS
1 9 5 4
Printed at the Caxton Press
Christchurch : October 1954
with the assistance of the
New Zealand Literary Fund
In Praise, Gratitude, and Humility this book is dedicated
TO THE DEAR MEMORY OF ETHEL, MY WIFE
Who gave to me the transcendent privilege of loving her, thus enabling me to find,
in her abundance, all that life
had to bestow.
How far we travelled, sweetheart,
Since that day when first we chose
Each other as each other's rose,
And put all other worlds apart.
So, to be honest, I must wear your death
Next to my heart, where others wear their love.
Indeed, it is my love, my link with life
My word of life being death upon my breath.
My dying word because of you can live
Crowned with your death so not evading truth.
from Elegy for Margaret by Stephen Spender
{By permission of the author)
Acknowledgments are made to the following publications in which certain of these poems appeared : New Zealand Listener, New Zealand Observer, New Zealand Poetry Yearßook, Landfall, Arachne, Sydney Bulletin, Poetry Quarterly London
By the same author:
SELECTED POEMS
( The Caxton Press 1940 )
NEW POEMS
( The Caxton Press 1942 )
MAN ON A RAFT
( The Caxton Press 1949 )
CONTENTS
SHE WAS MY SPRING page 9
SONNETS OF DEPARTURE 10
VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF JOHN DONNE 13
PHILOSOPHER 15
WHITE, DARK 16
FOR A SAD LADY 17
ON A VERANDAH 18
MOUNTAINEER 19
GHANDI DEAD 20
GLACIER 21
TREE 22
READER TURNED PILGRIM 23
LETTER TO MY WIFE 24
LETTER TO ANOTHER WORLD 25
HIS LOVE AND RENUNCIATION 26
ICY OMENS BLOW 27
YOUR BIRTH MY LIFE 28
ANALYSIS OF GRIEF 29
BEGGAR THE HEART 30
PHOTOGRAPH 3 1
THE BEACH 32
THE TRUTH IS SINGLE 33
NO LOVE AS NOW 34
DEATH'S DARLING 35
A CRYSTAL BIRTH 36
NO HARVEST HERE 37
THIS DAY THAT HEAVY-LIDDED YEAR 38
THE DANCER AND PROPHET 39
CHRISTMAS COME IN 41
HERO WORSHIPPER 42
HYDRO WORKS 43
MISS GARTH 44
TRAIN 45
VENUS 46
THE MAN WHO WANTED TO BE A SEAGULL 47
CENTENNIAL ODE 4 8
EASILY THE SPRING MOVES 53
SHE WAS MY LOVE WHO COULD DELIVER 54
THE RETURN 55
HONEYMOON SCENE REVISITED 56
I SANG MY LOVE 52
RETROSPECT 51
CHRISTMAS IN THE SUN 50
14
SHE WAS MY SPRING
She was my spring from whom these thrusting powers,
The immaculate arch, the animating light:
Her towering love brought all my dreams to sight,
Not tiptoe visitors of sleep but flowers
Of the heart, visions, phantoms of fair unreason,
Impulsive spirits, stars on my courted night,
Or, from the assured and love-encompassed height,
Casual voices redeeming a ruthless season.
My famine fed upon her look, her laugh
Dazzled the curtains of hebetude, but spring
Has progressed past the directing epitaph,
Yet grief is burnished with her offering,
Leaving a lyric on an idle breath —
Ah, April squandered on the face of death!
SONNETS OF DEPARTURE
I
So the veils fall, I cannot reach the mind,
Nor signal to the eyes, nor wake the lips,
My starry Love is under the eclipse,
And sleep is all, with being going blind,
The stream flows on, nor can contriving bind
Waters that work their will, purpose that grips:
Beneath a hushed horizon beauty dips,
And all wild earthly gropings cannot find.
You were so fixed, I would not think of this,
Or if you went you would return like spring,
But now you go with no returning kiss,
The world is dead for life is on the wing:
Yet love that holds would help to new estate
With a strange hope while time thrusts on the gate.
II
The room of peering shadows holds her fast:
Deep is the pit from which she would not rise:
Her spirit is upon some enterprise
In a far field where all her dreams are cast:
A world weighs on her lids, this being past,
And all its legend gathered from her eyes,
So that it is the dizzy world that dies
Like a mad wheel whose motion cannot last.
Here lie the littered years, the fading heart,
The fettered love whose every word is spoken:
This is the night and turning where we part,
For one by one the living links are broken,
And, mingled in the ceremony of death,
Love and the silence watch a hastening breath.
15
11l
The stream has met the dark, the thwarted eye
Lowers before the wall of mystery
Only the fading fruit of time to see
Before the living candle flames that die:
This was my hope, the answer to my cry;
My store, but now my empty treasury:
Only rejoicing flags of memory
Keep joy alive where all these ruins lie.
There is no pattern and no darling aim,
And only sorrow speaks, she is not here
Who left me this and a consuming name,
And love that has a darkened edge of fear,
For having bathed in tears and felt the rod
Somewhere she finds the steps that slope to God.
IV
She said this was a shelter from the world
Whose peace was crowned by larks, by death designed:
A trusted field where life at last was kind
Under the shepherd, sleep, where hearts were furled:
It was a guarded peace, a resolute ground
Where stones rose in reproof, and sharp as flames
Love flung its cordon of invincible names,
And faith’s eternity embraced a mound.
Now here she lies where all my heart remains
Who came as bride to earth as once to me:
With her are strewn my many mortal gains,
Tomorrow clothes me but in poverty,
But still her presence from the wintry grave
Will kiss my sorrow like a summer wave.
16
V
Window that wore her image, that conferred
Her meaning looks to spare my wistful need,
You held all things that living could concede,
Spoke with the smile that was her final word:
Now you are empty, staring on my pain
Like a dead eye, my night forbids the day,
The road is barred, there is no other way,
I drown in loss, there is no good to gain.
'Tis death that hides my joy with cloud so deep,
While I must go among the voiceless years
With a light hand on life, looking for sleep,
Night being the time, the season being tears,
Until the frost, asking no other grace,
Death be a window with a waiting face.
VI
Now would I find her in those places where
Beauty befriended us and held us still,
Beyond the conquering streets and towers of ill,
And taught our wondering hearts and cleared of care:
There was no doubt, no pricking question there,
For love, content with its own calm and skill
Sufficed the wavering moods and hours to fill,
And kept us close and gave all good to share.
The sea will have another voice, she'll give
The soul and secret riches to the day:
She'll be the wandering life with which I live,
In all conflicting paths she'll be the way:
Earth is her home and death shall not have power
To hold my Love from this immortal hour.
17
VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF JOHN DONNE
Only death adds to our length, nor are we grown
In stature to be men till we are none.
DONNE: AN ANATOMY OF THE WORLD
Bent beneath the boughs of time a man
Is less than a man:
Diminished, diminished, except for the grave's adoption,
The anonymous.
Although he take the rain upon his shoulders
The hapless root
Is bitten by fire, and smothering the yellow grass
Life is iron.
Only out of a window open towards
The extravagant grave
May he see a summer, a madcap gleam of growth,
In a thought stand upright.
Else is he but a chime of bones, a rag
Riding the wind,
Neither enriched by a ghost nor entrusted with
The key to a god.
He is the agile pilgrim winning only
A witless journey:
Pomp-pauperised, with begging bowl of hope,
Death owes him nothing.
He may dream a crown but not for him shall be
A coronation:
Brave from all banquets not for him the table
Of daintier death.
What is he more than a waif woven into
The autumn disaster?
O rejected leaf black in the bitter alleys
Where is your spring?
18
Migratory, he shall seek and find pastures
Pretending wealth,
But through the wound of death shall he emerge
On the lush levels.
This leaden man by alchemy of death
Is sudden gold:
A god ruined beneath the roof of the sky
Finds stature in a leap.
His earth is a rocking stone in resolute waters,
Not even a safety
Island before the plunge, but to sink in death
Is to be established.
19
PHILOSOPHER
TO H. H.
Having arrived at many shores none ever
Possessed him, never did the roving eye light
On the thing fulfilled, but the new mountain merely
Was finger-post or no finger post to another.
This is the man in gray taller than
Towers, more voluble than cities, bearing
Wisdom like a bomb, dictating roads.
Houseless, no country holds him, and he looks
Never to west, and lies down with no sunset:
Man of the dawn, pacing forbidden shores,
First on his face the glory, and first on him
Change tearing the sky and the earth ceasing.
20
WHITE, DARK
Mountains have been in all my life and in different ways.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A MOUNTAINEER
Despising the easy streets and simpering plain,
Adjuring to peril, towers of teasing white:
They could only take yes from my admiring look,
And from the spirit prompting hands and feet
Not one such but the many mighty stood,
Posing their proud significance, they lifted
Me from the tinkling callow carnival
To the mature silence and grief to cast a man.
Mountains white, dark, piercing the midnight,
Lovers' revolt, revelation, anger.
Volcanic after many days and no
Return to understanding, death in dispute.
The flat deceit of snow where a foot may
Touch the trigger of an avalanche.
And one word releasing a mountain side
Of sorrow, leaves a mountain in the mind.
And that black mountain closing every road
That outsoars every sun-requited peak.
That, too, is with me as a promised climb,
My life to plan a favourable approach.
21
FOR A SAD LADY
Grieve not for hours that found the sun
O you for whom a song has risen:
Though praise and passion now be done
Why do you lie in sigh-built prison ?
Look not in sorrow on the hands
Warm with the bird you could not hold:
Though lover in the shadow stands
He left a fire to foil the cold.
And weep not beauty left, for he
Goes guarded by that human light
Against whatever mystery,
A star amid the alien night.
22
ON A VERANDAH
In the full embrace of sunshine I look upon
The cold and cruel grass, upon the damp
And crumpled leaves, and, warm with confidence,
I am withdrawn from the welter of decay
And glistening winter. O residence of life
In which I sit, the heat of love about me
And comforts cringing, resist the rainy wind,
The sly disaster parting boughs of night,
The careful hand of loss, the heavy tread
And possessive voice of sorrow, or if thunder
Leaving the sky splinter my solid peace,
Support the heart and let no ruin ravish.
Cool and green
Let death lie, and the token leaves betray
To no friendless fall, but let the path sing
With the romances of spring, and let the heat burn,
And the growing gold wipe winter from the grass.
23
MOUNTAINEER
Never free of the mountain, no man ever
Held his own freedom so precariously
As he who takes the peak as lord, admitting
An icy will that makes the meagre plain
A dubious reality and takes
From simple days their core of consequence.
Although he walk the streets their sounds cannot
Rend the remembered silence, nor can life
Calling along the flat, decorous paths
Deny the voices singing an ascension.
How shall a garden win him, though prostrate for
His sole content, while his desire returns
To the white beatitude, the fearful bride,
Shining on lovers but whispering with death ?
The hungry rivers wait, the thickets spread
Their nets of night, the staring rockface hoards
Its purpose like a god, but he will tread
The wayward slope heeding no phophecies
That darken winds . . .
24
GHANDI DEAD
As the brave gull the width of waters so I
Endured the image of eternity,
I went weighted with the invisible,
And more insistent than the shouting streets
Were the thin voices calling through the veil.
I was the bridge across which messengers
Went carrying palms, I was the shell whose murmurs
Of peace could not persuade: only by wasting
Could I become the master of floods, by weakness
See my sole will arrest the rush of hate.
Now I am dead, the people think of me
A god with folded hands, my small desires
All smouldered out beneath my cone of rest:
But I am not raised so high in prayer that I
Lose India like a child, my love asleep.
No cry shall flee through India but its pain
Shall darken round me, no division rend
The fearful land but I too feel the sword:
No blood shall bloom but I must wear again
The rose of death, for I am India.
20
GLACIER
Traveller on no light foot pitting the earth
With your determined tread, devouring stones,
And sinewed with snow and frost, your strength sears
The indomitable mountain, your strength lies
Huge and bestial, an unhurried hate,
Your slow anger meditates a goal.
You flout the walls that grip you, nothing turns
Your solid evil pace, and though the sun
Bring peace like a perching bird deep thereunder
Destruction growls, and though you wear the snow
Like innocence the buried will is guilt
How look on the wandering threat, how feel :
With feet the iron challenge ? No one goes free
Though wide the sunlight and the wing of peace:
The agile mind sits still, the spirit falls
Under the spell of an eternity.
For this is purpose, unleashed, here in the seen
The strong unseen, purpose breaking the small
And mortal dream and through the careless days
And vast caress of night a purpose grinding.
26
TREE
You repeat the human tragedy,
Whether it be
Love drooping from the heavy disclosure,
Or despair
Signalling the empty air.
On you the black stain
Of the rain:
On us
Tears that darken the heart.
Autumn's victim, ravaged saint,
Wrapt in a golden martyrdom,
One with all burning names
Born of the flames.
Or bankrupt, bare to winter,
Beauty worn to the bone,
And in that cold calamity
Announcing a heart's insolvency.
Or, erect in summer, beaded with birds,
You are lover, proud with sun,
Rapt above the crawling fates that put
The shadows at your foot.
22
READER TURNED PILGRIM
These books, perhaps not for you nor me,
Not remote pastures in which to replenish
The spirit’s energy:
Yet this and more they were to him.
Keys that commanded surprising doors,
Lights growing out of the void when thought
was dim.
These were his windows to the world,
Having learnt life he put his books away:
But here he drank, here thrust a torch,
Against whatever desert, whatever dark.
Not frittered like a breath,
But reader turned pilgrim,
And wearing amulets wrung from these redoubtable priests,
Shall he not prevail
To read a radiance on the walls of death ?
28
LETTER TO MY WIFE
On Holiday
Love was not meant to be a hermit
With no hand near,
And only memories trailing
Their dark or vivid raiment.
But this house is aloof in
A new pride of loneliness,
Admitting no alien voice
Where still your words are winsome.
How can I tread easily
The unfenced fields of sleep,
If heavier than night impends
The cloud of absence ?
You will see a river,
And you will know that I watch
Time flowing, bearing nothing to me,
Until it bring you at the incredible hour.
29
LETTER TO ANOTHER WORLD
From this autumn I write to you in your flowering cerement,
From this mortal house where I made frail offerings,
To send you an unrebukable word,
As gold-laced rock, love in a word of time,
A scroll that would not grieve eternity.
I ponder now the handwriting of your life,
Hieratic in stone, and every meek event
A peak in history, and I discover
Portrait passports to lost Elysiums.
My hungry prayer makes a path through every night
For your hesitating ghost and I remember
I wrote once, you by a distant river,
That time as a river carried nothing to me
Until it brought you at the incredible hour.
I write now, you on continuing holiday,
So lacking the cornucopia of your presence,
To tell you that summer redeems the earth, fore-shadowing
Your deathless season, and that your garden wears
No more an air of permanence and that I
Hold it an island with temporary provisions
Lying off the last continent and your completeness.
30
HIS LOVE AND RENUNCIATION
S. KIERKEGAARD
His melancholy seems to have been an ally of Kierkegaard's religious faith, assisting his desire to withdraw from wordly affairs. In the opening lines, for the sake of verisimilitude, I have adopted some of his own ecstatic addresses to his Love, varied and expanded them.
Light as a bird she shot up, and audacious
As a soaring thought, and then, tame with love,
Her proud perch was my hand where her wings
Shook with delight, but ah, she did not know
It was I threw her into the air, it was I
Who made the water as a carpet cringe
For her emancipated feet, and my acclaim,
Being rich with honour, lifted up her face
Till drained of memories.
She was possessed
By my strong eyes, enclosed in the instant glory,
Translated to beatitude while I,
Having beheld that lustrous limitless sea,
A province for my spirit, was self-drawn
To dire retreat, coveting that darker bride,
My melancholy with her voice of death.
31
ICY OMENS BLOW
She hears the first fine notes of spring in flowers
That watch her trembling hours:
But not for her the hurrying season sent
To carve the heart's content.
She sees the winter look with face of snow.
And icy omens blow
About my Love who with bewildered flakes
Now all my world forsakes.
And spring will cry against corroding pain
But not for her the gain
Who grips a thorn and in her dying dressed
Is sharply dispossessed.
32
YOUR BIRTH MY LIFE
Your birth my life that was not yet
Till our twin tendernesses met.
But time that plays a tortuous game
Twisted tomorrows till this came.
This death in life, this empty calm,
This riddle of your renouncing arm:
This doom in depth love's counterpart,
This halted hope, this coffined heart.
33
ANALYSIS OF GRIEF
Though strict the search grief finds no goal
Beyond the wander ways of thought:
Its fancy seeks in freer air
The captive of the clinging earth.
It lays no finger on the frail
Yesterday whose ghost distracts
An endless gloom, its anxious net
Is strung within a sterile depth.
The pressing memories are but
A wall of shadows, pale tokens
Of radiant realities
That died with her disastrous sun.
Grief is a floating entity
With no impulse, no direction,
Complete within itself, with core
Of stillness through the raging gladness.
Is this the true time of my love,
Enfolding a perpetual image,
Beauty not a resting place,
Not an attained felicity,
But still to seek, lovelier
In death’s habiliment, upbraiding
The high past as trivial, disclosing
To hope the far face of promise?
34
BEGGAR THE HEART
Beggar the heart, but find a wilderness
Where storms have liberty and trees are torn,
And where the earth is sour, guilty of thorn,
A place to match its new and ragged dress:
Let no path lead, nor wandering song caress,
For one who knows no manner but to mourn,
A smiling world is buried in his scorn,
Who bears a forest grief, no sun to bless.
This is the child that love bore yesterday,
Who flinches from the spring and can but know,
For dark content, the rank rejected way,
A blackened scene to drape its name of woe:
Haggard the heart, there is not any grace
But only that which wears a widowed face.
35
PHOTOGRAPH
Faith cannot hold the thought nor eye receive
This smiling pledge, this flourish of the past:
Surely some wealthy dream upon me cast
Has met the fatal morning beam to leave
Naked my life, ruin beyond reprieve.
Where tears assert a hungry loss to last,
The living face in darkness held so fast,
And the daunted mind knowing but to grieve.
Here yesterday is proud, and love is seen
As final, fixed as in rejoicing stone:
For time's swift plunder and for sorrows lean
These features shall compel and must atone:
For though a furtive death has flung a breach
Yet this shall be her distant love and speech.
36
THE BEACH
Her presence was about me like a fire,
The world and love were morning, and the beach,
Winsome with all my wealth, my sole desire,
Gave dazzle of joy to the unending reach.
O we were ravished by the simple reign
Of little staring relics, stick and shell:
The sea had cast its loneliness and pain,
And, hand in hand, there was no fear to tell.
Her going has washed wonder from the shore;
A gull's slow shadow on the lifeless sand,
A wave remembering grief... for me no more
The miracle that touched a torpid land:
There is no marvellous coast, no morning shout,
Although my prayer should search the world about.
37
THE TRUTH IS SINGLE
The truth is single and severe,
No traffic with the trifling dust;
Your dawn will not be dimmed, you must
Bloom like the day upon my fear.
From your dark death what light, what gain
From your deep grave? All presences,
The sky, the trees learn tenderness
From you who smile away my pain:
So this new thing is but the breath
That fanned our fancy's world, that moved
Through our twin hearts and taught we loved,
As we love now through leagues of death;
And thro' time's valley you in flood
Are my release, my sorrow’s good.
38
NO LOVE AS NOW
No love as now when my unyielding passion
Consumes your death and the grandiloquent
Grave tokens speak but what our love has meant,
Surpassing all of time's declining fashion;
Not less but more through this rejected relic,
The listless bone that could not bear our love:
The flesh makes way, this is the moment of
Union beyond the body's rhetoric.
Your beauty daunted me, your eyes withheld
The fuller image, and your words but gave
A foretaste of the tale that death has spelled
Although a passing look from you would save:
I could not find you nor could I possess
Till you were lost in everlastingness.
34
DEATH'S DARLING
Death's darling, pure on that pool of rest,
My lily love, whom death loved best,
From faithless earth and all that seemed,
And lower loves by pain redeemed —
How can I blame your hidden bliss
Where all I covet for you is ?
And yet you cannot be complete
Until our loyal tendrils meet:
Pampered in penurious time
Tangled together they must climb,
It needs only my agony
To furnish our eternity.
40
A CRYSTAL BIRTH
For you whose body kissed the earth
Dull death devised a crystal birth,
And in the dark my sorrow waits
For you whose love makes light of gates.
No road, no road, but thickets tall
As the sky forbidding festival:
How should I think the thorn of pleasure
Sharing with you eternity’s leisure ?
36
NO HARVEST HERE
Like a figure head’s stare
Disdaining the oceans, straining
Beyond the harbour hush, the eyes look past
All fading presences, never are held
By the hard image, the plausible flower,
The hypnotic wave,
The mercenary grave.
Eyes find no object, and love, forewarned,
Outgrows the limbs’ tenure, retires
From fevers of flesh, those death-dispensing fires.
No harvest here, life and love accumulate
At the river mouth, death's unambiguous outlet.
42
THIS DAY THAT HEAVY-LIDDED YEAR
This day that heavy-lidded year
Whose face of dawn was flecked with fear—
This day, time's trembling delegate,
Flung for you the fog-bound gate.
O not for me the squandering rose,
Nor any tripping song that goes:
I, like the autumn-ruined bough,
Stir to malefic musics now.
And what shall star or moonlight tell
To one whose mentor is a knell ?
Uncomprehended bird and leaf
Seen through the window of my grief.
Life is strange and life is far,
Death is my familiar
Whose speech is dark but clear as day
To you who fled the curse of clay.
No moth-like word and no spring air
To light upon my winter care—
Only with you converse to keep
In the dissolving lanes of sleep.
You cannot come, perhaps I go
To you made visible by woe,
And in your interdicted land,
So apt is love, am made to stand.
Until I cross the bridges to
The country that embraces you:
Until I tear the fences down
And flee this smooth perfidious town —
Until my smiling death appears,
This day a dagger in the years.
38
THE DANCER AND THE PROPHET
She whirls in a storm of praise
In this the sultry hour of her dominion,
Beauty, possessive as the sun,
And these the dazed minds
Caught in the loop of loveliness.
All words desert
the brain groping for speech,
For this starry thing burns away all utterance,
And loads the time with an intolerable treasure
Who can make a song to follow
That glittering flight,
Limited by no leash,
Sobered by no presage,
Scattering laughters among the ascetic tombs?
To her, yesterday is not,
And to-morrow, even now walking,
Is an unheeded threat—
How shall she from the reckless music
Hear the studied approach of the stranger ?
She is the darling of time,
The quivering priestess under the arch of days,
But she does not see
Time putting off his reassuring disguise,
And on the appointed night
The murderer at the last milestone.
Cool in her confident dream
she knows nothing of
One lurking beyond the lure of her effulgence,
The dark-browed exile
Who from his god-haunted rocks
Sees the dancer ringed by the wrathful fire—
Sees her like a sun-blessed wave
Die in a dishonour of scum.
44
For this is the man approved who from his tower
Of prescience sees the casual
Disaster fall from the dallying god
On the swaying adoration of the flesh.
And from a Voice more secret than the heart,
Knows of the bright-eyed bird
The least touch of whose feathers
Delivers the infection of death.
The dancer, along the blazing highway,
Could not discover the place
Where her heart was hidden—
Could not find
The self in its dreadful hermitage.
But he, having torn the corrupting raiment
And beneath the charming cerecloth
Having found himself
found also
The revealing solitude in which the rocks
Arranged themselves into an altar releasing
Perpetual waters.
And falling at last under the smile of death
He persevered towards the highest peak
Yet still lived in a word which ran
Like spring about the winter-famished pastures.
40
CHRISTMAS COME IN
Carol, 1950
Christmas come in on a tide of bells
Christmas come in with a shout:
Winter a ghost, summer the host,
Christmas come in.
With never a log to light the story,
With never the stamp of storm,
Christmas come in unweary, warm,
Christmas come in with glory.
Though heavy on heart the tread of days,
Though a hush from the horn of fear,
Come in to shine on the age of the year,
Christmas come in with praise.
Love be the carol, feather of dove,
Love be a flying sandal:
Love like a candle all to handle,
Christmas come in with love.
46
HERO WORSHIPPER
Must I ever stand
Cold before Colossus
Until warmed by his greatness—
Walk through a winter of self-abnegation
To clutch his fruits,
Find in myself no roots ?
Like wings his words
Envelop me, beat down my speech:
His glance
Shrivels my significance.
I drown in a silence
Brimmed with his presence:
But I shall find myself,
Shall scream myself awake,
Lay hold of my powers like weapons
To wean me from this woe of littleness.
47
HYDRO WORKS
First the valley where the houses
Are cherished by hedges and trees,
The pastures flowing green
To the river, the willows
Frail against a face of rock.
Nothing to threaten the eye,
Sheep penned in the peace of summer,
Larks with the song of certitude.
Emerging from the valley the mind
Encounters like an enemy, itself,
Rock-like in the cowering wilderness:
The idling spirit
Recoils from the resolute wall,
The squat citadel spraying power.
And the hills stand in submission
And the dumb, disciplined waters,
For harder than driven stone or defiant rock
The hard core of the purpose and will of man.
48
MISS GARTH
She lived alone but often she was seen
Like a neglected bloom in her small bay-window:
No waves swept over her but ripples
Were the motions of her modest world.
Never had she been young, even her hat
Was ageless and time, repenting her ruined face,
Now passed her by and left her, rocklike,
Confronting whatever doom
With old-fashioned placidity.
She went under one shadow,
The iron god of duty,
And, because of his adorable exactions,
She trampled her corns with a martyr's relish.
The hearts of children were not bruised
By this survival of a stiffer age,
But she conferred an inexplicable good
Like flowers that surprise a flinty place.
49
TRAIN
Hurling away the harvest, flinging
The staid hay-stacks into idiot flight,
It carves the day
With angry purpose,
And the doomed houses sail away.
Portentous and hotly proud, :
It drains the land of significance:
The sheep-faced country retires
Before such pomp, such fires;
Simplicity cannot endure
Nor the morning-kissed
Earth before such antagonist.
I, caught in the contagion of power,
Feel the land as dominion,
Positive as the engine of the sun,
Or as man, truculent through time,
Quelling the world,
The servile road where runs his story,
Plunging to death or glory.
50
VENUS
Day voices die in twilight. Venus takes
The dark without fanfare, Venus the untroubled,
The pilgrim bearing vials of purification,
O I am white from the whiteness of a star.
Hers is the eyedrop of peace, and under her
Memory strokes the brain and the west is a field
Of emancipation, and always a lover she leans
From broken clouds a breast of serenity.
The world like a shoe discarded I am equipped
For the shrine, above my docile head the rich
Darkness looms like a priest and Venus sends
Over me her runnels of renovation.
51
THE MAN WHO WANTED TO BE A SEAGULL
He chose the sea, mother, emancipator,
(Spendthrift of seamen's hopes, cloaking a knell)
Attained the sea-blue heart and salted speech,
And the cruising bird's intent exploratory eye.
Especially his perennial longing reached,
Out to the gull and its immaculate freedom:
He loved them even when, desultory in harbours,
Their lust probed the slack and dubious waters.
No saintly rapture after his body's shipwreck.
But he would look forward and through his death and see
Himself as a gull in smoothest searching flight,
Between the sea and sky his wandering heaven.
And when at last he felt the fatal wind
He smiled, expecting wings of liberty.
52
CENTENNIAL ODE
DEDICATED TO THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS
Written for music and set by John Ritchie of Canterbury University College. First performed by the Royal Christchurch Musical Society, 1951.
From the old remembering harbour
The ships went,
The day being heavy with the weight of departure
And ghostly fears and hopes
Were singing in the ropes.
Men of one place knowing only
The sure village or the prodigal town,
The street of friendly windows,
The history-ridden road
And the bland
Buckler of the land.
Men of one place not hungry for
The hidden country —
Son like sire,
Docile to no pointing finger of desire.
But when knowledge came like a stone
Shivering the sheltered pool,
There was no rest for the awakened heart:
Already they felt the chill of a departing glory
As they stepped into another story.
Claimed by the winds and
Poised on peril,
Doubt came like a spray
Dashed in the face,
But warm out of the secret night
The whiffs of promise.
48
Cupped in green
They came to clear waters
Whose own contentment
Flowed into them:
How could memory be heard
When adventure shouted from the hills ?
But like a cold hand
A strangeness touched them as they touched the land,
And home was but a mood, a spirit distressed,
Waiting for walls in which to be at rest.
But the rough, relenting track
Gave them the prophetic hill,
And the hill gave the plain
Apt for the plough of pain.
And gave
Labour that lapped up the years
With laughter loose among crowding fears:
And for all their wealth of sorrows
The tall tomorrows.
And so they walked with time having wrung
A lyric from the cold denying season,
The children singing—
We sail into a new day.
And the women, in the hour of twittering memories—
Time could not but bless
When our love walked the wilderness.
So they saw the beginning
And faith saw
The flowing good forever
From the mine of their endeavour.
And pilgrims always, knowing their mortal hour,
Faith signed itself in stone, the holy tower.
54
CHRISTMAS IN THE SUN
The river flashes a smile, the trees gather
Families like anxious mothers, the birds
Buried in leaves uncover their songs, the cries
Of children rain on the riverbed, a girl
Sees the hour in a poem's prism, a man
Sleeps off the headlines, and unwatched the sheep
Drift across their heaven of grass, and life
Is in the sun . . .
Till the broadcast, scattering Christmas,
Brings night, and winter, and crying birth, and sheep
Watched under stars, and the trees of picnic hear
The exhortation of bells, and down by the river
The carols tumble where the children have seized their joy,
Having quick desires —through the pleasure and glory
Runs like a radiant child the Bethlehem story.
55
RETROSPECT
Midnight, 31st December 1949
Staring at the harbour and the enigmatic hills
I looked through them to the huge dawning dark:
The clock had summoned the new and phantom year
Whose easy road could be like the sloping town.
No fortune teller and no indication
That every sorrow split my innocent palm.
But rather tomorrow selected for its symbol
The mothering moonlight and the unharrowed sea.
I moved off from the warning clock and felt
No rising tide of evil, doting upon
The fidelity of landmarks treading the mist.
Strange, but with the familiar tower of love.
But that was taken stone by stone until
Unhoused and swallowed in a cave of grief
I heard the clock announcing all things new,
Ruin, mad moonlight, and a storm-cut sea.
56
I SANG MY LOVE
I sang my love through leaves of spring
And all my joy was easy treasure.
For striding youth was mine and life
Found all the world in flower with pleasure.
I sang my love when songs were tossed
On every wind, and every day
Came in to call the dance, and even
The dark heart of the pine was gay.
But autumn like a prophet cried
Against that day of darling folly,
And snapped the silver mood of men
And masked the earth in melancholy.
Even so my spring is passed and I
Am on the outward march, but strong
Against the wolfish autumn waste
Where grief is poised to grapple song.
For, growing old, my joy is held
From time in never-yielding hand;
I sing where songs have fluttered down,
I sing my love through autumn land.
52
EASILY THE SPRING MOVES
Easily the spring moves, easily
With light, leaping armament and the earth
Feels the relaxing winter claw, hears
The astonished drums dying and remembers only
In sunset ruin the broken royal angers.
This is the sun returning
Yearning towards the earth whose smile
Is spring. O lie not
With the winter wreck, or, if a loser,
Count now your clear possessions, fossick
For fragments. Winter no longer holds
Like a beast the land, and the heart itself,
No stranger to cold, looks for its own release.
After dream-trodden dark
See now the light,
And hear beyond the black and goading voices
The singing day . . . O plundered by the storm,
On your wasted heart be undenying spring,
As on the earth a dawn of daffodils.
58
SHE WAS MY LOVE WHO COULD DELIVER
She was my love who could deliver
From paws of pain and melancholy,
And light the lamps that burn forever,
And cleanse a page of screeds of folly,
And with a motion of her hand
Could heap a harvest on my land.
And she could melt an iron mood,
And lashing chords with love were softer,
And she could bring my course to good,
Could renovate with raining laughter,
And eye and heart her beauty brace
When death approached with peering face.
Against a secret shaft of malice
Piercing my solitary isle
She would defend with flying solace,
And visitations of her smile,
And from the spirit's blank occasions,
And from the craft of days and seasons
She was my love who could deliver.
59
THE RETURN
Her childhood could not believe in those mountains
But growing up under them
Her youth learned to kneel to their greatness.
Finding, however, a love higher than mountains,
She departed into an equable domesticity,
Rude, nevertheless, with a dark rush of duties.
And caught in cascading trivialities.
But love kept a silence in her heart,
And snow-bright memories rose
Out of a scene distant as juvenility,
A tranquillizing retrospect.
And these stood guard until time
In his more tender guise as deliverer
Nudged her into the narrowness of age.
Where hungering for a waft of the freedom in which she began
And with past loyalties stirring like lilies,
She returned to the former wilderness
Where she had lost her childhood like a silver trinket,
And to the mountains and their old redeeming friendship,
Feeling so safe under mountains.
60
HONEYMOON SCENE REVISITED
And here is the road that was carpeted
With all the chronicles of love,
And the hedges thrusting fabulous favours
Under an arch of skylarks,
And the hills meditating but reaching
Never our rich conclusion—
But the silver mountain beyond
Sheathing a sharpened future.
The time was a sonnet's resounding final couplet.
Our master work recorded for
The strings of the years.
And now, still the pondering hills,
The skylarks untouched by terror.
The hedges consuming death, and, I alone
Starveling, feeding on echo.
61
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/books/ALMA1954-9917503793502836-She-was-my-spring---poems
Bibliographic details
APA: Hervey, J. R. (John Russell). (1954). She was my spring : poems. Caxton Press.
Chicago: Hervey, J. R. (John Russell). She was my spring : poems. Christchurch, N.Z.: Caxton Press, 1954.
MLA: Hervey, J. R. (John Russell). She was my spring : poems. Caxton Press, 1954.
Word Count
6,637
She was my spring : poems Hervey, J. R. (John Russell), Caxton Press, Christchurch, N.Z., 1954
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