She was my spring : poems

Hervey, J. R. (John Russell), Caxton Press, Christchurch, N.Z., 1954

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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