page 92

Reality
This wide arc of earth and sea,
Wrinkled hills' immensity,
Lambent greens and flowing golds,
Valleys which the river moulds;
All this stir of light and shade
Is by mine own being made;
Patterned leaf and fretting bough
With the birds in tumult now,
And the stealth of sunset wind
Have no being save in my mind.
Forest ripples, start and sway,
Wheeling of the brisk, blue day,
And the gloomed, tremendous night
Lit by moons of borrowed light,
All are just a faery mood
Of the man-created wood.

This tall fir, so straight and young,
From a casual seedling sprung,
Armoured against thrust and blow,
Clutching frost and beating snow,
Moored in windy tides that swing
In the swelling days of Spring,
Takes its form and shape and scent
From my busy brain's assent.
I need but to turn my head,
Shut mine eyes, and it is dead—
Faded all its coloured pride,
Vanished bough and leaf beside,
Foothold where the tui sings,

page 93

Home of thousand creeping things.
And the wind that tunnels through
Whistling crack and roaring flue,
Stop mine ears and what are you?
But a ragged, waving tree,
But a cloud's flight over me,
But a straining, blind and brute,
At my body by the root.

In that lucid void there glow
Colours I shall never know,
For mine eye's receptive skin
Has no way to let them in.
Every chord musicians make
When the rich vibrations wake
Beats my ears' responsive zones
Meshed in its soft overtones,
And the sound of any word
Is by tumbling accents blurred.

This smooth-shaped mahogany
To a stronger-seeing eye
Is with giant fissures rift,
On its shining surface lift
Marching mountains by whose crests
Atom eagles have their nests,
Yet the board beneath my hand
Is caressing, silken, bland.

Seeking truth I grope, I pry,
Lift my anxious, unquiet eye,
Search forgotten wisdom out,
Calculate, and put to rout

page 94

Calculation's judgments when
They return to me again.
Which the real, the seeming things?
Dark distrust its curtain flings
On the portal of my mind,
And I halt, benumbed and blind.

I cannot scale, I cannot flee
This wall that bars reality.

Sonnet for Elizabeth
Beauty has come to us from other days
Storied and strange, in triumph and in tears,
Cloaked in sweet quietness, clad in glory's blaze,
Adown the viewless path of travelled years.
Old lovers gazed upon it, felt love's sun
Burn into brightness, saw the white steel fall
And unremembering slept, their bodies one
With mould and must, their names a clarion call.

Now is your own dear beauty to the world
A voice uplifted and a trumpet blown,
A silken splendour never idly furled
Or listless in life's airs, a tome of truth
For the faint earth. Oh, wondrous to have known
Beauty in you and you in beauty's youth.

page 95

Retrospect
And thus, my dear, and thus we loved,
Hugged our contentment, languored, moved
In a lamped mist, felt pulses ring,
Stammered, touched hands, knew kisses' sting
And the whole flame of nearness. We,
Wrapped in our glowing certainty,
Knew no pretence. Eye smiled to eve
From a complete, unclouded sky
Of being. Strife and mind's distress
Could never near us; they were less
Than unmarked fading of a star
From heaven's lighted harbour. Far
From the long littleness of day
We walked a calm, resplendent way,
Alert, responsive, each to each
Without the stumbling sounds of speech.
Our level minds, apt parallels,
Reached out together. Never dwells
A look on a loved lover's face,
Moving with fond, and transient grace,
But we looked so; never a thought
Of tenderness in tribute brought,
But we have paid it—there was caught
From some remote and slumbering sea,
In our minds' mesh, serenity.
Measured when others were beside,
We were a warm, suffusing pride
In one another, and our glance
Shattered the wall of circumstance.

Now in this book I read and find
All that those months have left behind,
page 96 A tiny, tragic, mummied flower,
Corpse of dead Springtime, hour by hour
Tombed in an old and mumbling book
In which but patient scholars look—
The violet which you leant to pull
That day, blue-gowned and beautiful,
We curled beside the river's brink;
I watched the slim and spreading chink
Until it suddenly shut and then
The pages' straightness stood again.

You are a mood of quietness,
Leisured remembrance, something less;
A dry, dead flower, a faded flame
—And what, I wonder, was your name?

Quentin Pope.