Poems

This is their trumpet ripe and rounded, They have burnt the wheat and gathered the chaff, And we that have fought them, we that have watched them, Have we at least not cause to laugh?

Never so low at least we stumbled— Dead we have been but not so dead As these that live on the life they squandered, As these that drink of the blood they shed.

We never boasted the thing we blundered, We never Haunted the thing that fails, We never quailed from the living laughter, To howl to the dead who tell no tales,

'Twas another finger at least that pointed Our wasted men or our emptied bags, It was not we that sounded the trumpet In front of the triumph of wrecks and rags.

Fear not these, they have made their bargain, They have counted the cost of the last of raids, They have staked their lives on the things that live not, They have burnt their house for a fire that fades.

Five years ago and we might have feared them, Been drubbed by the coward and taught by the dunce; Truth may endure and be told and re-echoed, But a lie can never be young but once.

Five years ago and we might have feared them; Now, when they lift the laurelled brow, There shall naught go up from our hosts assembled But a laugh like thunder. We know them now.

WRITTEN DURING A FRIDAY AND SATURDAY IN AUGUST 1911.

King Dives he was waiting in his garden all alone, Where his flowers are made of iron and his trees are made of stone, And his hives are full of thunder and the lightning leaps and kills, For the mills of God grind slowly; and he works with other mills. Dives found a mighty silence; and he missed the throb and leap, The noise of all the sleepless creatures singing him to sleep. And he said: "A screw has fallen—or a bolt has slipped aside— Some little thing has shifted": and the little things replied:

"Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels; We are taking rest, master, finding how it feels, Strict the law of thine and mine: theft we ever shun— All the wheels are thine, master—tell the wheels to run! Yea, the Wheels are mighty gods—set them going then! We are only men, master, have you heard of men?

"O, they live on earth like fishes, and a gasp is all their breath. God for empty honours only gave them death and scorn of death, And you walk the worms for carpet and you tread a stone that squeals— Only, God that made them worms did not make them wheels. Man shall shut his heart against you and you shall not find the spring. Man who wills the thing he wants not, the intolerable thing— Once he likes his empty belly better than your empty head Earth and heaven are dumb before him: he is stronger than the dead.

"Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels, Steel is beneath your hand, stone beneath your heels, Steel will never laugh aloud, hearing what we heard, Stone will never break its heart, mad with hope deferred— Men of tact that arbitrate, slow reform that heals— Save the stinking grease, master, save it for the wheels.

"King Dives in the garden, we have naught to give or hold— (Even while the baby came alive the rotten sticks were sold.) The savage knows a cavern and the peasants keep a plot, Of all the things that men have had—lo! we have them not. Not a scrap of earth where ants could lay their eggs— Only this poor lump of earth that walks about on legs— Only this poor wandering mansion, only these two walking trees. Only hands and hearts and stomachs—what have you to do with these? You have engines big and burnished, tall beyond our fathers' ken, Why should you make peace and traffic with such feeble folk as men?

"Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels, They are deaf to demagogues, deaf to crude appeals; Are our hands our own, master?—how the doctors doubt! Are our legs our own, master? wheels can run without— Prove the points are delicate—they will understand. All the wheels are loyal; see how still they stand!"

King Dives he was walking in his garden in the sun, He shook his hand at heaven, and he called the wheels to run, And the eyes of him were hateful eyes, the lips of him were curled, And he called upon his father that is lord below the world, Sitting in the Gate of Treason, in the gate of broken seals, "Bend and bind them, bend and bind them, bend and bind them into wheels, Then once more in all my garden there may swing and sound and sweep— The noise of all the sleepless things that sing the soul to sleep."

Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels. Weary grow the holidays when you miss the meals, Through the Gate of Treason, through the gate within, Cometh fear and greed of fame, cometh deadly sin; If a man grow faint, master, take him ere he kneels. Take him, break him, rend him, end him, roll him, crush him with the wheels.

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget. For we are the people of England, that never has spoken yet. There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully, There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we. There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise. There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes; You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet: Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.

The fine French kings came over in a flutter of flags and dames. We liked their smiles and battles, but we never could say their names. The blood ran red to Bosworth and the High French lords went down; There was naught but a naked people under a naked crown.

And the eyes of the King's Servants turned terribly every way, And the gold of the King's Servants rose higher every day. They burnt the homes of the shaven men, that had been quaint and kind, Till there was no bed in a monk's house, nor food that man could find. The inns of God where no man paid, that were the wall of the weak, The King's Servants ate them all. And Still we did not speak.

And the face of the King's Servants grew greater than the King: He tricked them, and they trapped him, and stood round him in a ring. The new grave lords closed round him, that had eaten the abbey's fruits. And the men of the new religion, with their bibles in their boots. We saw their shoulders moving, to menace or discuss, And some were pure and some were vile; but none took heed of us. We saw the King as they killed him, and his face was proud and pale; And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.

A war that we understood not came over the world and woke Americans, Frenchmen, Irish; but we knew not the things they spoke. They talked about rights and nature and peace and the people's reign: And the squires, our masters, bade us fight; and never scorned us again. Weak if we be for ever, could none condemn us then; Men called us serfs and drudges; men knew that we were men. In foam and flame at Trafalgar, on Albuera plains, We did and died like lions, to keep ourselves in chains, We lay in living ruins; firing and fearing not The strange fierce face of the Frenchmen who knew for what they fought, And the man who seemed to be more than man we strained against and broke; And we broke our own rights with him. And still we never spoke.

Our patch of glory ended; we never heard guns again. But the squire seemed struck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew, He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo. Or perhaps the shades of the shaven men, whose spoil is in his house, Come back in shining shapes at last to spoil his last carouse: We only know the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea. And a new people takes the land: and still it is not we.

They have given us into the hand of the new unhappy lords, Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load 01 their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet, Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street. It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first, Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst. It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest God's scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best. But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

So you have gained the golden crowns, so you have piled together The laurels and the jewels, the pearls out of the blue, But I will beat the bounding drum and I will fly the feather For all the glory I have lost, the good I never knew.

I saw the light of morning pale on princely human faces, In tales irrevocably gone, in final night enfurled, I saw the tail of flying fights, a glimpse of burning blisses, And laughed to think what I had lost—the wealth of all the world.

Yea, ruined in a royal game I was before my cradle; Was ever gambler hurling gold who lost such things as I? The purple moth that died an hour ere I was born of That great green sunset God shall make three days after I die.

When all the lights are lost and done, when all the skies are broken, Above the ruin of the stars my soul shall sit in state, With a brain made rich, with the irrevocable sunsets, And a closed heart happy in the fullness of a fate.

So you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the golden weather, The kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy and sell, But I will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring feather, For the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like hell.

O well for him that loves the sun That sees the heaven-race ridden or run, The splashing seas of sunset won, And shouts for victory.

God made the sun to crown his head, And when death's dart at last is sped, At least it will not find him dead, And pass the carrion by.

O ill for him that loves the sun; Shall the sun stoop for anyone? Shall the sun weep for hearts undone Or heavy souls that pray?

Not less for us and everyone Was that white web of splendour spun; O well for him who loves the sun Although the sun should slay.

Happy, who like Ulysses or that lord Who raped the fleece, returning full and sage, With usage and the world's wide reason stored, With his own kin can wait the end of age. When shall I see, when shall I see, God knows! My little village smoke; or pass the door, The old dear door of that unhappy house That is to me a kingdom and much more? Mightier to me the house my fathers made Than your audacious heads, O Halls of Rome! More than immortal marbles undecayed, The thin sad slates that cover up my home; More than your Tiber is my Loire to me, Than Palatine my little Lyré there; And more than all the winds of all the sea The quiet kindness of the Angevin air.

"The Rev. Isaiah Bunter has disappeared into the interior of the Solomon Islands, and it is feared that he may have been devoured by the natives, as there has been a considerable revival of religious customs among the Polynesians."

A real paragraph from a real Paper; only the names altered.

It was Isaiah Bunter Who sailed to the world's end, And spread religion in a way That he did not intend.

He gave, if not the gospel-feast, At least a ritual meal; And in a highly painful sense He was devoured with zeal.

And who are we (as Henson says) That we should close the door? And should not Evangelicals All jump at shedding Gore?

And many a man will melt in man, Becoming one, not two, When smacks across the startled earth The Kiss of Kikuyu.

When Man is the Turk, and the Atheist, Essene, Erastian Whig, And the Thug and the Druse and the Catholic, And the crew of the Captain's gig.

The old earth keepeth her watch the same. Alone in a voiceless void doth stand, Her orange flowers in her bosom flame, Her gold ring in her hand. The surfs of the long gold-crested morns Break ever more at her great robe's hem, And evermore come the bleak moon-horns. But she keepeth not watch for them.

She keepeth her watch through the awns, But the heart of her groweth not old, For the peal of the bridegroom's paeans, And the tale she once was told.

The nations shock and the cities reel, The empires travail and rive and rend, And she looks on havoc and smoke and steel, And knoweth it is not the end. The faiths may choke and the powers despair, The powers re-arise and the faiths renew, She is only a maiden, waiting there, For the love whose word is true.

She keepeth her watch through the aeons, But the heart of her groweth not old, For the peal of the bridegroom's paeans, And the tale she once was told.

Through the cornfield's gleam and the cottage shade, They wait unwearied, the young and old, Mother for child and man for maid. For a love that once was told. The hair grows grey under thatch or slates, The eyes grow dim behind lattice panes, The earth-race wait as the old earth waits, And the hope in the heart remains.

She keepeth her watch through the aeons, But the heart of her groweth not old, For the peal of the bridegroom's paeans, And the tale she once was told.

God's gold ring on her hand is bound, She fires with blossom the grey hill-sides, Her fields are quickened, her forests crowned, While the love of her heart abides, And we from the fears that fret and mar Look up in hours and behold awhile Her face, colossal, mid star on star, Still looking forth with a smile.

She keepeth her watch through the sons, But the heart of her groweth not old, For the peal of the bridegroom's paeans, And the tale she once was told.