John Drinkwater

Beyond my window in the night Is but a drab inglorious street, Yet there the frost and clean starlight

Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed Because a summer evening passed; And little Ariadne cried

From babyhood I have known the beauty of earth, I learnt it, I think, in the strange months before birth, I learnt it passing and passing by each moon

You who have gone gathering Cornflowers and meadowsweet, Heard the hazels glancing down

And Jonathan too had honour in his heart, Jonathan who with an armour-bearer went Alone by Michmash to the Philistines,

Shy in their herding dwell the fallow deer. They are spirits of wild sense. Nobody near Comes upon their pastures. There a life they live,

There is a castle on a hill, So far into the sky, That birds that from the valley-beds

High up in the sky there, now, you know, In this May twilight, our cottage is asleep, Tenantless, and no creature there to go

What love is; how I love; how builders' clay By love is lit into a golden spending; How love calls beautiful ghosts back to the day;

Full summer dusk was round him as he stood On the hill-top, over the calling sheep Drifting along the pastured downs. The moon

A shower of green gems on my apple tree This first morning of May Has fallen out of the night, to be

At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows, And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes

(To those who live there) For peace, than knowledge more desirable, Into your Sussex quietness I came,

Now June walks on the waters, And the cuckoo's last enchantment Passes from Olton pools.

When you deliberate the page Of Alexander's pilgrimage, Or say - 'It is three years, or ten,

Then I asked: 'Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?' He replied: 'All Poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.' Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell'.

Though black the night, I know upon the sky, A little paler now, if clouds were none, The stars would be. Husht now the thickets lie,

I do not think that skies and meadows are Moral, or that the fixture of a star Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees

I Long ago some builder thrust Heavenward in Southampton town

He was a man with wide and patient eyes, Grey, like the drift of twitch-fires blown in June, That, without fearing, searched if any wrong

Sometimes the ghosts forgotten go Along the hill-top way, And with long scythes of silver mow

I Time gathers to my name; Along the ways wheredown my feet have passed

That was the proud woman, Naaman's wife. Basking at noon under the Syrian fans, While Naaman, the leprous mighty captain,

Black in the summer night my Cotswold hill Aslant my window sleeps, beneath a sky Deep as the bedded violets that fill

(AGED SIXTEEN) Dear boy unborn: the son but of my dream, Promise of yet unrisen day,