Sir John Collings Squire

Gently the petals fall as the tree gently sways That has known many springs and many petals fall Year after year to strew the green deserted ways

I. MORNING The village fades away Where I last night came,

The loose earth falls in the grave like a peaceful regular breathing; Too like, for I was deceived a moment by the sound: It has covered the heap of bracken that the gardener laid above him;

(To K. Wigram.) Sheltered, when the rain blew over the hills it was, Sunny all day when the days of summer were long,

Now am I a tin whistle Through which God blows, And I wish to God I were a trumpet

There was a time that's gone And will not come again, We knew it was a pleasant time,

Now very quietly, and rather mournfully, In clouds of hyacinth the sun retires, And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him

(F.T.) The cord broke, and the tent Slipped, and the silken roof

Muse, you have opened like a flower. *    *    *    *    * Long ago I knew that brown integument,

[To F., who complained of his vagueness and lack of dogmatic statement] Not, I suppose, since I deny Appearance is reality,

My heart was like a bird and took to flight, Around the rigging circling joyously; The ship rolled on beneath a cloudless sky

All the trees and bushes of the garden Display their bright new green. But above them all, still bare,

A smooth blue sky with puffed motionless clouds. Standing over the plain of red roofs and bushy trees The bright coloured shell of the large enamelled sky.

I.    THE FLUKE For two years you went Through all the worst of it,

There was a day, when I, if that was I, Surrendered lay beneath a burning sky, Where overhead the azure ached with heat,

As I stand waiting in the rain For the foggy hoot of the London train, Gazing at silent wall and lamp

When her eyes' sudden challenge first halted my feet on the path, I stood like a shivering caught fugitive, and strained at my breath, And the Truth in her eyes was the portent of Love and of Death,

O full of candour and compassion, Whom love and worship both would praise, Love cannot frame nor worship fashion

Dark fir-tops foot the moony sky, Blue moonlight bars the drive; Here at the open window I

(To F. S.) In the smooth grey heaven is poised the pale half moon And sheds on the wide grey river a broken reflection.

The wind of evening cried along the darkening trees, Along the darkening trees, heavy with ancient pain, Heavy with ancient pain from faded centuries,

"I suddenly realise that the ambition of my life has been, since I was two, to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.", Letter from Rupert Brooke.    (Died at Scyros, April 23rd, 1915.) JUSTINIAN. Does the church stand I raised

No creature stirs in the wide fields. The rifted western heaven yields The dying sun's illumination.

Lord, I have seen at harvest festival In a white lamp-lit fishing-village church, How the poor folk, lacking fine decorations,

THE ONE The dead man's gone, the live man's sad, the dying leaf shakes on the tree, The wind constrains the window-panes and moans like moaning of the sea,

There is a far unfading city Where bright immortal people are; Remote from hollow shame and pity,

I vaguely wondered what you were about, But never wrote when you had gone away; Assumed you better, quenched the uneasy doubt

I vaguely wondered what you were about, But never wrote when you had gone away; Assumed you better, quenched the uneasy doubt

Beloved, when my heart's awake to God And all the world becomes His testimony, In you I most do see, in your brave spirit,

Than farthest stars more distant, A mile more, A mile more,

The leaves fall gently on the grass, And all the willow trees, and poplar trees, and elder trees That bend above her where she sleeps,

When I see truth, do I seek truth Only that I may things denote, And, rich by striving, deck my youth

Wind waves the reeds by the river, Grey sky lids the leaden water. Ducks fly low across the water,

My soul, it shall not take us, O we will escape This world that strives to break us

Death in the cold grey morning Came to the man where he lay; And the wind shivered, and the tree shuddered

I When I was a boy there was a friend of mine: We thought ourselves warriors and grown folk swine,

Moonlit woodland, veils of green, Caves of empty dark between; Veils of green from rounded arms

I shall make beauty out of many things: Lights, colours, motions, sky and earth and sea, The soft unbosoming of all the springs

The room is full of the peace of night, The small flames murmur and flicker and sway, Within me is neither shadow, nor light,

Airy and quick and wise In the shed light of the sun, You clasp with friendly eyes

This dense hard ground I tread. These iron bars that ripple past, Will they unshaken stand when I am dead

I and myself swore enmity.    Alack, Myself has tied my hands behind my back. Yielding, I know there's no excuse in them,

The heavy train through the dim country went rolling, rolling, Interminably passing misty snow-covered plough-land ridges That merged in the snowy sky; came turning meadows, fences,

When London was a little town Lean by the river's marge, The poet paced it with a frown,

What deaths men have died, not fighting but impotent. Hung on the wire, between trenches, burning and freezing, Groaning for water with armies of men so near;

Agatha, tell me, does thy heart not ache, Plunged in this squalid city's filthy sea, For another ocean where the splendours break

Oft Music, as it were some moving mighty sea, Bears me towards my pale Star: in clear space, or 'neath a vaporous canopy

In this dense hall of green and gold, Mirrors and lights and steam, there sit Two hundred munching men;

My window is darkness, The sighs of the night die in silence; The lamp on my table

I The stream goes fast. When this that is the present is the past,

What hues the sunlight had, how rich the shadows were, The blue and tangled shadows dropped from the crusted branches Of the warped apple-trees upon the orchard grass.

I I find my mind as it were a deep water. Sometimes I play with a thought and hammer and bend it,

With my sleeping beloved huddled tranquil beside me, why do I lie awake, Listening to the loud clock's hurry in the darkness, and feeling my heart's fierce ache That beats one response to the brain's many questionings, and in solitude bears the weight

Rivers I have seen which were beautiful, Slow rivers winding in the flat fens, With bands of reeds like thronged green swords

The heaven is full of the moon's light, The earth fades below. In this vast empty world of night

Eyes like flowers and falling hair Seldom seen, nor ever long, Then I did not know you were

There was an Indian, who had known no change, Who strayed content along a sunlit beach Gathering shells.    He heard a sudden strange

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid Upon the spirit aching for the light And all the wide horizon's line is hid

Last night I lay in an open field And looked at the stars with lips sealed; No noise moved the windless air,

One, Nature! burns and makes thee bright, One gives thee weeds to mourn withal; And what to one is burial

(To Edmund Gosse) Within mankind's duration, so they say, Khephren and Ninus lived but yesterday.

The lover and the stern philosopher Both love, in their ripe time, the confident Soft cats, the house's chiefest ornament,

'Tis bitter-sweet, when winter nights are long, To watch, beside the flames which smoke and twist, The distant memories which slowly throng,

Flying his hair and his eyes averse, Fleet are his feet and his heart apart. How could our song his charms rehearse?

I have loved to-night; from love's last bordering steep I have fallen at last with joy and forgotten the shore; I have known my love to-night as never before,

BOOK I Mother of Rome, delight of gods and men, Beloved Venus, who under the fleeting stars

I am a lake, altered by every wind. The mild South breathes upon me, and I spread A dance of merry ripples in the sun.

The lily of Malud is born in secret mud. It is breathed like a word in a little dark ravine Where no bird was ever heard and no beast was ever seen,

I heard a voice that cried, "Make way for those who died!" And all the coloured crowd like ghosts at morning fled; And down the waiting road, rank after rank there strode,

I Beneath my skull-bone and my hair, Covered like a poisonous well,

(To Maurice Baring) I waited for a miracle to-night. Dim was the earth beneath a star-swept sky,

O moon, O lamp of hill and secret dale! Thou whom our fathers, ages out of mind, Worshipped in thy blue heaven, whilst behind

'Neath their black yews in solemn state The owls are sitting in a row Like foreign gods; and even so

I When the clouds hide the sun away The tall slate roof is dull and grey,

(OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE, QUEEN'S, DECEMBER) (To Hugh Brooks) I

This evening the Moon dreams more languidly, Like a beauty who on mounded cushions rests, And with her light hand fondles lingeringly,

There was no song nor shout of joy Nor beam of moon or sun, When she came back from the voyage

Quieter than any twilight Shed over earth's last deserts, Quiet and vast and shadowless

There were three hills that stood alone With woods about their feet. They dreamed quiet when the sun shone

(W. H. S., Capt. [Acting Major] R.F.A.; killed April 12, 1917) We sha'n't see Willy any more, Mamie, He won't be coming any more:

Musician, with the bent and brooding face, White brow and thunderous eyes: you are not playing Merely the music that dead hand did trace.

So proud your port, your arm so powerful, With such a grip you grip the goddess' hair, That one might take you, from your casual air,

This morning in my attic high The Demon came to visit me, And seeking faults in my reply,

Mostly in a dull rotation We bear our loads and eat and drink and sleep. Feeling no tears, knowing no meditation,

There beyond my window ledge, Heaped against the sky, a hedge Of huge and waving tree-tops stands

In this house, she said, in this high second storey, In this room where we sit, above the midnight street, There runs a rivulet, narrow but very rapid,

Blood, hatred, appetite and apathy, The sodden many and the struggling strong, Who care not now though for another wrong

The old yellow stucco Of the time of the Regent Is flaking and peeling: