MEW, Charlotte

I so liked Spring

I so liked Spring last year

Because you were here; –

The thrushes too –

Because it was these you so liked to hear –

I so liked you.

This year’s a different thing, –

I’ll not think of you.

But I’ll like the Spring because it is simply Spring

As the thrushes do.


Beside the Bed

Someone has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded

The wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet breast:

So, smoothed and silenced you lie, like a child, not again to be questioned or scolded;

But, for you, not one of us believes that this is rest.

Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden

The blue beyond: or to screen the wavering flame subdue its breath:

Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, like dawn, would quiver and redden,

Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death.

Because all night you have not turned to us or spoken

It is time for you to wake; your dreams were never very deep:

I, for one, have seen the thin, bright, twisted threads of them dimmed suddenly and broken,

This is only a most piteous pretence of sleep!


On the Asylum Road

Theirs is the house whose windows—every pane—

Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:

Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,

The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

But still we merry town or village folk

Throw to their scattered stare a kindly grin,

And think no shame to stop and crack a joke

With the incarnate wages of man's sin.

None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet.

The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet,

The hare-bell bowing on his stem,

Dance not with us; their pulses beat

To fainter music; nor do we to them

Make their life sweet.

The gayest crowd that they will ever pass

Are we to brother-shadows in the lane:

Our windows, too, are clouded glass

To them, yes, every pane!

In Nunhead Cemetery

It is the clay what makes the earth stick to his spade;

He fills in holes like this year after year;

The others have gone; they were tired, and half afraid

But I would rather be standing here;

There is nowhere else to go. I have seen this place

From the windows of the train that's going past

Against the sky. This is rain on my face -

It was raining here when I saw it last.

There is something horrible about a flower;

This, broken in my hand, is one of those

He threw it in just now; it will not live another hour;

There are thousands more; you do not miss a rose.

…..

We should have stood on the gulls' black cliffs and heard the sea

And seen the moon's white track,

I would have called, you would have come to me

And kissed me back.

You have never done that: I do not know

Why I stood staring at your bed

And heard you, though you spoke so low,

But could not reach your hands, your little head;

There was nothing we could not do, you said,

And you went, and I let you go!

Now I will burn you back, I will burn you through,

Though I am damned for it we two will lie

And burn, here where the starlings fly

To these white stones from the wet sky - ;

Dear, you will say this is not I -

It would not be you, it would not be you!

….


Saturday Market

Bury your heart in some deep green hollow

Or hide it up in a kind old tree;

Better still, give it the swallow

When she goes over the sea.

In Saturday’s Market there’s eggs a ’plenty

And dead-alive ducks with their legs tied down,

Grey old gaffers and boys of twenty—

Girls and the women of the town—

Pitchers and sugar-sticks, ribbons and laces,

Poises and whips and dicky-birds’ seed,

Silver pieces and smiling faces,

In Saturday Market they’ve all they need.

What were you showing in Saturday Market

That set it grinning from end to end

Girls and gaffers and boys of twenty—?

Cover it close with your shawl, my friend—

Hasten you home with the laugh behind you,

Over the down—, out of sight,

Fasten your door, though no one will find you,

No one will look on a Market night.

See, you, the shawl is wet, take out from under

The red dead thing—. In the white of the moon

On the flags does it stir again? Well, and no wonder!

Best make an end of it; bury it soon.

If there is blood on the hearth who’ll know it?

Or blood on the stairs,

When a murder is over and done why show it?

In Saturday Market nobody cares.

Then lie you straight on your bed for a short, short weeping

And still, for a long, long rest,

There’s never a one in the town so sure of sleeping

As you, in the house on the down with a hole in your breast.

Think no more of the swallow,

Forget, you, the sea,

Never again remember the deep green hollow

Or the top of the kind old tree!


Rooms

I remember rooms that have had their part

In the steady slowing down of the heart.

The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,

The little damp room with the seaweed smell,

And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—

Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.

But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,

Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again

As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed

Out there in the sun—in the rain.


The Farmer's Bride

Three summer's since I chose a maid,
Too young may be - but more's to do
At harvest time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter's day.
Her smile went out, and 'twasn't a woman-
More like a little frightened fay.
One night, in the fall, she runned away.

"Out 'mong the sheep, her be," they said,
Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wasn't there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her fast.

She does the work about the house,
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to chat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk keep away.
"Not near, Not near," her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The women say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I've hardly heard her speak at all.

Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me ?

The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie's spotted feathers lie
On the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden up to Christmas- time.
What's Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house but we.

She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. 'Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh! My God! the down,
The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her - her eyes, her hair ! her hair !

The Call

From our low seat beside the fire

Where we have dozed and dreamed and watched the glow

Or raked the ashes, stopping so

We scarcely saw the sun or rain

Above, or looked much higher

Than this same quiet red or burned-out fire.

Tonight we heard a call,

A rattle on the window pane,

A voice on the sharp air,

And felt a breath stirring our hair,

A flame within us: Something swift and tall

Swept in and out and that was all.

Was it a bright or a dark angel? Who can know?

It left no mark upon the snow,

But suddenly it snapped the chain

Unbarred, flung wide the door

Which will not shut again;

And so we cannot sit here any more.

We must arise and go:

The world is cold without

And dark and hedged about

With mystery and enmity and doubt,

But we must go

Though yet we do not know

Who called, or what marks we shall leave upon the snow.

Love

Tide be runnin’ the great world over:

’Twas only last June month I mind that we

Was thinkin’ the toss and the call in the breast of the lover

So everlastin’ as the sea.

Here’s the same little fishes that sputter and swim,

Wi’ the moon’s old glim on the grey, wet sand;

An’ him no more to me nor me to him

Than the wind goin’ over my hand.


Ken

The town is old and very steep

A place of bells and cloisters and grey towers,

And black-clad people walking in their sleep—

A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers

To her new grave; and watched from end to end

By the great Church above, through the still hours:

But in the morning and the early dark

The children wake to dart from doors and call

Down the wide, crooked street, where, at the bend,

Before it climbs up to the park,

Ken’s is in the gabled house facing the Castle wall.

When first I came upon him there

Suddenly, on the half-lit stair,

I think I hardly found a trace

Of likeness to a human face

In his. And I said then

If in His image God made men,

Some other must have made poor Ken—

But for his eyes which looked at you

As two red, wounded stars might do.

He scarcely spoke, you scarcely heard,

His voice broke off in little jars

To tears sometimes. An uncouth bird

He seemed as he ploughed up the street,

Groping, with knarred, high-lifted feet

And arms thrust out as if to beat

Always against a threat of bars.

And oftener than not there’d be

A child just higher than his knee

Trotting beside him. Through his dim

Long twilight this, at least, shone clear,

That all the children and the deer,

Whom every day he went to see

Out in the park, belonged to him.

“God help the folk that next him sits

He fidgets so, with his poor wits,”

The neighbours said on Sunday nights

When he would go to Church to “see the lights!”

Although for these he used to fix

His eyes upon a crucifix

In a dark corner, staring on

Till everybody else had gone.

And sometimes, in his evil fits,

You could not move him from his chair—

You did not look at him as he sat there,

Biting his rosary to bits.

While pointing to the Christ he tried to say,

“Take it away”.

Nothing was dead:

He said “a bird” if he picked up a broken wing,

A perished leaf or any such thing

Was just “a rose”; and once when I had said

He must not stand and knock there any more,

He left a twig on the mat outside my door.

Not long ago

The last thrush stiffened in the snow,

While black against a sullen sky

The sighing pines stood by.

But now the wind has left our rattled pane

To flutter the hedge-sparrow’s wing,

The birches in the wood are red again

And only yesterday

The larks went up a little way to sing

What lovers say

Who loiter in the lanes to-day;

The buds begin to talk of May

With learned rooks on city trees,

And if God please

With all of these

We, too, shall see another Spring.

But in that red brick barn upon the hill

I wonder—can one own the deer,

And does one walk with children still

As one did here?

Do roses grow

Beneath those twenty windows in a row—

And if some night

When you have not seen any light

They cannot move you from your chair

What happens there?

I do not know.

So, when they took

Ken to that place, I did not look

After he called and turned on me

His eyes. These I shall see—