Title: Tides - A Book of Poems
Author: Drinkwater, John
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Tides - A Book of Poems" ***


[Illustration: bookcover]



          This is the first book issued by The Beaumont Press
          20 copies have been printed on Japanese vellum
          signed by the author and numbered 1 to 20 and
          250 copies on hand-made paper numbered 21 to 270
          This is No. 232



                                 TIDES

                           A BOOK OF POEMS BY


                            JOHN DRINKWATER



                               DEDICATION

                      TO GENERAL SIR IAN HAMILTON


                  Because the darling chivalries,
                  That light your battle-line, belong
                  To music’s heart no less than these,
                  I bring you my campaigns of song.



                                CONTENTS


                                                            Page

        DEDICATION                                             5

        A MAN’S DAUGHTER
          There is an old woman who looks each night           9

        VENUS IN ARDEN
          Now Love, her mantle thrown,                        11

        COTSWOLD LOVE
          Blue skies are over Cotswold                        12

        THE MIDLANDS
          Black in the summer night my Cotswold hill          13

        MAY GARDEN
          A shower of green gems on my apple tree             15

        PLOUGH
          The snows are come in early state,                  16

        POLITICS
          You say a thousand things,                          17

        BIRMINGHAM—1916
          Once Athens worked and went to see the play,        19

        INSCRIPTION FOR A WAR MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN
          They nothing feared whose names I celebrate.        20

        TREASON
          What time I write my roundelays,                    21

        MY ESTATE
          I have four loves, four loves are mine,             22

        WITH DAFFODILS
          I send you daffodils, my dear,                      23

        FOR A GUEST ROOM
          All words are said,                                 24

        ON READING THE MS. OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH’S JOURNALS
          To-day I read the poet’s sister’s book,             25

        THE OLD WARRIOR
          Sorrow has come to me,                              26

        THE GUEST
          Sometimes I feel that death is very near,           27

        REVERIE
          Here in the unfrequented noon,                      28

        PENANCES
          These are my happy penances. To make                36

        COLOPHON                                              37



A MAN’S DAUGHTER


 There is an old woman who looks each night
           Out of the wood.
 She has one tooth, that isn’t too white.
           She isn’t too good.

 She came from the north looking for me,
           About my jewel.
 Her son, she says, is tall as can be;
           But, men say, cruel.

 My girl went northward, holiday making,
           And a queer man spoke
 At the woodside once when night was breaking,
           And her heart broke.

 For ever since she has pined and pined,
           A sorry maid;
 Her fingers are slack as the wool they wind,
           Or her girdle-braid.

 So now shall I send her north to wed,
           Who here may know
 Only the little house of the dead
           To ease her woe?

 Or keep her for fear of that old woman,
           As a bird quick-eyed,
 And her tall son who is hardly human,
           At the woodside?

 She is my babe and my daughter dear,
           How well, how well.
 Her grief to me is a fourfold fear,
           Tongue cannot tell.

 And yet I know that far in that wood
           Are crumbling bones,
 And a mumble mumble of nothing that’s good,
           In heathen tones.

 And I know that frail ghosts flutter and sigh
           In brambles there,
 And never a bird or beast to cry—
           Beware, beware,—

 While threading the silent thickets go
           Mother and son,
 Where scrupulous berries never grow,
           And airs are none.

 And her deep eyes peer at eventide
           Out of the wood,
 And her tall son waits by the dark woodside,
           For maidenhood.

 And the little eyes peer, and peer, and peer;
           And a word is said.
 And some house knows, for many a year,
           But years of dread.



VENUS IN ARDEN


 Now love, her mantle thrown,
     Goes naked by,
 Threading the woods alone,
     Her royal eye
 Happy because the primroses again
 Break on the winter continence of men.

 I saw her pass to-day
     In Warwickshire,
 With the old imperial way,
     The old desire,
 Fresh as among those other flowers they went,
 More beautiful for Adon’s discontent.

 Those other years she made
     Her festival
 When the blue eggs were laid
     And lambs were tall,
 By the Athenian rivers while the reeds
 Made love melodious for the Ganymedes.

 And now through Cantlow brakes,
     By Wilmcote hill,
 To Avon-side, she makes
     Her garlands still,
 And I who watch her flashing limbs am one
 With youth whose days three thousand years are done.



COTSWOLD LOVE


 Blue skies are over Cotswold
   And April snows go by,
 The lasses turn their ribbons
   For April’s in the sky,
 And April is the season
   When Sabbath girls are dressed,
 From Rodboro’ to Campden,
   In all their silken best.

 An ankle is a marvel
   When first the buds are brown,
 And not a lass but knows it
   From Stow to Gloucester town.
 And not a girl goes walking
   Along the Cotswold lanes
 But knows men’s eyes in April
   Are quicker than their brains.

 It’s little that it matters,
   So long as you’re alive,
 If you’re eighteen in April,
   Or rising sixty-five,
 When April comes to Amberley
   With skies of April blue,
 And Cotswold girls are briding
   With slyly tilted shoe.



THE MIDLANDS


 Black in the summer night my Cotswold hill
   Aslant my window sleeps, beneath a sky
 Deep as the bedded violets that fill
   March woods with dusky passion. As I lie
 Abed between cool walls I watch the host
   Of the slow stars lit over Gloucester plain,
 And drowsily the habit of these most
   Beloved of English lands moves in my brain,
 While silence holds dominion of the dark,
 Save when the foxes from the spinneys bark.

 I see the valleys in their morning mist
   Wreathed under limpid hills in moving light,
 Happy with many a yeoman melodist:
   I see the little roads of twinkling white
 Busy with fieldward teams and market gear
   Of rosy men, cloth-gaitered, who can tell
 The many-minded changes of the year,
   Who know why crops and kine fare ill or well;
 I see the sun persuade the mist away,
 Till town and stead are shining to the day.

 I see the wagons move along the rows
   Of ripe and summer-breathing clover-flower,
 I see the lissom husbandman who knows
   Deep in his heart the beauty of his power,
 As, lithely pitched, the full-heaped fork bids on
   The harvest home. I hear the rickyard fill
 With gossip as in generations gone,
   While wagon follows wagon from the hill.
 I think how, when our seasons all are sealed,
 Shall come the unchanging harvest from the field.

 I see the barns and comely manors planned
   By men who somehow moved in comely thought,
 Who, with a simple shippon to their hand,
   As men upon some godlike business wrought;
 I see the little cottages that keep
   Their beauty still where since Plantaganet
 Have come the shepherds happily to sleep,
   Finding the loaves and cups of cider set;
 I see the twisted shepherds, brown and old,
 Driving at dusk their glimmering sheep to fold.

 And now the valleys that upon the sun
   Broke from their opal veils, are veiled again,
 And the last light upon the wolds is done,
   And silence falls on flocks and fields and men;
 And black upon the night I watch my hill,
   And the stars shine, and there an owly wing
 Brushes the night, and all again is still,
   And, from this land of worship that I sing,
 I turn to sleep, content that from my sires
 I draw the blood of England’s midmost shires.



MAY GARDEN


 A shower of green gems on my apple tree
   This first morning of May
 Has fallen out of the night, to be
   Herald of holiday—
 Bright gems of green that, fallen there,
 Seem fixed and glowing on the air.

 Until a flutter of blackbird wings
   Shakes and makes the boughs alive,
 And the gems are now no frozen things,
   But apple-green buds to thrive
 On sap of my May garden, how well
 The green September globes will tell.

 Also my pear tree has its buds,
   But they are silver yellow,
 Like autumn meadows when the floods
   Are silver under willow,
 And here shall long and shapely pears
 Be gathered while the autumn wears.

 And there are sixty daffodils
   Beneath my wall....
 And jealousy it is that kills
   This world when all
 The spring’s behaviour here is spent
 To make the world magnificent.



PLOUGH


 The snows are come in early state,
 And love shall now go desolate
 If we should keep too close a gate.

 Over the woods a splendour falls
 Of death, and grey are the Gloucester walls,
 And grey the skies for burials.

 But secret in the falling snow
 I see the patient ploughman go,
 And watch the quiet furrows grow.



POLITICS


 You say a thousand things,
 Persuasively,
 And with strange passion hotly I agree,
 And praise your zest,
 And then
 A blackbird sings
 On April lilac, or fieldfaring men,
 Ghostlike, with loaded wain,
 Come down the twilit lane
 To rest,
 And what is all your argument to me?

 Oh yes—I know, I know,
 It must be so—
 You must devise
 Your myriad policies,
 For we are little wise,
 And must be led and marshalled, lest we keep
 Too fast a sleep
 Far from the central world’s realities.
 Yes, we must heed—
 For surely you reveal
 Life’s very heart; surely with flaming zeal
 You search our folly and our secret need;
 And surely it is wrong
 To count my blackbird’s song,
 My cones of lilac, and my wagon team,
 More than a world of dream.
 But still
 A voice calls from the hill—
 I must away—
 I cannot hear your argument to-day.



BIRMINGHAM—1916


 Once Athens worked and went to see the play,
 And Thomas Atkins kissed the girls of Rome,
 In council in Victoria Square to-day
 Are grey-beard Nazarenes, with shop and home
 And counting-house and all the friendly cares
 That Joseph knew; in Bull Ring markets meet
 Gossips as once at Babylonian fairs,
 And Helen walks in Corporation Street.

 Now Troy is Homer; and of Nazareth
 Grave histories are of one love that was strong;
 Athens is beauty; Rome an immortal death;
 And Babylon immortal in a song....
 Perplexed as ours these cities were of old;
 And shall our name greatly as these be told?



INSCRIPTION FOR A WAR MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN


 They nothing feared whose names I celebrate.
 Greater than death they died; and their estate
 Is here on Cotswold comradely to live
 Upon your lips in every draught I give.



TREASON


 What time I write my roundelays,
 I am as proud as princes gone,
 Who built their empires in old days,
 As Tamburlaine or Solomon;
 And wisely though companions then
 Say well it is and well I sing,
 Assured above the praise of men
 I am a solitary king.

 But when I leave that straiter mood,
 That lonely hour, and put aside
 The continence of solitude,
 I fall in treason to my pride,
 And if a witling’s word be spent
 Upon my song in jealousy,
 In anger and in argument
 I am as derelict as he.



MY ESTATE


 I have four loves, four loves are mine,
   My wife who makes all beauty be,
 Tom Squire and Master Candleshine,
   And then my grey dog Timothy.

 My wife makes bramble-berry pies,
   And she is bright as bramble dew,
 She knows the way the weather flies,
   And tells me every thing to do.

 Tom Squire he is my neighbour man,
   His apples fall upon my grass,
 And in the morning, when we can,
   We say good-morning as we pass.

 And Master Candleshine the True,
   Considering some fault of mine,
 Says—“Had it been for me to do,
   It had been hard for Candleshine.”

 When I have thought all things that be,
   And drop the latch and climb the stair,
 And want an eye for company,
   My grey dog Timothy is there.

 My loves are one and two and three
   And four they are, good loves of mine,
 Tom Squire, my grey dog Timothy,
   My wife and Master Candleshine.



WITH DAFFODILS


 I send you daffodils, my dear,
 For these are emperors of spring,
 And in my heart you keep so clear
 So delicate an empery,
 That none but emperors could be
 Ambassadors endowed to bring
 My messages of honesty.

 My mind makes faring to and fro,
 Deft or bewildered, dark or kind,
 That not the eye of God may know
 Which motion is of true estate
 And which a twisted runagate
 Of all the farings of my mind,
 And which has honesty for mate.

 Only my hope for you is clean
 Of scandal’s use, and though, may be,
 Far rangers have my passions been,—
 Since thus the word of Eden went,—
 Yet of the springs of my content,
 My very wells of honesty,
 Are you the only firmament.



FOR A GUEST ROOM


 All words are said,
 And may it fall
 That, crowning these,
 You here shall find
 A friendly bed,
 A sheltering wall,
 Your body’s ease,
 A quiet mind.

 May you forget
 In happy sleep
 The world that still
 You hold as friend,
 And may it yet
 Be ours to keep
 Your friendly will
 To the world’s end.

 For he is blest
 Who, fixed to shun
 All evil, when
 The worst is known,
 Counts, east and west,
 When life is done,
 His debts to men
 In love alone.



ON READING THE MS. OF DOROTHY
WORDSWORTH’S JOURNALS


 To-day I read the poet’s sister’s book,
 She who so comforted those Grasmere days
 When song was at the flood, and thence I took
 A larger note of fortitude and praise.

 And in her ancient fastness beauty stirred,
 And happy faith was in my heart again,
 Because the virtue of a simple word
 Was durable above the lives of men.

 For reading there that quiet record made
 Of skies and hills, domestic hours, and free
 Traffic of friends, and song, and duty paid,
 I touched the wings of immortality.



THE OLD WARRIOR


 Sorrow has come to me,
 Making the world to be
   Of sunken cheek;
 Faded my fields, and of
 Names that were most to love,
   I dare not speak.

 Would that my soul were blind,
 Since duty brings to mind
   All that is done,
 Saying, ‘How gladly you
 Walked with your chosen few
   Under my sun.’

 I am an alien now;
 Tell me, good stranger, how
   Best may be borne
 His grief who comes at night
 To his own window-light
   Friendless, forlorn.

 No. I will pass. Again
 Of my delight in men
   Nothing shall tell.
 Now is my travel where
 My lost companions fare;
   Onward. Farewell.



THE GUEST


 Sometimes I feel that death is very near,
 And, with half-lifted hand,
 Looks in my eyes, and tells me not to fear,
 But walk his friendly land,
 Comrade with him, and wise
 As peace is wise.

 Then, greatly though my heart with pity moves
 For dear imperilled loves,
 I somehow know
 That death is friendly so,
 A comfortable spirit; one who takes
 Long thought for all our sakes.

 I wonder; will he come that friendly way,
 That guest, or roughly in the appointed day?
 And will, when the last drops of life are spilt,
 My soul be torn from me,
 Or, like a ship truly and trimly built,
 Slip quietly to sea?



REVERIE


 Here in the unfrequented noon,
 In the green hermitage of June,
 While overhead a rustling wing
 Minds me of birds that do not sing
 Until the cooler eve rewakes
 The service of melodious brakes,
 And thoughts are lonely rangers, here,
 In shelter of the primrose year,
 I curiously meditate
 Our brief and variable state.

 I think how many are alive
 Who better in the grave would thrive,
 If some so long a sleep might give
 Better instruction how to live;
 I think what splendours had been said
 By darlings now untimely dead
 Had death been wise in choice of these,
 And made exchange of obsequies.

 I think what loss to government
 It is that good men are content,
 Well knowing that an evil will
 Is folly-stricken too, and still
 Itself considers only wise
 For all rebukes and surgeries,
 That evil men should raise their pride
 To place and fortune undefied.
 I think how daily we beguile
 Our brains, that yet a little while
 And all our congregated schemes
 And our perplexity of dreams,
 Shall come to whole and perfect state.
 I think, however long the date
 Of life may be, at last the sun
 Shall pass upon campaigns undone.

 I look upon the world and see
 A world colonial to me,
 Whereof I am the architect,
 And principal and intellect,
 A world whose shape and savour spring
 Out of my lone imagining,
 A world whose nature is subdued
 For ever to my instant mood,
 And only beautiful can be
 Because of beauty is in me.
 And then I know that every mind
 Among the millions of my kind
 Makes earth his own particular
 And privately created star,
 That earth has thus no single state,
 Being every man articulate.
 Till thought has no horizon then
 I try to think how many men
 There are to make an earth apart
 In symbol of the urgent heart,
 For there are forty in my street,
 And seven hundred more in Greet,
 And families at Luton Hoo,
 And there are men in China, too.

 And what immensity is this
 That is but a parenthesis
 Set in a little human thought,
 Before the body comes to naught.
 There at the bottom of the copse
 I see a field of turnip tops,
 I see the cropping cattle pass
 There in another field, of grass,
 And fields and fields, with seven towns,
 A river, and a flight of downs,
 Steeples for all religious men,
 Ten thousand trees, and orchards ten,
 A mighty span that curves away
 Into blue beauty, and I lay
 All this as quartered on a sphere
 Hung huge in space, a thing of fear
 Vast as the circle of the sky
 Completed to the astonished eye;
 And then I think that all I see,
 Whereof I frame immensity
 Globed for amazement, is no more
 Than a shire’s corner, and that four
 Great shires being ten times multiplied
 Are small on the Atlantic tide
 As an emerald on a silver bowl ...
 And the Atlantic to the whole
 Sweep of this tributary star
 That is our earth is but ... and far
 Through dreadful space the outmeasured mind
 Seeks to conceive the unconfined.

 I think of Time. How, when his wing
 Composes all our quarrelling
 In some green corner where May leaves
 Are loud with blackbirds on all eves,
 And all the dust that was our bones
 Is underneath memorial stones,
 Then shall old jealousies, while we
 Lie side by side most quietly,
 Be but oblivion’s fools, and still
 When curious pilgrims ask—‘What skill
 Had these that from oblivion saves?’—
 My song shall sing above our graves.

 I think how men of gentle mind,
 And friendly will, and honest kind,
 Deny their nature and appear
 Fellows of jealousy and fear;
 Having single faith, and natural wit
 To measure truth and cherish it,
 Yet, strangely, when they build in thought,
 Twisting the honesty that wrought
 In the straight motion of the heart,
 Into its feigning counterpart
 That is the brain’s betrayal of
 The simple purposes of love;
 And what yet sorrier decline
 Is theirs when, eager to confine
 No more within the silent brain
 Its habit, thought seeks birth again
 In speech, as honesty has done
 In thought; then even what had won
 From heart to brain fades and is lost
 In this pretended pentecost,
 This their forlorn captivity
 To speech, who have not learnt to be
 Lords of the word, nor kept among
 The sterner climates of the tongue ...
 So truth is in their hearts, and then
 Falls to confusion in the brain,
 And, fading through this mid-eclipse,
 It perishes upon the lips.

 I think how year by year I still
 Find working in my dauntless will
 Sudden timidities that are
 Merely the echo of some far
 Forgotten tyrannies that came
 To youth’s bewilderment and shame;
 That yet a magisterial gown,
 Being worn by one of no renown
 And half a generation less
 In years than I, can dispossess
 Something my circumspecter mood
 Of excellence and quietude,
 And if a Bishop speaks to me
 I tremble with propriety.

 I think how strange it is that he
 Who goes most comradely with me
 In beauty’s worship, takes delight
 In shows that to my eager sight
 Are shadows and unmanifest,
 While beauty’s favour and behest
 To me in motion are revealed
 That is against his vision sealed;
 Yet is our hearts’ necessity
 Not twofold, but a common plea
 That chaos come to continence,
 Whereto the arch-intelligence
 Richly in divers voices makes
 Its answer for our several sakes.

 I see the disinherited
 And long procession of the dead,
 Who have in generations gone
 Held fugitive dominion
 Of this same primrose pasturage
 That is my momentary wage.
 I see two lovers move along
 These shadowed silences of song,
 With spring in blossom at their feet
 More incommunicably sweet
 To their hearts’ more magnificence,
 Than to the common courts of sense,
 Till joy his tardy closure tells
 With coming of the curfew bells.
 I see the knights of spur and sword
 Crossing the little woodland ford,
 Riding in ghostly cavalcade
 On some unchronicled crusade.
 I see the silent hunter go
 In cloth of yeoman green, with bow
 Strung, and a quiver of grey wings.
 I see the little herd who brings
 His cattle homeward, while his sire
 Makes bivouac in Warwickshire
 This night, the liege and loyal man
 Of Cavalier or Puritan.
 And as they pass, the nameless dead,
 Unsung, uncelebrate, and sped
 Upon an unremembered hour
 As any twelvemonth fallen flower,
 I think how strangely yet they live
 For all their days were fugitive.

 I think how soon we too shall be
 A story with our ancestry.

 I think what miracle has been
 That you whose love among this green
 Delightful solitude is still
 The stay and substance of my will,
 The dear custodian of my song,
 My thrifty counsellor and strong,
 Should take the time of all time’s tide
 That was my season, to abide
 On earth also; that we should be
 Charted across eternity
 To one elect and happy day
 Of yellow primroses in May.

 The clock is calling five o’clock,
 And Nonesopretty brings her flock
 To fold, and Tom comes back from town
 With hose and ribbons worth a crown,
 And duly at The Old King’s Head
 They gather now to daily bread,
 And I no more may meditate
 Our brief and variable state.



PENANCES


 These are my happy penances. To make
 Beauty without a Covenant; to take
 Measure of time only because I know
 That in death’s market-place I still shall owe
 Service to beauty that shall not be done;
 To know that beauty’s doctrine is begun
 And makes a close in sacrifice; to find
 In beauty’s courts the unappeasable mind.



                    HERE ENDS TIDES A BOOK OF POEMS
             by John Drinkwater the Typography and Binding
               arranged by Cyril William Beaumont Printed
                on his Press in London and Published by
                  him at 75 Charing Cross Road in the
                     City of Westminster Completed
                     on the first day of September
                               MDCCCCXVII

[Illustration:

  SIMPLEX MUNDITIIS
  THE BEAUMONT PRESS]

                          The Binding has been
               executed by F. Sangorski and G. Sutcliffe

[Illustration: back cover]

------------------------------------------------------------------------



                           TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE


The author’s spelling and punctuation has been maintained.

Repeating titles in the front of the book have been reduced.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Tides - A Book of Poems" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.