The Bird-Catcher

and Other Poems

By Martin Armstrong

Contents

I

The Bird-catcher

Honey Harvest

Spanish Vintage

Summer in Winter

Rhapsody on a Pink-Iced Cake

The Eve of the Fair

II

Before the Battle

Immortality

Bugles

Epitaph

Man Seeks to Cage Delight

To Hate

III

To Messaline

Puppets

IV

Heard in a Lane

Rain in Spring

Blue Night

On the Salt Marsh

Frost in Lincoln’s Inn Fields

The Naiad

Christmas Eve

V

The Fisherman’s Rest

Mrs. Reece Laughs

VI

Expostulation to Helen

To Helen with a Bottle of Scent

Serenade

The House of Love

Autumn

The Immortals

Fog in the Channel

From the French

VII

Cathedral at Night

Poetry and Memory

The Secret

All is One

The Cage

A Note on the Author

I

The Bird-Catcher

O you with the five-stopped pipe

And delicate, close-webbed net and eyes that have stared

Into worlds unknown, what poor wild bird have you snared,

What plover or lark or snipe?

I roved to the rim of the world,

To the borders of life and death, to the glimmering land

Where matter and spirit are one, and I closed my hand

On a marvellous prey in the mouth of the net upcurled:

For while with the breath of dream

I filled the pipe and fingered the stops with the touch of thought,

In a web of sweet and intricate tunes I caught

God, to be caged awhile among things that seem.

Honey Harvest

Late in March, when the days are growing longer

And sight of early green

Tells of the coming spring and suns grown stronger,

Round the pale Willow-catkins there are seen

The year’s first honey-bees

Stealing the nectar; and bee-masters know

This for the first sign of the honey-flow.

Then in the dark hillsides the Cherry-trees

Gleam white with loads of blossom where the gleams

Of piled snow lately hung, and richer streams

The honey. Now, if chilly April days

Delay the Apple-blossom and the May’s

First week comes in with sudden summer weather,

The Apple and the Hawthorn bloom together,

And all day long the plundering hordes go round

And every overweighted blossom nods.

But from that gathered essence they compound

Honey more sweet than nectar of the gods.

Those blossoms fall ere June, warm June that brings

The small white Clover. Field by scented field,

Round farms like islands in the rolling weald,

It spreads thick-flowering or in wildness springs

Short-stemmed upon the naked downs, to yield

A richer store of honey than the Rose,

The Pink, the Honeysuckle. Thence there flows

Syrup of clearest amber, redolent

Of every flowery scent

That the warm wind upgathers as he goes.

In mid-July be ready for the noise

Of million bees in old Lime-avenues,

As though hot noon had found a droning voice

To ease her soul. Here for those busy crews

Green leaves and pale-stemmed clusters of green flowers

Build heavy-perfumed, cool, green-twilight bowers

Whence, load by load, through the long summer days

They fill their glassy cells

With dark green honey, clear as chrysoprase,

Which housewives shun; but the bee-master tells

This brand is more delicious than all else.

In August-time, if moors are near at hand,

Be wise and in the evening twilight load

Your hives upon a cart, and take the road

By night; that, ere the early dawn shall spring

And all the hills turn rosy with the Ling,

Each waking hive may stand

Established in its new-appointed land

Without harm taken, and the earliest flights

Set out at once to loot the heathery heights.

That vintage of the heather yields so dense

And glutinous a syrup that it foils

Him who would spare the comb and drain from thence

Its dark, full-flavoured spoils:

For he must squeeze to wreck the beautiful

Frail edifice. Not otherwise he sacks

Those many-chambered palaces of wax.

Then let a choice of every kind be made

And, labelled, set upon your storehouse racks,—

Of Hawthorn-honey that of almond smacks;

The luscious Lime-tree-honey, green as jade;

Pale Willow-honey, hived by the first rover;

That delicate honey culled

From Apple-blossom, that of the sunlight tastes,

And sunlight-coloured honey of the Clover.

Then, when the late year wastes,

When night falls early and the noon is dulled

And the last warm days are over,

Unlock the store and to your table bring

Essence of every blossom of the spring.

And if, when wind has never ceased to blow

All night, you wake to roofs and trees becalmed

In level wastes of snow,

Bring out the Lime-tree-honey, the embalmed

Soul of a lost July, or Heather-spiced

Brown-gleaming comb wherein sleeps crystallized

All the hot perfume of the heathery slope.

And, tasting and remembering, live in hope.

Spanish Vintage

Now that the tropic August days are ended

Come Bacchus and Silenus great of girth

And Autumn with her kindly witchcraft blended

Of suns and showers and the dark creative earth,

To stain the swelling grape-skins and to muster

The flavorous juice in every ripening cluster

Where, over all the southern slopes extended,

The laden vineyards wait the vintage-birth.

So in the golden-hued September weather

The master of the vineyard and his men

Bearing small wicker baskets pace together

Down the leaf-shadowed alleys, pausing when

Among the vines thick-leaved and deeply-rooted

They chance upon those bunches heaviest-fruited

And fullest-ripened: these alone they gather

And softly in the baskets lay; and then

Convey them to a sunny spot, made ready

With little mats of woven grass; for here

They must be laid awhile beneath the steady

Streams of the sunshine. But when night draws near,

With other mats they shield them, nor uncover

Till all the dark and dewy hours are over:

So for three days, till the juice turns sweet and heady

From four and twenty hours of sun and air.

Now to the winepress. Now the mounded treasure

Load upon load into the trough is tossed,

But never heaped above the proper measure

Lest something of the scented juice be lost

When, stripped to the thighs, the peasants take their station

And tread the grape to rich annihilation,

While all the rest stand round and laugh with pleasure

To see the foam seethe up as keen as frost.

But when above that pool of bubbling juices

Not one whole cluster shows, with wine-stained legs

Then men step forth, and some unstop the sluices

And catch the gurgling must in wooden kegs

Which soon, close-packed, the rocking mule-cart beareth

Two dusty miles away to white-walled Jerez

Where the great vats, set for their ancient uses,

Sweetened and scoured of former lees and dregs,

Wait in the dark bodega. There unloaded,

The kegs are heaved and emptied one by one

Into the portly vats. So having stowed it

They leave the must to work. Now has begun

That early fermentation musky-scented

And softly-hissing, called “the tumultuous,” ended

After a few brief days, which but foreboded

That slower, stealthier change whose stages run

Beyond Christ’s Birthday to the old year’s ending

And on into the New Year till the first

Or second month, while the slow dregs descending

Leave the wine clear, all cloudy films dispersed.

Thereafter, from its lees drawn off, enduring

Through the long months it waits the slow maturing

Laid up in other vats, till ripe for blending

With older wine, in whose soft flame immersed,

It grows to subtler essence. And that older

Is mixed with older yet, from every vat

A little drawn, till Time, the patient moulder

Of pure perfection, who on Ararat

Watered the vine of Noah, slowly fashion

The pure Solera, daughter of the passion

Of Earth and Sun, and make the gold one golder,

The ripe one riper than that old king who sat

On Israel’s ivory throne, and every nation

Drew near to taste his wisdom. For in wine

Lie wisdom and that fair illumination

That charms the brain to fancies half divine.

Then drink! For, kindling in our crystal rummers,

Wakes the bright Phœnix of a thousand summers

And the great gods stand again, each in his station,

With garlands crowned of the immortal vine.

Summer in Winter

Winter lies on the fields so cold and grey

That morning and noon are dim as the fall of day.

Colour is gone from the world, and the rustle of leaves,

And the song of the birds; but under the loaded eaves

Icicles drip and drip to the ground below,

Melting a line of holes in the floor of snow.

Shut out this desolation. Here indoors

Are bright, warm rooms. The fire of pine-logs roars:

In polished brass and blushing mirror flares

The hearth’s red gleam. Long sofas, deep soft chairs,

And books are here. Let snow mount to the sill,

Here we have made a summer no frost can kill.

And here, conserved in jars, is the wealth of June,—

Raspberry, strawberry, waiting the silver spoon;

Jelly of autumn brambles, gleaming pots

Of plums, greengages, tawny apricots

Steeped in clear syrups, and the crystal spoil

Of bees, the vintage of a five-months’ toil.

But, more than this, in cellared gloom are laid

Other and older vintages that swayed

In purple clusters on Burgundian plains,

On Lusitanian mountain-slopes or Spain’s

Swart vineyards, in whose generous nectar runs

The prisoned soul of long-forgotten suns.

Unlock the door, then; down the dark stone stair

Grope in the taper’s wavering light to where

The cobwebbed bottle slumbers; gently lift—

Gently as new-born babe—lest you should shift

The cloudy sediment; then thief-like slink

Upstairs again and in the pantry sink

Knock off the sealing-wax, then draw with care,

Decant, and set in a warm room to air.

Then shall we sit and sip in candle light

And let the storm roar out its heart all night.

Rhapsody on a Pink-Iced Cake

To Gertrude Freeman

When Earth arose out of the Flood

And sang before the throne of God,

So shone on Ararat sublime,

Bright in the second dawn of Time,

The rosy Ark, its roofing laid

With beam of ruby, tile of jade,

And the bright bulwarks crusted o’er

With silver limpets from the floor

Of the drowned Earth. So Solomon,

Dreaming towards evening alone,

In the clear kingdom of his brain

Wrought that first temple without stain,

Too pure for stone or the rough grain

Of cedar or the dross of gold.

And Homer, blind and very old,

Along the wide plains of his thought

Saw battles and long sieges fought

Round ramparts rosy even as these.

So soared above the glooming trees

That tower of laughter and of tears

Where Beauty slept a hundred years.

And, built of sweetness and pure light,

So love and hope and heart’s-delight

And all the lovely things of dream,

Hovering an instant on the stream

Of Man’s ambitious spirit, glow

And vanish like an April snow.

The Eve of the Fair

Green grows the grass in these well-watered meadows

For here there bubbles from a hundred springs

The bright Clitumnus under dappled shadows

Of slender poplars where the faint breeze sings

And the green-showering tresses of weeping willows;

And all the pool is floored with woven weed

And caverns lined with glimmering mossy pillows

And pale blue rocks. Those bubbling waters feed

Rich farms, half-hidden behind a feathery screen

Of silver olive-boughs and trailing vines

Heavy with clusters purple, red, and green,

Soon to be trodden to red and golden wines.

And bounding either edge of the green plain,

The violet mountains lift their peaceful crowns,

Soaring like waves crest above crest again,

Still peopled by remote and ancient towns,—

Lofty Spoleto with its rocky gorge

Spanned by the aqueduct, and many a keep,

Spello and Montefalco, towns that urge

Stone street and scowling palace up the steep

And set a crown of towers on many hills,

Leaping abrupt and stark against the sky

And turbid at noon and eve with clanging bells.

From these and all the villages that lie

Scattered upon the plain, the countryfolk

Are flocking towards Foligno for the fair,

Bringing their goods. With song and curse and joke

They swelter along in the dry and dusty glare.

All day along the parched and dazzling roads

That straggle to the town from every part,

Oxen and mules and horses draw their loads

In wain and barrow and brightly painted cart.

While in the town all day, along the streets

And in that empty space within the walls

Edged with cool-shaded trees and long stone seats,

A crowd of busy folk are building stalls;

Till the place rings with hammering and knocking

And cracking whips and jangling harness-bells

And rumbling wheels of all the traffic flocking

In from the teeming plains and those blue hills.

Still with the growing crowd the din grows louder

With shouts of drivers, wagons turning, backing,

And stamping hooves that churn the dust to powder

And sweating men unloading and unpacking,

Spreading the wares in clusters on the grass

All duly planned like little towns with walls

And lanes and streets to let the buyers pass,

Or carefully disposed upon the stalls.

And carts and mules come pushing through the throng

Or scarlet wagon like a stranded hulk

That great white oxen slowly haul along

Heaving the yoke with all their noble bulk,

Patient, with branching horns and deep calm eyes

Like forest pools, and scarlet-tasselled brows.

Evening draws on; but ere the sunset dies

The bells in every tower and belfry rouse

A hum of clanging bronze that builds a dome

Of mellow noise above the din below,

So bright, it seems as if the shining foam

Of dust-motes and the golden evening glow

Were suddenly enchanted into sound.

But when both sound and light from the sky have faded

And colour has faded from all the hills around

And streets and squares are all grown cool and shaded,

Those weary folk make ready for the night.

Some with tarpaulin sheets build bivouacs

Or over the wide wagons stretch them tight

To form a hutch, or spread their rugs and sacks

Under the carts, while every tethered beast

With drooping head crops at the scanty grass.

Then, before rest, they spread the evening feast

Grouped about lamps and lanterns, and they pass

The wine-flask, the brown loaf and honeyed figs

And marbled mortadella and pale cheese.

Then someone tunes a fiddle and scratches jigs

Or softly from the darkness of the trees

Jingles a mandoline, so sad, so faint,

It sounds as though dead fingers touched the strings:

And laughter comes in gusts and through the quaint

Dark-huddled groups the yellow lamplight flings

Brightness across the corner of a shawl

Or fires a hand or gilds a laughing face

Or, touching hidden boughs, reveals a fall

Of emerald leaves with shadows frail as lace.

Then lamps go out and laughter dies and each

Creeps to his bed, and moonlight fills the square

And silence, broken by the lone owl’s screech,

While all lie dreaming of to-morrow’s fair

Till the delicious coolness of early dawning

Sharpens the air and all is fresh and gleaming,

And a chill fragrance steals beneath the awning

Of dewy boughs and stirs them from their dreaming.

II

Before the Battle

Here on the blind verge of infinity

We live and move like moles. Our crumbling trench

Gapes like a long wound in the sodden clay.

The land is dead. No voice, no living thing,

No happy green of leaves tells that the spring

Wakes in the world behind us. Empty gloom

Fills the cold interspace of earth and sky.

The sky is waterlogged and the drenched earth

Rots, and the whining sorrow of slow shells

Flies overhead. But memory like the rose

Wakes and puts forth her bright and odorous blooms

And builds green hanging gardens in the heart.

Once, in another life in other places,

Where a slow river coiled through broad green spaces

And sunlight filled the long grass of the meadows

And moving water flashed from shine to shadows

Of old green-feathered willows, bent in ranks

Along sun-speckled banks,—

Lovely remembered things now gone forever;

I saw young men run naked by the river,

Thirty young soldiers. Where the field-path goes,

Their boots and shirts and khaki lay in rows.

With feet among the long warm grass stood one

Like ivory in the sun,

And in the water, white upon the shade

That hung beneath the shore,

His long reflexion like a slow flag swayed

And at the trembling of the water frayed

Into a hundred shreds, then joined once more.

One, where the river, when the willows end,

Breaks from its calm to swirl about a bend,

Strong swimmer he, wrestled against the race

Of the full stream. I saw his laughing face

Framed by his upcurved arm. Another, slim,

Hands above head, stood braced upon the brim,

Then dived, a brother of the curved new moon,

And came up streaming soon

Ten feet beyond, brown shoulders shining wet

And comic face and hair washed sleek as jet.

Out on the further bank another fellow

Climbed stealthily into a leaning willow

And perched leaf-shrouded, crooning like a dove;

Till from the pool below a voice was heard:

“’Ere, Bert! Where’s Bert?” and Bert sang out above:

“Up ’ere, old son, changed to a bloody bird!”

And dived through leaves and shattered through the cool

Clear watery mirror, and all across the pool

Slow winking circles opened wide, till he

Rose and in rising broke their symmetry.

Laughter and shouting filled the sparkling air.

Bright flakes of scattered water everywhere

Leapt from their diving. Hosts of little billows

Beat the shores, and the hanging boughs of willows

Glittered with glassy drops. Then, bright as fire,

A bugle sounded, and their happy din

Stopped, and the boys, with that swift discipline

By which keen life answers the soul’s desire,

Rushed for the bank. And soon the bank was bright

With bodies swarming up out of the stream.

From the water and the boughs they came in sight:

Across the leaves I saw their quick limbs gleam.

Then brandished towels flashed whitely here and there.

They dried their ears and scrubbed their towzled hair.

One, stepping to the water, carefully

Stretched a bare leg to rinse a muddy foot:

One sat with updrawn knee,

Bent head, and both hands tugging on a boot.

And gradually the bright and flashing crowd

Dimmed into sober khaki. Then the loud

Laughter and shouts and songs died at a word.

The ranks fell in: no sound, no movement stirred.

The willow-boughs were still: the blue sky burned:

The party numbered down, formed fours, right turned,

Marched. And their shadows faded from the stream

And the dark pool swayed back into its dream:

Only the trodden meadow-grass reported

Where all that gay humanity had sported.

So the dream fades. I wake, remembering how

Many of those smart boys no longer now

Cast running shadows on the grass or make

White tents with laughter shake,

But lie in narrow chambers underground,

Eyes void of sunlight, ears unthrilled by sound

Of laughter. Round my post on every hand

Stretches this grim, charred skeleton of land

Where ruined homes and shell-ploughed fields are lost

In one great sea of clay, clay seared by fire,

Battered by rainstorms, jagged and scarred and crossed

By gaping trench-lines hedged with rusted wire.

The rainy evening fades. A rainy night

Sags down upon us. Wastes of sodden clay

Fade into mist, and fade all sound and sight,

All broken sounds and movements of the day,

To emptiness and listlessness, a grey

Unhappy silence tremulous with the poise

Of hearts intent with fearful expectation

And secret preparation,

Silence that is not peace but bated breath,

A listening for death,

The quivering prelude to tremendous noise.

O give us one more day of sun and leaves,

The laughing soldiers and the laughing stream,

And when at dawn the loud destruction cleaves

The silence, and (like men that walk in dream,

Knowing the stern ordeal has begun)

We climb the trench and cross the wire and start,

We’ll stumble through the shell-bursts with good heart

Like boys who race through meadows in the sun.

Immortality

When on the sluggish tide of time

The immortal moment comes

Whose bugle-summons cleaves with gleaming edge

Flesh and all stuff of the material world,

The soldier-soul, with that swift discipline

Wherewith keen life answers the heart’s desire,

Leaps on the deed as tiger leaps on fawn,

As powder answers fire.

Soul is the perfect athlete running free

Among the clear winds of reality;

For whom dim speculation and the thought

That measured, weighed, and sought

In worlds unreal the cloudy paradises

And comfortable prizes

For loveless rules obeyed, are less than nought.

The eternal moment being his vital air,

He cannot ask nor care

Whether his burning deed shall sow the seeds

Of other life and deeds,

Or if his being, ardent, pure, intact,

Die on the summit of the immortal act.

Bugles

Mournful and clear and golden on the dusk

The sudden fire of bugles. Fervid flights

Of burning wings flash up from the dark hill

Where like a growth of giant lilies glow

The lighted tents. That piercing music rouses

The slumbrous memory. Forests of the past

Answer those fervid notes with fainter notes

Sepulchral, far, whose clear reveille shakes

The dark unfretted waters of the mind

Till all the surface quivers with keen pain

And depth to depth the searching trouble stirs

Till all that watery world

Thrills with new life that urges to the top

Layers of dim memory hidden long from light,

And years long dead, victories, endurances,

And terrible happenings live again. Again

In rainswept darkness down the broken roads

The drenched and sweating troops swarm towards the line,

Stumbling with burdened backs and burdened hearts

Into their new ordeal: on and on

Through tunnels of the blind and timeless night,

By wallowing lorries thrust into the ditch

And pulsing tractors hauling monstrous guns,

Or in cold rain interminably impeded

By some unknown obstruction miles ahead:

Through fields that stink of carnage, yawn with holes

Full of pale stagnant water; thicket-snares

Of sharp-fanged wire, through roar of murderous shells

And gas and blood and flame, till the shocked mind

Flares up in terror and the memory dies

In tumult and blown smoke. Then slowly rise

The pale forgotten faces of the dead,

Cast off the rust of Time, the mould of Earth,

And speak again and laugh and sing gay songs

And eat and drink in warm light of the sun

In the good fellowship of adventurous souls

Who have purged their hearts of fear. Too happy vision,

Vainly denying death and the iron fact

For those poor slaves of clay

And us sad children of mortality.

For the buglers take the bugles from their lips

And Time and Death return with the failing light

To numb the leaves and blind the lake’s clear eyes

And shroud the water with a film of frost.

And the heart takes up its sure mechanic beat

And the dulled eyesight shrinks

To outward things and the narrow pen of Space.

Layer under layer, sluggish as falling snow,

The settling sediment of memory sinks

Till the mind is tranquil as a block of ice.

Epitaph

These are the unthrifty souls

Who watered dusty streets with wine;

Gathered pearls from Indian shoals

And cast them royally to swine;

Their most precious love who strowed

To be trampled by the crowd;

Freely broached their hearts’ red blood

To dye the garments of the proud;

Who have sung away their years

To soothe the perjurer and the thief;

Poured for the heartless, healing tears;

Fed the tyrant with their grief;

Paid the price they never owed;

Prayed to gods who claim no prayer;

Climbed the high encumbered road

Never asking why or where.

Man Seeks to Cage Delight

Man seeks to cage delight

In vain, not seeing

That her strong-pinioned flight

Is all her being,

And sets about to frame

Dead fantasies—

Eternity, Infinity—to tame

The ecstasy that flies;

And vexed by bonds of Space,

By veils of Time,

He dreams a special grace,

A power sublime,

In these abstractions, vain

Unbodied signs,

Frail shadows of the ecstasy and pain

With which Orion shines,

With which the rose unwinds

Each scented fold,

With which man grows and finds

The note of gold

Hid in the heart of laughter,

Heart of sighs,

In measured golden music flying after

The golden voice that flies,

In love from marble wrought,

In love that chimes

Over clear-ringing thought

And well-tuned rhymes,

In love become a fact

Keen, swift, and fell,

When the whole self leaps forward to the act

Clean as the whistling shell.

For when the body and mind,

Fused in one fire,

Leap, like tiger on hind,

On the one desire,

Then the careful thoughts and schemes

Of barren years

Go down into the pit of ruined dreams

And crumbling hopes and fears.

For to be single, sure,

In one swift flash,

Pure flame or diamond pure;

To slough the ash

Of things burnt out; to gain

The fountain’s powers

Gathered in little compass to attain

Its crown of glittering showers;

This is the eternal, this

The infinite,

The gods’ immortal kiss

Set warm and bright

On heroes’ brows. In these brief moments’ span

Shall man outlive the thousand centuries

Of the blind life of man.

Therefore when I am sunk

To earth again

And thirsty earth has drunk

My joy and pain,

I shall not know or need

Pity or praise

Or thanks or love from you, the human seed

Sprung out of later days:

For on the burning crest

Of great extremes

Where the soul meets breast to breast

Its highest dreams,

Safe from stern Fate’s decrees

Irrevocably

I have possessed and savoured to the lees

My own eternity.

To Hate

Come, holy Spirit, pentecostal flame.

Out of the deep we cry to thee. The shame

Of feeble virtues, mild complacencies

Consumes our bodies like a foul disease.

Eat us as acid eats, burn us with fire,

Till every timid hope and pale desire,

All fond ideals, misty hopes that fly

Beyond the frontiers of reality,

Crumble to ash and leave us clean as light,

Essential strength, pure shapes of granite bright

Set up for no man’s worship, no man’s pleasure,

But fashioned by the slow, aeonian leisure

Of storms and blowing sands. Of thee is born

All power, all bravery, and the sharp-eyed scorn

That sees beneath bright gawds to the bare bone

Of naked Truth’s relentless skeleton.

Save, lest we perish unrepentent, sped

To our last count without thy lance and shield,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

With all our small perfections on our head.

III

To Messaline

When you in death shall lie

And coldly across the low, deep-windowed room,

Where table, chair, and bed emerge from gloom,

Light from a pallid sky

Shall fall on the quiet hair and large white brow

And gleam along the sharp edge of the nose

Austere, ascetic now;

And night’s dim water, as it backward flows,

Shall leave small pools of gloom

In the waxen hollow of each sunken eye,

Round the drawn mouth where the cheeks have fallen in,

And where the throat drops from the jutting chin;

And under the cold sheet

The trunk shall stiffen and the stretched limbs pine,

Lapsing in one continuous hollow line

From the peaked face down to the long gaunt feet;

Then, Messaline, O most unhappy one,

That longing for the unattainable

That shakes your body like a vibrant bell,

Consumes it on the sacrificial pyre

Of unassuaged desire,

Shall lose its hold. And you, poor wandered nun,

Thwarted idealist, at last shall know

Repose; pure, cold repose. For you shall go

Through death, corruption, to nonentity

Of small, clean dust; and parching winds shall blow

That senselesss dust far out upon the sea,

And all of you be drowned most utterly

In each small mote descending through profound

Blind gulfs of cold green water, far from sound

And touch and every sense that wove the mesh

That held your struggling spirit in the flesh.

Puppets

We are the bloodless echoes of the past,

Blown between vast and vast:

Miserable automata, we check

Each impulse at the beck

Of dead, forbidding hands. Dancing, we tread

The footsteps of the dead,

And by their laws make love; and when we sing,

Dead fingers pluck the string

And twist our music to a stale old song;

And when we walk along

Green valleys and wide fields of reddening wheat,

Grey phantoms dog our feet

And their sere joys, voiced in a tongue outworn,

Turn all our joy to scorn.

An unsubstantial shadow dulls our light,

And when we sit to write

A ghost stands by the chair to guide the pen

Lest we should write for men

Some vivid truth, some song with potency

To set the whole world free.

And when we think, ghosts in our spirits cast

Dust of a ruined past,

Lest we should see and feel and, knowing our strength,

Rise in revolt at length

Against the iniquitous tyranny of the dead.

But still we bow the head,

And still the blind obstruction of the past

Builds over us a vast

Cold sepulchre, an incubus of stone.

IV

Heard in a Lane

When the wet earth dreamed of spring

In early February

And the first gnats danced on fragile wing,

I stood where the air was warm and still

In a deep lane under a hill

Gazing at a copse of birches

That ran uphill to meet blue sky.

From slim white trunks the tapering branches spread

To a web of rosy twigs. But from their perches

In the high hawthorn-fence

Two robins chuckled loudly, and one said

In his clear, dewy speech: “look how he stares

Like a daft owl in the sun!” The other broke

To trills of scornful laughter and then spoke:—

“These huge unfeathered creatures are so dense

That their slow vision sees

Nothing but rooted wooden trees

In those white, living flames that leap from the hill

And the crown of rosy smoke that hangs so still.”

Rain in Spring

Cloud-films that hardly stain

The sky’s blue hall

Gather, dissolve, and fall

In sudden visitations of bright rain.

Then the soft voice of seas

Is heard in the green precincts of the trees—

A long, still hushing; then the subtler hiss

Of thousand-bladed grass: then, over this,

Out of the trees’ high tops

The ticking of larger drops

That small leaf-tricklings fill

Till, one by one, whenever the wet leaves stir,

From leaf to overweighted leaf they spill,

Heavy as quicksilver.

These are the showers of spring,

Pilgrims that pass

And scatter crystal seed among the grass;

That make the still ponds sing

Delicate tunes and leave the hedgerows filled

With moist and odorous warmth, brim with blue haze

Hollows of hills and glaze

Each leaf with lacquer cunningly distilled

From sunlight; they that fling

A brightness along the edge of everything,

And the frail splendour of the rainbow build

To span six miles of meadowland, as though

Each rain-dipped flower below

Had breathed its colour up through the bright air

To hang in beauty there.

Blue Night

Blue waves of Night

Brim the warm hollows of the hills

And wrap from sight

Fields of our earth and the high fields of air.

Slowly the great bowl of the evening fills

With heavy darkness, till the fading sense

Of sight falls from us, and beneath a dense

And denser gloom all visible things are thinned

To empty shades,—to nothing. But we hear,

Mysteriously swayed, now far, now near,

The long hush of hidden rivers,

This hiss of a hidden bough that shivers

Beneath an unfelt wind.

On the Salt Marsh

Here where the lark sings overhead

And the grey sheep nibble the short salt herb

And the bugloss lifts a sky-blue head

And only the sea’s long sighs disturb

The silence spread

Like a great arch overhead;

Here where the very air is peace

And our footfalls stir not the smallest sound

On a turf as soft as the ewes’ soft fleece,

Passion has walked, till the very ground

Pulsed like a monstrous heart, and fear

And struggle and hate roared down the breeze

Till even the hill-perched farms could hear.

For see, in a spiny whin-bush bleached,

This seaweed that was flung to parch

A mile inland, when the sea thrice breached

The long sea-wall and the whins were whirled

Breast-high in a tumbling tide, wind-hurled

On a stormy night in March.

Frost in Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Lifeless, still, in the frosty air

The old stone houses round the square

Look out upon grey lawns whose grass

Is frozen to brittle blades of steel or glass;

And on black beds through whose ice-welded crust,

Hollow and hard, no gardener’s spade can thrust;

And on black branches that forget to grow

And hang benumbed and hypnotized as though

The sap stood still. The very air seems dead,

All sound dried out of it. No ringing tread

Warms the numbed silence. Even the sun himself,

An orange disk in a grey frost-laden sky,

Hangs lightless, like a plate upon a shelf.

This is not life. Some ghost of otherwhere

Takes shadowy substance from the frozen air

To hover briefly till the spell is broken,—

A dream, a passing thought, a faint word spoken.

But suddenly from a corner of the square

A shimmering fount of sound leaps clear and rare,

A small, thin, frosty cheer like tinkling glass.

Is it shouts of boys that pass

Running in file to slide on the icy kerb,

Or Dryad, sick for spring,

Wailing forlornly under the frozen herb?

O light of youth, O flower of life in death!

We listen with bated breath;

So sad, so clear the delicate, wistful spell;

Till frost lays hold on the sound and all is still.

The Naiad

Frost-bound the garden stands.

The claws of the frost are sharp upon my hands.

On the harsh lawn each blade of grass

Is tempered to a brittle spear of glass.

The fountain is crystal-hung; its waters fail.

Wilted to colourless, frail

Paper the tender flesh of the flowers.

The Dryads are gone from the tree,

For the leaves are gone, the delicate leafy towers

Dismantled, bared to the iron anatomy

Not even a bird could hide in. But hid within

In the hollow trunk, the knees drawn up to the chin,

Hugging herself each shivering Dryad sleeps,

And frozen Echo leaps

From her dream when my footfalls knock

In a motionless, soundless world

On a pathway hard as rock.

No flutter, no song of bird

Nor bubbling flute is heard,

Nor laughter of green-eyed Satyr. The Satyr, curled

In his ice-hung cave, is shaken with torpid fear;

For the days of lust are over

And cold are the loved and the lover

And the birthday of Christ draws near.

Smooth flows the stream, its shallow banks ice-coated,

And the pool where the lilies floated

Is glazed with a polished pane as black as flint

And fringed with a delicate wreath

Of crystal leaves. But a hint

Of water moving beneath

Draws my eyes. Pale, pale through the polished glass,

Sweet naked body and wavering hair pass

Pallid as death, fluid as water.

O ghost of Arethusa, Spring’s first daughter,

Beating vain hands against your crystal ceiling!

O hands imploring, O white lips appealing

Stirred and parted by syllables unheard!

See, with a sharp-edged stone I crack the pane.

The pale lips part again

And the leafless garden thrills to the delicate ring

Of a small, clear call from Naiad or hidden bird,

From water or air, crying, “The Spring! The Spring!”

Christmas Eve

Still falls the snow. White-thatched are all the groves.

Lost field, sunk roadway, and the buried heather

Lie in unbroken whiteness all together.

This is not snow of any worldly weather,

For now the Queen of Loves

Drops to our earth feather on crystal feather

Plucked from her team of doves.

Cold in the moonlight cold the hoar-frost shines

On forests lost in snow, a desolation

Like seas of foam in frozen fluctuation.

Those moon-lit fires of frosty scintillation

On boughs of frozen pines

Are jewels from the days before Creation

Dug from no mortal mines.

Row upon glassy row, from cornice white

Of boughs and thatches, hang the slim and even

Long icicles, like daggers frost-engraven.

Seven on the eaves and on the pine-bough seven

These are the swords shall smite

The heart of Mary Mother, Queen of Heaven;

For on this winter’s night

The hidden Flower of Love wakes from its dreaming,

Breaks the green sheath, uncurls each petal folded;

And silently as dew on green leaves gleaming

The world is shattered and a new world moulded

In Love’s own likeness, ere world-weary men

Have taken breath and breathed it out again.

V

The Fisherman’s Rest

Under the shining helms

Of piled white cloud

A sombre screen of elms

Is set to shroud

The little red-roofed inn

From the midday glare.

Its smoke climbs straight and thin

Through windless air,

And breaks on the sombre boughs

To an azure bloom.

But we, who know the house

And the clean-swept room,

Enter and loudly ask

Huge Mrs. Reece

To draw from the new-tapped cask

A pint apiece

Topped with a creamy crown

And clear and cool

As the trout-stream lagging brown

In its rock-carved pool.

Then, after talk and drink,

We’ll rise and go

To the brown stream’s trembling brink,

To crouch and throw

A tinselled fly, till the trout

That sulks alone

Is artfully wheedled out

From his shadowy stone.

Mrs. Reece Laughs

Laughter, with us, is no great undertaking;

A sudden wave that breaks and dies in breaking.

Laughter, with Mrs. Reece, is much less simple:

It germinates, it spreads, dimple by dimple,

From small beginnings, things of modest girth,

To formidable redundancies of mirth.

Clusters of subterranean chuckles rise,

And presently the circles of her eyes

Close into slits, and all the woman heaves,

As a great elm with all its mounds of leaves

Wallows before the storm. From hidden sources

A mustering of blind volcanic forces

Takes her and shakes her till she sobs and gapes.

Then all that load of bottled mirth escapes

In one wild crow, a lifting of huge hands

And creaking stays, a visage that expands

In scarlet ridge and furrow. Thence collapse,

A hanging head, a feeble hand that flaps

An apron-end to stir an air and waft

A steaming face … and Mrs. Reece has laughed.

VI

Expostulation to Helen

Helen, I’d be, if I could have my wish,

A pool among the rocks where small, shy fish

Gleam to and fro, and green and rosy weed

Sways its long fringes. So I should not heed

Your comings and your goings nor each whim

So skilfully contrived to torture him,

Your chosen fool. And still, as now, each day

Your vanity would bring you where I lay

To kneel and on my crystal face below

Gaze self-entranced, as now; and I should grow

Beautiful with your beauty, and you would be

More beautiful for the crystal lights in me.

But when, self-surfeited, you went away

I should not care, nor could the blown sea-spray,

Blurring your image all the winter through,

Vex the pure, passionless water, strictly true

To its own being. Only the weeds would swing

Rosy and green, and the ripples, ring on ring,

Tremble and wink above the gleaming fish.

So would I be, if I could have my wish.

To Helen With a Bottle of Scent

Sage titillator of a thousand noses,

Old Hafiz the Perfumer, years ago

Boiled down two gardensful of yellow roses

And skimmed the gold froth from the sumptuous brew;

Then strained it out into a crystal vat

To work and settle during certain moons

As ordered in the thirteenth Caliphate;

Then boiled again and stirred with silver spoons

Till shrunk to half; and so, by slow degrees,

Boiled and laid up and boiled again, till fined

To pure quintessence purged of subtlest lees.

Then, death at hand, he chose with artist’s mind

This curious flask embossed with bees and flowers,

And, drop by drop, with trembling hand distilled

The priceless attar, whose insidious powers,

Helen, I place at your command, though chilled

With aching doubts lest you, while up in town,

Shedding its sunny fragrance on the air,

Should trap the dashing Captain Archie Brown

Or twang the heartstrings of some millionaire.

Serenade

I am the voice in the night, the voice of darkness;

Listen, O shy one, listen, my voice shall find you.

As the rose springs from the earth,

So love blooms from the dark unknown.

Hark to the voice of love that springs in the darkness.

O timid, O craven.

Though you have barred your doors against earth and heaven

You shall not escape me.

See, like a thin blue flame

My voice burns up to your window,

Steals through the fast-closed casement, stirs in the curtains,

Flushes to rose the pale and delicate lamplight.

O fear, O wonder, the bright flame circles about you,

Flashes above you, burns deep down to your heart.

You struggle, you cry, cry out of a heart tormented:

“Ah Terror, ah Death, have mercy!”

O timid and craven heart, it is love that takes you:

Give yourself up to the flame. I am life, not death.

O slim moon veiled in the cloud, shy fawn in the thicket,

Lily hid in the water, come from your hiding.

Why is your hair like silk and your flesh like a flower?

Not for your own delight nor the cold delight of your mirror:

Not for the kisses of death.

I am a cry in the night, a song in the darkness.

O timid, O craven,

Vain, how vain is your hiding.

For the night brims up with my singing, my voice enfolds you,

And how shall you flee when the whole night turns to music?

The House of Love

As a bird’s wing,

Against the soft warm body gathering

Its folded feathers, closes and is still

When the wind-wandering bird has dropped to rest

On the green bough beside her hidden nest;

So my blind will

Wanders no more, nor beats the empty air,

Nor follows hot-foot to their phantom lair

Beguilement of the ear, lust of the eye

And all such pageantry

As lures men from fulfilment of desire;

Wanders no more, but entering that small house

Which Love has made his palace, lights the fire,

Bars door and shutter, sets the wine and bread

Where the tall candles shed

Soft lustre, and stands ready to carouse

With her who is the mistress of the house.

Autumn

All day the plane-trees have shaken from shadow to sun

Their long depending boughs, and one by one

From early-falling limes the yellow leaves

Have eddied to earth. But still warm noon deceives

Old fears of death. But when with the twilight came

From the dim garden an air like sharp cold flame

And bitter with burnt leaves, I knew once more

That the walls were down between love and the silent, frore

Wastes of eternity. O lean above me,

Screening my eyes with your hair like a dark willow

From the cold glare of death. O you that love me,

Lean with your body’s weight, that the cold billow

Not yet may lift me away, though love and light,

Roses and fruit and leaves prepare to-night

With unreturning wings

To launch upon the eternal flux of things.

The Immortals

Beloved, in this world of sense

We have the one omnipotence.

None but we lovers can erase

The foolish laws of time and space

Or gather by their wedded power

Eternity into an hour.

So to the four winds let us cast

Vague future and abysmal past

And, proud of body, leave behind

The fretful ghosts of soul and mind;

Nay even scorn the ageless joys

Of lovely sights and the soft noise

Of waving branches, streams that sing,

And music of the trembling string,

And all sweet scents and tastes that creep

Through brain to spirit. Alone we’ll keep

(Since ours is the one certain bliss

To come together in a kiss)

Locked in our frail and narrow clutch

The world-creating sense of touch.

All things are ours because we love.

Not men nor wrathful saints above,

Nor all the long corroding years,

Nor envious death’s remorseless shears,

Can ever vanquish or destroy

The sure possession of our joy.

Even God Himself can ne’er retract

His gift of the accomplished fact

Nor cancel by divine decree

Our once-enjoyed eternity.

Then let us keep forever fresh

This warm eternity of flesh,

This only true reality

Of lip-to-lip and knee-to-knee;

Knowing that, whatever years may bring

Of dusty earth or golden wing,

Once having loved, both you and I

Have been immortal ere we die.

Fog in the Channel

The sea is silent to-night. To our inland village,

A mile from the Channel, comes never a sound of the seas.

Windless night is heavy on pasture and tillage,

On houses and herbs and trees.

But suddenly over the silence, lone and far,

Long-drawn, desolate, hovers a deep intoning,

A measureless sadness; and soon, remote as a star,

An answering voice. A multitudinous moaning

Fills the night, and my heart shrinks cold, for I know

That fog has closed on the sea in a blinding smother.

O why do we suffer this craving for another

To split our lives in two? Though my body lies

So safe and warm beneath this low white ceiling,

Dark terrors round me rise;

For my heart is out in the Channel among the wheeling

Wreaths of fog and the deep-tongued desolate cries

Of fog-bound ships; and lying here I am lost

In a darkness denser and stranger

Than any darkness of mist. I am torn and tossed

Upon the horns of a more than bodily danger,

Yes, greater than yours, Beloved, who waken drifting

In your blinded ship that utters its long lament

From the soft, slow swell of the Channel, sinking, lifting,

Out between France and Kent.

From the French

Days of the Lilac and the days of Roses

Come not again this spring, for all our sighing.

The days of Lilac and days of Roses

Are past, and all the scented Pinks are dying.

The wind has changed. A sullen vapour closes

The weeping skies. We may not gather now

The Lilac-blossoms and early Roses.

Sad is the spring and bloomless hangs the bough.

O sweet and happy springtime that invaded

Our fields last year to gladden loved and lover.

So utterly our flower has faded

That even your kiss, alas, can wake it never.

And what of you, my love? No flower uncloses

Nor sunlight blooms through the shadowy leaves above.

Days of the Lilac and the days of Roses

Lie dead for evermore with our dead love.

VII

Cathedral at Night

Huge as a precipice in the summer night

The black porch yawned above him like a wave

And swallowed him. Shrunk to a grain of sand

He paused inside, bewildered at the sense

Of so much height and darkness, till his eyes

Gained strength, and in the emptiness dark shapes,

Pinnacled rocks and towering trunks of stone,

Loomed round him and, high hung like long pale banners,

Tall windows showed. And it seemed the whole void cavern

Vibrated sensitive as a strung harp,

For his shy footfall woke a spreading trouble

That echoed from furthest galleries and vaults

Awareness of his presence. He crossed the transept,

Climbed to the loft hung like a falcon’s nest

On the sheer face of the triforium,

From which the towering shafts of organ-pipes

Shot up like tropic growths. There, round about him,

The music books, the rows of stops, the close

Familiar walls of oak glowed as a core

Of radiance in the darkness; and he sought

Books of old music, chose his stops, began.

Vague tremors shook the stillness, voices woke,

And the emptiness was peopled with the life

Of crowding notes. Down the wide nave, along

Cold aisles, through secret chapels, hanging vaults,

Flowed the warm circulation of sweet sounds

Like health into a body long diseased,

While the august and ancient music-makers

Woke from long sleep and their immortal voices

Flooded the dark shrine with a golden beauty.

And he, the player, with cunning fingers piling

Sound upon sound, harmony on harmony,

Launched out his spirit upon those tides of music

Until it grew and filled the shadowy place,

Swung with the arches, soared to the topmost vault,

Put on the whole great structure as a garment,

Sang with those ancient voices as with his own,

And on the summit of the last pure chord

Found unity and peace. He raised his hands:

The music stopped, and his full-statured spirit

Shrivelled. The horror of sheer height hung above him,

The cavern of sheer depth was scooped below,

And silence fell like doom. Out in the dark,

Blind windows hung, dumb columns rose, vast trunks

Upheaved the heavy foliage of the night,

And darkness, emptiness, like birds of prey

Swooped back and perched about him, grimly still,

While he, as in the bright cup of a flower,

Rigid, with sharpened senses, hung besieged.

Poetry and Memory

Dark is the mind’s deep dwelling,

Roofed and walled and floored

With ancient rock. There water, slowly welling

Or slowly dripped, is stored

In a dim, deep, dreaming pool

Unvexed by rain or sunlight or the cool

Wings of the wind, untroubled by joy or grieving

Or the bitterness and the ecstasy of living.

Till the white young bathers come, warily treading,

Lovely, desired, with rosy flesh

Like the apple-bloom on grey boughs spreading

In April, and their feet refresh

Like April the grey desert place.

For when with a sudden freakish grace

They break the pool’s long sleep in an airy flight

Of diving, the dim pool takes light,

Blooms to soft fire in a thousand tongues unfurling

That shed a shimmering beauty on roof and walls

And rouse in those stern halls

Laughing music of water, till the death

Of that dark underworld

Thrills harp-like with new ecstasy and the breath

Of a thousand buds uncurling.

The Secret

Under high boughs I lay in sunny grass.

My mind a mirror was

Reflecting leaves and sunshine; but no Past

Nor fancied Future cast

Their shadows there. For I was grass and trees,

No less, no more than these;

Lay in the sunlight, felt the warmth, and grew;

And sunlight, air, and dew

And earth were all my knowledge. But a breeze,

Winnowing the laden trees,

Drowned me in perfume of the Lime in flower,

And by that perfume’s power

My sense woke on a pale transtellar coast,

Half recognized, half lost,

As an old dream. I lingered there expecting,

My mind a pool reflecting

Unfathomed shapes by dim weeds blurred and webbed,

While waves of memory ebbed

And climbed again up, up the gleaming shoal,

But never reached the pool.

Then expectation shaped. I was aware

Of one with sea-smoothed hair

Leaning above me, in whose eyes I caught

The urgence of the message that she brought.

But, even as her lips stirred,

There fell the clear call of a hidden bird

Out of the Lime’s green leaves,

Waking me to warm grass and the sunny leaves

Of roofing boughs: unheard

The utterance of that still-escaping word

Whose solving fire, revealing light, shall set

All realms of being aflame. So am I yet,

Bewildered and uneasy traveller, blown

Between two kingdoms, neither wholly known.

All is One

I hear the flowing of great rivers

And the long slow breathing of the wind,

And solemnly, incessantly,

Like gleaming fish

In weeds beneath dim water,

Stars on their universal way

Glide among woven boughs.

All is one,

Surely, indivisibly.

A falling pebble

Ruffles the pool’s clear face,

And in those wavering circles waken

Powers that shall change the motion of Orion

And vex the dreaming of a million stars.

Deeds are immortal. Once the rose is gathered,

Nothing can ever be the same again.

The Cage

Man, afraid to be alive,

Shut his soul in senses five,

From fields of uncreated light

Into the crystal tower of sight,

And from the roaring songs of space

Into the small flesh-carven place

Of the ear whose cave impounds

Only small and broken sounds;

And to this narrow sense of touch

From strength that held the stars in clutch;

And from the warm ambrosial spice

Of flowers and fruits of Paradise

To the frail and fitful power

Of tongue’s and nostril’s sweet and sour.

And toiling for a sordid wage

There in his self-created cage,

Ah, how safely barred is he

From menace of eternity.

A Note on the Author

Martin Armstrong (1882–1974) was an English writer and poet. He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He served in World War I in the British Army in France as a Private in the Artist’s Rifles. He was commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment in 1915 and promoted Lieutenant in 1916. He was included in the final Georgian Poetry anthology.

In 1929 he married writer Jessie McDonald, after she had divorced Conrad Aiken, making Armstrong the stepfather of the young Joan Aiken. He appears in disguised form as a character in Conrad Aiken’s Ushant.

Discoverbooks by Martin Armstrong published by Bloomsbury Reader at

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Sir Pompey and Madame Juno

The Bird Catcher

The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife

The Sleeping Fury

The Stepson

Venus over Lannery

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, LondonWC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain 1929, Martin Secker

Copyright © Martin Armstrong

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eISBN: 9781448210336

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