
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Islands
Author: Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson (1878-1962)
Date of first publication: 1932
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Macmillan, 1932
Date first posted: 17 February 2013
Date last updated: 17 February 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1045

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






  ISLANDS
  POEMS, 1930-1932





  ISLANDS


  BY

  WILFRID GIBSON





  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
  1932




  COPYRIGHT



  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
  BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH




  _By WILFRID GIBSON_

  HAZARDS, 1930
  THE GOLDEN ROOM, 1928
  COLLECTED POEMS (1905-1925), 1926
  SIXTY-THREE POEMS.  A Selection for
      use in Schools and Colleges




  TO
  DOROTHY UNA RATCLIFFE


  Off MALOHAMN
  THE BALTIC
  _June_ 1932




  CONTENTS


  ADVENTURE

  The Blue-Peter
  Jungle Drums
  Above the Storm
  Before the Wind
  The Dancing Spears
  Adventure
  The Feathers
  The White Stag
  Avalanche
  Dead Calm
  The Minaret
  Tempest
  The Storm
  In the King's Chamber
  The Unseen Rider
  The Sleeping Dragon
  The Peak
  Panic
  Coaster
  The Tryst
  Islands
  Guillemot
  Olympus
  Sail on, Sail on!



  TRAFFIC

  The Telephone
  The Linn
  The Glance
  Sal
  The Preacher
  The Recollection
  Taking them Unawares
  The Surprise
  The Years Between
  The Dream
  The Old Doctor
  The Bright Glance
  Her Death
  The Unrevealed
  The Cut
  The Dark Forest
  The Window
  The Appointment
  The Separate Bed
  The End of the Game
  Fruits of the Tree
  His Last April
  From Day to Day
  All Souls
  The Cows
  Jocelyn
  Come Life, come Death!
  In the Dead Hour
  The Broken Link
  The Unseen Housemate
  The Poplars
  The Shifted Chair
  Isolation
  The Last Visit
  Broken Toys
  Moonstruck
  Early to Bed
  Coming upon Them
  The Dark Gift
  The Old Man Listens
  The Easy Chair
  Gone to Bed
  The Sick Boy
  Time, Gentlemen, please!
  Marching on
  The Hunter's Moon



  SAILS

  Out of the Air
  _Sea Swallow_
  The Outer Isles
  Skye
  Loch Shieldaig
  Singing Waters
  Canna
  The Island Bull
  The Primrose
  Gairloch
  The Stag unseen
  The Birds of Saint Bride
  Green Cormorant
  Dunvegan
  Scuir-nan-Gillean
  From Night to Night
  The Stormbow
  Drifters, Mallaig
  The Sleepers of the Isles
  The Sound of Sleat
  At Sea
  The Singing Island



  CORONACH

  In Exile
  Renewal (In Memoriam, R. B.) (_For E. M., W. de la M. and L. A._)
  Who shall remember?
  The Singer of the Trees (In Memoriam, John Freeman)
  No Son
  In No-Man's-Land
  Died of Wounds
  The Singer of the Isles (In Memoriam, Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser)
  Coronach
  Draw close the Curtains
  Are there no other Isles?



  HIGHLAND DAWN

  Song at Midnight
  Winter's Breath
  The Little Birds
  The Swooping Wings
  The Birch
  Hear You Nothing in the Glen?
  The Wishing-tree
  The Raider
  The Island Songs
  Not Proven
  Sheldrake
  Island Dawn
  The Last Word
  His Fetch
  On the Edge of the Tide
  The Return
  Too Late
  Glencoe
  The Old Wife
  Red Ranald
  The Little Croft
  The Island Graveyard
  The Golden Hill
  Highland Spring
  Flight
  The Exiles
  The First Flake
  Highland Dawn
  Eagles and Isles




  ADVENTURE




  THE BLUE-PETER

  The day has come for sailing; and at last
  The brisk blue-peter flutters at the mast.
  Too long beneath the mountains we have lain
  While winds and waters called to us in vain:
  Too long the inn has held us, and too long
  Our ears have hearkened to the tavern-song.
  The time has come to quit the company
  Of those who dread the isolating sea,
  Who, slumbering through night-watches, spend their days
  Carousing in the ingle's drowsy blaze:
  For what are they to us who are the sons
  Of tempest, in whose veins the salt tide runs,
  Whose pulses answer to the ebb and flow
  Of all the seas that travel to and fro,
  Whose feet have trod the tilting deck from birth
  And stumble only on the stable earth,
  Whose eyes can pierce the spindrift of the night
  And blunder blindfold in the tavern light,
  Whose hearts must ever in the throng and press
  Ache with intolerable loneliness
  Shut in by walls as in an airless grave,
  Whose home is the unwalled unraftered wave,
  Who each within himself can only find
  In solitude the comrade to his mind,
  And only in the lone sea-watch can be
  At ease at length in his own company.

  The brisk blue-peter beckons; and at last
  Our souls shall ride full-sailed before the blast
  Into the perilous security
  Of strife with the uncompromising sea.




  JUNGLE DRUMS

  Huddling among the scared baboons, he watches
  From his uneasy refuge in the boughs
  The battle-royal as the lions roll,
  A whirl of lashing tails and crashing limbs,
  Round the contested carcase of the quarry,
  But now, a lithe light-hearted springbok leaping
  In the still crystal of the wizard moon;
  When suddenly the snarls and skirls that rend
  The tense expectancy of jungle-night,
  Ripping his midriff, scooping out his vitals,
  Stop dead--those steely clutching claws of sound
  Blunted and muted to a thudding thrumming,
  A far dull thudding, as of the jungle's heart-beat
  Grown audible--the heart of occult evil
  Pulsating with slow measured palpitation
  Of sluggish blood, and the dumb sulking lions
  Skulk through the brush, awed by that mesmerising
  Monotonous redundant muttering menace,
  Relinquishing their quarry that not even
  One jackal stays to snuffle; and in the branches
  No shuddering baboon beside him huddles,
  All stolen off like soundless ghosts unheeded,
  As nearer, clearer, rolls that stunning drubbing,
  A ghostly rub-a-dubbing like the drumming
  Of ghostly marchers ever closer coming,
  The bloodless drumming of a bony army
  Beating again to unremembered battles
  On the taut tympan of the tom-toms rattling
  In cracking fusillades, then dully grumbling
  Like sullen thunder in far hills, then rumbling
  Like earthquake underfoot, then sharply shattering
  The zenith with a cataract of clattering
  That peters to a pattering stuttering mutter,
  Now seeming but the pulse of his own terror
  Feebly aflutter, now a spate full-flooding
  The strained walls of his thudding breast to bursting,
  Then a slow drub of bludgeon blows nigh clubbing
  His senses to unconsciousness, then startling
  His frayed and fretted nerves awake
  With crackles as of burning brake,
  Then sinking slowly to a lamentation
  Throbbing and sobbing through the wizard moonlight
  Until the sobbing strangles in the tangles
  Of crass embrangling creepers' throttling clutches
  And, suffocating under smothering lumber
  Of centuries that crashed in crushing cumber
  To a gross bloated fever-ridden slumber
  Glutted with all the blood-lust of the jungle,
  Is muted to a muffled moaning mumble
  Droning and dulling to a silent stupor
  More dread than death--then rousing of a sudden
  A rattling roulade on his very eardrums,
  Reverberating through his shuddering midriff
  Rending each anguished fibre of his being
  Till, just a stretched skin on earth's hollow gourd,
  He throbs and quivers, swinging at the thigh-bone
  Of the old inexorable skull-faced Drummer
  Madding the fearful hearts of men to war.




  ABOVE THE STORM

  Sheer through the storm into the sun the plane
  Shot, streaming silver from its wings;
  And he who'd won through volleys of blind rain
  And baffling smother of dense cloud
  To heights of rare
  And eager air,
  Keen-edged as icy wine,
  Where only man's heart sings
  In the celestial hyaline,
  Where only man's heart sings, adoring,
  Beyond the range even of the eagle's soaring--
  He, who had braved the tempest's rage and roaring,
  Sang out above the loud
  Propeller's whirring
  As in the crystal light
  Above the curded white
  Of billowy snows
  He rose
  Even to his own heart's height;
  And happily in flashing flight
  He soared and swooped
  And zoomed and looped
  With ease unerring
  Through the unsearchable inane
  In dizzy circles of insane
  And death-defying insolence
  Of youth's delight
  Above the sunny dense
  And seething cloud whereunder
  Still rolled the thunder
  Over an earth already drowned in night.

  He soared and swooped again,
  Exulting in the flawless enginery
  Of hand and brain
  That, even in the heady urgency
  And wildest flight
  Of his insatiable soul,
  Obeying his intrepid will,
  Still kept serene control
  Of his frail plane
  That hung
  Ever on peril's edge and swung
  In thin and scarce-sustaining air
  As by a single hair,
  When one missed heart-beat or untaken breath
  Might lunge him in a fiery plunge to death.

  And still in aerial ecstasy,
  A flittering midge in the infinity
  Of heaven, he revelled till the light
  Drained even from that celestial height,
  And through the icy beryl of the night
  Star after star dawned silverly.




  BEFORE THE WIND

  Aboard her craft once more, she breathed the air
  Of hard-won freedom: standing by to take
  Her trick at the helm, she watched green-water break
  Over the bow; and, as she took the wheel,
  Thrilled to its tug and wrench and the mate's "Take care
  She doesn't gybe!" and thrilled again to feel
  The exultant sea-lift as the slicing keel
  Cut clean the flaking foamheads--body and mind
  Braced, mettled and strung tensely as the taut
  Mainsheet, to keep the ship before the wind,
  Enraptured to escape from brooding, caught
  Into the conflict of the wind and wave
  That shook her soul free from the thrall of thought,
  The dire obsession of futility
  That for so long had darkened all her life:
  And now she felt at last that she was free,
  Recovering in the elemental strife
  Her own identity and the zeal to save
  Her soul alive.  Clear-eyed, with tossing hair
  And lifted brow, she breathed the sharp salt air,
  Nerved to an urgency that held her mind
  Steady on even keel, and proud to find
  Her seamanship sufficing still to keep
  Through the blind smother and welter of the deep
  The cutter running well before the wind.




  THE DANCING SPEARS

  By dark glass shielded from the utter glare
  Of colour razor-keen that cuts the air
  With fiery lancing
  Of purple emerald and ruby light,
  His young eyes yet can hardly bear
  The flicker and the flare
  Of icy pinnacles and needles glancing
  Beneath the flashing of the Dancing Spears;
  And as he lingers by the mast,
  While older shipmates huddle snug below
  In the close cabin's reek and glow,
  The Aurora of the Polar night
  Suffusing steepling berg and level floe,
  And the sharp perilous sense of vast
  Infinitudes of kindled ice and snow,
  Sting his young heart to tears,
  To tears that freeze
  Ere they can fall--
  Tears from a heart overcharged with joy to know
  His dream come true, that he at last
  Has won through all
  The leaden labouring of sullen seas,
  Butting and buffeting and blundering
  Blindfold through fog and sleet and through the thundering
  Of shattering cascading brine,
  To this still crystalline
  World of his heart's desire,
  He who had hankered hungrily
  For the sheer icy ecstasy
  Of Boreal solitudes that hold
  The secret of eternity,
  Of Boreal solitudes whose spires
  Kindle and bicker with the burning cold
  Quick coloured fires
  And icy flames of youth's desires.
  And as he stands a tingling instant there,
  Ere he must seek the human warmth below,
  In the cold lustral glow
  Of purple emerald and ruby light,
  In quietude that only seems
  Intenser for the rumble and creak and screams
  Of far-off splitting bergs, he knows,
  As only youth can know,
  The utter ecstasy of solitude, and dreams
  The unchallengeable dream an instant there
  In a rapt trance, through which a shadowy bear
  Shuffling across the visionary snow
  Steals like the spirit of the Polar night.




  ADVENTURE

  As slowly from the gateways of the mills,
  Whose monster crystal cubes of lighted glass
  Still hum and glitter on the darkening hills,
  Into the frosty dusk the tired hands pass,
  They breathe the crisp chill of October air
  Edged with an eager hint of early snow
  With tingling lips; and grateful for the gloom,
  Eyes, aching from the mills' electric glare,
  Are lifted to the cold horizon where,
  Against the smouldering amber afterglow,
  Purple the dome of the gasometer
  And the slim soaring stacks, each with its plume
  Of smoky purple shot with rosy fire,
  Over the labyrinthine city loom:
  And as the apocalypse of colour fills
  The eyes of lads and lasses, unaware
  They pause in silence, and each bosom thrills
  Pierced suddenly with pangs of sharp desire
  For some unknown, unknowable delight,
  Rapt an eternal instant in the dream
  Of some strange city on the edge of night...
  Till the glow shivers to an icy gleam
  And darkness closes down upon the hills.




  THE FEATHERS

  Stridently cutting through
  The diamond flame of heat
  That holds the city in a glassy trance,
  The searching chanting of the muezzin sings
  Above the empty street
  From the slim minaret whose lance
  Of ivory pierces the dense blue,
  Where on still planing wings
  A solitary kite,
  Dark as charred paper floating in the light,
  Hangs hovering; when, as the call to prayer
  Sinks to a murmur, suddenly a white
  And startled pigeon flutters through the air
  In tumbling flight,
  And from the glittering height
  Death drops on unheard wings;
  And as again the dark kite swings
  Into the blue, a snowy flutter
  Of feathers falls in the deserted square,
  And a lean mongrel snoozing in the gutter
  Opens one eye and blinks
  In the white glare,
  Licking warm blood-drops from his muzzle, and sinks
  Again in deep
  Undreaming sleep:
  But the child peering through the latticed shutter
  Shivers with sudden cold
  To see life stricken in mid-air
  And heaven darken with the wings of death,
  And instantly grown old
  Already feels the cruel talons tear
  His fluttering heart, and cowers with sobbing breath,
  Eyeing with frightened stare
  The scatter of white feathers lying there.




  THE WHITE STAG

  As down the mossy woodland ride the car
  Shivered the quietude of forest night,
  Our startled eyes saw suddenly afar,
  Bedazzled by the wheeling shaft of light,
  Under the boughs a young stag, strangely white
  In the cold brilliance, with uplifted head
  Of haughty-browed and antlered majesty.
  As though the wild, a moment brought to bay
  By our machine's invasion, sought to stay
  The shattering onset, for one moment he
  Challenged our coming, then unhurriedly
  Followed the rustling unseen herd that sped
  Through the dark brake, an undefeated king:
  And as, into the turnpike hurrying,
  We shot from out the brooding woodland shade
  As though by panic terror put to flight,
  Behind us once again the wild closed in,
  Unruffled by the flurry, glare and din
  Of our brief passage; and the undismayed
  Lord of the forest ranged the realms of night.




  AVALANCHE

  He had but crossed a crumbling bridge
  Of snow that crusted a crevasse
  And gained a foothold on a jutting scar,
  When his close-muffled ears
  Caught a dull rumbling from afar;
  And, glancing towards the ridge,
  It seemed the mountain shrugged its shoulders
  As if to shake off fleecing snows,
  And his blood froze
  To see the white folds stir
  And loosen and slip downwards in a mass
  With gathering roar and torrent race
  Towards the spur
  On which he stood, and almost instantly
  About him hurled
  A cataract of icy spears
  And smothering snow and crashing boulders--
  About him hurled and swirled
  While he,
  Save for a spray of splinters in his face,
  Stood scatheless on that isle of rock
  In the glissading devastating sea
  Of terror shattering down the mountain-side:
  Then in his ears the roaring died,
  And once again the blizzard clearing
  Settled to white tranquillity
  Of smooth and scarcely ruffled snow,
  As speeding to the valley far below
  The avalanche swept out of sight and hearing:
  While stunned and shaken by the shock
  He stood with fluttering breath
  As one come through the cataract of death
  Trembling bewildered on the other side;
  And to his still dazed eyes the light
  Quietly shining on celestial snow
  Burned with a strange unearthly glow
  Intolerably bright;
  As, still unrealising, he
  Watched in tranced ecstasy
  A solitary eagle glide,
  A bird of gold
  Circling through cold
  Cerulean skies
  About serene unshadowed peaks of paradise.




  DEAD CALM

  The gale
  Dropped suddenly,
  And losing way with slatting sail
  We staggered on the sea

  As men,
  Bereft of breath,
  Borne on the crest of life, and then
  Dropped in the trough of death.




  THE MINARET

  Into the black gorge of an alleyway
  He stepped aside to let the yelling pack
  Of pariah dogs sweep down the moon-white street,
  When suddenly the startling pistol-crack
  Of a scared rider's whip rang out, and sent
  The yelping rabble into his retreat:
  And, overborne and tumbled in the mud
  By the mad onset of that ravening flood
  Glutting the alley's throat, nigh scared to death
  Beneath the pad of frantic scurrying feet,
  The panting bodies and the steamy breath
  Of frothing muzzles, helplessly he lay,
  Feeling as though the obscene and bestial herd
  Of all the world's brutalities, released
  From loathsome lairs and dens, in panic rout
  Were driven over him to trample out
  The breath of life: and even when at last
  The lamest laggard of the curs had passed,
  He lay there for a while and never stirred,
  Bruised, crushed and shaken, breathless and terror-spent,
  In the deserted alleyway still dazed,
  Staring into the narrow lane of sky
  That with the silver fire of moonlight blazed
  Between the cliff-like houses looming high
  Above him--still he lay with dazed eyes set
  On the white slender spiring minaret
  That soared into the still, cold, argent blaze
  Above the noisome city's huddled ways
  And noxious courts and kennels like the flame
  Of the soul's intense resilient diamond fire
  Of ardent unappeasable desire
  That, springing from the pits and sties of shame
  Ever towards heaven aspires: and gradually,
  As in the distance died that brutal yelling
  And healingly the assuaging quiet of night
  Settled, life's eager quickening flood came welling
  Back to his breast, and with eyes kindling bright
  To that heaven-piercing shaft of lovely light,
  Scarcely remembering the bestial pack
  That seeks to trample man's heart into mire,
  He rose and stumbled from the alley's black
  Foul throat into the full moon's crystal fire.




  TEMPEST

  Caught in the tempest as we leave the creek,
  With no return against the racing tide,
  We must run on into the night, and seek,
  All canvas save the storm-jib stowed, to ride
  The gale out in mid-ocean, stripped and stark
  To the dire fury of the raging dark.

  Lashed to the wheel, the helmsman can but strive
  To hold a course before the wind, and clear
  The headlands, his one chance to save alive
  The ship, to keep a steady helm and steer
  Beyond the limits of the land and brave
  The utter angers of the wind and wave--

  Lost to the world, stript to the storm, and free
  At last to pit the soul's integrity
  Against the ultimate blast of destiny!




  THE STORM

  All night the fierce North-easter slashed the spray
  Against the cottage window as she lay
  With open aching eyes awaiting day;
  And all night long her heart in agony
  Tossed blindly in the welter of the sea,
  A little boat that battled desperately,
  Wave-scourged and stripped of sail and spar, to keep
  Her lover safe from the devouring deep.
  Wave after wave, she felt cold oceans sweep
  Over and over her; and now she hung
  On toppling precipices and was flung
  Down cataracts to bottomless gulfs and swung
  Up to the very stars it seemed, and fell
  Once more into the roaring pits of hell
  Whose icy swirl closed over her....
                                      A bell
  Tinkled beside the bed; and up she leapt,
  Startled by the alarm, to find she'd slept:
  Yet even in sleep her heart its trust had kept;
  And she knew surely, as she watched the light
  Of windless dawn gild the still-seething white,
  His heart in hers had ridden out the night.




  IN THE KING'S CHAMBER

  In the King's Chamber, the cold empty heart
  Of Cheops' pyramid, he stands alone,
  Save for the fellahin who patiently
  By the dim shafted entrance wait apart
  In swart unhuman immobility
  Like statues hewn from immemorial stone
  To sentinel the vestibule of death
  And ward the crumbling pride of majesty--
  Silent he stands in the dark heart of time...
  Still hearing in strained ears the crazing chime
  Of camel-bells, still peering through the glaze
  Of high-noon's merciless white blinding blaze
  That seems to search the tomb's marmoreal night
  With glancing needles of sharp stabbing light,
  Stinging his eyes with sparking particles
  Of flinty fire; still scorched and seared with glare
  Of white-hot sandy barrens and breathing in
  With labouring lungs the desert's furnace-breath,
  With burning bones and cracking shrivelled skin
  And fevered heart, he stands, awaiting there
  Some miracle of healing, 'waiting stands
  For an eternity with outstretched hands,
  Until the oblivion of the buried past
  Descends upon him gradually and fills
  His breast with healing cold tranquillity,
  And his way-weary heart finds peace at last
  As petrifying icy numbness steals
  Through all his being, and old darkness seals
  His vision and, no longer an agony
  Of quivering anguished human flesh and bone,
  He sinks in that stone chamber quietly
  To the undreaming quietude of stone.




  THE UNSEEN RIDER

  The roads blocked deep with drifts, when Helen died,
  We had to cross the fells, scoured clean of snow,
  To reach the little churchyard in the dale,
  Her coffin strapped across the saddlebow
  Of her young chestnut filly, Heatherbell,
  Bridling and restive under the deadweight
  Of that strange burden; when down Elkridgeside
  There swirled a scathing blast of blinding hail;
  And the young lad who held the bridle-rein,
  Stumbling among the tussocks, slipped and fell;
  And Heatherbell broke loose and plunged and reared;
  Then, as the scared lad snatched at her in vain,
  She dashed across the fell and disappeared
  In the dense flurry of the squall: too late
  We cantered after her; and never again
  Was she or the dread burden that she bore
  Seen by a living soul.  Yet oft at night
  The muffled drumming hoofs of Heatherbell
  Are heard by lonely shepherds on the fell
  As, high of heart as she would ride of old,
  Helen, who that wild day in death's despite
  Escaped the durance of the churchyard mould,
  Ranges the fells she loved for evermore.




  THE SLEEPING DRAGON

  The sleeping dragon of the Gower Coast
  Basks in the sunshine with gold-glancing scales,
  Then slowly fades to a dim dreaming ghost
  As daylight fails--
  As daylight fails, and slowly the blue night
  Droops over Carmarthen Bay her shadowy veils,
  Her shadowy veils of shifting drifting white
  Through which the full moon pours her witch's light
  Through the long watches of enchanted night
  That shrouds the slumbering dragon of old Wales.




  THE PEAK

  We sailed in sunshine; but the glen was black
  As Tartarus with raven clouds that swirled
  In a fantastic frenzy, closely furled
  One moment round the hills; now, streaming, torn
  To ribbons; then in bundling fleeces whirled
  As in a witch's cauldron, leaving bare
  The jagged ranges to the pallid glare
  Of lightning: and we heard the thunder crack
  In short sharp volleys like quick rifle-fire:
  Then once again the firth in instant night
  Was blotted out; while still in lively light
  We sailed serenely on through the blue morn
  Towards the islands of our heart's desire.

  But, ere we lost the land, a brooding cloud
  On the horizon, suddenly the shroud
  Slipped from the shoulders of a single peak
  That soared in sunshine like a soul set free
  Of the gross turmoil of mortality:
  And, as we gazed, our hearts, too full to speak,
  Found in that vision all we sailed to seek.




  PANIC

  Shrewd as the Northern wind that blows
  Iced with an inkling of near snows,
  The breath of unknown terror froze
  My courage, as I trod
  The crackling bracken underfoot,
  While the screech-owl's unhallowed hoot
  Rang like the cruel mocking brute
  Laugh of the woodland god:

  And as I hung in utter fear
  And shuddered like a stricken steer,
  I felt an unseen presence near
  And knew undying Pan
  Kept still his ancient haunts, although
  Men sang his dirge so long ago,
  But waiting for time's overthrow
  To sing the death of man.




  COASTER

  Blindly we steal
  Through the blind night with ship's lamps dully gleaming
  And siren screaming,
  And now a sudden whirling wheel
  And a sharp signal tinkling
  To warn the engineer
  As in a twinkling
  We shift our course and steer
  On the port-tack or the starboard-tack, to clear
  A bottom-ripping reef or the too near
  Suddenly looming ghost
  That bears down on us threateningly
  With bows that barely sheer
  Clear of catastrophe--
  Blindly we steal
  With cautious searching keel
  Along the unseen coast
  Through the obscurity
  Of blind white night
  Momently mantling with the eerie gleam
  Of the far Longstone Light
  Whose baffled beam
  Can scarcely pierce the fog; while everywhere
  About us the incessant blare
  Of sirens rends the shuddering numb air
  With shriek and moan and howl
  As unseen groping coasters prowl
  So close we feel their wash about our hull.

  And now an instant lull
  When nothing stirs the brooding mystery
  That merges sky and sea
  Save the sharp eldritch yelling of a gull
  Whose solitary railing
  Sounds like the desolating scream
  Of nightmare terror wailing
  When the lost spirit, in uneasy sleep,
  Still plunges desperately more deep
  In suffocating labyrinths of fear:
  Then, as the soul wakes and in smothering dread
  Lies scarcely realising on the bed
  That the familiar and dear
  Daylight is glowing through the window-blind,
  We seem to waken suddenly to find
  The sea and sky swept clear
  To the horizon and the summer night
  Alive with glancing airs and scattering light
  Beneath a heaven miraculous with stars;
  And as we waken from blind dream
  Our dazed eyes dazzle to the gleam
  Of the far Longstone's wheeling beam
  That like a flourished scimitar's
  Cold flashing cuts the crystalline
  Blue lucency of June midnight:
  And like souls newly won
  Through the blind regions of oblivion
  We stand beneath the dripping spars
  And in divine
  And quivering delight
  Drink deep the quick air tanged with brine.




  THE TRYST

  Gulls, whose voice is the cry
  Of the ravening soul of the sea,
  You call on my heart, as we lie
  In harbour, to venture once more
  Out from the shelter of shore,
  Out where the hurricanes sweep
  Through a crashing and deluging sky
  Over the face of the deep.

  Gulls, whose voice is the cry
  Of my hungry unsatisfied breast,
  You call on my heart, as we lie
  In harbour, to venture once more
  Out from the shelter of shore,
  Out through the midnight to keep
  In the swirl of the sea and the sky
  My tryst with death on the deep.




  ISLANDS

  Six souls in one small craft, among the isles
  We cruised day after day in harmony,
  The glory of the mountains and the sea,
  Sky-shouldering bens and glittering firths and kyles,
  Holding us in enchantment, seemingly
  At one in all things, all desires and dreams
  Merged, as the voice of waves and mountain streams
  In one austere exultant symphony.
  One undivided soul we seemed; and yet
  It was but seeming: perilous as the kyles
  Whose torrent races separate the isles
  The deeps that sunder soul from soul--each set
  An individual island in life's sea,
  Dissevered each from each eternally.




  GUILLEMOT

  As quietly chill day is breaking
  Through storm-cleansed and unclouded skies,
  On a low wave-lapped shelf he lies
  With open but unseeing eyes
  Slowly awaking
  From the unconsciousness of deathly sleep--
  Still desperately, it seems,
  Struggling to keep
  His head above the drowning wave
  And drag himself clear of the ravening deep--
  To drag his waterlogged numb body free
  Of the cold clutching sea
  And from annihilation save
  Something that is, and yet is not, himself...
  And now becoming gradually aware
  Of the hard ridges of the rocky shelf,
  He feels a sense of some security--
  When through the dwindling darkness riving screams
  That seem to tear
  The tympan of his ear
  Pierce the dark hollow of his heart with fear;
  And he hangs listening for a spell
  On the sharp brink of hell
  While flapping fiends about him skirl and yell:
  Then, as the sense of sight
  Slowly returns he lies dimly perceiving
  The living world about him, yet
  Hardly believing
  That he himself still lives, with vacant stare
  Watching dark shooting shuttles weaving
  A glittering fabric in the air
  With ravelling skeins of light
  As if they sought to snare
  His weary body in a magic net....
  And now, as his dazed vision clears,
  Again those cries,
  No longer sinister, but sharp
  With the harsh urgency of life, he hears,
  And sees quick-flapping wings and breasts of white,
  As those dark shuttles suddenly
  Change to swift birds that ceaselessly
  Speed 'twixt the crag's high scarp
  And the bright level of the sea;
  And gradually
  The dear lifelong familiarity
  Of homely guillemot that come and go
  About their business fussily
  With clapping wings and breasts of snow
  And short stretched necks and anxious cries,
  Fills his tired heart with comfort and he lies
  Watching them with untroubled eyes,
  Glad but to know
  Life still is his, that he has won
  Through the black peril of shipwrecking night
  Back to a world that kindles to the sun,
  A world of lively airs and waves that fling
  Bright scattering manes into the light;
  And as he feels the sting
  Of sharp life shooting through numb limbs he tries
  With gasping breath to echo those harsh cries.




  OLYMPUS

  The clouds serenely parted and revealed
  Beyond the dark gean remote Olympus,
  The snow-cold empty throne of fallen gods,
  A moment, then once more the heavenly peak
  Resumed its ancient mystery of cloud.
  Long years have passed since then; and they who stood
  Beside me on the deck are long since dead;
  And long the very ship on which we sailed
  Has lain beneath the wave it rode so proudly:
  Yet, even as in that cloudy dawn, my soul,
  At moments in the strain and stress of life,
  On that serene celestial snow-cold peak
  Finds sanctuary with the forgotten gods.




  SAIL ON, SAIL ON!

  The day is dying and the steady breeze
  Grows wild and gusty, working to a gale;
  And through the threshing gloom the farther seas
  Flash angrily.  Shall we not shorten sail
  And make for harbour while we have the light?
  _Sail on, sail on, sail on into the night!_

  The night is on us with a swoop and roar
  That shudders through the ship from truck to keel:
  And we may never reach another shore
  On those uncharted deeps that surge and reel
  Beyond the gleam of the last island-light.
  _Sail on, sail on, sail on into the night!_




  TRAFFIC




  THE TELEPHONE

  The shrill bell sings
  Through the silent house
  And scares to its hole
  A venturing mouse:

  But no other ear
  Pays heed to the call;
  And the form on the bed
  Never troubles at all--

  For nothing at all
  To the form on the bed
  Is the unknown who tries
  To ring up the dead.




  THE LINN

  All day he broods beside the thunderous linn,
  His eyes on the sun-burnished steel-bright curve
  Of the sheer force, whose waters never swerve
  A hair's breadth from their course, until the din
  And steady dazzle make his senses spin
  In a dazed ecstasy that drugs the nerve
  Of anguish and the agonies that serve
  To rend a soul racked with a sense of sin.
  Though still he sees her drawn despairing face,
  The tortured eyes that searched him through and through,
  And hears that desolated cry, the race
  Of hill-born waters through his being heals
  His lacerated life: at last he feels
  That there was nothing else for him to do.




  THE GLANCE

  Catching a glance betwixt them as they turned
  To greet him smiling, in a flash he learned
  They to each other were all in all, while he
  To them was less than nothing, even though she
  Was his betrothed who so light-heartedly
  Greeted him with a smile.  Without a word
  He stood before them smiling, but scarcely heard
  Their voices as they talked about the weather:
  And presently they strolled away together,
  Leaving him stricken by that lightning glance
  Of mutual understanding, in a trance
  Of dread prevision ... in a land of dream
  Lit only by the welkin's pallid gleam
  From which the chill rain dripped and dripped on three
  Neglected graves through all eternity.




  SAL

  A sudden spasm racked her; and they said,
  "Come, Sal, by rights you ought to be in bed."
  But, when they sought to help her from her chair,
  She, seeing death coming, with ignoring stare
  Looked clear beyond them and without their aid
  Stood up to death, serene and unafraid.




  THE PREACHER

  He stands in the deserted square and preaches
  To all the world, though not a soul is listening,
  His worn face white with fervour, his eyes glistening
  With unshed tears, as his old voice beseeches
  The world to heed his gospel and to save
  Its soul alive from the devouring grave.

  He speaks, unrealising that none hearkens;
  He only knows 'tis his to love and cherish
  His fellows and to warn them, lest they perish
  In stubborn pride; and while the dull square darkens,
  Entreating all to come to God he stands
  With flame-bright face and flickering white hands.




  THE RECOLLECTION

  Little I fancied he could make me cry--
  And after all these years!  I should have said
  I could have looked on Nicholas lying dead
  Dry-eyed: yet when at last I saw him lie
  Speechless and harmless, his one evil eye
  With no more power to hurt me, on the bed
  Wherein long since my last tear had been shed,
  Something stirred in my heart, long dead and dry;
  Something stirred in my heart as I recalled
  How at the circus, lad and lass, we'd laughed
  Together at the clown when he had chaffed
  The proud ringmaster who, offended, hauled
  The squealing fool by one ear round the ring;
  And tears were in my eyes, remembering.




  TAKING THEM UNAWARES...

  Taking them unawares, he only smiled
  And uttered no reproach; and yet they felt
  The thought he left unuttered had defiled
  Their innocent tenderness, and his glance had dealt
  A deathblow to their love, though his eyes dwelt
  Only an instant on them as they stood
  Embarrassed, stiff as figures carved in wood:
  Then murmuring, "A truly pleasant day!"
  He turned upon his heel and strolled away.




  THE SURPRISE

  Why do you start and stare?
  You don't see anyone behind my chair?
  I seem to feel ... Wife, say there's no one there!

  I cannot turn or rise,
  And my old heart's too weak to stand surprise....
  I feel a cold breath on my scalp....  My eyes--

  Someone's blindfolding me
  With icy fingers, and I cannot see....
  Wife, wife, why don't you bid them let me be?

  For I'm too old, too old
  For hoodman-blind ... and I am growing cold
  As death....  Wife, give me your warm hand to hold.

  Wife, wife, are you not there?
  I'm falling, falling down an endless stair...
  And I, I cannot find you anywhere.




  THE YEARS BETWEEN

  The low light streams
  Through the open door,
  Turning to gold
  The sanded floor.

  I rise and look
  To the glowing west
  To see him come
  Over Harelaw crest;

  And as at last
  He tops the hill
  I catch a gleam
  Of his shouldered bill,

  And know a bare
  Ten minutes more
  Should bring him home...
  Through the open door

  The low light streams....
  But how should he
  Through twelve dead years
  Come back to me?




  THE DREAM

  He could not sleep--and yet, if he'd not slept,
  How came he in the wood?  His bed he'd kept
  Since first he'd taken to it years ago;
  He'd never risen from it once; and so
  It surely must have been in dream he'd stood
  At night within the dark heart of the wood--
  The dark heart of the middle of the night
  Pierced only by one icy lance of light,
  And all unruffled by the faintest breeze--
  Stood like a tree among those quiet trees,
  With arms outstretched like branches in the gleam,
  Like still unswaying branches, and in dream
  Upon his open hand the little bat
  Alighted suddenly and cowered flat
  And frightened in his palm--he still could feel
  The cold wee fluttering body, and the steel
  Of those sharp flinching eyes, that glittered bright
  As needles in that one ray of moonlight,
  Still pricked him to the heart--his heart that knew,
  Even as it 'lighted, 'twas her soul that flew
  To him for refuge from eternal night
  Wherein she wandered, exiled from the light
  She'd always loved....  And now again he stood
  In the dead heart of that phantasmal wood,
  A living man among cadaverous trees
  That rustled now, but with no earthly breeze;
  And strove to hold that quivering soul, and bear
  His frightened love back to the light and air
  Of living day, strove that she might regain
  Her own sweet living body, strove in vain....
  The dead trees closed about him, rank on rank,
  Hiding the moon, and to the ground he sank,
  Sank down and down in darkness and despair ...
  And found again that he was lying there
  In his accustomed chamber in the gleam
  Of the unclouded moon whose crystal stream
  Flooded the snowy quilt: an eager breeze
  Ruffling and questing through the living trees
  Outside the open window; and he heard
  The flutter and cheep of the first wakened bird,
  Soon with its fellows to put dreams to flight
  In a full-throated chorus of delight.

  And yet that quivering soul, those frightened eyes,
  Shall haunt his heart until the day he dies.




  THE OLD DOCTOR

  Dropt dead at his own door they found
  The doctor, back from his last round.
  All day he had been listening
  To histories of suffering
  And seeking to alleviate
  For others the shrewd pangs of fate;
  Yet added not to their distress
  A hint of his uneasiness,
  Though but too well he knew that he,
  Even as he fought for them, must be
  The first to fall before the foe,
  To fall, but not to fail--and so
  Dead at his own door he was found
  When he had finished his last round.




  THE BRIGHT GLANCE

  Her bright glance flitted round the room and dwelt
  Unconsciously a moment on his face;
  And, his eyes meeting hers, he suddenly felt
  That they together out of time and space
  Were swept into the swirl of singing stars....
  And she--complacently discussing cars
  With her companion, never even dreaming
  Of his existence--sped with gold hair streaming,
  The star of all that singing galaxy,
  One moment his and for eternity.




  HER DEATH

  Now death at last had taken her; and they
  Were free to live and let love have its way,
  They who had held themselves in check so long
  Lest they should hurt that tender heart, and wrong
  Their love itself by letting it destroy
  The affection that had been the only joy
  Of her poor crippled life....  Now they were free--
  And yet they stood there, hesitatingly,
  And realised their love held in restraint
  By tenderness had with the years grown faint,
  That now between them there could only be
  The affection of familiarity
  And old habitual kindness....  Side by side
  Speechless they stood, regretting she had died.




  THE UNREVEALED

  Always a door within a door we find
  When curiously we venture to explore
  The obscure and labyrinthine corridor
  Of man's unsearchable immemorial mind--

  Always a shrine within a shrine, when we
  Would seek through courts and chambers crystalline
  The temple's holy of holies, to divine
  The secret of the soul's flame-folded mystery.




  THE CUT

  We quarrelled sorely, and I cut him dead
  Day after day; then for a week or so
  I missed him in the street; and gradually
  The folly of it all came over me;
  So I at last determined I would go
  And make it up with him, but came too late,
  Though just in time to meet him at the gate,
  Leaving it for the last time; and as I
  Stood to one side to let the bearers by
  It seemed that there was nothing to be said,
  Since I had cut my friend, had cut him dead.




  THE DARK FOREST

  _You knew him?_

  Knew him?  Who can thread with ease
  The implications and intricacies
  Of the dark forest of another's mind?
  Why, even in my own, I stumble blind
  And baffled through crass midnight and the dense
  Thicket of cobwebbed branches, with no sense
  Of sure direction, tangled in the brake,
  Ever uncertain of the road to take
  Through thorn and brambled sprays that trip and rasp:
  And only rarely is it mine to grasp
  The trenchant thought that cuts a pathway clear
  Through matted undergrowths of doubt and fear.




  THE WINDOW

  I sit within the darkening room,
  Watching the window's growing gloom
  Until my eyes distinguish there
  No glimmer of the night-filled square,
  Thinking of her who, even now,
  Feels death-dew settle on her brow,
  Uneasy lest I suddenly
  A white face at the window see,
  And in the midnight silence hear
  Her fingers fumbling, numb with fear,
  The cold unseen dividing-glass
  The exiled dead may never pass.




  THE APPOINTMENT

  "I should have wired to put you off: I know
  I should have wired--I know I should have wired:
  Over and over to myself I said
  I ought to wire, I ought--but I was tired,
  So tired, so tired ... I was so tired; and so..."
  Then the old woman paused with trembling head
  And still unseeing eyes, and said no more
  A moment, as we stood beside the door.

  "You see, it happened all so suddenly--
  One moment, he stood there and looked at me--
  The next, and he was lying on the floor...
  And, after sixty years, to leave his wife
  Without a word--though what he's left 'twould seem
  Is little enough, God knows!  I think my life
  Went out with his ... I felt so tired, so tired.
  I should have wired, I know I should have wired:
  I knew that you were coming; and I said
  I ought to wire ... and yet, 'twas all a dream
  In which I wandered round in my own head
  Where he lay staring at me with still eyes
  That followed me and looked me through and through,
  But never saw me....
                       And still there he lies
  Just where he fell: I couldn't move him, I
  Was much too tired, and had to let him lie;
  And no one else has been here....  But I knew
  That there was something that I ought to do--
  And meant to wire....  I know I should have wired
  To put you off--but I was tired, so tired."




  THE SEPARATE BED

  "Is that you, Jenny?"
  His voice rang clear
  As he smiled in his sleep
  And turned his head:

  But how should she answer,
  Or even hear,
  Who six foot deep
  Had made her bed?




  THE END OF THE GAME

  A shower of pebbles rattles on the door;
  And then a scampering of little feet,
  And laughing cries as down the village street
  The children scatter into safe retreat--

  The children scatter, and then turn and peep
  Round coign and corner, and with cruel bright
  Young eyes they watch the door in scared delight,
  Ready, when it shall open, to take flight:

  But nothing happens; and at length they tire
  Of waiting, and so turn to some fresh game,
  Since, for the first time, the old crazy dame
  Has failed to let them see her anger flame:

  While, colder than the ashes of her fire,
  Beyond all anger, stretched upon the floor,
  Safe from young cruelty, she lies asleep.




  FRUITS OF THE TREE

  No breath was stirring, and yet quietly
  The leaves were falling from the chestnut tree,
  Quietly through still air as clear as glass
  Floating to rest upon the rimy grass,
  Falling and falling in a golden shower
  Till the whole tree was stripped in one short hour,
  And naked on a golden carpet stood
  Against the purple of the dark pine wood.

  And from his chair beside the autumn blaze
  The old man watched them falling, as his days
  Were falling from him, leaf by shrivelled leaf,
  In the still autumn of his life, so brief,
  So endless-seeming in its golden quiet--
  His days that once had been a glistening riot
  Of quickening buds that thrust in April air;
  And then a spreading foliage green and fair
  Lighted with blossoms through enchanted May
  And thrilled with song of birds the livelong day;
  Then tranced in the still glow of summer sun....
  His leaves were falling, falling one by one,
  Quietly drifting to the earth, and now
  But few were left upon the drooping bough....
  His days were falling ... and the chestnut tree
  Stood naked in the cold air....  Merrily
  His laughing grandson burst in through the door,
  Clutching in grubby hands a precious store
  Of ruddy burnished nuts that on the ground
  Beneath the naked branches he had found,
  And dancing round his chair in restless glee
  Held out his treasure for grandad to see.




  HIS LAST APRIL

  Silent he stands
  Looking across the lighted meadowlands,
  Remembering with tears
  The daffodils of other years:

  He stands alone
  Recalling other Aprils he has known,
  With eyes that see in dream
  The asphodels of Enna gleam.




  FROM DAY TO DAY...

  From day to day, not too unhappily
  We live, ignoring man's mortality,
  We sleep and wake and work and eat and drink--
  But what would happen if we stopped to think?




  ALL SOULS

  Lying awake in his lone bed,
  Somehow he did not feel alone:
  The icy aching darkness searched
  His fevered body to the bone.

  A chill breath prickled through his hair,
  And as into the heart of fear
  He stared with sightless eyes, he felt
  That something slowly glided near--

  Something that drew, in spite of him,
  His clenched reluctant hand outside
  The quilt; and as cold fingers closed
  On his, he knew his foe had died.




  THE COWS

  He had to milk the cows; he couldn't keep
  The poor beasts waiting, though he'd had no sleep,
  Tossing and tumbling all night on his bed,
  Turning things over and over in his head,
  Turning things over and over all the night
  Without a clue or hope of getting them right,
  Fumbling them over and over in his mind
  To the flap-flapping of the window-blind
  That through the livelong night of wind and rain
  The draught had fluttered at the window-pane--
  The flap-flap-flapping that had seemed to be
  The sound of his own thoughts so uselessly,
  As he in sleepless torment tossed in bed,
  Beating their wings inside his aching head--
  Bats in a loft that seek in flurried flight
  A chink to let them out into the night,
  When someone's stopped up their accustomed chink--
  But bats were bats, and didn't have to think--
  At least not his thoughts, and without a doubt
  They in the end would blunder their way out:
  While he, for all his thinking, could not see
  That any blundering would set him free.

  He had to milk the cows; and he must rise:
  They would be waiting; and their patient eyes
  Would turn towards him in the lanthorn light
  Calmly as though no storm had raged all night,
  Rattling the loose tiles of the milking shed;
  Ay, each would slowly turn a patient head
  And look at him with grave untroubled eyes
  That took things as they came without surprise,
  Without foreboding, greeting each new day,
  And, without brooding, munching their fresh hay:
  And wise they were--nay, 'twas stupidity
  That let them chew the cud contentedly
  Day after day; and they would never know
  The thoughts that tortured him....  But, even so,
  It would be healing to be with them now,
  To press to their calm sides his throbbing brow,
  And feel them heaving as the easy breath
  Moved them, unfluttered by the thought of death,
  To leave the tossing torment of his bed
  For the cool quiet of the milking shed,
  The quiet only broken by the sound
  Of streaming milk--the quiet only found
  With beasts that munch in deep placidity
  The fodder of each morn unquestioningly,
  Dreading no doomsday.
                         And another night
  At least was over.  He must strike a light,
  And rise and milk the cows: he couldn't keep
  The poor beasts waiting: though he'd had no sleep,
  They must be tended.  'Twould be good to be
  Again the servant of necessity,
  Working among the quiet beasts again
  With no dark blind flap-flapping in his brain.




  JOCELYN

  As one who finds in dews of dawn
  The crystal of the sprinkled lawn
  Printed with hoofmarks of a faun,
  That under the new moon all night
  Has danced in circles of delight--
  So I with thrilling heart surprise
  The elfin light that gleams and glances
  In Jocelyn's enchanted eyes
  As her wild spirit dances, dances....




  COME LIFE, COME DEATH!

  Come life with kindling strife,
  That I in life may lose the fear of life!

  Come death with drowsing breath
  That I in death may lose the fear of death!




  IN THE DEAD HOUR

  Startled instantly awake
  In the dead hour of the night
  By some unknown urgency
  Tingling through the icy air--

  Knowing not if someone cries,
  Some lost soul in evil plight
  Sinking in the last despair
  Cries his name despairingly--

  For a dire eternity
  Helpless in the dark he lies
  Till a blackbird in the pear
  Hails the reassuring light.




  THE BROKEN LINK

  She always seemed to flinch from him and shrink
  Farther into her shell when he appeared,
  Answering his sullen grunts as if she feared
  To speak and hardly even dared to think
  Her own thoughts in his presence, trained to sink
  Her own identity in servitude
  To his least whim, the slave of every mood,
  Till his caprice or death should snap the link.
  But when one winter night he did not come,
  And slowly she was brought to realise
  That he'd forsaken her, her stricken eyes
  Fixed on the open door, with anguished stare
  All night she watched and waited, deaf and dumb;
  And dead at dawn they found her in her chair.




  THE UNSEEN HOUSEMATE

  A shuffling step across the upper floor,
  Loose-fitting slippers flapping down the stair,
  The handle turns and stealthily the door
  Swings on its hinges, and there's no one there--
  No one my eyes can see; but, happen, he
  Who dwelt here ere I came had keener sight--
  At least I wonder what he saw the night
  He hanged himself from the old apple tree.




  THE POPLARS

  The poplars all the long unquiet night
  Tossed to unsleeping stars their ruffling plumes;
  But still gold flames tranced in the frosty light
  Of dawn they soar above the mounded tombs--

  Soar like gold flames, as flake on flake they shed
  Their yellow fire, and bury yet more deep
  In drift on drift of rustling gold the dead
  Who never more shall waken from deep sleep--

  Who never more shall waken in the night
  To hear the threshing of unquiet trees,
  Or see the poplars in the morning light
  Soar like gold flames above the frozen leaze.




  THE SHIFTED CHAIR

  It seemed to be a chair ... assuredly
  It was a chair, as far as he could see
  With sleepy eyes....  A chair?  Why not a chair?
  And yet last night it surely wasn't there--
  No chair had stood beside the bed last night
  When he'd blown out the guttering candlelight,
  Who could have moved the one chair from the wall
  To his bedside, or needed to at all?

  He'd lain for hours before he'd fallen asleep
  Staring into the past: but fast and deep
  He must have slumbered, or he should have heard
  If any footstep in the dumb house stirred--
  If any foot ... but no foot, well he knew,
  Save his, had stirred the dust for years; and who
  Should enter the barred house at night, and there
  Sit, while he slept, beside him in a chair?
  If only it were day ... in this half-light
  He couldn't think: 'twas neither day nor night....
  Yet, when he saw it first, the chair had been
  Empty ... but now a figure, vaguely seen,
  Sat drooping in the shadow....  Could it be--
  And after all these years?  But surely she
  Had died?  Beside her grave long years ago--
  Or was it yesterday?--he'd watched the snow
  Fall on the new-laid turf and bury deep
  And deeper in cold drifts his heart asleep
  Beside that silent sleeper....  And yet there
  She sat beside him slumbering in a chair.

  He must lie very quiet and not stir,
  He must lie quiet and not waken her--
  Quiet....  His eyes closed gradually, and deep
  As hers in her dark grave was his last sleep.




  ISOLATION

  Knew him?  I'd sworn I knew him through and through;
  Yet, after all, it seems, like others, I knew
  Only the surface he cared to let me see
  Or didn't mind me seeing; or, it may be,
  He'd no deliberate purpose to conceal
  Anything from me, that no one may reveal
  His innermost being even to a friend,
  But each must hold in secret to the end
  His self of selves; that even love can't find
  The key to unlock the mind within the mind,
  The heart within the heart; and though it seem,
  As we together watch the first star gleam
  Through the cold beryl of the afterglow
  Or dayspring wash with pearl an alp of snow,
  Our souls are one in mutual ecstasy,
  Merged in emotional identity
  Eternal and inviolable, that still
  Each soul is isolated as the hill,
  That even in love's embrace the lovers are
  Divided soul from soul as star from star.




  THE LAST VISIT

  Gently the doctor closed the door, and stole
  Between the borders of wet lavender
  Down to the wicket quietly as though
  His step from that deep sleep might startle her.

  Day after day so long now had it been
  His lot to visit unavailingly
  That unquelled soul in its frail cage of bones
  Racked on a bed of hopeless agony--

  Day after day....  His fingers touched the latch,
  Chill in its silvering of dewy rime,
  For the last time--his fingers that at dawn
  Had closed those weary eyes for the last time.

  And then he sighed, though for her sake relieved
  By her release, as over him there came
  A sense of all that life for him had lost
  Since death had quenched that spirit's eager flame.




  BROKEN TOYS

  His toy is broken, and he seems to weep
  His very heart out, till he falls asleep;
  Yet when he wakes next morning some new toy
  Catches his fancy, and his heart with joy
  Brims bubbling over in a laughing stream....

  But I must hug the fragments of my dream
  And never know, as sleeplessly I lie,
  The sweet relief of tears--too old to cry.




  MOONSTRUCK

  The moon has got into his blood
  And runs, quicksilver, through his veins
  And so he rambles all night long
  About the fields and lanes:

  And when he comes upon a pond
  Wherein her image glitters bright,
  He kicks his heels up in the air
  And dances with delight.

  He dances till the moon herself
  And the mock moon are dancing too--
  Quicksilver in his toes and heels,
  He dances in the dew.




  EARLY TO BED...

  Lodged in the dead man's house, I climb the stair,
  And halt a moment by the gilded chair
  On the landing where he paused to rest half-way,
  Rest and recover his breath on that last day,
  Mounting the marble steps laboriously
  For the last time.  "Sent like a child," said he,
  "Sent like a naughty child to bed by day!
  I who've not once, since I could have my way,
  Retired before midnight.  Ah, well, they say
  "Early to bed" ... Perhaps I shall grow wise
  At last--the health and wealth I've had--and rise
  Early; I must rise early, if the rhyme
  Demands obedience"; and then for the last time
  He looked at the great pendent chandelier,
  Its numerous irised lustres glittering clear
  In sunshine through the crystal lantern streaming;
  And like a child's, enchanted by its gleaming,
  His old eyes kindled to the coloured lights;
  And then he slowly toiled up the last flights.

  And I, who sojourn in his house, still hear
  His chuckling words--"Perhaps I shall grow wise
  At last: I must rise early--I must rise...."
  And wonder what was in his mind when he
  Struggled to rise at dawn so desperately.




  COMING UPON THEM...

  Coming upon them where they stood embraced,
  His young wife and his bosom friend, he fell
  Dumb at their feet.  They drew apart in haste,
  And stooped to succour him, but knew full well
  The shock had been too much for his old heart,
  That never now should he with eye or tongue
  Reproach their faithlessness....  And still apart
  They stood on either side of him, unstrung;
  And, shuddering and sick at soul, they knew
  That pitiful rigid body on the floor,
  Whose love for them had been so warm and true,
  Would lie betwixt them now for evermore.




  THE DARK GIFT

  "Led there be light!" God said; and there was light;
  And man rejoiced at dawn; but all too soon
  His eyes grew weary; and he cried at noon,
  "Let there be darkness!" and God gave him night.




  THE OLD MAN LISTENS

  Behind his chair an unseen robin's trilling
  Shivers the brittle silence to a tinkle
  Of crystal notes; and as the old man listens
  His worn face glistens and his thin mouth quivers,
  And bright as a new shilling his eyes twinkle;
  His old eyes twinkle bright as a new shilling
  To hear again those trilling notes that sprinkle,
  Sprinkle and spirtle in their crystal spilling
  The quiet of old age with thoughts that tinkle,
  Tinkle and twinkle like the clear bells shrilling,
  The crystal bells of youth whose ting-a-linging,
  Crystal in crystal, set a boy's heart ringing,
  In far Septembers through a boy's heart thrilling,
  Crystal Septembers thrilled with crystal singing,
  In far Septembers his old heart remembers,
  His heart that's now again a robin trilling.




  THE EASY CHAIR

  He drew the curtain to shut out the night,
  The pitchy welkin of low brooding storm,
  Hoping himself secure within the light
  Of his accustomed room so snug and warm:

  Yet, as he settled in his easy chair
  And held his hands to the familiar glow,
  A cold breath seemed to shiver through his hair,
  Cold as the wind that blows from Polar snow;

  And to his eyes the lamp's clear golden light
  Clouded with shadows; and he knew that he
  Had drawn in vain the curtains, for the night
  Was in his heart--that he was doomed to be

  Ever a traveller through the sleety gloom
  Of that black bitter night when, passion-torn,
  His bride had fled the comfort of his room
  And left him to his cosy hearth, forlorn--

  Left him to stumble over craggy scars
  And through deep glens of his own heart's despair,
  Blinded by fog, or mocked by cruel stars--
  An old man brooding in his easy chair.




  GONE TO BED

  Ay, he has gone to bed, for he was tired.
  What's that you say?
  "Early for him, at his age!"  Nay, man, nay!
  He'd stayed up over-late and he was done:
  And as he tumbled into bed
  And turned to go to sleep he said,
  "It's been a gey long day."

  Ay, he has gone to bed, for he was tired.
  What's that you say?
  You wanted just a word with him?  Nay, nay!
  You've come too late to have a word with him:
  You'll have to leave your word unsaid
  Until he rises from his bed
  At dawn of Judgement Day.




  THE SICK BOY

  He floated on the surface of the stream
  And could not sink, although so desperately
  He longed in some deep pool of night to lie
  And never look again upon the sky.

  On the bright surface of his hurrying dream
  'Twixt sleep and waking all night restlessly
  The fevered boy tossed, longing in profound
  Oblivion of deep slumber to be drowned.

  Ever the roaring in his ears, the gleam
  And glitter in his eyes as towards the sea
  On the swift torrent 'neath the tropic day
  His weightless body spun upon its way--

  Until a giant hand of ice, 'twould seem,
  Was pressed on his hot brow; and gradually
  Down, down he sank ... and watched the bubble beads
  Of breath rise slowly through the swaying weeds.

  Down, down he sank through icy deeps of dream,
  Down, down and down through all eternity ...
  Then, light of heart, new-risen from the dead,
  Smiled as he saw his mother by the bed.




  TIME, GENTLEMEN, PLEASE!

  "Time, gentlemen, please!"  The inexorable host
  Calls out above the chattering and the laughter,
  Flinging the door wide open to the night;
  And out we stumble from the warmth and light
  Into Hereafter--

  One after one we go into the cold
  Lampless oblivion that so long has haunted
  Our hearts in pauses of the revelry,
  Our bosoms emptied of the pride that we
  So bravely flaunted.

  "Time, gentlemen, time!"  And we who long hobnobbed
  With boon companions in the light and laughter,
  Each, willy-nilly, must set out alone,
  Stript to the naked soul, through the unknown
  Homeless Hereafter.




  MARCHING ON

  _John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave_...

  A rain-soaked shapeless huddle of sacks that showed
  Nor head nor limbs came shuffling down the road:
  And neither man nor woman could I descry
  Within that bundle as it passed me by:
  Yet from the sodden sackcloth hood a shrill
  Old reedy voice piped, singing with a will--
  _And his soul goes marching on!_




  THE HUNTER'S MOON

  Not yet the moon
  Had topped the hill;
  The moorland lay
  In shadow still:

  And still no tune
  His heart could find,
  No tune to sing
  His care away.

  But when at last
  The dreaming blind
  Dark leagues of ling
  Leapt into light

  Into the night
  His care was cast,
  And clear and high
  A lively tune

  Sang down the dale
  And through the sky
  Rang out to hail
  The hunter's moon.




  SAILS




  OUT OF THE AIR

  No song-bird will ever
  Come to my call;
  But when I am thinking
  Of nothing at all,
  Thinking of nothing
  And going nowhere,
  Out of the air
  The crystal notes fall.




  _SEA SWALLOW_

  I

  Bright as a tern's wet breast
  Sea Swallow cleaves the crest
  Of each dark wave that shivers
  About her slender sprit,
  Each wave that spills and shivers
  In spray that pearls and quivers,
  Quicksilver on the foresail
  With iris lustres lit.

  A white thought through my mind,
  Sea Swallow cleaves the blind
  Dark waves of baffled dreaming
  That drowsed in deepest night--
  Her white hull spills the dreaming
  Dark waves to a salt gleaming
  And glancing rainbow dazzle
  Of quivering delight.


  II

  Where, shivering into brilliants, the beryl waters spray
  The island crags and caverns, and gulls on silver wings
  Hover in airs of crystal the livelong summer day,
  My heart aboard the Sea Swallow for ever sails and sings:

  And where about the ramparts of dark embattled isles
  The unseen threshing tumult a moment flickers white,
  It rides the roaring darkness of the races of the kyles
  Through endless starry watches of the song-enchanted night.




  THE OUTER ISLES

  "Lee oh!" the cry rang, and scarce consciously
  He ducked just as the boom swung overhead
  With clack and rattle of blocks and slap of sail;
  And still across the steely heaving sea
  Of ever alternating hill and dale
  He watched the scudding squall that northward sped,
  Sweeping the Outer Islands with a trail
  Of golden showers through which the sunset burned;
  And as he looked through that translucent veil,
  Momently glowing to intenser fire,
  The sea-scourged islands of bleak rock were turned
  To the Hesperides of his desire;
  And even as the sun dipped and the squall
  Was but a flying darkness and the night
  Suddenly closed about the little yawl,
  Still in his eyes those islands glittered bright,
  Tranced in a glory of unearthly light.




  SKYE

  I

  The squall had swept the heavens clear
  At sundown and across the sea,
  Relinquishing her veils of rain,
  Skye burned, an emerald on our lee--

  Over a tide of serpentine,
  Chiselled by the keen diamond light
  Out of the matrix of dark cloud,
  It burned and glittered, jewel-bright.

  The sun dipped swiftly, and the Isle,
  Its peaks dissolved in amethyst,
  As southerly we sailed, again
  Vanished in veils of opal mist.


  II

  But for a breathing-space the witch,
  Shedding her cloak of mystery,
  Unveils her beauty to the light
  Beyond the cold green glancing sea--
  A moment, and then busily
  Spinning, she swathes herself again
  In a fresh web of mist and rain.




  LOCH SHIELDAIG

  After long pitching on uneasy seas,
  As peacefully with canvas stowed we lay
  In the unruffled and pelucid bay
  And the young moon swung clear of the dark trees,

  Shadow on shadow through the silvering gloam
  Athwart the unclouded amber afterglow
  We watched the heron sail, serenely slow,
  Like ghosts of unquelled heroes coming home--

  Against the embers of day's dying fire
  They streamed in stately and unhurried flight,
  Like souls of heroes from some ancient fight
  Seeking the haven of their hearts' desire.




  SINGING WATERS

  One loud tumultuous deluge is the sky,
  And all the hills are laced with flashing falls,
  And clear from strath and glen as we sail by
  The voice of water calls--

  The voice of singing water; and the deep
  Rock-cumbered wellspring that has slept so long
  In the dark cavern of my heart from sleep
  Wakens again to song.




  CANNA

  Our eyes peered through the rainy mirk until
  We saw a deeper shadow in the night,
  A square bluff sheerly rising from the sea,
  The island of our quest; and presently,
  Doubling the head, the winking harbour-light
  Flashed us a welcome from the little quay:

  And as to that dark dreaming isle that slept
  Unconscious of our coming we at last
  From the wild waste of the Atlantic came,
  Our hearts were lighted by the little flame
  Some friendly islander, now sleeping fast,
  Had kindled, and we blessed his unknown name.




  THE ISLAND BULL

  Within the four-foot span of his great horns,
  Beneath his brow's crisp curls of ruddy hair
  With a smoulder of blue fire his brown eyes stare
  At the unmastered snowy herds that sweep
  Over the windy pastures of the deep:
  And as he sees the breakers ranging free
  Over the shining meadows of the sea
  To even fiercer flame those unquelled fires
  Quicken with old far-wandering desires.




  THE PRIMROSE

  As that August eve I rambled
  Over benty braes and scrambled
  Up the Canna crags I found,
  Nestling closely to the ground
  In a corrie of the cliff-top
  One wee brave belated primrose
  Flourishing in eager air;
  And, as I stood dreaming there,
  Far from that stern Northern shore
  I was wandering once more
  Happily, a boy, through Cornwall's
  Primrose-lighted lanes of April--
  Happily--yet more to me
  Than the spendthrift blooms of April
  In that chilly sunset hour
  Meant that solitary flower
  Blowing by the Northern sea.




  GAIRLOCH

  After long tossing on the uneasy swell
  Under storm-rent apocalyptic skies
  Along the embattled coast by hills that towered
  In sunlight like the peaks of paradise
  Above tormented clouds and straths that glowered
  Black under tempest as the mouth of hell,
  We ran our little boat in to the land
  And wandered idly on the friendly strand,
  Glad, after infinite visions, to explore
  The tiny glittering treasures of the shore,
  Glad for a while to rest awe-wearied eyes
  On the infinitesimal marvels of the sand,
  Each sparkling grain, each brittle rose-leaf shell,
  Each lucent pebble a new miracle...
  Until across the Minch the sunset light
  Kindled the Outer Isles with stormy flare,
  And winds and waters called to us once more
  To ride again the ruffling surge and dare
  The old adventure of Atlantic night.




  THE STAG UNSEEN

  Mist swathes the Coolins in a stormy swirl
  As under Rum we sail; and all in vain
  We peer through the grey glancing veils of rain,
  Straining to catch a sight of some young stag
  Exultant on an isolated crag
  Of Haiskeval, vaunting his antlered pride
  O'er unseen corries of the mountain-side--
  Yet in our hearts a flying stormy gleam
  Gilds the proud antlers of the stag of dream.




  THE BIRDS OF SAINT BRIDE

  In the fringe of the tide
  All day in the sun
  That glitters so bright
  On bosom and back,
  With a dazzle of white
  And a kindling of black
  The birds of Saint Bride
  Flutter and run.
  Hither and thither
  Darting and dashing,
  Hither and thither
  Flirting and flashing,
  With a dazzle of white
  And a kindling of black
  They flutter and flitter
  To nowhere and back;
  They glance and they glitter
  In flickering flight,
  Then over the wall
  They wheel out of sight
  With a clear crystal call
  Like the voice of the light.




  GREEN CORMORANT

  On the wave-washed scarp of crag
  Broods the haggard hungry shag
  Over the green curdling sea,
  Like some ancient huddled hag
  Gloating o'er the witchery
  Of her seething cauldron, brewing
  Hell-broth for a king's undoing.




  DUNVEGAN

  Through the dark narrow channel in the night
  We stole into the little sleeping bay,
  And dropping anchor in the veiled starlight
  Under the shadow of Dunvegan lay--

  We who had ventured far across the surge,
  Drawn as by siren music to that shore
  Since first our hearts had heard Dunvegan's dirge
  Sung by a voice that we should hear no more:

  And as in that strange anchorage we dreamed
  Under the haunted shadow of the hill,
  The coronach of proud Dunvegan seemed
  About his castle walls to echo still.




  SCUIR-NAN-GILLEAN

  The jagged Coolins through a stormy rent
  Thrust their clean-chiselled peaks into the light
  Of the last rays of the storm-harried sun
  That, hurtling from the clear horizon, smite
  The crest of Scuir-nan-gillean with red lances,
  And over straths and corries lapped in night
  He towers a moment with fire-blazoned helm;
  Then the sun sinks and from the East advances
  The host of cloudy shadows that overwhelm
  The old chieftain and his clan, and once again
  He vanishes in darkness from our sight
  Wrapped in his ragged maud of mist and rain.




  FROM NIGHT TO NIGHT

  The mainmast rakes the midnight sky
  As on the slanting deck we lie
  And watch the dark waves racing by--

  The dark waves only flickering bright
  A moment in the starboard light,
  Then lost for ever in the night.

  From night to night the dark waves go:
  And we who watch them, even so
  One dancing dazzling moment know--

  One moment kindling to the glow
  Of life as we too hurry by
  In our swift course from night to night.




  THE STORMBOW

  As setting sail we left the creek
  Within whose shelter all the night
  Under Ben Aslak we had lain,
  Lulled by the lap of waves and loud
  Threshing of torrents big with rain
  Cascading from the unseen peak,
  A quivering lance of stormy light
  Suddenly shivered the cold bleak
  Low-brooding bank of Eastern cloud:
  And, as we turned to bid farewell
  To birchen brae and ferny dell
  And the high-soaring cloud-capped ben,
  A stormbow spanned the misty-glen;
  And in our hearts through all that day
  Of crashing showers and lashing spray
  That miracle of rainy light
  Quivered and sparkled Eden-bright.




  DRIFTERS, MALLAIG

  As, beating up against the wind, at last
  We make the harbour in the failing light,
  A fleet of smoky drifters, steaming past
  Our little yawl, rides out into the night--

  Rides out into the darkness and the storm
  To labour night-long on the turbulent deep,
  While in our quiet cabins snug and warm
  We lie securely in untroubled sleep:

  And when at last in sounder sleep we lie
  In the last anchorage, men will yet dare
  The midnight menace of the sea and sky
  And vigilant through crashing darkness fare.




  THE SLEEPERS OF THE ISLES

  Who calls, who calls the sleepers of the Isles?
  Who calls, who calls?
  Only the low voice of the starlit kyles
  And the deep voice of mountain waterfalls.

  And do they turn, the sleepers in their graves,
  And answer in their sleep--
  Who ever loved the voices of the waves
  And torrent waters crashing down the steep?

  Who calls, who calls the sleepers of the Isles,
  Who calls, who calls?
  Only the low voice of the starlit kyles
  And the deep voice of mountain waterfalls.




  THE SOUND OF SLEAT

  Squalls swirling round the mountain-side
  Rush out on us from strath and glen
  As down the Sound of Sleat we ride
  With straining sails the racing tide
  That bears us home again.

  Lee oh! to let the great boom swing
  We duck and scarce can keep our feet
  As like a crazy living thing
  With quivering keel and shrouds that sing
  Sea Swallow rides the Sound of Sleat.




  AT SEA

  Only the wash of waves and creak
  Of timbers as awake I lie
  And watch the starry patch of sky
  Through the companion....  Oh, that I
  On that last night of all may be
  Still sailing in a ship at sea;
  And even as I sink, too weak
  To turn my heavy head or speak,
  May I still hear the wash and creak
  And see the starry sky!




  THE SINGING ISLAND

  Grass of Parnassus stars the salty turf
  Of my heart's island in the Western seas
  With blossoms cold and snowy as the surf
  That breaks for ever on the Hebrides.

  Star after star the blue unclouded night
  Blossoms above Sea Swallow's raking spars--
  And I shall see again at morning light
  The singing island of the snowy stars.




  CORONACH




  IN EXILE

  How shall he rest
  With the lift and the shiver and swing
  Of seas in his breast?

  How shall he rest
  With the soar and the flutter and sweep
  Of wings in his breast?

  Inland he lies;
  But how in the grave shall he sleep
  When the mallard's keen cries

  Startle the night
  As seaward in starlight they wing
  Flight upon flight?

  How shall he rest
  While still the waves shiver and swing
  Round the isles in his breast?




  RENEWAL

  (IN MEMORIAM, R. B.)

  (_For E. M., W. de la M. and L. A._)

  Gathered together in the room he loved
  About the fire that to a jewelled glow,
  As of some fabulous Arabian cavern,
  Kindles the picture-covered walls, we talk
  Of things that were the very breath of life
  To him who, all the while, no dubious shade,
  But a quick golden presence in the room,
  Listens with smiling eyes to his old friends
  Still talking, talking....
                             Time has dealt with us
  After its wont; and something we have lost
  Of the old resilience, under the long stress
  Of troubled years and numbing hammer-blows
  Of all the unbearable things that men must bear:
  Yet, as we pause, the undiminished flame
  Of his unchallengeable singing youth
  Ripples and quivers through our lighted veins,
  Requickening the Phoenix in each heart,
  Till, the dun plumage of mortality
  Consumed, our souls, fledged with immortal youth,
  Are one with the young singer and his song.
    1930




  WHO SHALL REMEMBER?

  Who shall remember when the day is done
  The lark-song ere the rising of the sun?

  Who shall remember at the fall of night
  The rosy feathering of dawning light?

  Who shall remember when the day is over
  The silvering of the dew-pearls in the clover?

  Who shall remember when an old man dies
  The morning light and laughter of his eyes?




  THE SINGER OF THE TREES

  (IN MEMORIAM, JOHN FREEMAN)

  Like golden torches all about the land
  Above the frozen fields the great elms stand,
  Their massy darkness kindled to clear flame....
  And thus they stood the day their singer came,
  Came and rejoiced with us to see them there
  In the cold glitter of November air
  Like fires within a magic crystal burning....
  Once more they burn; but there is no returning
  For him within whose eyes the golden bright
  Exultant beauty quickened such delight,
  For him who sought so soon the shadow land,
  Exiled from all he loved....  The great elms stand
  Like golden torches year by year until
  The slashing squalls of sudden tempest spill
  Their glory broadcast, as on that wild day
  Of wind and rain the singer went away
  From these beloved fields to fields that know
  No flower-foamed springtide or autumnal glow,
  And where no trees, the best beloved of all,
  No trees to beauty burn and no leaves fall.




  NO SON

  No son to stand at last beside the bed
  Where she lies dead;
  And yet on that same bed with labour sore
  Three sons she bore--
  Sons who when death should come to her might still
  Her life fulfil--
  Three sons war took ere half her years were told,
  Leaving her old
  Before her time with heart too numb for tears
  To face the years--
  The empty widowed childless years, and live
  With naught to give--
  She who had given all; and so was left
  To die bereft
  Even of the last despairing tenderness
  Of love's caress--
  She who four deaths had died, yet lived, to find
  Only death kind
  At last: but safe from life at length she lies
  With dreamless eyes.




  IN NO-MAN'S-LAND

  I shot him as he stooped to finish me;
  And all night long across my shattered chest
  His stiffening body lay--an enemy
  No longer, but a weary lad at rest,
  Dropped from that devil's conflict suddenly
  Into deep slumber on a brother's breast.




  DIED OF WOUNDS

  He died of wounds, they wrote me--not a word
  To say how he was wounded, yet I know.
  How could they hope to keep the truth from me
  When I was with him in the agony
  Of his last dawn?  Had I not seen him go,
  The night they took him from me, with the eyes
  Of a poor frightened child who fears the night--
  The eyes of the poor baby-boy who'd clung
  To me, his mother, as he went to bed?
  They took him ... and he died of wounds they said.
  How could they hope to fool me--I who heard
  The rattle of the rifles and the cries
  He never uttered?  He who loved the light,
  Because he was so innocent and young
  And could not face old evil, could not fight
  Fear, into the most fearful night of all
  He had to go without me....  They just said
  He died of wounds ... and in his last lone bed
  They laid him, little dreaming I was there,
  I who had stood with him against the wall,
  Though my eyes were not bandaged....
                                       They would keep
  The truth from me: but where he lies asleep
  I soon shall lie beside him, sleeping light
  Lest he should wake in terror in the night.




  THE SINGER OF THE ISLES

  (IN MEMORIAM, MARJORIE KENNEDY-FRASER)

  Night settles on the Coolins and its wing
  Shadows the restless waters of the kyles
  As slowly with a heart too tired to sing
  Sails home the weary Singer of the Isles--

  Sails home in silence, she who sang of home
  To island hearts exiled beyond the seas,
  Seeking at last beyond the surge and foam
  Some heavenly haven in the Hebrides.




  CORONACH

  Cold the fires of sunset smoulder
  Over Scuir-nan-gillean's shoulder,
  And the sunset wind blows colder
  Over the cold moaning surge.

  Moaning surge and cold wind sighing,
  Singing spray and seamews crying,
  Voices of the day's cold dying
  Sound the island singer's dirge.




  DRAW CLOSE THE CURTAINS

  Draw close the curtains, make the windows fast,
  Shut out the restless voices of the night.

  _Nay, but he loved the soughing of the trees
  And the far murmur of the island seas!_

  But what to him, so still and sleeping fast,
  Are now the restless voices of the night,
  The soughing of the wind among the trees
  And the far murmur of the island seas?

  He cannot hear them where he sleeps so fast
  In the deaf grave, the voices of the night.

  _And yet he loved the soughing of the trees
  And the far murmur of the island seas._

  He loved ... but I ... Oh, make the windows fast
  Against the restless voices of the night--
  The old heart-breaking soughing of the trees,
  The old heart-breaking murmur of the far seas!




  ARE THERE NO OTHER ISLES?

  Are there no other isles beyond
  The waters of the west?
  If we set sail with questing keel
  At sundown towards the dying gleam
  Shall not another dawn reveal
  The unknown islands of our dream,
  The summer isles of rest?
  Are there no other isles beyond
  The waters of the west?

  Through wastes of windy dark must we
  Venture in endless quest,
  Through everduring midnight sail
  A havenless eternity.
  And in no virgin dayspring hail
  Over a yet unvoyaged sea
  The inviolable crest
  Of dream-familiar isles beyond
  The waters of the west?




  HIGHLAND DAWN




  SONG AT MIDNIGHT

  Something flutters through my mind
  Like a bird at dead of night
  From its perch in slumber shaken,
  Hither, thither, beating blind
  In a wild bewildered flight
  Through the thicket's baffling branches.

  Yet at length the dawn will come,
  And to greet the living light
  From the greenwood's highest tree-top
  Happily the bird will sing
  Dewy songs of welcoming,
  All its midnight fear forgotten.

  Something flutters blind and dumb
  Through the thicket of my mind
  Hither, thither, panic-stricken--
  Yet it, too, will hail the light
  With a sudden song and find
  All its fear resolved in singing.




  WINTER'S BREATH

  When winter's breath has strewn with diamond splinters
  The brambled brake and steeled the lake
  And stripped the rowan trees through which we rambled
  And glassed the granite screes up which we scrambled,
  The heart that still remembers
  The scarlet and the amber of September's
  Last flaring of the summer's smouldering embers
  Rejoices yet, rekindling to December's
  Austerer flame of icy fire, and glows
  With crystal ardours of the Cairngorm snows.




  THE LITTLE BIRDS

  No weasel's yelp
  Or fox's bark
  Shivers the brooding
  Leafy dark:

  No screech-owl's cry
  Comes shudderingly;
  Yet on the branches
  Of each tree

  The little birds'
  Hearts quake, aware
  Of stealthy hunters
  Everywhere.




  THE SWOOPING WINGS

  Suddenly, as I crouched low on a ledge
  For shelter as a hailstorm raked the crag,
  An eagle swooped, the gust of his descent
  Fanning me as he passed, and smote a stag
  That unaware belled on the precipice edge
  A blinding blow with his death-dealing wing,
  And toppled him from his precarious perch
  Where he had stood exultant, challenging
  The stags of all the earth in royal pride.
  And sent him hurtling down the mountain-side,
  Helplessly crashing through the silver birch;
  Then, swerving to recover poise, once more
  Swooped on his mangled victim, lying spent
  Among the boulders of the Atlantic shore,
  Soused in the spindrift of the flowing tide.
  The squall ceased; and the wet walls of the pass
  In instant sunshine gleamed like burnished glass:
  But still I huddled there with sobbing breath,
  My soul still shaken by the winnowing
  Of the down-rushing of the wings of death.




  THE BIRCH

  The birch grew weary of her leaves
  And shed them on the sward,
  And danced in naked loveliness
  Before the sun, her lord--

  And as that blue October day
  She danced and waved to him
  He gilded with his loving light
  Each glancing naked limb.




  HEAR YOU NOTHING IN THE GLEN?

  Hear you nothing in the glen
  Save the singing of the waters
  When the light of day is failing
  And the hosts of darkness gather,
  Sweeping over bent and heather?

  Hear you nothing in the glen--
  No unearthly pibroch wailing
  Through the singing of the waters,
  Summoning the ghostly clan
  When the light of day is failing?

  Hear you nothing in the glen--
  No gruff muttering of men,
  Ghosts of men o'er brae and corrie
  To the pibroch's ghostly wailing
  Swarming to the midnight foray?

  Hear you nothing in the glen
  Save the singing of the waters
  When the light of day is failing--
  No low sound of women weeping,
  No lament of wives and daughters
  Over mounds of heroes sleeping,
  Ghostly wives and ghostly daughters
  To the pibroch's ghostly wailing
  Keening for the slaughtered clan,
  Women bowed in unavailing
  Sorrow since the world began,
  Mourning for the sons of men?

  When the light of day is failing
  Hear you nothing in the glen
  Save the singing of the waters?




  THE WISHING-TREE

  Year after year each pilgrim who has come
  To this green rustling isle of Loch Maree
  Has wedged his penny in the soft birch-bark
  Of the old Wishing-tree.

  And now there's scarce a chink left in the trunk
  To take another coin and we must search
  On tiptoe straining if we'd try our luck
  With the old wizard birch.

  So thickly copper-studded is the bark
  The birch is now just a dead metal tree:
  And they who wished--how many ever came
  Again to Loch Maree?




  THE RAIDER

  Through the witchlight of the glen,
  Like a sudden skirl of pipes
  Summoning the scattered clan,
  Sings the screech-owl's hunting cry,
  As through ghostly silver birches
  The night-raiding restless spirit
  Of some ancient cateran
  To the foray brushes by.




  THE ISLAND SONGS

  As the lift of the wave to the venturing keel,
  As the spark that is stricken from steel upon steel
  As the sea-light that lures in the eyes of the seal,

  As the soar and the swoop of the seagull in flight,
  As the grip of the foe in the thick of the fight,
  As the grasp of a friend in the heart of the night,

  As a loved sail lost in the gold of the west,
  As the laughter of God in a baby's breast,
  As the lights of the haven, the end of the quest--

  To me, these songs in the island tongue
  That reivers and weavers and fishers have sung--
  Songs that are old as the earth, and as young.
    1909




  NOT PROVEN

  Somebody stirring in the glen--a light
  Stealing among the birches, ghostly white....
  Yet who would venture up the strath at night?

  In all the dreary years she'd dwelt alone
  Since Donald's killing, never had she known
  A visitor to cross her threshold-stone--
  Since Donald came at midnight as the clock
  Struck twelve....  Again she hears his knuckles knock
  On the half-door--and left, as the byre-cock
  Sang out the hour ere daybreak....
                                     He was found
  Among the birches, as though sleeping sound;
  And sound he slumbered on the blood-soaked ground.
  They found him sleeping with her knife between
  His shoulder-blades: and not a soul had been
  Across her threshold, she had hardly seen
  A neighbour from the clachan, since the day
  They tried her, and they let her come away,
  Her guilt, not proven.
                         She'd grown old and grey
  Since then, a wrinkled shuffle-footed crone
  Living in the dark haunted glen alone
  Until her heart was turned into a stone:
  But young she'd been, as Donald, on the night
  He left, in spite of all that she....
                                        The light
  Stole nearer: she could see his face dead-white,
  White as the silver birches: like a flame
  It burned among the birches: Donald came,
  Came back at last to end the years of shame....
  And now his knuckles ... Donald at the door;
  And she must let him in, to leave no more--
  But she, she could not cross the rocking floor....
  And still he kept on knocking, knock, knock, knock,
  To the floors rocking; and the long-dumb clock
  Was striking twelve ... and, hark, a crowing cock!




  SHELDRAKE

  The sheldrake streaming in clean arrowed flight
  Into the sunset of the western tide,
  Their burnished plumage gilded by the light
  Of the last radiance, swiftly out of sight,
  Like fire-birds fleeing from pursuing night,
  Into the glory glide--
  Like fire-birds homing to the heart of fire:
  And as she watches them her arrowy bright
  Young dreams on flaming pinions of delight
  Take wing with them towards her heart's desire.




  ISLAND DAWN

  At dawn the seamews shrill and wrangle
  About the storm-wrack of sea-tangle
  And clotted froth of curded waves
  That glut the entrance to the caves:
  And little heeds he, who lies there
  With cold sea-tangle in his hair,
  The gulls that wrangle in the air.

  At dawn the wife's eyes desperately
  Search all the sail-less leagues of sea;
  And she as little heeds the wrangle
  Of seagulls over the sea-tangle;
  And little guesses who lies there
  With cold sea-tangle in his hair
  While gulls still wrangle in the air.

  Yet, though no more his heart shall heed
  The gulls that shrill above the weed,
  Her heart shall lie in cold sea-tangle
  For evermore and hear the wrangle,
  Her heart shall lie, as he lies there,
  In the cold tangle of despair
  While gulls still wrangle in the air.




  THE LAST WORD

  Speechless at last she seemed, as on the bed
  She sank, and too far gone to see or hear:
  But, when he signed to us the end was near,
  Towards the doctor craning her old head,
  She fixed him with a kindling eye, and said--
  "You, Jock McCall, you've always been a fool,
  Ay, from the day I knew you first at school
  Till double-fool you turned the day you wed--
  A fool and liar; and if you fancy I,
  Because you choose to say so, mean to die,
  You're sore mistaken!  Die? not I, my lad--
  Not if I know it!" and she, who'd always had
  The last word, even with her latest breath
  Gasped her defiance in the face of death.




  HIS FETCH

  "You come again?" she said--
  "You come again to bid a last 'Good-bye '?"
  He stood bewildered by his mother's bed--
  For what could he reply--

  He who had not till then
  Set foot within his mother's house all day?
  "I'd hardly looked to see you, lad, again
  Before you went away.

  "But, son, you must not miss
  The tide for me," she murmured with a smile.
  "Come, give your mother one last hug and kiss.
  We part but for a while."

  Speechless to her he bent,
  Then stumbled from the cottage towards the shore
  Knowing too surely that the way he went
  His fetch had gone before.




  ON THE EDGE OF THE TIDE

  She stands on the edge of the tide
  With eyes that stare into the sea;
  And, as I creep up to her side,
  Knows nothing of me.

  And my heart quivers cold as I steal
  From my love where she dreams by the sea,
  Lest the dark yearning eyes of a seal
  She turn upon me.




  THE RETURN

  She saw him, smiling on the threshold-stone,
  Home from his voyage unexpectedly,
  And stepped to greet him ... yet it was not he
  Who'd left her, but a week ago, alone--

  Not Neil, her husband, dour and gnarled and grey,
  Who but a week ago had left her there--
  This lad with crisp and curly yellow hair
  And young eyes smiling like the break of day?

  Yet, surely Neil, the very lad she'd wed
  Just forty years ago, young Neil, come back....
  And then she saw with reeling sense the black
  Cold widowing waters close above his head.




  TOO LATE

  And he had turned and left without a word,
  While she stood hearkening to a silly bird,
  Hearkening, although she scarcely knew she heard
  A single note as she stayed rooted there:
  But ever after she could hardly bear
  To hear that tinkling through the crystal air,
  And almost hated robins: he had gone,
  Leaving her in dumb wretchedness alone;
  And still the silly sun in heaven shone
  And all the frosted bracken spangled bright
  With brittle glitter of cold splintered light
  Prickling dry eyes that ached and ached for night,
  For never-ending night: and night at last
  Had come, clear-starred and staring, and had passed,
  Leaving her heart unsolaced; and, overcast,
  New day had stolen on a bleak empty earth
  Of glooming mountain and ungleaming firth:
  And still she pined through days and nights of dearth
  Because her foolish traitor of a tongue
  Let slip the bitter idle word that stung,
  And could not, though her very heart was wrung
  With anguish as she saw his agony,
  Utter her quick remorse, struck suddenly
  Dumb till too late, too late: and ever she,
  When robins sing in bracken bright with rime,
  Hears in her hollow heart the dark words chime
  Too late, too late, until the end of time.




  GLENCOE

  On the big tops still deep
  Snow dwells and April squalls
  Between the mountain walls
  In feathery flurries sweep.

  Low on the hills, the deer
  Amid the dithering flakes
  Like phantoms through dim brakes
  Appear and disappear:

  Bewildered by the snow
  They haunt the shadowy brae
  Like souls that lost their way
  When death swept down Glencoe.




  THE OLD WIFE

  "Is that you, Donald?" the old wife said,
  Peeking and peering with dithering head
  And craning neck at the darkening door:
  But the shape that cheated her failing sight
  Was only a deeper shadow of night,
  And the step that sounded in her old head
  Was only the echo of days long dead,
  And never would waken her threshold more.




  RED RANALD

  With the yelp of a weasel
  He sprang from the corrie
  Where crouched in the bracken
  He'd watched from the ben,
  And slinging his ragged
  Plaid over his shoulder
  Headlong through the bracken
  He plunged down the glen.

  Through bracken and birches
  He crashed in red anger
  Till he came to the sheiling
  That stood by the stream,
  And stealthily striding
  Across the dark threshold
  Stooped over the lovers
  Still clasped in their dream--

  Stooped over the lovers
  Still lapped in sweet slumber
  And muttered above them--
  "So doucely you sleep,
  O blithe bonnie lovers,
  'Twere pity to wake you!
  Sleep on and sleep deeper...."
  And drove his dirk deep.




  THE LITTLE CROFT

  Sheer from the mountain shoulder to the foam
  Of the salt tide the flashing torrent falls,
  And to the seaman slowly making home
  Clear through the wash of waves its loved voice calls--

  Calls to his heart, and as he sways aloft,
  Trapping the slatting topsail with a will,
  His heart already seeks the little croft
  In a green pocket of the craggy hill.




  THE ISLAND GRAVEYARD

  In shallow rocky graves among the roots
  Of old wind-writhen silver birches sleep
  These Highland hearts as sound as they who lie
  In rich mould of the Lowlands buried deep.

  They sleep as sound in their last island home,
  Lulled by the whispering waves of Loch Maree--
  The water's susurration rippling through
  The silver birch's sighing threnody.

  They sleep as sound--and yet when winter pipes
  His skirling challenge down dark strath and glen,
  Do they not turn in shallow sleep and sigh
  To face the blast again as living men?




  THE GOLDEN HILL

  She watched the light fade from the golden fleece
  Of silver birches in October leaf
  That shawled the slopes and shoulders of the ben--
  She watched the light fade slowly that with brief
  Glory of rainy gold had filled the glen
  And filled her tempest-troubled heart with peace--

  A shining peace that failed not as the light
  Faded from crag and corrie, peace that still
  Would soar, a glowing presence, in her mind,
  A golden-peaked inviolable hill
  Of refuge when the valley-ways were blind
  Beneath the roaring cataract of night.




  HIGHLAND SPRING

  Caught in the white squall sweeping down the pass,
  On baffled wings the old raven flaps in vain
  Against the blast, then with a raucous cry
  Drops like a stone, dead in the whitening grass;
  When, answering life's last despairing call,
  From a snug bield of birchen brake hard by
  The first lamb bleats; and life's voice once again
  Re-echoes from the mountain's granite wall.




  FLIGHT

  Slowly he labours up the sun-baked strath
  Over sparse bracken and the blackened peat
  And charred heath-stalks that crackle in the heat,
  When suddenly across the scorching path
  A wide-winged shadow sweeps: he lifts his head
  And sees with eyes that tingle in the glare
  Above him hanging in the quivering air
  A golden eagle with great pinions spread:
  And he no longer labours; from him falls
  The burden of day, as, on imperious wings
  He hovers over the glen and sweeps and swings
  In the cool swirls and eddies of his own flight,
  Then soars with eyes undazzled by the light
  And to his mate in their far eyrie calls.




  THE EXILES

  Their souls return, though far from home they sojourn.
  Whose eyes still keep the sea-light of the Isles,
  Their souls return at night while they lie sleeping
  And cry among the seamews of the kyles.

  Their souls return, flight after flight the exiles
  Flock home at midnight from the foreign shore;
  And when the sea-light from their eyes has perished
  Their souls return, to leave the Isles no more.




  THE FIRST FLAKE

  Stript by the eager wind that sings and searches
  All day among the granite screes and corries
  And round the pinnacles and eagle-perches
  Of needle-scars that stab the steely glitter
  Of bleak November's icy blue, October's
  Fleeces of gold have fallen from the birches
  That clamber up the ben and bloom with purple
  The steeper braes, beyond the lucent amber
  Of sun-filled bracken, slashed with bramble-scarlet--
  October's gold has fallen from the birches,
  And soon the steely wind that sings and searches
  All day among the granite screes and corries,
  Clouding with falling flakes the eagle-perches,
  Will veil the purple bloom of trees that clamber
  The steeper braes and veil the lucent amber,
  The scarlet-brambled amber of the bracken;
  Shrouding in one white sheet November's glories.
  And even now the first chill crystal flutters
  Out of the blue and settles on the forehead
  Of the old shepherd as he seeks the clachan;
  And as he feels the first flake's death-cold tingle
  Upon his brow, his old heart knows too surely
  His eyes have looked their last on gold and purple,
  Amber and scarlet, his eyes already dazzled
  By the blind snows of unawakening winter.




  HIGHLAND DAWN

  I watched a stag that snuffed the kindling air,
  A golden eagle gliding in the light;
  Then, glancing up the brae, I saw you there,
  The wind of morning rippling through your hair,
  And bade farewell to night.

  The stag sped up the mountain out of sight;
  The eagle dwindled in the dazzling blue;
  But fleeter yet my happy heart took flight
  From the last valley-shadows of the night
  To lose itself in you.




  EAGLES AND ISLES

  Eagles and isles and uncompanioned peaks,
  The self-reliant isolated things,
  Release my soul, embrangled in the stress
  Of all day's crass and cluttered business,
  Release my soul in song and give it wings--
  And even where the traffic roars and rings,
  With senses stunned and beaten deaf and blind,
  My soul withdraws into itself and seeks
  The peaks and isles and eagles of the mind.




  THE END




  Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.




BY WILFRID GIBSON


HAZARDS: Poems, 1928-1930.  Crown 8vo.  5s. net.

THE GOLDEN ROOM AND OTHER POEMS.  Crown 8vo.  6s. net.

COLLECTED POEMS, 1905-1925.  With a Portrait.  Crown 8vo.  8s. 6d. net.

BETWEEN FAIRS.  A Comedy.  Crown 8vo.  3s. 6d. net.

KESTREL EDGE AND OTHER PLAYS.  Crown 8vo.  4s. 6d. net.

KRINDLESYKE.  Crown 8vo.  4s. 6d. net.

LIVELIHOOD: Dramatic Reveries.  Crown 8vo.  3s. 6d. net.

I HEARD A SAILOR.  Crown 8vo.  4s. 6d. net.

NEIGHBOURS.  Crown 8vo.  5s. net.

THOROUGHFARES.  Crown 8vo.  3s. net.

BORDERLANDS.  Crown 8vo.  3s. net.

SIXTY-THREE POEMS.  Selected, for use in Schools
and Colleges, by Prof. E. A. PARKER, Ph.D.  Crown 8vo.  3s. 6d.




NEW VOLUMES OF POEMS


POEMS OF T. STURGE MOORE.  Collected
Edition.  Volume III.  8vo.  12s. 6d. net.

_Previously published._

Volumes I. and II.  8vo.  12s. 6d. net each.

MOURNFUL NUMBERS: Verses and Epigrams.
By COLIN ELLIS.  Crown 8vo.

COLLECTED POEMS OF EDWIN ARLINGTON
ROBINSON.  With a Portrait.  Extra crown 8vo.  21s. net.

THE PRELUDE.  By WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
Edited, with Introduction and Commentary, by
E. E. REYNOLDS.  Pott 8vo.  3s. 6d. net.

_Golden Treasury Series._

SCARLET, BLUE AND GREEN: A Book of
Sporting Verse.  By DUNCAN FIFE.  With Illustrations
in Colour and Monochrome by CECIL ALDIN.  Crown
4to.  10s. 6d. net.

COLLECTED VERSE OF LEWIS CARROLL.
Fully illustrated by SIR JOHN TENNIEL, HENRY HOLIDAY,
etc.  Extra crown 8vo.  8s. 6d. net.

PROSE AND POETRY FROM PUNCH.  Selected
and Edited by GUY BOAS.  Fcap.  8vo.



MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON




[End of Islands, by Wilfrid Gibson]
