LOLLINGDON DOWNS
AND OTHER POEMS, WITH SONNETS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Uniform with this Volume
DAUBER THE DAFFODIL FIELDS PHILIP THE KING THE FAITHFUL (A PLAY)
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
LOLLINGDON DOWNS
AND OTHER POEMS, WITH SONNETS
BY
JOHN MASEFIELD
LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN. 1917.
TO MY WIFE
I.
So I have known this life, These beads of coloured days, This self the string. What is this thing?
Not beauty, no; not greed, O, not indeed; Not all, though much; Its colour is not such.
It has no eyes to see, It has no ears; It is a red hour's war Followed by tears.
It is an hour of time, An hour of road, Flesh is its goad; Yet, in the sorrowing lands, Women and men take hands.
O earth, give us the corn, Come rain, come sun; We men who have been born Have tasks undone. Out of this earth Comes the thing birth, The thing unguessed, unwon.
II.
O wretched man, that for a little mile Crawls beneath heaven for his brother's blood, Whose days the planets number with their style, To whom all earth is slave, all living, food! O withering man, within whose folded shell Lies yet the seed, the spirit's quickening corn, That Time and Sun will change out of the cell Into green meadows, in the world unborn! If Beauty be a dream, do but resolve And fire shall come, that in the stubborn clay Works to make perfect till the rocks dissolve, The barriers burst, and Beauty takes her way: Beauty herself, within whose blossoming Spring Even wretched man shall clap his hands and sing.
III.
Out of the special cell's most special sense Came the suggestion when the light was sweet; All skill, all beauty, all magnificence, Are hints so caught, man's glimpse of the complete. And, though the body rots, that sense survives; Being of life's own essence, it endures (Fruit of the spirit's tillage in men's lives) Round all this ghost that wandering flesh immures. That is our friend, who, when the iron brain Assails, or the earth clogs, or the sun hides, Is the good God to whom none calls in vain, Man's Achieved Good, which, being Life, abides: The man-made God, that man in happy breath Makes in despite of Time and dusty Death.
IV.
You are the link which binds us each to each. Passion, or too much thought, alone can end Beauty, the ghost, the spirit's common speech, Which man's red longing left us for our friend. Even in the blinding war I have known this, That flesh is but the carrier of a ghost Who, through his longing, touches that which is Even as the sailor knows the foreign coast. So by the bedside of the dying black I felt our uncouth souls subtly made one: Forgiven, the meanness of each other's lack; Forgiven, the petty tale of ill things done. We were but Man, who for a tale of days Seeks the one city by a million ways.
V.
I could not sleep for thinking of the sky, The unending sky, with all its million suns Which turn their planets everlastingly In nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs. If I could sail that nothing, I should cross Silence and emptiness with dark stars passing; Then, in the darkness, see a point of gloss Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing, And rage into a sun with wandering planets, And drop behind; and then, as I proceed, See his last light upon his last moon's granites Die to a dark that would be night indeed: Night where my soul might sail a million years In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.
VI.
How did the nothing come, how did these fires, These million-leagues of fires, first toss their hair, Licking the moons from heaven in their ires, Flinging them forth for them to wander there? What was the Mind? Was it a mind which thought? Or chance? or law? or conscious law? or power? Or a vast balance by vast clashes wrought? Or Time at trial with Matter for an hour? Or is it all a body where the cells Are living things supporting something strange, Whose mighty heart the singing planet swells As it shoulders nothing in unending change? Is this green earth of many-peopled pain Part of a life, a cell within a brain?
