Poems, 1908-1919. Drinkwater John

      Of old men wrought strange gods for mystery,

      Implored miraculous tokens in the skies,

      And lips that most were strange in prophecy

      Were most accounted wise.

      The hearthstone’s commerce between mate and mate,

      Barren of wonder, prospered in content,

      And still the hunger of their thought was great

      For sweet astonishment.

      And so they built them altars of retreat

      Where life’s familiar use was overthrown,

      And left the shining world about their feet,

      To travel worlds unknown.

      We hunger still. But wonder has come down

      From alien skies upon the midst of us;

      The sparkling hedgerow and the clamorous town

      Have grown miraculous.

      And man from his far travelling returns

      To find yet stranger wisdom than he sought,

      Where in the habit of his threshold burns

      Unfathomable thought.

      Here in the unfrequented noon,

      In the green hermitage of June,

      While overhead a rustling wing

      Minds me of birds that do not sing

      Until the cooler eve rewakes

      The service of melodious brakes,

      And thoughts are lonely rangers, here,

      In shelter of the primrose year,

      I curiously meditate

      Our brief and variable state.

      I think how many are alive

      Who better in the grave would thrive,

      If some so long a sleep might give

      Better instruction how to live;

      I think what splendours had been said

      By darlings now untimely dead

      Had death been wise in choice of these,

      And made exchange of obsequies.

      I think what loss to government

      It is that good men are content —

      Well knowing that an evil will

      Is folly-stricken too, and still

      Itself considers only wise

      For all rebukes and surgeries —

      That evil men should raise their pride

      To place and fortune undefied.

      I think how daily we beguile

      Our brains, that yet a little while

      And all our congregated schemes

      And our perplexity of dreams,

      Shall come to whole and perfect state.

      I think, however long the date

      Of life may be, at last the sun

      Shall pass upon campaigns undone.

      I look upon the world and see

      A world colonial to me,

      Whereof I am the architect,

      And principal and intellect,

      A world whose shape and savour spring

      Out of my lone imagining,

      A world whose nature is subdued

      For ever to my instant mood,

      And only beautiful can be

      Because of beauty is in me.

      And then I know that every mind

      Among the millions of my kind

      Makes earth his own particular

      And privately created star,

      That earth has thus no single state,

      Being every man articulate.

      Till thought has no horizon then

      I try to think how many men

      There are to make an earth apart

      In symbol of the urgent heart,

      For there are forty in my street,

      And seven hundred more in Greet,

      And families at Luton Hoo,

      And there are men in China, too.

      And what immensity is this

      That is but a parenthesis

      Set in a little human thought,

      Before the body comes to naught.

      There at the bottom of the copse

      I see a field of turnip tops,

      I see the cropping cattle pass

      There in another field, of grass.

      And fields and fields, with seven towns,

      A river, and a flight of downs,

      Steeples for all religious men,

      Ten thousand trees, and orchards ten,

      A mighty span that curves away

      Into blue beauty, and I lay

      All this as quartered on a sphere

      Hung huge in space, a thing of fear

      Vast as the circle of the sky

      Completed to the astonished eye;

      And then I think that all I see,

      Whereof I frame immensity

      Globed for amazement, is no more

      Than a shire’s corner, and that four

      Great shires being ten times multiplied

      Are small on the Atlantic tide

      As an emerald on a silver bowl …

      And the Atlantic to the whole

      Sweep of this tributary star

      That is our earth is but … and far

      Through dreadful space the outmeasured mind

      Seeks to conceive the unconfined.

      I think of Time. How, when his wing

      Composes all our quarrelling

      In some green corner where May leaves

      Are loud with blackbirds on all eves,

      And all the dust that was our bones

      Is underneath memorial stones,

      Then shall old jealousies, while we

      Lie side by side most quietly,

      Be but oblivion’s fools, and still

      When curious pilgrims ask – “What skill

      Had these that from oblivion saves?” —

      My song shall sing above our graves.

      I think how men of gentle mind,

      And friendly will, and honest kind,

      Deny their nature and appear

      Fellows of jealousy and fear;

      Having single faith, and natural

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