sensitive hand to pick them up
From this strange din of busy living.
I hear an echo in my sleep,
But I, caught up in the tide, like the rest,
Must spend all my life for the means to live:
I starve if I stop to sing–
Yet this dull murmuring
Will keep my heart forever hungering.
1936
The news from abroad was troubling as well. In 1936 both Hitler and Mussolini were consolidating their power. Germany and Italy, the Axis Powers, became allies. In March 1936, Hitler moved twenty thousand troops into the German Rhineland. Europe was on edge.
WHILE WE RE-ARM
Behind the mountains of imagination,
Screened off by passing mirth and passing tears,
The mind of mortal man is holding unawares
The harvest of a million weary years.
Some time, some place, some unsuspected dreamer
Will catch an echo of the far refrain,
And by his visions in a night of watching,
Will break the misty barriers of the brain.
His song shall shake the souls of politicians,
And while the craven church still watches, dumb,
The hands of men shall grasp at tools, not weapons,
And womanhood shall sing that peace has come.
1936
SANCTUARY
I may not move, while that lone tuft of cloud
Still holds the fairy hues,
An opal thrown against the sky;
And were this shovel in my hand a waiting sword,
And all the great crusaders beckoned me –
I could not move, until the glory passed.
1936
UPON A HILL IN THE MORNING
The timid kiss of the winter sun,
The waiting faith of the naked trees,
The breath of a day so well begun,
Take what you will and leave me these.
Leave me my love and leave me these,
Leave me a soul to feel them still,
Better to be a tramp, who sees,
Than a monarch blind upon a hill.
1936
THE DREAMER
I stood in flowers, knee high,
Dreaming of gentleness,
Dreams, in the promise of a shining sky
That I should make a garden from a wilderness;
I would subdue the soil and make it chaste,
Making the desert bear, the useless good,
With my own strength I would redeem the waste,
Would grow the lily where the thistle stood.
The while I dreamed, the flowers were sweet,
Now that the flowers are gone, it seems
They never bloomed except in dreams.
There are no blossoms at my feet,
The bald blue sky is lustreless,
The flowers had never been, except in dreams,
It was a dream … this is a wilderness.
My eyes are tired of the skyline,
My feet are tired of the sand,
I am as dried of laughter as the sun-scorched land,
As the staff in my sun-scorched hand.
Had I not dreamed so long,
Not dreamed of so much beauty, or such grace,
Mayhap I could have trod a quieter path,
With other men, in a green, quieter place …
My ears are tired of the silence,
My heart is tired of the toil.
If I sowed any seeds, they have perished,
Nothing is living in the soil.
From the dewless morn I have been here,
Now the day is nearly through;
The tyrant sun sinks down at last,
The colours fade, the sun departs.
Was there a glory – or was that a dream?
I hear, or think I hear, faint music:
Not the song of birds, which are fled from me,
Not the humming of bees, on dream blossom,
Not the voices of happy men …
I strain to catch the sound again …
Oh! let the music swell, slowly,
Mould a stately music, to soothe the pulse of the earth,
Develop the theme –
Do I pray? or hope? or dream?
I do not know if I dreamed I stood in a garden.
(Was it a dream, the flowers’ caress?)
Or did I dream of the sun and the sand –
Am I dreaming this wilderness?
1937
But while both spiritual and political questions demanded answers, there were others of a more personal nature to be asked as well. Philip had known Joan Grayling, his future wife,
