Name: Sonnets from a prison camp
Author: Archibald Allan Bowman

Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh

FOREWORD

For allowing this slight volume to see the light of day I have but one excuse to offer. The situation to which these verses are the emotional reaction represents a very real and serious piece of experience. It is no mere poetical exaggeration to say that in the first days of captivity at least, the writing of the sonnets was a labour that “stood between my soul and madness,” and I cannot help feeling that what, under one of the heaviest blows that can befall a soldier, has meant so much to me, may have in it something that will raise it at times above the personal to the level of general human interest.

It ought to be a pleasure to acknowledge generosity in an enemy; and I wish to express my indebtedness to Captain Hohnholz, Commandant of the Prison-Camp at Hesepe, to whose kindness I owe it that I am able to offer the sonnets as they stand for publication.

Offizier—Gefangenenlager
Hesepe, 17th August 1918

PROEM

He who hath never from behind toothed wire

Glimpsed, helpless, freedom’s waiting amplitude,

Hath never watched, fast rooted where he stood

The embers of another day expire

In glory welling westward, like the pyre

Of some spent viking whom the Atlantic flood

Bears dwindling into that infinitude

That great souls end in; then around the fire

Of his own musings, lodering through the bars

Of a shrunk life, hath sought awhile to limn

His lost felicity—can ne’er divine

The vastness of the common things that line

Life’s banked horizon, nor hath learned to rim

Infinity with galaxies of stars.

Rastatt, 26th April 1918

SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP

IN THE FIELD

I

Two hours before the mist of morning paled

Beneath a sun that never showed his flame,

And spectral day stole on the world with shame,

Into the night unsentinelled there sailed

The whistling murder, sudden. Sudden wailed

Shrapnel, and breaking cloud, began to claim

Window and tile down clattering from the frame

Into the littered causeway. Dreamers quailed,

And propped themselves to listen, or rising, crept

From corridors by fitful candle; then

Gathered scared children down the winding stair,

And only whispers passed where no one slept.

And thought drew rein, surmising wildly, when

The guns spoke murder over doomed Estaires.

Rastatt, 27th April

II

“Stand to!” The warning word was hardly said,

And had not moved a man, when round and round

Forthwith the steaming kettles came to ground,

And the men swarmed to dip their hasty bread,

A soldier’s morning bite. Still overhead

Murder flew hurtling, shell by shell, and found

Earth in some rearward purlieu, quenched in sound.

Breakfast began, but not a man was fed

Ere the growled “Fall in” menacingly proved

The dog’s bone kinsman to a soldier’s meal.

We mustered, lowering, hungry. The ranks grew;

And it was seen the world again had moved,

As at the impulse of a groaning wheel,

Unto some issue, from that first “Stand to!”

Rastatt, 27th April

III

Unto some issue, Whither? No one dreamed

What menace crouched behind that bankèd mist,

Massing to bear down on us. No one wist

What power that shrapnel covered as it screamed

Futilely overhead. Scarce more it seemed

Than many a day had happed, of trials the least,

Vexatious interruption of a feast,

A broken night, a day spoiled ere it gleamed.

But still the thickening barrage combed the air;

Still whistling shrapnel sputtered into smoke;

And momently the cobbled roadway shook

With sickening thud where freighted monsters took

The earth with double thunder. Here and there

Blood trickled into hollows. No one spoke.

Rastatt, 27th April

IV

The bridge across the Lys! A slender thread

To bind or bar thy holders to their own;

But one span, small and narrow, lightly thrown

Over these sullen waters, lightly shed.

Upon thy planks the heavy-booted tread

Of men who seemed with sudden trouble grown

Haggard. “What are you?” “Durhams.” “What is known?”

“Our billet down, our officers are dead.

We seek a new position further on.”

Position! Little recked they then how steep

The way, how sure the ending. They were gone,

And the keen harvester prepared to reap

In fresh fields. The mourne blanket of the dawn

Gathered the Durhams to eternal sleep.

Rastatt, 28th April

V

The Church of Nouveau Monde! Lead on. ’Tis there

We concentrate. There hung in the void street

A local silence, which our sudden feet

With lesser clangour startled in its lair,

While, strangely, not the brood that racked the air

Could break the boding hush of that retreat.

So in a thunder-storm the quickened beat

Of one’s own startled pulses may impair

The silence of a room which the onfall

Of shafted noise o’erhead left deadly still.

Perchance the mind doth place as on some plan

The figured sounds which figured space do fill,

Far or more near. ’Tis sure the hodding van

Broke forward into silence virginal.

Rastatt, 29th April

VI

Waiting! A soldier’s sacrament of strain,

The eager cup of poising destiny,

That may not pass from him till it is dry,

And Death with peace, or Life unveils with pain.

Full many in this demented play must drain

That cup but once. Full many a soul must try

Its sharpness, till numbed sense hath lost the lie

Of a life’s landscape, smitten from the brain.

Then in a falling twilight of the mind

Their way into that temple oft they grope,

Where from the true, strong human hand doth slip

Life’s vesture of live colours, meaning, hope,

Purpose and fear, leaving dumb wont behind,

While the word “Fate” drops dreaming from the lip.

Rastatt, 29th April

VII

What of our comrades in the forward post?

The fog of war but deepened with the day.

We knew that in that troubled ocean lay

Uncharted shoals, blind rocks, and treacherous coast.

And what of yonder never-ending host

Of wan, unwounded Portuguese? Ah, stay,

Pale sergeant. Do you bleed? You came that way?

What is the tidings? Is the front line lost?

“Nothing is known of posts that lie before

Laventie. At the cross-roads hellish fire

Has cut them off who shouldered the first load.”

Can they live through it? “They can not retire,

Nor can you reinforce. I know no more

But this. No living thing comes down that road.”

Rastatt, 30th April

VIII

Still waiting! And the oozing hours have crept

The morning out in vapour shot with fire,

That struck now here now there in random ire

Bloodily something human down, yet kept

Alone stagnation at arm’s length. Men leapt

Suddenly to their feet, smit with a dire

Surmise, collapsed, and huddled in the mire.

No whisper passed. Some seemed as though they slept.

Only the stolid bearers wound about,

Shouldering their still and dabbled burdens white;

Or sharply a familiar voice rang out,

Comfortingly peremptory: “All right?

Then keep together. Lie low. Do not doubt.

The hour will surely come when we shall fight.”

Rastatt, 29th April

IX

Does the first softening of the season break

The winter of Glenogle? Do the sighs

Of wooing spring bid curling brackens rise

On hillsides out of nothing for love’s sake?

How sweet it is to think that harebells shake

Over Green Lowther, where the shadow lies

Far in the Enterkin, beneath blue skies;

In trance to see the catkined willows quake,

Where April stirs along Loch Lomond side;

To watch the sands of Morar gently take

The Atlantic swell that softly combs the Isles;

And through the gorgeous portals of the Clyde

To hear at dawn the thudding paddle wake

The ever-brooding silence of the Kyles.

Rastatt, 29th April

X

There is a stillness in the heart of sound,

How dire soever, if unloosed too long.

There is a time for pause in every song,

And in the whirling cyclone’s heady round

A core of peace. So the taut soul is bound

With iron girdle, and with leathern thong

To the acute wheel of the sense’s wrong

Only until the creaking spring is wound.

Then softening come sweet phantoms of far things,

Peopling the vacancy with joys unspent,

And visions of fair spaces left behind,

As if the genius of the place had wings,

And in the migratory hour were sent

To haunt awhile the silence of the mind.

Rastatt, 30th April

XI

Back from it, back! The quelling mandate rang,

As the mad moment swooped upon the dream.

Straight heathered hillside, mountain, loch, and stream

Flashed out of sight, and but the shrapnel sang,

And greater guns with stunning double clang

Rocked the earth under us. It well might seem

All hell was in the air—not without gleam

Of hope, the worst might prove the final pang.

Men crouched together, shaken as they took

That presence far too massive for their fear,

A quivering sense that something tidal welled

Over their perfect helplessness, and shook

The core of being; yet that being held.

We knew a limber clattered to the rear.

Rastatt, 30th April

XII

’Twixt Nouveau Monde and Laventie there lies

A breastwork, where the clearing tempest found

Tossed remnants of the cyclone come to ground,

Part English, Portuguese in part. The skies

Brightened, the housing spirit to entice

Into the air; the string its length unwound,

And nightmare, having pinioned, now unbound

Our helplessness. The hour had come to rise.

Alas, the lifting battle-fog proclaimed

The line was gone, with those who bore the brunt.

Our comrades, whom the fierce Valkyries claimed,

Closing upon them in the bloody hunt;

And Verey lights at hand too well explained

The long and boding silence of the front.

Rastatt, 30th April

XIII

Gray figures stealing, and a headlong dash

From hedge to house, from house again to hedge,

And fifty rifles levelled on the ledge!

One instant on the aim, and then, the crash!

He went to earth, and vanished in a flash.

And there once more was house, and there was hedge,

With sprouting field, and farm, and ditch with sedge,

And crop-head pollard row and leafless ash—

A cheerless landscape gray, and the profound

Loneliness of the battlefield. The next

Moment trench-mortar shells were on our head;

Another, and the day was sealed and fixed

On front and flank. Among the stricken dead,

One in the skull, behind, his summons found.

Rastatt, 1st May

XIV

—Found it behind, while yet his soul was set

And his eyes eager with the death he planned

For his foe forward, where he stood and manned

His gun upon the roaring parapet.

We knew the sign, the closing of the net,

The baying of the pack on every hand,

Terror of isolation. Still it fanned

Some flame within. We were not conquered yet.

Circled with unseen fire, we only heard

The bullets whistle round us, only saw

The solitude of battle. Nothing stirred.

And yet, unseen, we felt his forces draw

Upon us, earthed at length where earth had lured

Treacherously to cover. We endured.

Rastatt, 1st May

XV

A man dashed in among us and caught breath.

A sergeant, resolute and silent, one

That we who knew him trusted. He had run

As men run only in the face of death,

Yet had not fled. What is it that he saith?

“The game is all but up, the end begun.

Live men we shall not see another sun.

Laventie North has fallen, a feast of death.

’Tis your turn, sir. Your left is in the air,

And through the breach, five hundred yards away,

His fours have marched on Sailly and Estaires.”

Column of fours? No! Then God save the day!

These breastwork trenches!—’Twas as if there snapped

Some devilish mechanism on us—trapped!

Rastatt, 30th April

XVI

How it befel?—The overreaching arm,

Bombs; and he was among us. In his plan

Surprise completed what surprise began.

The treacherous shelter of a too-near farm,

A ditch along a road, a false alarm,

Thirty yards of the open; in the van

A desperado running—How he ran!—

And the pack had us. Hands up and disarm!

—It is the end of all, the bitter end,

The unpardonable, though ineluctable,

A breach in life no living now will mend;

The sin that sinned not; fell not, yet a fall.

One thought burned in the brain: How dear it cost

England to gain what I this day have lost!

Rastatt, 1st May

THE NADIR

I

There is no moment in the life of man

More potent to subdue the stuff that binds

His manhood into one than that which finds

The work the founders of his race began,

And centuries enlarged, until its span

Encompasses a nation, bodies, minds

And institutions, scattered to the winds

Out of his life, of which it held the plan.

And with the sense of something sacred sold,

His heritage, and branded with the crime

Against the ages, from the lowest pit,

Gathered for judgment meet, his eyes behold,

Tier after tier upon the banks of time,

The generations of his fathers sit.

Rastatt, 1st May

II

One moment and his reeling world has rolled

Back into ages now no longer fit

For human dwelling. Here exalted sit

The cruel strong, and, with the cunning bold,

Possess the meek’s inheritance, and hold

The good man in subjection—ages knit

With blood and iron, and with arson lit,

Crusted with murder, wanton, fierce and cold.

And England, who so mightily championeth

That freedom forced from us (our guards were met,

And we went, speechless—to a living death)

—England—a new light breaking on me, set

My brain aworking—England lives! The breath

That moment spared I hold for England yet!

Rastatt, 1st May

ON THE MARCH

I

Never wound cortège more exceeding slow,

Nor mourners to more melancholy tones,

Than that wan wending, musicked by the moans

Of wounded men, whom pity bade us show

That much of tenderness. Nor friend nor foe

Spoke in the heavy language of these groans,

But stark mankind, whose utter anguish owns

A common nature, in a common woe.

Full many a mile of weary footing sore,

By miry side tracks, not unkindly led;

And each unwounded man his burden bore

On stretcher or in blanket, ransacked bed,

Duck-board uprooted, hand-cart, unhinged door.

We left behind the dying and the dead.

Rastatt, 2nd May

II

Hour followed hour, and slowly on we wound,

Till wan day turned to front the gradual west;

And with day’s waning waned the dream of rest

For the worn bearers, whom the twilight found

Voyaging no-man’s gray, wide-watered ground,

Their shoulders bowed and aching backs distressed;

Isthmused between deep pools, and sorely pressed

To foot the flanks of many a slippery mound;

While floundering convoys, till the light was gone,

Across the perilous space their drivers nurse,

Limber and gun, by frighted horses drawn,

Whose plunging swerve that bogged their burdens worse,

Provoked Teutonic fury, well laid on

With sounding whipcord and sonorous curse.

Rastatt, 2nd May

III

And darkness fell, and a great void of space,

As if to bar our further going on,

Unfeatured, huge, gloomed o’er us. No light shone.

Strength, too, scarce held sufficient now to trace

The squalid reaches of this dismal place;

And silence settled near and far upon

That vacancy at length—our last guide gone.

Night hid each from his comrade, face from face.

As is a voyage through the uncharted waste

Of seas, unpiloted by any star,

Alone, unmooned, uncomforted, unplanned;

So forward still in silent pain we paced,

Nor light of moon nor pharos gleamed from far

Across the boding gloom of that lost land.

Rastatt, 3rd May

IV

We came to Aubers at the dead of night,

And found the semblance of that circled hell,

Which Dante once, damnation’s pains to tell,

Paced out in darkness, agony and fright.

In that blank lazarette no kindly light

On bending form of nurse or surgeon fell,

But darkness and barred doors proclaimed too well

The piteous end of long-endured plight.

No room was there in stable or in stall,

Nor roof to shelter cattle while they eat,

Where wounded men could shelter from the blight

Of the foul dew that drizzling covered all.

But in the open and the squelching street

We left them to endure the drenching night.

Rastatt, 3rd May

V

There is a garden where the whispering breeze

Perchance has wooed the lilacs in the spring,

Where still perchance at dawn a few birds sing,

And love goes nesting in the willow-trees.

But night’s ear now caught other sounds than these,

And darkness, bending, shrouded with his wing

What from an iceberg scalding tears might wring,

The glowing core of any furnace freeze.

Thick as the crimsoned leaves of autumn fall,

And crimsoned, too, and torn, and crushed as they

(’Twas the wet hand that told it) over all,

Moaning and writhing in their pain they lay;

And none to turn their faces to the wall,

And none to close their eyes, and none to pray.

Rastatt, 4th May

VI

So where the wide and shallow beaches bound

The ceaseless moiling of the North Sea hoar,

And on the sands the rounding billows pour

Their majesty of waters to the ground;

As one by one the rising breakers pound

The beaten salt sands of the yeasty shore,

Their bursting charges’ momentary roar

Dies in a background of prevailing sound—

Thus hour by hour the moaning did prevail

Over night’s stillness, rose, and swelled, and died

In the sad level of a murmuring wail,

Like ocean’s moan with voices multiplied

Along the reaches of the sounding graile,

The west wind wrestling with the flowing tide.

Rastatt, 5th May

VII

The last march opened with the sudden blaze

Of howitzers upon the face of night,

Waving us onward ere the laggard light

Of morning broke down transport-crowded ways.

Next to the first was this the bitterest phase

Of our humiliation. Yet ’tis right

To chronicle some kindness, and requite

Our armed custodians with this word of praise.

By Fournes, by Haubourdin, the endless reel

Of marching men ran out its windings slow,

Till near day’s end, nigh broken on the wheel

Of hunger, and scarce longer fit to go,

Within the moated Citadel of Lille

The sharper pang gave place to deeper woe.

Rastatt, 5th May

VIII

—The deep woe of the mind when prison walls

First darken it with shadow, throbbing hot

To meet the outrage, as the bolts are shot,

The locks ground home, and the long silence falls.

And next a settling helplessness appals

The sinking soul, as if that hour should blot

One’s name out of the Book, as if one caught

Of life’s retreat the hurrying last footfalls.

Where once a vision smiled of rankèd days

Drawn on life’s vista’d curtain rich and vast,

Only a gulf now yawns. Of all the plays

Played out in visions, we have played the last.

The future bankrupt, ’tis the present pays;

And of life’s triple span, remains—the Past.

Rastatt, 5th May

RASTATT

I

Yet morning comes with pageantry of fire,

And evening falls with majesty of flame,

And every hour hath something to reclaim

The waste of life, slow wilting behind wire.

It were a doleful dungeon that could tire

Nature’s incessant carefulness to shame

Sheer stalemate from each thing that lives, and claim

All motion for her universal choir.

Thus day by dreary day the chargèd hours

Pass influence from the sweetness of the hills

Across these cages, and the scent of flowers

Is wafted, and the fragrant dew distils,

And unimaginable stir of powers

From the deep sense of woods divinely thrills.

Rastatt, 7th May

II

Two silent influences mainly move

The captive’s mind, not wholly sunk in sloth,

Nor lost in carnal craving—dangers both

That to the core the sterling manhood prove.

One is the sense of shrinkage, of the groove

In which the soul enshuttled—O how loth!—

Feels stoppage of life’s pulse, arrested growth,

Heart-sickness which no medicine can remove.

The other wakens when departing night

Throws up the windows of the spacious morn

Upon a new day pulsing with new light;

And from the hill the hunter with his horn

Sends down imagined valleys strains that smite

The spirit with the sense of something born.

Rastatt, 7th May

III

Within these cages day by day we pace

The bitter shortness of the meted span;

And this and that way variously we plan

Our poor excursions over the poor place,

Cribbed to extinction. Yet remains one grace.

For neither bars nor tented wire can ban

Full many a roving glance that dares to scan

The roomy hill, and wanders into space.

Yea, and remains for ever unrepealed

And unimpaired the free impetuous quest

Of the mind’s soaring eye, at length unsealed

To the full measure of a life possessed

Awhile, but never counted, now revealed

Inestimable, wonderful, unguessed.

Rastatt, 7th May

IV

The long day waned beneath refulgent skies,

And evening sunshine bathed the hilltops round,

Where on the sudden from the level ground

Pine-vestured, solemn, summit by summit rise

The tops of the Black Forest. Wistful eyes

Wandered from peak to peak, as if to sound

Their mystery, if perchance there might be found

Some healing essence there, some glad surprise.

Long strove the puzzled spirit, vainly yearned

Into that alien soul to force its way;

When suddenly—the mystic rune was learned!

And in an upland glen remote and gray

There moved a presence known and last discerned

In Glendaruel on a morn of May.

Rastatt, 7th May

V

O May! O month of months divinely dear,

Which severest, amidst the toil and strife

Of Nature’s round, as with a glittering knife,

A perfect segment from the varying year!

Month of entrancing spaces, wide and clear,

Calling us to the open, thick with life,

All leaf and lamb and freshness, welling, rife

With blossom—can it be that thou art here?

O that it were in some sweet Scottish strath,

Backed by the mountains, watered, green and wide,

Where the Tay laves in shallow crystal bath

His pebbles, or the Forth’s meandering tide

Receives Dumyat’s shadow o’er his path,

And young light breaks down Ochill’s mottled side.

Rastatt, 8th May

VI

As the lone searcher, crouching o’er his glass,

Beside the window while the light is high,

Doth moved therein the forms of things descry

Invisible else to common vision crass;

Spirilla, the amœba’s sprawling mass,

With gliding infusoria sailing by—

And marks each vestige with entranced eye,

Glimmer, emerge and clear, dissolve and pass;

So in that optic lens, where never yet

The sun prevailed, beneath my prison wall,

One-windowed to the past, but brightly lit

By the eye’s own pure light, a swarm of small

And fleeting memories, else forgotten, flit,

Trivial, yet entrancing to recall.

Rastatt, 9th May

VII

Oft at the hour when night’s aërial spring

Waters with dew the beauty of the morn,

What time another rosy day is born,

Along these lanes the echoing footsteps ring

Of marching men, who to their marching sing,

Deep-voiced, light-hearted. Yet they do not scorn

Due pause and measure, and the theme well-worn

From the full heart of Germany they bring.

But we, whose fathers once in songs as fine

Unburdened hearts as full, and with the power

Of our dear country pulsing in each line,

Scorn to remember England, and to our

Incomparable heritage of song

Prefer the tinkle of some mean ding-dong.

Rastatt, 9th May

VIII

All is not well with England. Her great heart

Beats faultily and to no music set.

She hath her moods, suspicions, and doth fret

The daylong hour, by night doth toss and start.

Oft she stands dreaming in the crowded mart.

’Tis true that this distemper doth not yet

The deeper functions of her life beset,

And mightily she plays her mighty part.

Yet sometimes in this tempest the heart fears

Whether, so faulted, the old anchor grips.

And shall we find, we ask, when the sky clears,

England still mightier than England’s slips?

Let our own past proclaim it. Let the years

Advance and set their trumpets to their lips.

Rastatt, 9th May

IX

The root of our infirmity is found

In English liberty, grandly achieved,

Yet little understood and ill conceived,

And sprouting rank from the uncultured ground.

Too much the thought prevails that man unbound

Is man made free, a life oft unretrieved

From chaos by a content; undeceived

Only when licence runs the ship aground.

O England! Mother! whom thine every child

Loves, surely, to the last, forgive that some

Must fear the loss of thy benignant strength

Through the mind’s error—lest, too freely wild,

Thy liberty of indifference become

A liberty of impotence at length.

Rastatt, 9th May

X

There is no single foot of English soil,

Howe’er defaced, that is not holy ground.

There is no spot where great souls more abound,

Or where man’s greatness is more truly royal.

Who hath o’ertopped our Shakespeare? Who by toil

Of kingly thought more lofty, more profound,

Than Newton e’er from heaven’s majestic round

Brought home at night a more stupendous spoil?

One thing I find not well. In our reserve

We oft-times cloak our excellence, ashamed

Not of our imperfections, but our Best;

And what is finest, most our own, we serve

In some mean dish, or pass it by unclaimed,

Leaving the noble in us unexpressed.

Rastatt, 9th May

HESEPE

I

A lonely camp and small amidst the miles

Of the Westphalian plain, where islanded

In the green waste our simple lives are led

Out of the troubled world. Here morning smiles

Splendidly, and the mustering twilight wiles

To a strange sense of peace consummated

Over these low-hung woods, where setting red

And oval the sun the yearning eye beguiles.

Then as the white and sheeted vapour steals

Along the flats lagoon-like, comes a breath

Of anguish from the void, where still is hurled

Nation on nation; and the spirit feels

A tidal presence of o’erwhelming death

Stir through this weird backwater of the world.

Hesepe, 19th May

II

How hard it is to think upon this shoal

Of Inanition that the world’s ablaze.

How hard to link these lazy summer days

With ends and issues that will not unroll

Their length in æons—mankind’s furthest goal,

Perpending in the thick and murderous haze

Of yonder battle-hurricane that lays

Legions to rest till the last tattoo roll.

On sun-beat sand the busy ants deploy;

Industrious spiders ply their little looms;

With brush and pencil or with book we toy.

The quiet evening nears; the beetle booms.

God blazes at the world. Hell gapes for joy.

And Europe whitens with those nameless tombs.

Hesepe, 30th May

III

Scanted of life and vented on this shore,

Where but the salt and sailless ocean plies

His tide of time with soulless fall and rise,

We conn the unfeatured waste from pole to pole.

Daily the gray remorseless waters roll

Out of the blank of gray remorseless skies,

And nothing happens. Then we close sick eyes,

And sadly the soul communes with the soul—

When often o’er night’s face a sudden glow

Of Boreal splendour palpitating plays,

And the long runners, shaking tress-like, show

Our life’s plan in a vision which betrays

Our secrets to our pillows; and we know

Our selves more clearly than in happier days.

Hesepe, 4th June

IV

When in this deep Re-entrant’s sullen shade,

What hour night’s middle watches change reliefs,

The mind compiles the roster of its griefs,

Before the inward eye there oft parade

Life’s serried loves, appointed and arrayed

For high inspection, potentates and chiefs,

And armed retainers whom some bond enfeoffs,

And all precisely marshalled grade by grade.

Then we discern at length where each doth stand,

In front or rear, and what the rank they bear;

The acquainted Mass, the Intimates, the band

Of such as do the forward stations share.

And last the One with none on either hand.

And thou art She, whose ring and seal I wear.

Hesepe, 4th June

V

What time in empty hour awhile relaxed,

Around my cage’s circuit I have paced,

Sunk in myself, and broodingly have traced

These late appalling issues, I have taxed

My country with a weakening will: “Thou slack’st

Thy effort, England.” Then some sight hath braced

My soul, and from my mind the doubt effaced.

England, it is not energy thou lack’st!

I felt it when one morn there sudden flew

Around the camp new life and boisterous cheer,

Unlike the mood of those who hitherto

Our wants supplied, and something did endear

The noise of labour to us, and we knew

That English orderlies at length were here.

Hesepe, 20th June

VI

My Countrymen! The years that have gone by

Since Hengist came with Horsa from the sea,

Find the same substance in you, fiercely free,

Yet of that fundamental liberty,

The soul’s state, oft unable to descry

The deeper import, your simplicity,

Your limit, only natural chivalry

Redeeming what your insight doth deny.

Unskilled to conn the inwardness of things,

There is a health about you keeps you clean,

Derisive of all high pretence that chimes

Not with your plainness, sound. Your laughter rings

Over hard toil, and all things grandly mean

Your humour shatters, punctures, or sublimes.

Hesepe, 22nd June

VII

With little tasks we wile the hours away,

Each bringing shyly forth his piteous store

Of erudition, oft-times dubious lore,

Since memory cupboards all we dare to say.

One tells us how to mine, one how to lay

A crop of good Rhodesian maize. Nay more,

The skirts of metaphysics we explore,

And touch the dread fringe of psychology.

O to be hidden here amongst the seams

Of History’s garment, while the whole world rocks

Upon its base! When every day that gleams

Tells us that England still against all shocks

Raises her front; and starting from our dreams,

Each morning Hesepe the lonely mocks!

Hesepe, 30th May

THOUGHTS OF HOME

I

As are the features of some well-loved face,

On which a life’s prolixity is writ

In moving characters much conned and fit

Across a single soulful ground to trace

Feeling and thought and purpose, like the grace

Which motion adds to loveliness (there flit

The spirit’s shades, and there the lamp is lit

That lights twin souls to a lifelong embrace);

So to the city-dweller hath the town,

Much conned, its moving physiognomy,

Which oft in exile, as the sun goes down,

Teams in the caverned dusk of memory

With haunting visions of dear streets, that crown

Night’s sorrow with entrancing imagery.

Hesepe, 19th May

II

Does the slant touch of early light awake

The sirens on the Clyde, and fling the door

Wide on the city’s rousing all-day roar?

Are the streets well a-clatter? Do they break

From tram and train, that travelling host, and take

The town by storm? Does gathering traffic pour

Over the tide-line of night’s silent shore,

Into the spaces, till the cobbles quake?

While down the river, crowded to the brink

With huddled shipyards, many a loaded quay,

Ten hundred thousand volleying hammers clink;

And the slow homing liner booms to see

The ever-coiling waters still a-wink

With mirrored shipping freighted for the sea.

Hesepe, 19th May

III

Ah me, I dream of what they do at home

This Sabbath sunrise of the early prime!

The slumbering city waking to the chime

Of opening church-bells, when the sun hath clomb

Full half-way up the hollow of heaven’s dome;

The leisured family muster, the sublime

Jollity and the uplift of the time

That sets the week-worn spirit free to roam;

The walking to the kirk, the solemn hour

With the Creator, lapsing at the close

Into the sweet expansiveness that plays

Round the church door, when from the too tense power

Of prayer and praise the natural spirit flows

Back to its level.—That was in past days.

Hesepe, 19th May

IV

What do they do to-day? What form of fear

Haunts the now voided chambers of their life,

Troubling its ancient tenor, parent, wife,

Survivors of the broken circle dear

In the old home enisled, as in some drear

Interspace of existence, till the strife

Is overblown, and but the echoes rife

Volley adown the days still left them here?

How they must suffer!—Yet these later shocks

Displace not from my brain the life it knew

Before the Power that our planned journey mocks,

Over our faring war’s dark glory drew;

And when my miser mind its store unlocks,

It takes out treasures rather old than new.

Hesepe, 20th May

V

So thus I picture it, not as life lies

Now writhing, but as when the days and nights

Followed each other in unmarked delights;

Nor noted we the measure of the prize

Till all was over. Now the spirit cries,

What time encroaching Inanition blights,

For but the phantom of its past, and fights

Extinction with its memories. Let them rise!

Let me dissemble that as in past days

The crystal fountain with delicious flow

Of bursting social joy unconscious plays

Over the garden close, where row by row

The flowers of life in such profusion blaze

That their own loveliness they do not know.

Hesepe, 20th May

VI

Day follows night, and night returns to day

Through all the enchanting stages of the spring;

And exile lengthens out to months that fling

Their shadow further, and my life grows gray;

Grays even with the sun’s increasing ray;

While forward still the heading heats do wing

Into the year, that softly rounds his ring

To midsummer, and June is on the way:

The perfect season, when the hawthorn blows

Down cream-white Scottish hedges, and the spent

Airs of the evening gently swaying close

Tired eyes upon it, heavy with its scent;

While on the Downs the beating sunlight glows,

And sends the wildering roses over Kent.

Hesepe, 21st May

INFLUENCES

I

When in the waking visions of the night

I travel back the miles my feet have worn

Since with a cry my spirit was reborn,

There stirs again the anguish and delight

Felt first as each new vista on the sight

Swam in the luminous duskiness of morn,

And the soul quested down the long leagues, torn

With its own thirst for vision and more light.

One realm in thought I near with awe profound,

Where hangs the Slav for ever on his tree,

Bedewed with sorrow, with contrition crowned,

And thorns of perfected humility,

The holy flowering of that cursed ground;

And at the mighty portals Titans three.

Hesepe, 21st May

II

Russia, thy bitter sorrows partly spring

From the deep cleavage which, as with a knife,

Severs what is most native in thy life

From what thy troubled history doth bring

Out of dark days that threatened once to wring

That life itself from thee. The very strife

That heals our Europe through thy pains, is rife

With thine own Tragedy, still on the wing.

Here stand thine institutes, designed to sway

A local life within thee, Zemstvo, Mir,

And Duma, people’s parliaments; and here

The iron empire with the feet of clay,

That froward issue of the Olden day

When Ivan’s legions laid the Tartar spear.

Hesepe, 22nd May

III

The other cause behind the ages lies,

A-swelter in the elemental yeast,

Where yet thou lay’st fermenting for the feast

Of nationality, thine opening eyes

Turned longingly to where the sun doth rise,

And thy great spirit, when the ferment ceased,

For ever oriented to the East,

Mysterious, helpless, beautiful and wise.

Thence while the bitter ages onward run,

And the fierce West doth rend a path through time,

Thou for the nations from the healing sun

Draw’st healing still, and in the teeth of crime

Provest by many a bloodless victory won,

Than this world’s pride of power Love more sublime.

Hesepe, 22nd May

IV

Who is it loometh o’er the Steppes at e’en,

A giant from the sunrise of man’s race,

Statured of eld, that immemorial face

Hewn out of Ararat, in which we glean,

And in the froward, patriarchal mien,

An old tale told in many a furrowed trace,

Moulded before the Sphynx crouched in her place,

By passion uncontrollable and clean.

For he hath sat with Abram in the tent,

And gazed on Hebron, till the blue heaven broke

Over them into stars. Then he went on

Down all the ages ageless and unbent,

Till in this later world of lesser folk

’Mongst men he towers the eternal Mastodon.

Hesepe, 23rd May

V

And all that man hath felt since man hath known

Life first within him, aye, and woman too,

Conceived and manifolded in him, drew

To limitless creation, widely sown

On teaming soil o’er which his breath had blown.

Magnificently carnal, through and through.

Each taste of the green earth, the brown, he knew,

And tasted deep, and joyed, and made his own:

The boundless steppe, to which the sky bends down,

The forest where the eternal shadows sleep,

The sowing and the mowing and the frost;

The village and the pleasures of the town,

And birth and death and love, and the starred deep

Of heaven by night; and here his soul was lost!

Hesepe, 23rd May

VI

Tolstoy is great in art, in thought not great.

Yet his thought troubles, oft-times shivering through

With icy barb the best that thought can do.

And when we ponder o’er his latter state,

And note its argument, backed by the fate

That marked his greatness down, we feel here too

That Something elemental, vast and true

To which all things at length capitulate.

And ye who sadly ponder to behold

The ruin of such greatness, grieved to see

How the child in him acted, thought and spoke,

Perchance will wonder, when the tale is told,

Whether ’twas not a mightier Thing than he

On which the Titan stumbled when he broke.

Hesepe, 24th May

VII

So Tolstoy passed, and passing left behind

Not great themes only, but himself a great

And tragic Theme. Another shares his state,

Supreme within the kingdom of the mind,

As he where soul and body meet, combined

In lovely earth-forms. Dostoievsky, late

Thou cam’st into thine own, thy bitter fate

To be an exile; for the world is blind.

But in thy mantic cavern, undismayed

Amongst thy spirits, named and known so well,

Each a familiar, and thyself a shade,

By whitest light of heaven, by reddest hell,

Unscorched, unblinded, wrapt yet unafraid,

And true to thine own Passion, thou dost dwell.

Hesepe, 26th May

VIII

Deep-sounding, subtle, pitiful, profound,

Dredger of human nature, versed in crime,

Mated with every grief, who in the slime

Divinest well where purest pearls abound;

Where darkness mostly reigneth thou dost found

A kingdom of the light, O soul sublime,

Most pure, most Christ-like spirit of thy time;

And where thy feet have trod is holy ground—

Holy, yet haunted, and a realm of fright,

Not to be traversed but with flying feet,

And beating heart and racing brain alight

With fire from hell, and heated with hell’s heat,

Till in the cooler spaces of the night

The o’erwrought spirit finds a safe retreat.

Hesepe, 27th May

IX

Here is thy limit, mightiest of thine age

An under- and an over-world to paint,

Peopled with epileptic and with saint,

The murderer’s, ogre’s, and the gambler’s rage:

Too much of fever in thee to assuage

Our average human restlessness, the taint

Of a charmed subtlety oft rendering faint

The sense of man’s salvation in thy page.

Perchance in thy heroic spirit, fraught

With too much tragedy, the causes lie;

That spirit unembittered, overwrought,

In which a something fitful we descry,

A fretfulness, as in thine image caught

By Sonia Kovalevsky’s soulful eye.

Hesepe, 28th May

X

Turgenev, gentlest of the sons of pain,

Who in a line, as Homer wont, distillest

The essence of all pathos, thou who fillest

A human place ’twixt the Cyclopean twain,

’Tis not with hell-fire driven o’er the brain,

Nor stretched titanic canvas that thou thrillest,

But by the plotted garden-space thou tillest,

Making man’s middle courses thy domain.

Here once more we discern how still great art

Meets nature greatly. Elemental powers

Pulse in thy perfect pages. Souls depart

With awe upon them to the silent bowers.

The world is ever with thee, its great heart

Laid to thy beating own, as thine to ours.

Hesepe, 21st May

XI

Wordsworth, above all poets in thee I find

What in the greatest we too seldom see,

The crowning virtue of tranquillity,

Effectual o’er the sorrows of the mind.

Others to gain such peace have left behind

This hard world for the realm of fantasie,

Or in a past remote found sanctuary,

Or in the end thought’s burden have resigned.

One above all by daily struggle rose

Into a blue empyrean of the brain,

Self-mastering might, yet such as never knows

The deeper calm that masters. There remain

Nature’s anointed dynasts. Only those

Whose peace is fundamental truly reign.

Hesepe, 30th May

XII

Of these thou art. And, Wordsworth, it is not

That thou hast missed man’s feverish heritage.

Strange passions thou hast known, and noble rage,

Nor in Romance an anodyne hast sought.

And if to souls in trouble thou hast brought

Strength and relief, ’tis not thy sauntering page,

Nor oft-times common theme that doth assuage

The anguish of the spirit overwrought.

Rather it is that, deeply moved, thou sink’st

Deeply in nature’s homeliness, thy rime

Plain as her face; but, stooping as thou drink’st,

The eternal from beyond the hills of Time

Is on thee ere thou know’st it, and thou link’st

Thy being with it, suddenly sublime.

Hesepe, 31st May

XIII

Herein is thy celestial wisdom shown,

That thou, divining Godhead scarce concealed

In nature’s plain immediacy, dost yield

To her the soul of poetry and thine own.

Until thou cam’st no son of time had known

The measure of the glory now revealed

In common things, the beauty of the field,

The moving grace of planet and of stone.

What bliss it was to feel as at the first,

But with that insight now supremely thine,

The trailing clouds upon a world accurst

In all their fresh and pristine splendour shine;

While into that familiar face there burst

The expression of the Countenance divine.

Hesepe, 31st May

XIV

Sweetly at length, like faithful love abused

By cold neglect, in this domed interval

Of silent time returns with soft footfall

The echo of a music long disused.

Ah me, before such strains I stand accused,

So early known, and then my all in all,

And with the magic of the morning’s call

And ethos of my children interfused—

A nameless sense of youth that will not die,

While Homer’s volleying dactyls surging send

The music of the wind-entangled seas

Around the world, and as the billows fly,

Shouldering each other shorewards, metely blend

His harping with the thunderous centuries.

Hesepe, 8th June

XV

Oft have I risen before the night hath flown,

To catch the hour of deepest silence sweet,

And through that hush to list in my retreat

The solemn voice of Æschylus intone,

His great Iambic, till the tale hath grown

Into a passion over me, where meet

Huge forms archaic, and on stately feet

Move to swift doom in Æginetan stone.

High over all in simple grandeur bold,

With crest on crest against the morning skies,

Yet in eternal shadow, I behold

The massif of the Agamemnon rise,

And through its marble caverns shuddering hear

The haunting voice of Clytæmnestra’s fear.

Hesepe, 9th June

XVI

—Infatuate queen, who oft as lingering day

Rounds to his close, and passion’s hour is nigh,

Through Atreus’ halls on soundless foot doth hie,

And from the tower the purpling east survey—

Lest in the still and fearful night’s thick play,

While by her beating side doth sweltering lie

Sallow Ægisthus with the hawking eye,

Swift Fate prepare a swifter stroke than they;

And while love’s maddening vintage they partake,

A sudden flame should redden all the land,

And beacon call to beacon, where they break

From the lone watchman on the Ægean strand.

“The ship! the ship! His ship comes tossing o’er

The wine-dark sea. The King is at the door.”

Hesepe, 9th June

XVII

I paced entranced the mourne, melodious shore

Where Sophocles unwinds with matchless art

Life’s tangled error, pondering in my heart

The tragic theme that middle diction bore—

The end not hopeless, when, all wanderings o’er,

By still Colonus in that place apart

The thunder rolled, and while the earth did start,

The old man of the sorrows was no more.

And I have felt the moving of the strings

Beneath the fingers of that troubled soul,

Third in the triple dynasty of kings,

Whose tenderness, beyond his art’s control,

Over life’s mutilated torso wrings

Fierce protest, agonizing for the Whole.

Hesepe, 10th June

XVIII

One scene, Euripides, throughout the years

Clings to the moving skirts of memory,

Among the images of things that lie

In beauty perfected, too deep for tears.

’Tis where, to still his faithful matron’s fears

Through lonely days and nights of agony,

Having fulfilled his roving chivalry,

At length the Paladin of eld appears,

Thy Herakles; and wife and children stand

’Neath that majestic manhood pure from blame;

The basket circulates from hand to hand.

When of a sudden—He was not the same.

There could no more, but with the dripping sword.

And all that ruth impounded in a word!

Hesepe, 10th June

XIX

While still that music pealed an alien strain

Broke boisterous into sudden interplay,

Troubling the soul with laughter and dismay;

And chattering drolls appeared, expressly plain,

And tingling to the immemorial vein

Of the obscene in all things formed of clay.

There pausing on the turmoiled scene that lay

Before my eyes, a light broke on my brain,

And vast Aristophanic laughter shook

Each nerve within me, and a hand did part

Some far-back curtain of the soul, and took

A portion of my years; and I did start,

Divining art’s new purport, to rebuke

And humanize the stiffly pure of heart.

Hesepe, 11th June

XX

It were not well with man did he not feel

At home with his own nature, all we are

Conspiring with our angel and our star

To keep our being whole, or, broken, heal,

Lest in some faulted mould the soul congeal.

And oft-times ’tis the Highest that doth mar

The Perfect in us, straining us too far,

And overreaching Justice. Hence the peal

Of that great cachinnation echoing woke

Appreciation of the lofty use

Of comedy, to shake the settling soul

Out of itself. The Elemental spoke,

And something broadened in me. The recluse

Unstiffened, and I felt my nature whole.

Hesepe, 11th June

XXI

Justice! the very sound brings back the throes

Of that tremendous season when Youth sees

His world collapse, and beaten to his knees

He takes the bolt of doubt, all that he knows,

That he knows nothing. Underneath the blows

Of thought I laboured long in labouring seas,

Pledging my soul to martyred Socrates;

And o’er night’s face the star of Plato rose.

This much of truth I still divined, that here

Was internecine conflict; only doubt

Strained to the uttermost a path could clear

To that last Deep where wind and tide give out,

And freighted Time drops softly out to sea,

A moving image of Eternity.

Hesepe, 12th June

XXII

Who to the visions of immortal Thought,

Engendered by the music of the mind—

First in that place where our poor human kind

Sit in the cave and watch the shadows wrought

By firelight on the wall, obscurely caught;

Then luring on to where the soul, half blind,

Turns from the Splendour which itself divined—

With kinglier toil a loftier art hath brought,

Than Plato? Who more haunted by the light

Hath ever yet gone coasting with the sun,

Or in the deep and constellated night,

Claimed from the spheres their voices as they run?

Or soaring where the Eternal Glories shine

Hath stretched to earth a more majestic line?

Hesepe, 13th June

XXIII

As deeply versed in that infinitude

Where man his doom within himself doth find

By no strait pedagogy, but divined

Through some more massive sense of True and Good,

A kind of Inspiration, the soul’s food,

Derived from far, and working still behind

All conscious reason, till the labouring mind

’Neath that profounder suasion sinks subdued.

So Plato’s thought grows cosmic, by its own

Illumination led and mystified,

And haunted by a voice of purer tone

Than reason’s groping motion e’er supplied;

The beam refracted by the Forms and shown

As coloured light wherein the soul is dyed.

Hesepe, 14th June

XXIV

Thus do the greatest ever by sheer might

Of natural penetration find their way

Into the Innermost, where Being’s ray

Burns unendurable, and in that light

Their own with nature’s majesty unite

To one high rhythm, stupendous interplay

Of Thought and Being, perioded, gray

With shadow, with serenest sunshine bright.

So that old man of Koenigsberg profound,

By night revolving two infinities,

And so Spinoza, when his spirit found

Intellect into Intuition rise,

Envisaging creation from above,

Where knowledge takes the perfect form of Love.⁠[1]

Hesepe, 14th June

[1] The “Amor Dei intellectualis.”

XXV

But thy peculiar greatness more than these,

By thinking pregnant with creative art,

Subduing chance and moulding part to part,

Hath Cosmic in it, Plato, harmonies

That wake the dim immortal memories

We bring from the Eternal, whence we start

The round of Being, bearing in our heart

The echoes of the everlasting seas.

Here stands no accidental word. And so,

While theme with theme grows twisted and entwined,

Is freedom perfected. We gaze, and lo,

The argument is off before the wind,

Like some great trireme tacking endlessly,

Yet ever headed for Eternity.

Hesepe, 14th June

WATCHWORDS AND MAXIMS

I

“Live dangerously.” No braver mandate yet,

Nietzsche, nor charged with finer lightning ran

Around the world. And true it is the man

Who hath no menace in him, nor hath met

A threatening Universe with counter-threat

Is caitiff still. In those who lead the van

The Headlong is the guide to each new plan,

While lances leap, spears break, the ground is wet.

One prayer I prayed: “Lord, if Thou hast discerned

Within me ought of manliness, enroll

Thy servant with the fighters, who have earned

Their manhood’s charter where the thunders roll

Over the field, that so I may have learned

To taste this Element, and know my soul.”

Hesepe, 6th June

II

There comes to me a memorable thought

Borne on that voice, which like some wandering gleam

Brings freshness into Hegel’s well-worn theme

From Naples lately, Croce, he who taught

That Art’s true nature is not to be sought

In what is fitted only to redeem

By strict initiation souls who dream

Of beauty in some crafty pattern wrought,

But in the apt Expression, wheresoe’er

Expression apt is found, the Inward still

Externalizing till the soul declare

The thing within it, and divinely fill

With sound or sign the habitable air—

A language universal as man’s will.

Hesepe, 18th June

III

Thus language is the type wherein revealed

Art’s universal function we behold,

In sensuous forms appropriate to unfold

Whate’er of meaning Individuals yield:

A doctrine this which doth enlarge the field

To every man who in himself doth hold

But speech enough a simple thought to mould

In words well wedded to the sense concealed.

—Doubtless a truth, though strained beyond the Norm,

If still the theme, with varying purport fraught,

Loses itself entirely in the Form,

And ugliness and beauty count for naught;

And yet a truth, although a truth in part,

All art expression, not all expression art.

Hesepe, 18th June

IV

The Import counts. All great art greatly deals

With themes not insignificant. The less

Gives lesser art, howe’er the form express

The sense of that the artist thinks or feels.

And wonderful it is how life reveals

The great theme near at hand, did we but press

Our lives less fiercely, and our souls possess,

When stirred, until the fitting word congeals.

Art should not fail among us. All have eyes

Which bring the star-sown heavens nightly home,

And there are ever winds about the world.

And no man but hath felt the mysteries

Of birth and wedlock and death’s solemn gloam,

Or seen the petals of a rose uncurled.

Hesepe, 19th June

V

Of Tragedy the essence and the goal

Is Vindication. Fear and pity close

The tale with mourning, but the issue shows

The moral order master of man’s soul.

And as its slow and solemn waters roll

Thunderingly through the scenes, a sense there grows

Of some high Presence working in these throes,

Whose Being is the topic and the whole.

Thus not these personal griefs alone comprise

The theme of Tragedy, that theme more vast

Than its own content, deeper than the sighs

Of the doomed Titan hounded home at last—

The Universe in action, and the cries

Of Cosmic Vengeance closing with the Past.

Hesepe, 25th May

VI

“Gehorsam.” It is seldom that one hears

The German tongue commended. Yet I find

No spell more swift, more potent to unbind

The spirit’s shades in some fine phrase that clears

An entrance to the import of the years,

Where speech, unwinding as thought’s coils unwind,

Makes landfall, and companioning man’s mind,

Ends in the Innermost, whereto he steers.

And many a haunting solitary sound

In that strange tongue, with doubling content fraught,

Booms at the ear of conscience, whose profound

Responses in that energy are caught,

And Teuton loyalty, that holds its ground,

Sweeps Europe still, and sets a world at naught.

Hesepe, 4th July

VII

Two other words contrasting well distil

In two clear drops of sound significant,

And flavoured to the thought, the crowning want

That mars our enterprise—the English will,

Steadfast of purpose, but unsteady still

In the particular. Strange humours haunt

The earnestness of battle, and we flaunt

The eccentric in us even as we kill.

A nobly erring pride is here, disdain

Of death—and duty, when that duty chimes

Not with our liking; and our stubbornness

Wants sternness in it to perfect the grain.

Of late to tragic heights the contrast climbs,

Which “Ernst” and “Eigensinnigkeit” express.

Hesepe, 5th July

VIII

Compel them to be free! A true word there

Thou minted’st, Rousseau—half the human race

Still unaspiring to that crowning grace,

Still disinclined the easy yoke to wear.

Oh, that at length our people would but dare

To look their cancer fiercely in the face,

Consenting on the foul and rotting place

The short sharp anguish of the knife to bear.

For there are powers upon us that still sap

Our liberty and drain our manhood dry,

Which if we clear not speedily, mayhap

Our twilight follows and the end is nigh;

Or else there rise a Strong One who will clap

The Teuton iron on us, and we die.

Hesepe, 7th July

IX

As when along a level land we pace,

The scene, from where our forward-moving feet

Touch ground, to where the earth and heaven greet,

Seems to revolve in some vast wheel’s embrace,

Whose spoke-wise turning slow the eye can trace

From near-by hedges, wayside trees, that fleet

With rick and steading by, till all lines meet

And motion dwindles in far distant space—

There haply some majestic mountain mass

By contrast travels with us as we go,

And doth across the spirit, as we pass,

The feeling of its omnipresence throw—

So o’er man’s fleeting and particular fate

For ever omnipresent broods the State.

Hesepe, 30th June

X

Unto man’s spirit thou art closely bound

By natural drift and consanguinity,

But more by long companionship, the tie

That holds you twain together tightly wound

First in his infancy, where thou art found

Like some great watchdog that doth panting lie

Stretched by his infant master, his dull eye

Wakeful, his sharp ear cocked at every sound.

Nay, for the bond is closer, ’twas thy face

Bent over him at birth; thy kindly pains

Steadied his childish feet. Nor can we trace

What in his blood derives not from thy veins

By long transfusion unprecipitate,

Alive, organically intimate.

Hesepe, 19th July

XI

Suppose a race (the vision first I saw

Among the dark stern reasonings of Kant)

Resolved its past for ever to recant,

And from its island borders to withdraw:

No man shall move—I heard that doom with awe—

Until the wretched, last, lorn miscreant

By shameful death full reparation grant

To the offended majesty of Law.

So as man’s coming race prepares to leave

The Island of its Present, where to-day

Europe in crime lies sweltering, and to cleave

A fresh path through the portals of the Day,

At History’s bar the nations duly lined

Await their judgment. Some remain behind.

Hesepe, 7th July

XII

One thing upon the tablet of the mind

By fire should be imprinted. Nations stand

Only as to the touch of that great Hand

Their substance answers, which when it outlined

A cosmos on the waters, and designed

Earth’s granite frame, and sundered sea and land,

Laid in man’s heart a Law, more deeply planned

Than that of nations, compassing his kind.

And in that Law eternal stands revealed

How by self-abnegation man at length

Comes to himself, how to the meek is sealed

The habitable earth, how human strength

Is perfected in weakness, into dross

Earth’s glory sinks confronted with Christ’s cross.

Hesepe, 25th July

XIII

Protector of the spirit, who by night

With hands bent round it lanthorn-like dost frame

Against the wind a shelter for its flame,

Thyself a thing of spirit and a light,

The Commonwealth! Yet in thy sovereign right

Thou may’st not unrebuked, unchallenged claim

To be the First and Last, a holier Name

Than thine intoning from a higher height.

For blood is on thy hand and on thy head,

And war’s black cloud upon thy deep dark brow;

And in thy shadow Socrates lies dead.

And though awhile it needs must be that thou

For man’s unrighteousness shalt legislate,

Man’s righteousness will yet become thy Fate.

Hesepe, 17th July

ENGLAND AND OXFORD

I

Line after line the tale beneath the pen

Moves on, and rodent Time with tireless tooth

Works o’er our portion, till one day forsooth

We tread the cool gray shadow, ageing men.

This change I mark, and sadly pondering then

Catch the soul’s murmur, accented with ruth:

“Oh, let me hear upon the lips of youth

‘Eothen’ and ‘Eothen’ once again!”

And Oxford, oh, do thou with soulful toil,

While o’er our folk tumultuous ages throng,

Mounted at night as o’er some priceless spoil,

For us the fineness of this cult prolong,

Still nurturing in our sweet English soil

That glory from the Morningland of song.

Hesepe, 8th June

II

Yet, Oxford, it is better thou should’st know

That eyes which love thee in thy culture see

The withering curse of long sterility.

Rooted in England, thou hast ceased to grow

Together with her growth. Thy waters flow

Not with her broadening current to the sea,

But murmuring their delicious melody

They wander forth and wist not where they go.

And thus thy fine-edged spirit, which in high

Disdain hath never paltered with the pelf

Of modern rapine, doth too often fly

To endless crochets, wayward as an elf,

Self-humouring and posturing and shy,

And broods apart and lives unto itself.⁠[2]

Hesepe, 8th June

[2] It is hoped that it may not be thought too much of a liberty in an outsider to criticize anything so esoteric as the Oxford culture; but if so I should reply that it is just this esoteric quality which I wish to criticize. Admiration for Oxford and love of England alike compel me to deplore the fact that so typical a product of our national life should be so little representative.

III

None than thyself more royally to-day

Hath given to England in her hour of need.

In every field where England’s children bleed

Thine own have there more richly bled than they.

And Oxford still incarnadines the clay

To such a sanctity as doth o’erplead

The voice of censure, silenced by the deed

Of the great heart that laid them where they lay.

’Tis their’s, that murmur fluttering from the marge

Of thither Acheron, where their cares they ply

In deathless death: “O Mother mine, enlarge

Thy life to England’s. Thou hast learned to die.

But while thy life thou dost so grandly give,

One thing thou lackest, Oxford: learn to live!”

Hesepe, 8th June

IV

There is one source alone which can supply

New life and impulse. ’Tis a voice that rolls

Half inarticulate in English souls,

From field and mine and factory, where they ply

The single talent Fate did not deny,

Their labour. Now they hear upon the shoals

Of a sad life that there are other goals

To man’s existence than they yet descry;

And, scarcely yet discerned, they deeply feel

A presence over them, a haunting sense

Of music in the world, whose echoes steal

Unto them from the spheres, where in the immense

Circle of night and day the planets keep

Measure and watch, while mortals toil and weep.

Hesepe, 15th June

V

Thine be it to direct their steps aright

Unto that bourne which doth not cease to haunt.

They cry for it, not knowing what they want,

Or what for man is best—the use of sight;

Some inkling of the precious power of light,

To glorify a mean existence gaunt,

And check the bitter self-inflicted taunt

That nothing worthy calls them home at night.

And thou can’st set them questing, make them feel

The nearness of true knowledge, where it lies

In common things with which they daily deal,

Yet ending in the Splendour of the skies;

Or teach them in shunned volumes to detect

The simplicity of letters unsuspect.

Hesepe, 16th June

VI

Yet—for the kindly Mother may not quit

Her cloistered sanctuary, where from the height

Of scholarship’s remoteness day and night

She strains truth’s fabric—it is those who sit

A season at her feet, and learn to fit

Their spirits to her own, who must requite

These lofty cares, and carry out the light,

And serve it round, and tend its burning, lit.

But thine, O Kindly Mother, first to prove

Thy ministers, and having chosen, tune,

Bringing thy spirit o’er them, till they move

Like one at thy behest—as to the moon,

Passing soft influence from the quiet skies,

The oceans with their weight of waters rise.

Hesepe, 16th June

VII

One thing must be thine instant, anxious care,

Which on thine honour thou dar’st not refuse.

Long time our people now the habit lose

Of speech consecutive (which man should wear

Upon him like a garment, fit and fair)

And through some faulting of the brain abuse

Thought’s flowing vesture of a thousand hues,

Oft shorn to shreds, all fluttering in the air.

I mark and grieve; for in this lost control

We trace the weakness of these breathless times,

When man no longer keeps his nature whole,

Nor governs his spirit; and it chimes

With the unruly in us, deadliest threat

Our English liberty hath fronted yet.

Hesepe, 17th June

VIII

It is not for art’s sake this precious dower

Of speech must be renewed, but for the sake

Of life within. The expression doth not break

Silence in vain, but with reflexive power

To vitalize its source, and parting shower

New riches on the donor. Thus we take

Life’s counterthrust upon our souls, and shake

The vessel, lest by standing Being sour.

All life’s a language; but ’tis not enough

To launch forth with it wildly into space,

Adding one atom to the blinding drain,

A pitiable froth-bell in the trough

Of each new cause, wherein the striving race

Tries issue with stern time—perchance in vain.

Hesepe, 20th June

HOME THOUGHTS ONCE MORE

I

A week of nights and days once more brings round

The Sabbath tide; and once again the heart

Sets yearningly to homewards. Do they part

At the church door to-day, as when the stound

Of disillusioned fancy last unbound

Memory’s deep wound, and in the bitter smart

The vision vanished? Ah, the shadows start

To life again across the haunted ground;

The kindly farewells said, the sauntering walk

Home through the sun-baked streets, by twos and twos,

The friendly flow of pleasant secular talk,

And personalities and trivial news.

And the long winding prospect of the day,

The feast of children yet shall wile away.

Hesepe, 26-27th May

II

’Tis July, and a sunny stillness broods

On our magnificent England. Misty skies

Break into blue, and ripening harvests rise

Over her bosom. Her majestic woods

Ripple and sway before the varying moods

Of the west wind. The roses sacrifice

In every garden to the sun. There lies

Deep peace o’er all: no sound profane intrudes.

Far in the north the solemn mountains keep

A sanctuary amongst the shades that dwell

In the deep gloom of haunted Highland glens,

Where silence awes, and where for ever sleep

In lochs unfathomed and inscrutable

The shadows of the everlasting Bens.

Hesepe, 2nd July

III

There is another England, that which feeds

Our sinews where the champing engines chide

Beneath the settled darkness that doth hide

Earth’s stricken face from Rotherham to Leeds.

Deep in that gloom the blinding furnace bleeds

A molten treasure: England is supplied;

A million hammers roar along the Clyde;

The transport of a million men proceeds.

And all this horror of the work of man,

Effacing God, I magnify and bless—

The way that leads out leading also through,

While God goes round to compass His great plan,

And out of ashes and of hideousness

By curse of toil Creation blooms anew.

Hesepe, 3rd July

INTERLUDE

I

My hundredth sonnet! Here I pause to brood

A little by myself upon the theme

Ere once again with the meandering stream

Of my own thoughts I move. And it were good

To give thanks for the labour that hath stood

Between my soul and madness, like a gleam

Of sunlight in the darkness of the dream

Which passes over me, else scarce withstood.

Wonderful is it how the heart o’erwrought

Unloads in song, life’s passionate rebound

’Gainst agonies whose barb alone hath brought

This bird of sorrows fluttering to the ground,

And with these wild and wandering flowers of thought

The portion of a prisoner metely crowned.

Hesepe, 23rd June

II

I ponder on the form, and truth to tell,

’Twere scarcely to be deemed a sonnet chain

Which did not in its forged length contain

Some turn contemplative, where for a spell

The smith might lay his hammer by, to dwell

Upon the pattern, lest the octet strain

The content, or the sextet court in vain

A bigger thought than it can compass well.

And oft when to the varying interplay

Of partnered sounds I strive thought’s flower to train

Upon this trellis, the perplexing way

By lucky chance of rime lies sudden plain,

And I cry out with Agathon: τέχνη

τύχην ἔστερξε καὶ τύχη τέχνην.

Hesepe, 23rd June

III

Yet the sport wind that doubling oft blows home

Some welcome unforeseen felicity,

Is but, within the dreams of poesie,

Life’s average accident, which all who roam

The spacious earth, or try the beckoning foam

Of some unvisited soul-haunting sea,

May count on as their portion—even as we

Who chance a star or two in this weird gloam.

Hence as in all high toil which must be traced

In long-drawn sequence, linking part to part,

Not chance nor inspiration can fulfil

The welded whole, nor vanquish that distaste

Which ever comes with pause; but sovereign Art

Herself must bow to man’s more sovereign Will.

Hesepe, 24th June

IV

So forward still, might but my strength avail

Out of the brooding darkness of my plight,

Each day to bring one glimmering shaft of light,

Each night to add some fragment to the tale,

That so I sleep. Else o’er my dreams prevail

These sorrows, or within me hour-long smite

The hammers of the brain, and turn the night

Into a thing to make man’s reason fail.

—A little further; for the thoughts still rise

Over me like a soughing wind, that blows

From where the surges boom along the graile

Of the world’s misery under lowering skies,

—A little further and my task I close,

Lest twilight overtake me and I stale.

Hesepe, 25th June

ENGLAND

I

England, the strain of weakness in thee shows

Like to some fell distemper which doth threat

Thy noble life with blight, and doth beget

Many malignant sores. The evil flows

Not from one source, but gradually grows

With thine own growth of years, wherein are met

All the deep instincts that did ever fret

The soul of freedom against freedom’s foes.

But whatsoe’er the form, the effect is one;

Some great cause grandly tried and bravely lost,

Some work of beauty marred upon the loom,

And at the final reckoning, something done,

Yet at a bitter and a fearful cost—

In broken hearts and many a needless tomb.

Hesepe, 25th June

II

I heard it in the strife of other days;

It reached me in my home across the sea,

That the great soul that made my England free,

And now must make her perfect, idly plays

With the tremendous issue; that they raise

Sedition’s banner with impunity,

And legislators, hot with laboured plea,

Pile law on law, while Law herself decays.

It is the everlasting cloud that dwells

Upon the summit, compassed in one word,

Disruption, whose deep thunder as it swells

Unnerves us, and arrests the falling sword,

Even to this hour, when but to differ spells

Lese-majesty, and loyalty means accord.

Hesepe, 25th June

III

Man lives by love. The state subsists by Law.

And in these sacred islands east and west,

Constant of late the Beast its scaly breast

Half rears from earth, and with its unclean paw

And bloody fang a-work, and dripping jaw,

Offers at England. It is time this pest

Were exorcised, and Unrest laid to rest,

With all that dares to hold thee not in awe.

So thou deal’st faithfully with God and man;

With man, who prays thee, England, but to place

Thy heavy hand on all that doth immerse

The god-like in him, and distort his plan;

With God, who made thee regent for a space

Over a portion of His Universe.

Hesepe, 1st July

IV

England, I trust thee. What thy soul hath planned

Will be performed; and towards that last long end

Thou hast not wavered since thou first did’st send

Ship hot on ship, by freemen freely manned,

Over the sea to France’s sacred strand.

Faithful thou art, and knowest well to blend

Patience with resolution, and to lend

To thy heart’s aim thy gauntleted right hand.

This in the main. And yet the enterprise

Articulated, mocks the purposed whole

With fitful effort; and the dread doth loom,

As each fresh crisis darkens all the skies,

That the Disruptive in thy restless soul,

Become habitual, is become thy doom.

Hesepe, 28th June

V

Forget it, England, that this Tempest finds

Thy life at home with troubles overrun,

Issues unsettled, justice to be done,

And dark distrust corrupting all men’s minds.

Trust England, all her sons. Her millstone grinds

Slowly perchance; but while in heaven the sun

Endureth, while their rounds the planets run,

Her word is bond, and what she binds she binds.

And England, see thou that these debts are paid!

Be firmly true to thine own children. Stand

For justice. Let these arms aside be laid.

And in our dear inviolable land

None but thyself go armed—the only blade

Out of its sheath, that flashing in thy hand.

Hesepe, 28th June

VI

Until the day that England’s sons shall learn

Not in that instant only when there burst

Thunders upon her to place England first,

But steadily, and in her face discern

The hunger-look of one who still doth yearn

Over the children whom her breast hath nursed;

The long look of a mother, and her thirst

To see her children’s eyes that look return—

Not till the day when o’er our local strife

The feeling of our nationality

Shall rise spontaneous as our English Life,

Outsoaring every animosity

By sheer force of its grandeur—shall we see

The truth come home and our free England free.

Hesepe, 29th June

VII

Have you e’er thought, you people, have you thought

How great a thing it is in these great days

But to belong to England? The world stays

Upon the event. ’Twas English armies caught

The onfall of the Cyclone. While they fought,

The world forbore to breathe. Stern Fate delays

The issue; but that service and its praise

While England lives will never be forgot.

There was an honour that the ages kept

For English arms from immemorial time,

While yet the chivalry of nations slept

With mastodon and mammoth in the slime.

The æons rolled. Fate nodded. England woke.

The hour boomed forth. ’Twas England took the stroke.

Hesepe, 1st July

VIII

Let every child of England every day,

While o’er the world these battle-thunders roll,

Enter into the silence of his soul,

And there communing with his conscience say:

“I am a child of England, and I pray

That with a single eye and one fixed goal,

Thou grant me, God, to give my being whole

To England in her hour of agony.

Chasten me to the greatness of my fate;

And, self-divided, make me one again,

That, as to this last rally congregate

The last stern remnants of my countrymen,

Thou may’st behold Thy England move as one,

Swift, final, justified of every son.”

Hesepe, 2nd July

IX

There have been moments haunted by the sound

Of riot in our midst and foul rapine,

Which, with more wealth, still makes our lives more mean,

When I have asked: “If one who strove to ground

Our life afresh should cast his eyes around

Amongst the people, one great class to glean

Out of the whole, that should keep England clean,

Where should this pure, effectual class be found?”

No answer came from those who still divide

The old tradition of a worn-out past.

I asked the Church: the labouring lost replied;

For these the Publican. And at the last

I looked into the honest eyes of youth,

And knew—the exceeding bitterness of truth.

Hesepe, 5th July

X

My countrymen, if while upon the brink

Of this Penultimate of Destiny,

The world with gathered sinews, anxiously

Craning upon the plunge, awaits the wink

Of swithering Mars, I could but make you think

A wildish thought on purpose, it would be

That England in a night beneath the sea

Should like some greater Krakatoa sink.

Then while to water and oblivion

The great ship heels majestically down,

Ask ye what world it were in which the dawn

Sparkled no more on Ocean’s jewelled crown,

But in that place where England used to be

Spouted and plashed the insufferable sea.

Hesepe, 9th July

XI

Can it be thought, or can the thought be borne,

That for a single hour beneath the sun

Earth shall endure, when England’s day is done?

A world without an England! Yea, but shorn

Of the divinest gem her breast hath worn,

What most she makes for—doomed thenceforth to run

Blind, lost, and calling for that treasured One,

Through star-sown space, unfathomably mourne!

Never again the liquid air to breathe

On a May morn among the Mendip Hills;

Never to watch the green Atlantic seethe

Around the Lizard, while the Severn fills;

Never to hear the quivering strings that hung

The speech of Chatham on the English tongue!

Hesepe, 10th July

XII

’Tis not these Islands sundered from the Deep

By many a winding and melodious strand,

Lovely as when they issued from the Hand

That bade the Shannon from his cradle leap;

That smoothed the Cotswolds to the wandering sheep,

And spread the waters o’er the Solway sand,

And motioned where Ben Cruachan should stand,

And in his shadow laid Loch Awe to sleep;

’Tis not these shimmering woods of oak and beech,

Nor these green shires, each in its golden frame,

Like pictures hanging side by side, and each

Entangled with the music of its name—

Not all this weight of glory passing speech

Full measure of the English soul can claim.

Hesepe, 11th July

XIII

England is England’s history, that great dome

Which ever us and our immortal dead

Draws shadow, while men’s common lives are led,

Strange thought! in that superb half-light, half-gloam.

And all who dwell in England, all who roam

The seas on great emprise inherited,

Gazing into that fulness overhead,

Behold a sanctuary and a home.

England’s a spirit that doth interfuse

Whate’er is of her, every form wherein

Herself she reincarnates, all that strews

Her bosom and her years, and works within,

And spreads, and wells, and sinks, and overflows;

And how to know her only Spirit knows.

Hesepe, 12th July

XIV

And in that spirit interpenetrate

The numberless appealing strains that bring

The look of England into everything

That she hath looked on till the night grew late;

Where, as amongst the four gray seas she sate,

And mused upon it, she hath felt the ring

That bound her to her narrow island spring,

And something passed, and passing made her great.

And Empire mustered round her. Ere she knew

Her state, her hour was on her once again.

Herseemed that something winged from her flew.

Herseemed as though the feet of marching men

Bore past her to a music never mute

While England proudly takes that proud salute.

Hesepe, 12th July

XV

It is her destiny. She seems to sleep.

She dreams; and nodding, world on world is born.

For her the splendour of an eastern morn

The Coromandel sands profusely steep;

The rocks of Aden sentinel the deep.

Her paths are round the Cape and round the Horn.

And where the sun goes down in seas of corn

Across the West their way her children reap.

Thus ere she hath outdreamt herself, the wheels

Of her achievement on their axle-trees

Have turned without her; and upon her steals

A sense of waking amidst unknown seas;

And wondering at her motherhood, she feels

The greatness of the Thing upon her knees.

Hesepe, 13th July

XVI

Soul of an empire that hath far outrun

Thy purpose, England! thou who in the shade

Of thy maturing years thyself had’st laid

To rest amongst thy flocks—and lo! the sun

Set never more upon thee! One by one

The nations place them at those feet which strayed

Into the Innermost, where worlds are made,

And bless the Mother saw their race begun.

England, it must be that thou hast been sent

Some quest beyond thy vision to fulfil;

That, Mother of the Mighty, thou art meant

To be the Organ of a Mightier still;

And, while the final End we may not see,

We feel ’tis holier than or they or thee.

Hesepe, 14th July

XVII

My country! To the height of this great thought,

With all that in thee is, with all the weight

Of thy self-consciousness, though born full late,

Upon thee, and thy thronging memories fraught

With germinating dreams, still to be brought

Unto fruition—chastened, consecrate

To the high calling of the Perfect State,

Thou must arise, or, failing, come to naught.

The Organ of the Highest! pre-ordained

To execute the fateful judgment, planned

From the Beginning by the Power that deigned

First to create in air and sea and land

Each thing that breathes and seeks its daily food,

And having formed, pronounced Creation good.

Hesepe, 15th July

XVIII

Not to prevail by measure of thy might

O’er might that measures scarcely less than thine,

Bathing the naked world in blood and brine,

Till nature turns and sickens at the sight

—All but her vultures, gloating o’er the fight;

And the sun rages daily down the line

That doth compel his radiancy divine

So fair a world to such a doom to light—

Nay, be thy function rather to disperse

The shouldering elements, that so the core

Of pure light in this glimmering universe

May by its motion kindling more and more

The look and loveliness of Spirit bring

Into the face of every living thing.

Hesepe, 16th July

XIX

The Hittite is no longer. Babylon

Has gone into the silence of the sand.

Mirage-like in the Syrian desert stand

The pillars of Palmyra. Greece is gone.

And where for generations softly shone

The drowsy Pax Romana, sea and land

Mouth at the fragile landmarks Hadrian planned.

The State departs for ever: Man lives on.

And England, would’st thou live, it can but be

As thou, a spirit, in the restlessness

Of thine abundant strength on land and sea

Becom’st the spirit’s vehicle and dress,

Attaining in the measure of thy span

The spirit’s measure in the Perfect Man.

Hesepe, 21st July

XX

Man, little man, whose sun hath not declined,

Pale man with spirit written on his face,

Punched out of clay, and pitched on some mean place,

A breath of being battling with the wind,

A prisoner on Time’s floating isle confined,

Yet in himself encompassing all space,

While with the regal gesture of his race

He sweeps Eternity into his mind!

The Spirit! The Encompasser! O thou,

England my country, could I but behold

The steadiness of spirit on thy brow,

Could’st thou encompass spirit, I should hold

Thee master of the Future as the Past,

The immortal, perfect nation—and the last.

Hesepe, 21st July

XXI

Thou hast vast life in thee, howe’er uncouth,

And, unenlightened, dost possess the art

To feel the fairway home without the chart,

And erring still, inclinest still to truth.

The sense of justice and the sense of ruth

Are not yet dead within thee, and thy part

It is to be magnanimous. Thy heart

Bounds to the fulness of perpetual youth.

And while the shadows deepen into gloam,

And while the long years whiten on thy head,

Thy freshness fails not. Thou bring’st nightly home

The sense that thou hast earned a dreamless bed.

The solemn Abbey, and the whispering Dome

Open to-day to take thy Immortal Dead.

Hesepe, 22nd July

XXII

—Our own Immortals! Ours while we can keep

An isle of quiet for you ’neath the hoar

Shade of the Minster, where the Nation bore

Your mortal relics weeping. Rest you deep!

Rest! And while children’s children softly weep

Over you, and the great rose windows pour

A glory round, at peace for evermore

In marble and in alabaster sleep!

—Knowing your England! Knowing that while Time

Tries men by fire, these men will not recede

From where their fathers of the early prime

Led them by generations great in deed

To deeds still greater, where on fields sublime

The freeborn sons of England bled—and bleed!

Hesepe, 25th July

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Influences, XX: spelling error in “cachinnation” corrected.

England, XIV: stray period removed.

	PAGE
In the Field	1
The Nadir	19
On the March	23
Rastatt	33
Hesepe	45
Thoughts of Home	55
Influences	63
Watchwords and Maxims	91
England and Oxford	107
Home Thoughts Once More	117
Interlude	123
England	129

SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP

FOREWORD

PROEM

CONTENTS

SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP

IN THE FIELD

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

THE NADIR

I

II

ON THE MARCH

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

RASTATT

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

HESEPE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

THOUGHTS OF HOME

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

INFLUENCES

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX