Complete works of ford m.., p.801
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 801
Yet these are solid German folk
Outside, beneath the thinning planes
And the reflections that awoke
At candle time upon my panes
Are misty, unsubstantial gleams.
Only outside, obscurity,
The waning light, the cold blue beams
And rafts of shadow trick the eye;
So that the frozen passers-by
Look ghosts — and only real seems
My candle lighted, lonely place,
The gleaming windows and your face
Looking in likeness from the wall
Where the fantastic shadows fall....
Now the ghosts pass, the cold wind cries,
The leaves sift downwards, the world dies,
But in the shadows, lo! your eyes.
IN THE TRAIN
OUT of the window I see a dozen great stars, burning bright,
Flying in silence, engrossed in the uttermost
depths of the night,
Star beyond star, growing clear, flying on as I pass
through the night.
It’s many days since last I saw the stars
Look through the night sky’s bars,
Like mists and veils of shimmer and shining gauze —
So little time we have and so much cause
To stay beneath the roof; so much to do!
The life we lead!... Well, you
Get to your bed at ten, and you, away
I like my glass of wine to end the day.
Now as the train ambles on, slowly and I watch alone
Stars and black woods and the stream, dim in the
light of the stars
Winding away to the past beneath Castor and Pollux and Mars;
It seems as long since last I held your hand
As since I saw the stars.
And ah! if we meet in this land,
And ah! if we meet oversea
In the dark where the traffic of London races
Or in these castled, woodland places —
And then — wherever it be
Shall not our thoughts go away into deeps
Where the mind sleeps and the brain too sleeps,
As when we take thought and we gaze
Past all the bee swarms of stars
Spread o’er the night and its bars,
Past mists and veils and shimmer and shine and haze
Into the deep and silent places,
The still, unfathomable spaces
Where the brain sleeps and the mind too sleeps
And all the deeps stretch out beyond the deeps
And thought dies down before infinity?...
So, in an utter satisfaction
Beyond all thought and beyond all action
In a blindness more blind than the starless places
I shall stretch my face to where your face is.
And over head, over land and sea
Shall the white stars wheel in their reverie.
THE EXILE
MY father had many oxen
Yet all are gone;
My father had many servants;
I sit alone.
He followed the Southern women,
He drank of the Southern wines,
He fought in the Southern quarrels —
My star declines.
I will go to the Southern houses, I will sit’mid the maids at hire;
I will bear their meat to the tables and carry wood to their fire;
Where the cheep of the rat and mouse is all night
long will I lie,
Awake in the byres and the stables. When the white
moon looks from the sky,
And over the Southern waters, and the wind blows
warm from the South,
With the bitter tears in my eyelids and the heavy
sighs in my mouth,
I shall hear through the gaping gables how the
Southern night bird sings
Of hirelings once Queen’s daughters and slaves the seed of Kings.
MOODS ON THE MOSELLE
“SWEET! Sweet! Sweet!” sings the bird upon the bough.
But though he may call for sweetness
We have other things to witness,
Not all cherry-pie and neatness,
Now.
“Mourn! Mourn! Mourn!” cry the owls among the vines.
But it’s neither death nor fleetness
That have any utter fitness,
Not a final joy or sorrow,
As we press out wines.
“Change! Slow change!” ticks the church clock
through the snow.
And somehow ‘twixt winter’s dying
And spring apple-blossoms flying
And the summer hops a-tying...
It’s now haughty and now humble
Change! Slow change! And rough-and-tumble.
Down to-day and up to-morrow
That our songs sing now.
CANZONE A LA SONATA
(To E. P.)
WHAT do you find to boast of in our age,
To boast of now, my friendly sonneteer,
And not to blush for, later? By what line
Do you entrain from Mainz to Regions saner?
Count our achievements and uplift my heart;
Blazon our fineness, Optimist, I toil
Whilst you crow cocklike. But I cannot see
What’s left behind us for a heritage
For our young children? What but nameless fear?
What creeds have we to teach, legends to twine
Saner than spun our dams? Or what’s there saner
That we’ve devised to comfort those who part,
One for some years to walk the stone-clad soil,
One to his fathom-deep bed? What coin have we
For ransom when He grimly lays his siege
Whose dart is sharpened for our final hurt?
I think we do not think; we deem more fair
Earth with unthought on death; we deem him gainer
Whose brow unshadowed shows no wrinkled trail
Of the remembrance of the countless slain;
Who sets the world to fitful melody —
To fitful minstrelsy that’s summer’s liege
When all the summer’s sun-kissed fountains spurt
Kisses of bubbling sound about our hair.
I think we think that singing soul the gainer
Who disremembers that spent youth must fail,
That after autumn comes, few leaves remain
And all the well-heads freeze, and melody
O’er frozen waters grows too hoarse with age
To keep us from extremity of fear.
When agèd poets pen another line
And agèd maidens coif their locks in saner
And staider snoods; when winter of the heart
Comes on and beds beneath the frozen soil
Gape open — where’s your grinning melody?
SÜSSMUND’S ADDRESS TO AN UNKNOWN GOD
(ADAPTED FROM THE HIGH GERMAN - REFERS TO Carl Eugen Freiherr von Süssmund, b. 1872, d. 1910. This is, of course, a quite free adaptation.)
MY God, they say I have no bitterness!
Dear Unknown God, I gasp, I fade, I pine!
No bitterness! Have firs no turpentine?
If so, it’s true.
Because I do not go wandering round Piccadilly
Like an emasculated lily
In a low-necked flannel shirt beneath the rain.
(Is that what you’d do,
Oh God Unknown,
If you came down
To Piccadilly
And worried over London town?)
Wailing round Covent Garden’s what I should do
Declaiming to the beefy market porters
Dramatic propaganda about social wrongs
Denouncing Edward Morters
Or saying that Mr William Pornett
Is eleven kinds of literary hornet,
Or that the death of Mr Arthur Mosse
Would be no sort of loss
But a distinct gain
— That sort of silly literary songs
About no one you know,
And no one else could ever want to know.
You owe
(You’ve heard a thousand thousand dat qui cito’s)
Some sort of poisonous dew
Shed on the flowers where these high-horned mosquitoes
Dance in a busy crew.
But they will go on setting up their schools,
Making their little rules,
Finding selected ana,
Collected in Montana:
Connected with Commedié Diviné
Or maidens with names like Deiridriné...
Dear Lord, you know the stuff
You must have heard enough.
Find me a barrel into which to creep
Dear Unknown God, and get dead drunk and sleep.
But listen, this is for your ear alone
(God: where are you? Let me come close and whisper
What no one knows — I’m really deadly tired,
I cannot write a line, my hands are stiff,
Writing’s a rotten job, my head goes round:
You have afflicted me with whip-cord nerves.
That hammering fool drives me distracted... God!
Strike him with colic, send him screaming home.
Strike, Dash and Dash and Dash with eye complaints;
That beast who choked his dog with a tight collar
(He gave his child the lead to hold) last night;
It made me sick; God strike him with the pip.
And send down one dark night and no one near
And one white throat within my fingers’ grip!)
Dear God, you bade me be a gentleman,
And well you know I’ve been it. But their rot...
Sometimes it makes me angry. This last season
I’ve listened smiling to new Celtic bards,
To Anti-Vivisectionists and Friends of Peace,
To Neo-Psychics, Platonists and Poets
Who saved the Universe by chopping logs
In your own image —
I’ve smiled at Whigs intoning Whiggery
To keep the Labour Market down; at Tories
Sickening for office. I have surely been
Plumb centre in the Movement. O my God
Is this a man’s work. God I’ve backed up—’s
With proper letters in the Daily Press:
I’ve smiled at Dowagers and Nonconformists;
At wriggling dancers; forty pianists;
Jew politicians; Front Rank Statesmen’s—’s
Yankee conductors of chaste magazines...
God, fill my purse and let me go away.
But God, dear God! I’ll never get away
I know the — you are!
That’s off my chest. You’ll never let me go.
I know I’ll never drink myself dead drunk
Because to-morrow I shall have appointments
— You’ll make them for me — with a Jail Reform
And Pure Milk Rotter — such a pleasant man!
One garden city builder, seven peers
Concerned with army remounts, and a girl
Mad to take dancing lessons! Such my morrow!
It’s not so much I ask Great God of mine
(Fill up my little purse and let me go!)
These earnest, cold-in-the-heart and practised preachers
Have worked their will on me for long enough,
Some boring me to tears while I sat patient;
Some picked my purse and bit me in the back
The while I smiled as you have taught me to,
(Fill up my little purse and let me go!)
It’s not my job to go denouncing jobs
You did not build me for it. Not my job!
Whilst they are on the make, snatching their bits
Beneath the wheels of ninety-nine reforms.
(Note. — I have been unable to follow the Freiherr at any interval
at all on this page without leaving several words blank. F.M.H.)
But this is truth;
There’s not one trick they’ve not brought off on me,
I guess they think I haven’t noticed it
For I’ve no bitterness...
They’ve lied about me to my mistresses,
Stolen my brandy, plagiarized my books,
Lived on me month by month, broken agreements,
Perjured themselves in courts, and sworn false oaths
With all the skill of Protestant British tradesmen
Plundering a Papist and a foreigner
With God on their lips —
But all that’s private...
Oh, you sleeping God,
I hope you sit amongst the coloured tents
Of any other rotten age than this —
With great pavilions tinctured all with silks,
Where emerald lawns go stretching into space,
With mailèd horses, simple drunken knights,
Punctilious heralds and high-breasted ladies
Beauteous beyond belief and not one better
Than you would have her be — in such a heaven
Where there’s no feeling of the moral pulse,
I think I’d find some peace — with treachery
Of the sword and dagger kind to keep it sweet
— Adultery, foul murder, pleasant things,
A touch of incest, theft, but no Reformers.
Dear God of mine
Who’ve tortured me in many pleasant ways
I hope you’ve had some fun. And thank you, God!
No doubt you’ll keep your bargain in the end,
No doubt I’ll get my twopenny-halfpenny pay
At the back door of some bright hued pavilion
From a whore of Heaven —
But when it comes to “have no bitterness”...
(For bitter we read “earnest”) I’ve no stomach
For such impertinence; its subtlety
(You know it, God, but let me get it down)
Is too ingenious. It implies just this:
“Here is a man when times are out of joint
Who will not be enraged at Edward Morter,
Pornett or Mosse; who will not to the woes
Of a grey underworld lend passionate ears
Nor tear his hair to tatters in the cause
Of garden suburbs or of guinea pigs
Injected with bacilli... Such a man
(So say the friends that I have listened to
Whole wasted, aching desolate afternoons!)
Is morally castrated; pass him by;
Give him no management in this great world,
No share in fruity Progress or the wrongs
Of market porters, tram conductors, pimps,
Marriage-reforming divorcees, Whig statesmen
Or serious Drama.”
Did I, dear God, ever attempt to shine
As such a friend of Progress? God, did I
Ever ambitiously raise up my voice
To outshout these eminent preachers?
Suck up importance from a pauper’s wrongs
I never did!
But these mosquitoes must make precious sure
I do not take a hand in their achievements
Therefore they say, I have no bitterness
Being a eunuch amongst these proper men,
Who stand foursquare ‘gainst evil (that’s their phrase!)
God, you’ve been hard on me; I’m plagued with boils,
Little mosquito-stings, warts, poverty!
Yes, very hard. But when all’s catalogued
You’ve been a gentleman in all your fun.
No doubt you’ll keep your bargain, Unknown God.
This surely you will never do to me —
Say I’m not bitter. That you’ll never do.
‘Twould be to outpass the bounds of the Divine
And turn Reformer.
THE FEATHER
I WONDER dost thou sleep at night,
False friend and falser enemy!
I — wonder if thy hours are long and drag out wearily!
We’ve passed days and nights together
In our time... But that white feather
That the wind’s blown past the roof ridge
It is gone — So I from thee!
Aye, chase it o’er the courtyard stones.
Past friend of mine, my enemy!
Chase on beneath the chestnut boughs and out toward the sea,
If the fitful wind should fail it,
Thou may’st catch it, and may’st trail it
In midden’s mud and garbage...
As thou hast my thoughts of thee.
So I wonder dost thou sleep at night?
Once friend of mine, my enemy?
Or whether dost thou toss and turn to plan new treachery?
As the feather thou hast trodden
So my thoughts of thee are sodden
When I think — Yes, half forgotten,
A faint taste of something rotten
Comes at times, like worm-struck wood ash
Comes at times, the thought of thee.
But I would not have thy night thoughts
As the slow clock beats to day ward!
I’ll be sleeping with my eyes shut,
Dreaming deep, or dreaming wayward.
And I hear thee turn and mutter
As thy dawn-ward candles gutter —
For thou fear’st the dark... Hark! “Judas!”
Says the dawn wind from the sea.
Round the house it whispers “Judas!”
Friend of mine, my enemy.
SONGS FROM LONDON
The following poems appeared in the volume of the above name published by Mr Elkin Mathews in 1910.
VIEWS
I
BEING in Rome I wonder will you go
Up to the Hill. But I forget the name —
Aventine? Pincio? No: I do not know.
I was there yesterday and watched. You came.
The seven Pillars of the Forum stand
High, stained and pale’neath the Italian heavens,
Their capitals linked up form half a square;
A grove of silver poplars spears the sky.
You came. Do you remember? Yes, you came,
But yesterday. Your dress just brushed the herbs
That nearly hide the broken marble lion —
And I was watching you against the sky.
Such light! Such air! Such prism hues! and Rome
So far below; I hardly knew the place.
