OXFORD POETRY

1918

New York Agents:
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
Fourth Avenue and 30th Street

OXFORD POETRY
1918

EDITED BY

T. W. E., E. F. A. G., and D. L. S.

OXFORD
B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET
1918

	PAGE
ANON (Non-Coll.)
By Proxy	1
BASIL BLACKWELL (Merton)
At the Pauper Asylum	2
C. BURCHARDT (Magdalen)
Complaint	3
M. St. CLARE BYRNE (Somerville)
“And One Fell by the Wayside...”	4
J. E. A. CARVER (Magdalen)
Evening	5
E. P. CHASE (Magdalen)
On a Birthday	6
WILFRED CHILDE (Magdalen)
Sea Fairy	7
Age Gothique Doré	8
Rosa Innocens	9
GERALD H. CROW (Hertford)
Trench Vision	10
Madhouse Garden	11
G. D. DESMOND (Somerville)
Home-coming	12
Age	13
E. C. DICKINSON (Non-Coll.)
A Tavern Lilt	14
T. W. EARP (Exeter)
Our Lady of Light	16
E. F. A. GEACH (Home Student)
Romance	18
Retrospect	18
E. F. A. GEACH (Home Student) AND D. E. A. WALLACE (Somerville)
Ballade of Ladies who Died for Love	19
K. GIBBERD (St. Hilda’s Hall)
When I am Old	20
RUSSELL GREEN (Queen’s)
Faith	21
Hills	22
REGINALD HARRIS (C.C.C.)
Song	23
Fragment from the “Lament for Bion”	24
MERCY HARVEY (St. Hilda’s Hall)
Song	25
H. C. HARWOOD (Balliol)
Incompatibility	26
Dedication of an Unwritten Masterpiece to a Woman as yet Unknown	27
LUISA HEWITT (Home Student)
“You lit your Cigarette from Mine”	28
Ave atque Vale	29
R. M. HEWITT (Keble)
Iter Persicum	30
Gaudium in Cœlo	31
E. E. St. L. HILL (Keble)
Parting	32
ALDOUS HUXLEY (Balliol)
Two Songs	33
Song of Poplars	34
C. R. JURY (Magdalen)
A Sonnet to a Friend	35
An Epitaph	35
MARGARET LEIGH (Somerville)
Two Epitaphs	36
Sonnet: The Journalist	37
E. H. W. MEYERSTEIN (Magdalen)
The Incantation	38
ROBERT NICHOLS (Trinity)
Closing Lines from “Polyphemus his Passion”	41
L. RICE-OXLEY (Keble)
The Opening of the Grave of Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury	45
DOROTHY L. SAYERS (Somerville)
Pygmalion	46
HELEN SIMPSON (Home Student)
The Head of the Table	49
Aeroplane, June 6th	50
L. A. G. STRONG (Wadham)
Rufus Prays	51
In the Garden	52
SHERARD VINES (New College)
Permission	53
Summer	54
D. E. A. WALLACE (Somerville)
River-Pools	55
Life and I	56

ANON
(NON-COLL.)

BY PROXY

YOU will not lure me with your charms
Or win me back again
Because you held me in your arms
And I forgot my pain.

’Twas not for you my spirit yearned
That night of fierce desire;
The flame in which we met and burned
Drew from an alien fire.

I shall not win my lady’s grace,
Her eyes are still and cold;
I may not find a resting-place
Before my life grows old.

One thought alone rejoicing stirs
And shall, when all is done—
That in your arms my soul met hers
And we became as one.

BASIL BLACKWELL
(MERTON)

AT THE PAUPER ASYLUM

WITH naked turf-plots three by six in symmetric precision spread
You see, between its walls of red, the graveyard of the lunatics.

No cenotaph or obelisk holds memory in graven speech;
Sole epitaph accorded each a number on a painted disk.

In nameless uniformity, with few to know and none to weep,
While space allows, their freehold keep the men that God has made awry.

And these within their straitened fold, who nothing owned, were owned of none,
Possess of all beneath the Sun what God and man could not withhold.

So close they lie, a skeleton might give his rotting friend a nudge
And say, “If you or I were judge, we should not moulder here alone.

“Lest we might harm our fellow-men, they prisoned us, and now exhaust,
To speed a cosmic holocaust, the blood and gold they grudged us then.

“The world had seen less misery with us for prince and presbyter,
Who sometimes knew the fools we were, and in our folly could not lie.

“But happier we who lived in scorn, and dying, passed from human thought
Than they whose sophistry has bought the curses of a race unborn.”

C. BURCHARDT
(MAGDALEN)

COMPLAINT

MY love has left me. Let my heart forget
The happy days and moments of our past
That in the future I shall not regret
The worship of a love that could not last.

Make me remember there are things apart
From dreamy love and visionary truth
And teach me to forget how once my heart
Did love with all the tenderness of youth.

Yes, teach me to forget—and how to live
Without the joy of hope. For I have seen
How every single pleasure life can give
Must needs sow seeds of misery between.

No more of love. Since at such heavy cost
It must be bought and even then be lost.

M. ST. CLARE BYRNE
(SOMERVILLE)

“AND ONE FELL BY THE WAYSIDE ...”

SCHOLAR, and man of letters, and daintily nurtured,
You were one with your peers,
Leaving the half-told story,
Throwing away the dear things of this life-time—
All you found was the steady, silent effort,
Only the toilsome moulding, the shaping the weapon,
None of the keen sword-glory.

Not for you the crown and the consummation,
Not the battle-death, sharp, swift, and kindly;
Only the early plodding on, half blindly,
Only seeing the end by the faith of the spirit,
Only the hardest of all, the preparation,
All the heart-breaking spadework,
Formulas, initiation;
Only the snows of December ...

Under the snow the quiet brown land lies sleeping,
Waiting the breath of Spring—
God will remember.

J. E. A. CARVER
(MAGDALEN)

EVENING

THE children play, and the old folk talk
In the silent village square,
While the wagons jolt, and the belfry’s note
Comes floating through the air.

The white owl hoots from his lofty seat;
In the fields the rabbits play;
The weazel squeaks, and the red fox sneaks
From his lair at close of day.

The final signs of departing day
Burst out in its changing hues,
While the stars pearl out in the azure sky,
And silent fall the dews.

E. P. CHASE
(MAGDALEN)

ON A BIRTHDAY

AM I a man at last? I feared to think
Not long ago, that I could ever be
Older than twenty-one. Eternity
Is not more vast if one lean o’er its brink
Than are the cool sane draughts of years we drink
After the brilliance and the ecstasy
Of a decisive year. Majority
We hail; past commoner birthdays we slink.

We love all action that is glorious
It matters little whether, in our aim
We seem to fail or are victorious.
But in the lesser things and lesser hours
We must—how can we?—spend our treasured powers
For duties that can never bring us fame.

WILFRED CHILDE
(MAGDALEN)

SEA FAIRY

ALL day long the waves wander and the winds cry,
And there are blue stones sparkling by the shores;
But with evening there cometh a silence over the void sky
And the sea is hushed along her coral corridors.

Then the mer-girls fall asleep, their singing is over,
Their golden limbs lie stretched along the sands;
And wearily nods the Sun like a giant lover,
In a blood-red bath of dreams, with lilies in his hands.

On white wings screaming come the elvish gulls
But lo! where a glint of turquoise divides the cliffs,
Where the Halcyon Birds whom the rest of the world thinks fools
Are crossing the Ocean becalmed on their amorous skiffs.

AGE GOTHIQUE DORÉ

To G. C.

KING Richard in his garden walks royal,
His mantle green being wrought with scarlet flowers,
His hand holding a coloured book of hours.
His coat all gold, gilden his feet withal.

King Richard walks in his garden by Thames-side,
Hearing the bells of high Westminster ring,
And the sound of the chaunt of the monks echoing,
Singing each in his stall to God Crucified.

Golden the sun descends beyond Thames-water,
Golden flash out London steeples and spires,
Their vanes burn and turn in the day’s last fires.

About the King the flowers of the garden fade,
And in star-light he walks on, yet lonelier,
His heart being filled with the peace of the Mother Maid.

ROSA INNOCENS

O YOUNG fresh rose, O tender rose,
O rose so young, so newly born,
Whose petals fair do now unclose
To the radiant kisses of the air,
And the shell-soft lips of the morn,
To the heavens holy and bare!
Lovely, young, fresh rose,
Frail-framed and lapped in dew,
O born like a virgin anew
After a time of bale and scorn,
Storm-wind shattering the boughs
Of the tall trees turn by turn:
But thou art still abiding
Amid the slender veins of thy house,
Like an immaculate lady,
Very beautiful and causing the eyes of the beholders
To weep strange tears of joy!

GERALD H. CROW
(HERTFORD)

TRENCH VISION

A GREAT bee pottered round the room
And gossipped like a child to itself,
Investigating bloom by bloom
The lilac on the window-shelf.

Outside among the garden beds
The wind went like a laughing boy,
And caught the poppies by the heads,
And chased the honey-bees for joy.

The slanting patch of sunlight crept
Along the floor, across the wall,
And I was there and laughed and wept,
And laughed again to see it all.

MADHOUSE GARDEN

ALOOF he heareth yet the vulgar urge
And throng his realm, and groweth glad of bars.
It is a gentle kingly thaumaturge
Hath made a net of little silver stars,
And snared contentment, that great golden carp,
The moon contentment, that shall never die,
And charmeth him upon a tender harp,
And hath him in a net of lazuli.
Thus I shall hear you crying presently,
And shall look forth with questioning dream-dimmed eyes
Upon your turmoil and perplexity,
Out of whatever hell or paradise
The maker of nets is come to, bye and bye;
And shall not understand or sympathize.

G. D. DESMOND
(SOMERVILLE)

HOME-COMING

I COME back to my garment of hills
Now my soul is laid bare.
For I gave him my lips and my limbs
And my hands, and long hair—
I gave him all things that were mine,
This my garment of clay.
So have need of my garment of hills,
To hide me away—

O high hills, O loved hills, O hills
That are healing and strength,
I have grown to your measure at last,
I can wear you at length.

I have loved, so my soul is upgrown,
Adult in its nakedness
And I, as the naked, cry.
* * * * *
And the wild, kind hills are my dress.

AGE

I THINK that I am old. Silent I am with sorrow
At the beauteous sky that holds the new morrow.
I think that I am old. The lark sings words to me,
Who erst sung but Music. And in the ancient sea,
I can see old colours that I have seen elsewhere....
Purple orchids hurt me: and everything that’s fair—
Buttercups and distance and smoke, and people’s bodies.
O, I cannot get away from the places where my God is.
Laughter is a thing to strain and angle for,
My heart is quick and shrinking and pains me at its core.
I am older, older, than the Earth—O, I am old.
If I should be older, colder, than the stars, far off and cold?...
Once I danced and sang and capered on the grass
At the cool close of day, when shadows creep and pass.
When shadows link, and lengthen, and slowly become—nought.
Light flies, and shadow dies without its sustenance.
And stars shine out most silently, like jewels quietly wrought.
Not even then I ceased, nor paused upon my dance.
Now, I am struck and smitten with beauty’s poignancy.
Now, I am hurt with wonder, closed in from ecstasy.
No ecstasy is mine. I cannot get away.
Every way I turn—myself. By night, by day,
My face, my soul, my body, the people that I know—
Ah, no more free fashioning of worlds that gleam and go.
* * * * *
I have grown to be my own world, my world with heart and pain
And he that has found himself can be never lost again.
And he that is quite awake cannot dream his dreams again.

E. C. DICKINSON
(NON.-COLL.)

A TAVERN LILT

To W. W.

I DO not know more wonderful respite
Than to sit within the Inns of swinkèd lords
With a mate upon the left hand and the right
And tankards of good ale upon the boards.

My lads, the World for us when we’re in yoke—
To Hell and through to Heaven twice a day;
While Lancashire’s a splendid land for folk
Who’d woo a lass or taste a knuckled fray.

And when we’re free, with Freedom’s cap fast on,
How shall we bend new lives to jollity?
What songs our Will and Tom would you have won
Making the home-thatch rich for you and me?

Our Will, you’re young—the lathe you scorn to turn—
And sorrow life is not all Wigan Fair;
While I’d seek luck beside a gipsy’s burn
With a brace of whippets for a rabbits snare.

And you, Tom, you—what would you draw for prize?
A quickened pulse for the lass within your arms—
With her to walk i’ the lanes at the moon’s rise,
By the downland’s edge and over the sleeping farms.

My mates, you’re English and o’ the very best—
With no mean thought i’ the length or breadth o’ you:
Not Galahads, but yet to stand confessed
With finest hearts as ever heroes knew.

Because o’ simple, wide, and proudest worth
As English soil may give to English rule.
My head is bared before your richened birth,
My hand grips yours in cider-time and Yule!

And so again—more wonderful respite
I know not in the Inns of swinkèd lords,
With you upon my left hand and my right
And plenty of good ale upon the boards!

A health, a health, my lads, for very joy!
With such as you beside for love and life
We can with ease Dame Sorrowful destroy;
E’en toast the maid who will not be my wife!

T. W. EARP
(EXETER)

OUR LADY OF LIGHT

ON those eternal peaks of thought,
Where her bright crystal towers shine,
The many precious treasures brought
Seem its clear walls to incarnadine.

For all the varied colours heaped
There mingle in one general flush,
As through that lovely place there leaped
The rose-leaf burnish of a blush.

The golden arrowheads of wit,
The laughters of refinèd sense,
Diamond of sorrows infinite,
Calm, open looks of innocence,

And rubies, lovers’ burning hearts—
With these she decks her diadem,
Transmuting, by her learnèd arts,
Each to its own peculiar gem.

The jostling, crowded jewels show
In sparkling piles where colours dance,
And with angelic rosy glow
The ramparts of her palace glance.

And there she busied is, alone,
To make of beauty beauties fresh,
Or, seated queenly on her throne,
Weaves fate into a glittering mesh.

For every soul she gazes through
And sees its deepest-hid desires,
As though we were but drops of dew,
Transparent, lit by alien fires.

This one she chooses; it is clear
And burns with an intenser flame;
But that, for a long age’s year,
Leaves to the darkness whence it came.

While time itself grows weary, she
Still solitary sits to weave,
Until that last eternity
When all are taken, none to leave.

Then in her magic tissue hapt,
The new-clothed, fragrant earth shall run
In visionary radiance wrapped,
A dazzling sister to the sun,
And so Our Lady’s work be done.

E. F. A. GEACH
(HOME STUDENT)

ROMANCE

“J’étais comme un autre Jason allant à la conquête de la toison d’or.”
(Mademoiselle de Maupin).

ROUND the next corner and in the next street
Adventure lies in wait for you.
Oh, who can tell what you may meet
Round the next corner and in the next street!
Could life be anything but sweet
When all is hazardous and new
Round the next corner and in the next street?
Adventure lies in wait for you.

RETROSPECT

NOW I have fallen out of love
A year or two, I hold review
Of all the things I used to do,
Turning with fingers rational
The closed leaves of my passional.
And I am quite amazed, by Jove!
Wholly incredulous I smile—
So hard it is to reconcile
With this, my mere immediate me
The other self I used to be
You with the you that once was you—
Now I have fallen out of love
A year or two.

E. F. A. GEACH (HOME STUDENT)
D. E. A. WALLACE (SOMERVILLE)

BALLADE OF LADIES WHO DIED FOR LOVE

LADIES, why did ye all in vain
Seek death to end your misery?
Why did ye not forget your pain
In new loves and new ecstasy?
Ophelia racked with phantasy,
And Sigismunda, sick with rue—
Ladies, why did ye choose to die
When all the world was made for you?

Wild Phœdra by thy passion slain,
Œnone, nymph of Thessaly,
Dido and lily-white Elaine,
O Queen who died for Antony,
Sappho and all thy poesy,
Juliet to thy dead love true—
Ladies, why did ye choose to die
When all the world was made for you?

Fair Margaret distraught and fain
Beside thy phantom love to lie,
And Isabella who didst wane
Over thy pot of porphyry,
Aude and Isolde, tell me why,
Your lovers direly stricken thro’,
You chose by those same swords to die,
When all the world was made for you?

Envoy:

Love’s happiness had passed you by,
But there were other things to do.
Ladies, why did ye choose to die,
When all the world was made for you?

K. GIBBERD
(ST. HILDA’S HALL)

WHEN I AM OLD

I OFTEN think that when I’m old and grey,
Mechanically living through each day,
That when like all the rest I’ve found my groove
With little room for heart or mind to move,
But just enough to eat and work and dress;
And keep a failing temper more or less—
In tired sleep I’ll sometimes creep away
Back down the years to some old Oxford way.

And on this daisied lawn again I’ll lie,
And listen while the river folk go by;
And through the trees I’ll sometimes see the flash
Of punters’ poles and hear the rhythmic splash
Of oars; and over there again I’ll see
The petalled path beneath the cherry-tree,
And love the hawthorn scent, the cuckoo’s cry,
And Magdalen chiming while the spring runs by.

And you’ll be there, dear phantom friend, and you,
And you familiar faces that I knew
So well; and toward the ending of the day
We’ll sit and talk—the old accustomed way,
Till in the mutual calm we’ll see unfurled
The immeasurable vastness of the world
And I shall dream of all that I will do
With Life—and so will you, and you and you.

RUSSELL GREEN
(QUEEN’S)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Oxford poetry, 1918

OXFORD POETRY
1918

CONTENTS

BY PROXY

AT THE PAUPER ASYLUM

COMPLAINT

“AND ONE FELL BY THE WAYSIDE ...”

EVENING

ON A BIRTHDAY

SEA FAIRY

AGE GOTHIQUE DORÉ

ROSA INNOCENS

TRENCH VISION

MADHOUSE GARDEN

HOME-COMING

AGE

A TAVERN LILT

OUR LADY OF LIGHT

ROMANCE

RETROSPECT

BALLADE OF LADIES WHO DIED FOR LOVE

WHEN I AM OLD

FAITH

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Oxford poetry, 1918

OXFORD POETRY 1918

CONTENTS

BY PROXY

AT THE PAUPER ASYLUM

COMPLAINT

“AND ONE FELL BY THE WAYSIDE ...”

EVENING

ON A BIRTHDAY

SEA FAIRY

AGE GOTHIQUE DORÉ

ROSA INNOCENS

TRENCH VISION

MADHOUSE GARDEN

HOME-COMING

AGE

A TAVERN LILT

OUR LADY OF LIGHT

ROMANCE

RETROSPECT

BALLADE OF LADIES WHO DIED FOR LOVE

WHEN I AM OLD

FAITH

OXFORD POETRY
1918