WHEN a foam of snow is hurled
 Under the bare black trees,
 And rain is on the seas,
 And winter on the world,
 Yet, when I think of her,
 I know where summer is.
When friends to-day forget
 Ardours of yesterday,
 And to-morrow turn away
 As if we never met,
 Yet, when I think of her,
 I know where constancy is.

HILLS

AS I go inland
 Lo! my heart drooping
 As a bird’s in the grove when the shadow falls swooping
 Of the hawk’s wing down from a cloudless sky.
For the hills creep together,
 Murmuring, conspiring;
 Solitude, poverty, sorrow desiring
 For men that are born to dream and to die.
A prison land-locked,
 A grave for the living,
 And the ancient warders unsleeping, unforgiving,
 Cordon after cordon, massing behind me.
 I am in peril. I have left the sea.

REGINALD HARRIS
(C. C. C.)

SONG

“My heart was blithe at morning.”

MY heart was blithe at morning,
 For he was by my side,
 And through the woods together
 We wandered far and wide.
My heart was gay at noon-tide
 Together on the lea
 We lay, and heard the murm’ring
 Of many a busy bee.
My heart was sad at even,
 For in the cold stars’ wake,
 I laid him in the dark, dark grave
 And, oh, my heart would break!

FRAGMENT FROM THE “LAMENT FOR BION,” OF MOSCHUS

RAISE high, Sicilian Muses,
 Raise high the mournful cry,
 The mallows in the woodlands
 Whene’er they fade and die,
 And the dill, and the green parsley,
 When they grow wan and sere,
 Live on again, though dead a while,
 And flower another year.
But we, the great, the noble men,
 The mighty, and the wise,
 Whene’er our term of life is past,
 And our frail body dies,
 Lie down for ever, evermore
 Beneath earth’s hollow deep,
 And undisturbed for ever
 Lie low in death’s long sleep.

MERCY HARVEY
(ST. HILDA’S HALL)

SONG

OH! who hath seen Twilight the solemn-eyed?
 When the earth with a weary sigh
 Turns unto her, as a widowed bride,
 With the light all gone from the sky.
 She walketh in solitariness,
 Where still, shadowy waters gleam,
 But her grey eyes are none the less
 As if full of a troubled dream.

H. C. HARWOOD
(BALLIOL)

INCOMPATIBILITY

THERE shall be no more sorrow and no more pain.
 Go you to your anger and I to my books again.
 You loved me, but never have liked me, the issue was plain,
 Woman, if you be woman, you live too late,
 Never the man was suckled to be your mate,
 Wed with a god and break him in battle with fate.
 You are truth, and the world is illusion; faith, it is doubt.
 It wraps its disaster in darkness, and you shine out;
 And the liquor that drugs to endurance is not for your drought.
 Pass on to the waste and the fell! I stay, and forget
 Your breasts and your hair and your laughter like suns that are set.
 Despise me, forgive me, but leave me. I love you yet.

DEDICATION, OF AN UNWRITTEN MASTERPIECE, TO A WOMAN AS YET UNKNOWN

IF I have laboured seven years,
 It was not for your heart.
 Mine was the better part
 And hope is bright amid the vapourous fears.
 You are too close to me to need
 The idle compliment
 That it was my intent
 To build your name above the ages’ greed.
 We are comrade adventurers;
 Here is my challenge hurled
 Against the conspired world;
 You will have little time for flatterers,
 An equal combatant ... Or so,
 While in the dark I groped
 Vainly perhaps, I hoped,
 And, when at length we meet and love, shall know.

LUISA HEWITT
(HOME STUDENT)

YOU lit your cigarette from mine,
 And each increased the other’s glow
 Till the blue clouds began to blow
 And two red stars began to shine.
Who knows, if then our lips had met,
 A greater fire we might have fanned
 Whose fragrant smoke had filled the land,
 But left us ashes and regret.

AVE ATQUE VALE

ZEUS! whom Prometheus first defied and failed to quell,
 Once, only once I call on you that cannot hear;
 Titans and monstrous Forms inspiring these with fear;
 Heroes enthroned in Heaven, of whom their children tell;
 Pan of the forest, fauns and dryads of the dell;
 Chryselephantine gods to Art and Athens dear,
 Protectors of the deme, the spindle and the spear,—
 Once, only once I give you greeting and—farewell.
Proud-vested charioteers of punctual sun and moon,
 Racing and wrestling in your diverse course divine,
 Ye stars of peace and war, ye rivers of the sea,
 Greeting! from one who will forget your name right soon;
 Farewell! the while I pass, and nevermore repine
 The Perfect God in Man alone constraining me.

R. M. HEWITT
(KEBLE)

ITER PERSICUM

WHEN I rode out of Ispahan
 A thousand years ago,
 My horse’s hoofs were shod with gold,
 My turban rolled with gems untold,
 And the people louted low.
My poet rode along with me
 And sang of old Irán,
 Of Rustem and of Rudabeh,
 And whiled away the summer day
 As only poets can.
But now I march the Persian road
 With the devil of a pack;
 The jackals howl as we go by,
 And the fellows sigh and curse and cry,
 And my clothes are like a sack.
And the palaces of Ispahan
 Are full of owls and bats,
 And the truest poet that ever I knew,
 Whose roses grew in the Syrian dew,
 Lies dead at Davos Platz.

GAUDIUM IN COELO

I DREAMED that I was dead, and after
 My soul had passed its mortal bars
 I caught an echo of rolling laughter
 Across the intervening stars.
And all my fear was changed to wonder,
 I knew the rapture of the blest;
 To hear the immortal sons of thunder
 Applaud each day the immortal jest.

E. E. ST. L. HILL
(KEBLE)

PARTING

THE sky illumed by evening’s magic light
 Reflected in the lake seems opal blue.
 The autumn sun glows with a radiance bright
 That gives to everything an orange hue.
 The evening of the year draws on to night.
No sound of arms within this hallowed place
 Comes to disturb us with the thought of strife.
 Unhindered I may gaze upon your face,
 My jewel of priceless worth—my Love—my Life—
 Forgetting I must leave you for a space.
The woods around us, clothed in sombre gold,
 Robed for the great Death Pageant of the year,
 Grow dark. I strain you to my breast and hold
 You there, whispering in your ear
 Stories of love you know ere they are told.
Now I must go. But, when the blue-bells make
 The woods a carpet azure as the sky,
 Once more my darling in my arms I’ll take,
 Once more we’ll be together—you and I—
 And dream our dreams again and never wake.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
(BALLIOL)

TWO SONGS

I

THICK-flowered is the trellis
 That hides our joys
 From prying eyes of malice
 And all annoys,
 And we lie rosily bowered.
Through the long afternoons
 And evenings endlessly
 Drawn out, when summer swoons
 In perfume windlessly,
 Sounds our light laughter,
With whispered words between
 And silent kisses.
 None but the flowers have seen
 Our white caresses—
 Flowers and the bright-eyed birds.

II

MEN of a certain age
 Grow sad remembering
 Their youth’s libertinage,
 Drinking and chambering.
She, whom devotedly
 Once they solicited,
 Proves all too bloatedly
 Gross when revisited
Twenty years after,
 Sordid years,
 Oh, bitter laughter
 And bitter tears!

SONG OF POPLARS

SHEPHERD, to yon tall poplars tune your flute:
 Let them pierce, keenly, subtly shrill,
 The slow blue rumour of the hill;
 Let the grass cry with an anguish of evening gold,
 And the great sky be mute.
Then hearken how the poplar trees unfold
 Their buds, yet close and gummed and blind,
 In airy leafage of the mind,
 Rustling in silvery whispers the twin-hued scales
 That fade not nor grow old.
“Poplars and fountains and you cypress spires
 Springing in dark and rusty flame,
 Seek you aught that hath a name?
 Or say, say: Are you all an upward agony
 Of undefined desires?
“Say, are you happy in the golden march
 Of sunlight all across the day?
 Or do you watch the uncertain way
 That leads the withering moon on cloudy stairs
 Over the heaven’s wide arch?
“Is it towards sorrow or towards joy you lift
 The sharpness of your trembling spears?
 Or do you seek, through the grey tears
 That blur the sky, in the heart of the triumphing blur,
 A deeper, calmer rift?”
So; I have tuned my music to the trees,
 And there were voices, dim below
 Their shrillness, voices swelling slow
 In the blue murmur of hills, and a golden cry
 And then vast silences.

C. R. JURY
(MAGDALEN)

A SONNET TO A FRIEND

YOUNG bright-plumed eagle, prince of pure heaven’s fire,
 Inhabitant of glory clothed in light,
 Exalt me to this new triumphant pyre
 That burns the shades and monsters of our night,
 Vouchsafe thy spirit; touch me with the power
 So to desire, and so maintain my voice
 As thou, who in thy fair ascending hour
 Hawk’st in the top of morning at thy joys;
 O mortal splendour in immortal beams,
 Or deathless ghost, who buildest out of dust
 An edifice of temporal flame which seems
 Beyond the movement of our change and rust,
 Though it must die; O sheer delight above me,
 Fountain of undescended love, I love thee.

AN EPITAPH

YOU who shall come, exalt these childless dead
 As your great fathers, from whose fire you are bred;
 The dead beget you now, for now they give
 Their hope of sons, that you, their sons, may live.

MARGARET LEIGH
(SOMERVILLE)

TWO EPITAPHS

I. ON A DIPLOMAT.

OH, who will bid me rise again
 That gambled with the souls of men?
 Those whose lives I signed away
 Will meet me at the Judgment Day,
 My dead: can they forgive and pray?
 All honest men, pray for me, and pray well,
 Lest true men’s curses send the false to hell.

II. ON A PROFITEER.

I FATTENED on the blood and tears
 Of these long laborious years;
 Out of loss came forth my gain,
 Watered by another’s pain:
 Who shall bid me rise again?
 Pray for me, all poor men, and pray right well,
 Lest poor men’s curses bring the rich to hell.

SONNET: THE JOURNALIST

HE called for blood, and would not shed his own,
 He sat at ease, and sent young men to die
 With his strong pen; he was the enemy
 Stalking at noontide, by whose hand were sown
 Rank tares among us—love of country grown
 To poisonous cant, and blind hostility.
 He forged a chain to lead the people by,
 A chain of words, rattling with strident tone.
 He battened on men’s selfishness and fear,
 He pulled the strings that shook their statesmen down;
 The people were content to sit and hear
 His platitudes, and tremble at his frown,
 And followed him with meek attentive ear
 Till His Mendacity assumed the crown.

E. H. W. MEYERSTEIN
(MAGDALEN)

THE INCANTATION

EVIL birds of evil feather
 Night and storm are met together,
 Bitter gale and dripping wrack
 Unforetold by almanack.
 Come, Lucasta, bolt the door
 While I grave upon the floor
 Circle wide, and strew around
 Pentacles to guard the ground
 When the solemn fiends appear
 In fulfilment of our prayer;
 For though Cimon scorn thy sight
 He shall sleep with thee to-night.
Wond’rest not how I, a crone
 Whom no crippled lout would own
 His paramour, have strength to fling
 The loveless ’neath his true love’s wing.
 The old are strong, the young are fair,
 And thou, wan leaf, whom eager care
 Spirits to this world-shop of mine,
 Shalt for this hour see things divine.
 Thou trustest that my ugliness
 Shall dissipate thy soul’s distress.
 Yea, though he loathe Lucasta bright,
 Cimon shall sleep with her to-night.
See yon dun familiar toad
 That infecteth my abode
 With sage humours; stroke his head.
 Now he sleeps as he were dead.
 Yet must he hearken to the charm
 Watching that we take no harm,
 For spirits are fickle as men are
 And called to help may come to war.
 He wakes; now will I cease my croak
 And read the grand words from this book
 That he who recks not of our rite
 May sleep with her who loves to-night.
Arise, ye majesties of flame
 Exhorted by Jehovah’s name,
 That all things to itself hath won,
 The almighty Tetragrammaton.
 Paymon, Belphegor, ye that err,
 Tried spaniel-friends to Lucifer
 And him whose red and gusty eyes
 Captain the legions of the flies,
 Attend with ceremonious hum,
 Conjure the light o’ love to come
 Infirm of step, infirm of sight,
 To sleep with her who loves to-night.
Lucasta, see the lamp burns blue.
 Spirits, have we this boon of you?
 In the smoke their faces nod,
 He shall come though he were God.
 Shake not, girl, thy love they say
 Conquers—Spirits frisk away;
 By the powers that raised you, hence
 To your depths. Ye have licence.
 So, they are vanished. Why so frail?
 Once more the wick gleams yellow pale,
 The smokewreaths whirl to left and right,
 Cimon shall sleep with thee to-night.
He comes; his hand is on the latch,
 The owlet shrieks above the thatch,
 Unbolt, unbolt—scatter the yew,
 The tripod, and the cauldron’s brew.
 Cimon, Lucasta, hails thee now,
 The star of fate is on his brow,
 His eyes grow moist, his bosom warms,
 Receive him in thy weary arms,
 Loveliest! By Thessalian might
 He sleeps with her he loves to-night.

ROBERT NICHOLS
(TRINITY)

CLOSING LINES FROM “POLYPHEMUS HIS PASSION: A PASTORAL”

THE SHEPHERD. A GIRL.

Shepherd. Thus found he his loved Galatea fled
 With Acis! What rage ensued thou knowest.
 Deceived, dejected, foiled, and overthrown
 In hoarse distraction a full sev’n days’ term
 He ranged, but on the eighth no more was glimpsed
 Striding from vale to vale nor, raging, heard
 Splintering the pine-slope nigh the precipice
 With fist far flung nor with a desolate
 Thunder of voice, volleyed from scarp to jag,
 Dislodging from steep snowfields friths compact
 In downward avalanche: less loud than he.
 And no tide had we of him, save by chance
 The while I wandered seeking a strayed goat
 Through seaward vales, I happen’d on him.
Girl. Ah!
 Lubberly still poor wretch? or quiet grown?
Shepherd. He on an ocean pinnacle of rock
 Sat, scowling, motionless. In truth he seemed
 Rather a further buttress of the crag
 Than a giant, helpless and unhappy being.
 About his brooding bulk all day the birds,
 The slippery swallow, the pois’d martin,
 Lifted or swept a-scatter ev’n as when,
 Chatting, such gad around the ravaged mien
 Of the colossal Pharaoh or twin gods
 Hawk-headed and immense of ancient Egypt.
 Thus grieved he. And the huge begnarlèd hands
 Pillared his jaw. A chillness gloomed his face
 As on bare hills shadow of moveless cloud.
 Nor spake he aught. But when the sun raged high
 Grappling a rock he dashed it ’gainst his breast
 And roared till the golden-green sea blackened
 And spouting drove, loud with careering gulls,
 Before his gusty breath; but passion spent
 Dropping then pined, while from the single eye
 One tear, as huge and hot as Phlegethon,
 Fell in a hissing flood.
Girl. Alas, poor brute!
 And yet I laugh.
Shepherd. Longtime in sufferance
 Bowed he his massy head, quite dumb with grief.
 But, at the last, confusedly arousing
 His sluggish hands, groped for and found his pipes
 Twin, dry, boughless trunks of beech fire-hollowed
 And with huge cinder bored. This pair he set
 To cave-like mouth, then, pursing hairy lips,
 Vented, with monster fingers laid on stops,
 His heart’s deep sorrow: ’twas a wounding sound.
Girl. And was it angry, then, the giant’s plaint?
Shepherd. Angry ’twas not: though anger in it spake
 As of a rebel turning eye to heav’n
 With moody imprecation natural
 To one so crossed from birth. Melancholy
 Lent majesty to strains uncouth. He mourned
 The gift of might which is his mightiest foe.
 Mourned! though the dire pipes themselves rebelling
 Came apt not to his hand. With rage he shook
 Yet, obstinate, subdued them to his mood
 So that they brimmed the dusky lower air,
 The fire-strewn skies, flushed cliffs and tawny sea
 With the beauty borne of desolation.
 Thus lingered he.
Girl. And of the tune itself,
 Ugly, was it?
Shepherd. Listen: when twilight fell,
 While the near wave lapsed with but seldom foam,
 Darkling against the light foretells the moon,
 He still played on. “Strange end,” thought I, “thou hast,
 Poor fool whose all of life is ended now,
 Saving the music thou canst make of it.”
 Since, as I think, his heart is shipwrecked now:
 Heart, but not song! For as the night waxed late
 Somewhat of beauty found he and with beauty
 Somewhat of solace. To the last I listened
 The while th’ unbroken moon rocked in the tide
 And multitudes of sea-sprites, glistering,
 Rose up in choir, but, sudden, hushed to hear
 Such grief pine on. Thus somewhat was the sound—
 Like to the muffled wind among the crags
 When night is clear, without or stars or moon,
 And lightless clouds drift on a lightless sky;
 Or as the mournful blowing of the waves,
 Which in the pyloned gloom of northern cave
 Nightly with flood soon-swallowed and discharge
 Of pouring foam, deep tide and troubled ebb,
 Makes profound plaint and dreary melody
 To lightless waste, huge night and solemn stars.
 Such was the Cyclops’ music.
Girl. Ah, poor soul!
Shepherd. Dost weep?
Girl. Yes, shepherd.
Shepherd. Fie, now; comfort thee!
 The gods wax angry at a lass’s tears
 Who has no whit to cry for. Thus say I,
 Those there are who ev’n by living darken
 The lives of such as are less passionate
 Yet in their fall, by ev’n the full measure
 That they o’ertopped us, must we mourn for them,
 Such wonder has Life bared.
Girl. Maybe ’tis so;
 Still I am sorry.
Shepherd. Yield thee now thine arm.
 So: round my neck as mine sinks now round thine....
 Evening falls. Hear the brook in the spinney:
 Thy very voice.
Girl. And ... is yon star Venus?
Shepherd. Aye: Venus ’tis. Thou hast eyes like heaven.
Girl. Love is a pretty thing. Kiss me, sweet shepherd.

L. RICE-OXLEY
(KEBLE)

THE OPENING OF THE GRAVE OF ARTHUR AND GUINEVERE AT GLASTONBURY[A]

ONE slender relic from the wreck of death,
 One golden hair from that far age,
 A gleaming memory, a momentary breath
 Of mystic times and Merlin sage!
This only trace of that far-famous queen
 And of her beauty causing sin
 Recalled what Lancelot had whilom seen,
 What fame his compeers sought to win.
Swift as a monk stoops down to grasp that hair
 The golden glint dissolves to dust,
 And naught of that old glory lieth there
 But bones, and armour gone to rust.
Seek ye not thus to clutch the golden past
 Of legend and romance, for so
 Its splendour will dissolve and nothing last
 But Now, and dust of long ago.

[A] A tradition says that the grave was opened in the time of Henry II., and that all that remained of the royal pair was a hair, which too turned to dust as a monk stooped down to pick it up.

DOROTHY L. SAYERS
(SOMERVILLE)

PYGMALION

Therefore one day, as all flesh must, she died,
Just as the mowers brought the last load in
From happy meadows warm with summer-tide,
And through the open casement, far and thin,
The nightingale’s first music did begin.
“Love is the sum of this world’s whole delight,
Love,” said the bird, “the ending of desire,
Love brought us, timid, forth to the lovely light,
Love the sole outlet, love, both toil and hire,
Love, with whose death the songs of life expire.”
Yet, as the limbs turned stone and bitter-cold,
Widowed Pygmalion sat beside the bed,
Huddling dry-eyed to see the new grown old
Again so strangely, and his clamorous head
Jarred him with discourse; and at length he said:
“Marble, my white girl, marble! Cyprian thighs
And amorous bosom all made chaste once more,
As though no lips had ever kissed thine eyes
To slumber—virgin as they were, before
The feet of Venus glowed along the floor!...
“Thy beauty should have made the workman blind
That found thee buried in the dust of thrones
Hereafter, when our pomps are left behind
Like some strange, sprawling scale of barbarous tones,
Our temples turned to curious heaps of stones;
“When by the highways merchant folk shall go
Three feet of earth above our walls and towers,
And other than Grecian ships bear to and fro
New wares, new men, and all as brief as flowers—
Thou hadst outlasted all that time devours.
“But thou art dead; thou art flesh and art dead;
The grave will be thy lover, thy round breast
Nourish the worm, while, shred by ghastly shred,
The mouth that laughed, the fingers that caressed,
Wither, O dearest of my works and best!...
“What have I gained? some mornings when my soul
Leaped out of me into the arms of day,
When the world, like a chariot, span in my own control,
Times when I saw the beech-tree leaves a-sway
And knew how green they were and far from grey.
“Say I learned joy—this was indeed a gain;
But can I face the reckoning unafraid?
For joy I bartered, first, that ancient pain
Which stabbed me into vision; next, betrayed
All that men looked for in me; thus I paid.
“Yea, I that rated at a small amount
That strange, cold jewel, purchased unawares,
Men’s gratitude—I that no longer count
For anything in any man’s affairs,
Am doubtful now; thus the gods grant our prayers.
“Ay me undone! The world cries out to me:
‘Pygmalion the sculptor, where art thou?’—
Buried indeed, O buried hopelessly
Fathom-deep under, fathom-deep under now—
The curious rootlets pry about his brow ...
“There is no remedy; what is changed is changed;
No skill can rub out wrinkles from the heart,
Nor even God knit friends that are estranged
As innocently again as at the start,
Since they must keep the memory of that smart
“For good or evil still. So I return
Never to that old quiet which asked no beat
Of answering pulse, content alone to burn,
While no fierce hand might fret thy bosom sweet,
Nor any lover come betwixt thy feet.
“I wrought thee for the world, and then thou wast
Immortal—and I wept uncomforted;
But since I made thee mine—O thou art lost
To me and all men. I was glad,” he said,
“But thou art dead, O thou art dead, art dead.”

HELEN SIMPSON
(HOME STUDENT)

THE HEAD OF THE TABLE; DECODERS W.R.N.S.

EVERY day at ten to three,
 Be the weather wet or warm,
 I doff my identity,
 And assume a uniform.
 Clad in this I sally out,
 Cause considerable stir,
 Order nobodies about
 As becomes an Officer;
 Freeze the surreptitious smile
 With a chill severity—
 Longing all the weary while
 For the unregenerate Me.
 But when my release is earned
 And I am at home, secure,
 My identity has turned
 Unexpectedly demure.
 Why? I enter rather late
 And My manner when we meet,
 Seems, I fear, to indicate
 The repentant indiscreet.
 I, thus tantalized by Me
 Spend an irritated day;
 Now the question seems to be—
 What goes on when I’m away?

AEROPLANE, JUNE 6TH.

I WAS watching as you flew
 Circling in the summer sky;
 Round about you thoughts I threw,
 Every bit as swift as you,
 Every bit as high.
Out of cloud a palace springs,
 Domes and minarets and towers,
 Bastions, where the trumpet rings
 And my topmost turret swings
 High about the showers.
You were captain in the skies
 Nimble as a darting sword—
 Of the company of spies
 Who my castle from surprise
 Vigilantly ward.
Wheeling, darting, unaware
 That you were the warden bold
 Of my palace towering there,
 Of its battlements of air
 And its roofs of gold.
All unheeding trumpet calls
 Down you plunged from out the blue;
 Warderless the silver wells,
 And my airy castle falls
 Swifter far than you.

L. A. G. STRONG
(WADHAM)

RUFUS PRAYS

IN the darkening church,
 Where but a few had stayed,
 At the Litany Desk
 The idiot knelt and prayed.
Rufus, stunted, uncouth.
 The one son of his mother:
 “Eh, I’d sooner ’ave Rufie,”
 She said, “than many another.
“’E’s so useful about the ’ouse
 And so gentle as ’e can be:
 And ’e gets up early o’ mornin’s
 To make me a cup o’ tea.”
The formal evensong
 Had passed over his head:
 He sucked his thumb, and squinted,
 And dreamed, instead.
Now while the organ boomed
 To few who still were there,
 At the Litany Desk
 The idiot made his prayer:
“Gawd bless Muther,
 ’N’ make Rufie a good lad.
 Take Rufie to Heaven,
 ’N’ forgive him when he’s bad.
“’N’ early mornin’s in Heaven
 ’E’ll make Muther’s tea,
 ’N’ a cup for the Lord Jesus
 ’N’ a cup for Thee.”

IN THE GARDEN