Gordon Bottomley

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Atlantis

What poets sang in Atlantis? Who can tell

The epics of Atlantis or their names?

The sea hath its own murmurs, and sounds not

The secrets of its silences beneath,

And knows not any cadences enfolded

When the last bubbles of Atlantis broke

Among the quieting of its heaving floor.

O, years of tides andd leagues and all their billows

Can alter not man's knowledge of men's hearts --

While trees and rocks and clouds include our being

We know the epics of Atlantis still:

A hero gave himself to lesser men,

Who first misunderstood and murdered him,

And then misunderstood and worshipped him;

A woman was lovely and men fought for her,

Towns burnt for her, and men put men in bondage,

But she put lengthier bondage on them all;

A wanderer toiled among all the isles

That fleck this turning star of shifting sea,

Or lonely purgatories of the mind,

In longing for his home or his lost love.

Poetry is founded on the hearts of men:

Though in Nirvana or the Heavenly courts

The principle of beauty shall persist,

Its body of poetry, as the body of man,

Is but a terrene form, a terrene use,

That swifter being will not loiter with;

And, when mankind is dead and the world cold,

Poetry's immortality will pass.

New Year's Eve, 1913

O, Cartmel bells ring soft to-night,

And Cartmel bells ring clear,

But I lie far away to-night,

Listening with my dear;

Listening in a frosty land

Where all the bells are still

And the small-windowed bell-towers stand

Dark under heath and hill.

I thought that, with each dying year,

As long as life should last

The bells of Cartmel I should hear

Ring out an aged past:

The plunging, mingling sounds increase

Darkness's depth and height,

The hollow valley gains more peace

And ancientness to-night:

The loveliness, the fruitfulness,

The power of life lived there

Return, revive, more closely press

Upon that midnight air.

But many deaths have place in men

Before they come to die;

Joys must be used and spent, and then

Abandoned and passed by.

Earth is not ours; no cherished space

Can hold us from life's flow,

That bears us thither and thence by ways

We knew not we should go.

O, Cartmel bells ring loud, ring clear,

Through midnight deep and hoar,

A year new-born, and I shall hear

The Cartmel bells no more.

In Memorian, A.M.W.

September, 1910

For a Solemn Music

Out of a silence

The voice of music speaks.

When words have no more power,

When tears can tell no more,

The heart of all regret

Is uttered by a falling wave

Of melody.

No more, no more

The voice that gathered us

Shall hush us with deep joy;

But in this hush,

Out of its silence,

In the awaking of music,

It shall return.

For music can renew

Its gladness and communion,

Until we also sink,

Where sinks the voice of music,

Into a silence.

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