J.C. Squire

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A House

Now very quietly, and rather mournfully,

In clouds of hyacinth the sun retires,

And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him

Keep but in memory their borrowed fires.

And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied,

From that faint exquisite celestial strand,

And turn and see again the only dwelling-place

In this wide wilderness of darkening land.

The house, that house, O now what change has come to it,

Its crude red-brick façade, its roof of slate;

What imperceptible swift hand has given it

A new, a wonderful, a queenly state?

No hand has altered it, that parallelogram,

So inharmonious, so ill-arranged;

That hard blue roof in shape and colour's what it was;

No, it was not that any line had changed.

Only that loneliness is now accentuate

And, as the dusk unveils the heaven's deep cave,

This small world's feebleness fills me with awe again,

And all man's energies seem very brave.

And this mean edifice, which some dull architect

Built for an ignorant earth-turning hind,

Takes on the quality of that magnificent

Unshakable dauntlessness of human kind.

Darkness and stars will come, and long the night will be,

Yet imperturbable that house will rest,

Avoiding gallantly the stars' chill scrutiny,

Ignoring secrets in the midnight's breast.

Thunders may shudder it, and winds demoniac

May howl their menaces, and hail descend;

Yet it will bear with them, serenely, steadfastly,

Not even scornfully, and wait the end.

And all a universe of nameless messengers

From unknown distances may whisper fear,

And it will imitate immortal permanence,

And stare and stare ahead and scarcely hear.

It stood there yesterday; it will to-morrow, too

When there is none to watch, no alien eyes

To watch its ugliness assume a majesty

From the great solitude of evening skies.

So lone, so very small, with worlds and worlds around,

While life remains to it prepared to outface

Whatever awful unconjectured mysteries

May hide and wait for it in time and space.

To a Bull-Dog

(W.H.S., Capt. (Acting Major) R.F.A.; killed April 12, 1917)

We shan't see Willy any more, Mamie,

He won't be coming any more:

He came back once and again and again,

But he won't get leave any more.

We looked from the window and there was his cab,

And we ran downstairs like a streak,

And he said, 'Hullo, you bad dog,' and you crouched to the floor,

Paralysed to hear him speak.

And then let fly at his face and his chest

Till I had to hold you down,

While he took off his cap and his gloves and his coat,

And his bag and his thonged Sam Browne.

We went upstairs to the studio,

The three of us, just as of old,

And you lay down and I sat and talked to him

As round the room he strolled.

Here in the room where, years ago

Before the old life stopped,

He worked all dy with his slippers and his pipe,

He would pick up the threads he'd dropped,

Fondling all the drawings he had left behind,

Glad to find them all still the same,

And opening the cupboards to look at his belongings

. . . Every time he came.

But now I know what a dog doesn't know,

Though you'll thrust your head on my kneee,

And try to draw me from the absent-mindedness

That you find so dull in me.

And all your life, you will never know

What I wouldn't tell you even if I could,

That the last time we waved him away

Willy went for good.

But sometimes as you lie on the hearthrug

Sleeping in the warmth of the stove,

Even through your muddled old canine brain

Shapes from the past may rove.

You'll scarcely remember, even in a dream,

How we brought home a silly little pup,

With a big square head and little crooked legs

That could scarcely bear him up,

But your tail will tap at the memory

Of a man whose friend you were,

Who was always kind though he called you a naughty dog

When he found you in his chair;

Who'd make you face a reproving finger

And solemnly lecture you

Till your head hung downwards and you looked very sheepish:

And you'll dream of your triumphs too,

Of summer evening chases in the garden

When you dodgedus all about with a bone:

We were three boys, and you were the cleverest,

But now we're two alone.

When summer comes again,

And the long sunsets fade,

We shall have to go on playing the feeble game for two

That since the war we've played.

And though you run expectant as you always do

To the uniforms we meet,

You'll never find Willy among all the soldiers

In even the longest street,

Nor in any crowd; yet, strange and bitter thought,

Even now were the old words said,

If I tried the old trick and said, 'Where's Willy?'

You would quiver and lift your head,

And your brown eyes would look to ask if I was serious

And wait for the word to spring.

Sleep undisturbed: I shan't say that again,

You innocent old thing.

I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa,

While you lie asleep on the floor;

For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of,

And he won't be coming here any more.

The Lily of Malud

The lily of Malud is born in secret mud.

It is breathed like a word in a little dark ravine

Where no bird was ever heard and no beast was ever seen,

And the leaves are never stirred by the panther's velvet sheen.

It blooms once a year in summer moonlight,

In a valley of dark fear full of pale moonlight:

It blooms once a year, and dies in a night,

And its petals disappear with the dawn's first light;

And when that night has come, black small-breasted maids

With ecstatic terror dumb, steal fawn-like through the shades

To watch, hour by hour, the unfolding of the flower.

When the world is full of night, and the moon reigns alone

And drowns in silver light the known and the unknown,

When each hut is a mound, half blue-silver and half black,

And casts upon the ground the hard shadow of its back,

When the winds are out of hearing and the tree-tops never shake,

When the grass in the clearing is silent but awake

'Neath a moon-paven sky: all the village is asleep

And the babes that nightly cry dream deep:

From the doors the maidens creep,

Tiptoe over dreaming curs, soft, so soft, that not one stirs,

And stand curved and a-quiver, like bathers by a river,

Looking at the forest wall, groups of slender naked girls,

Whose black bodies shine like pearls where the moonbeams fall.

They have waked, they knew not why, at a summons from the night,

They have stolen fearfully from the dark to the light,

Stepping over sleeping men, who have moved and slept again:

And they know not why they go to the forest, but they know,

As their moth-feet pass to the shore of the grass

And the forest's dreadful brink, that their tender spirits shrink:

They would flee, but cannot turn, for their eyelids burn

With still frenzy, and each maid, ere she leaves the moonlit space,

If she sees another's face is thrilled and afraid.

Now like little phantom fawns they thread the outer lawns

Where the boles of giant trees stand about in twos and threes,

Till the forest grows more dense and the darkness more intense,

And they only sometimes see in a lone moon-ray

A dead and spongy trunk in the earth half-sunk,

Or the roots of a tree with fungus grey,

Or a drift of muddy leaves, or a banded snake that heaves.

And the towering unseen roof grows more intricate, and soon

It is featureless and proof to the lost forgotten moon.

But they could not look above as with blind-drawn feet they move

Onwards on the scarce-felt path, with quick and desperate breath,

For their circling fingers dreat to caress some slimy head,

Or to touch the icy shape of a hunched and hairy ape,

And at every step they fear in their very midst to hear

A lion's rending roar or a tiger's snore . . . .

And when things swish or fall, they shiver but dare not call.

O what is it leads the way that they do not stray?

What unimagined arm keeps their bodies from harm?

What presence concealed lifts their little feet that yield

Over dry ground and wet till their straining eyes are met

With a thinning of the darkness?

And the foremost faintly cries in awed surprise:

And they one by one merge from the gloom to the verge

Of a small sunken vale full of moonlight pale.

And they hang along the bank, clinging to the branches dank,

A shadowy festoon out of sight of the moon;

And they see in front of them, rising from the mud,

A single straight stem and a single pallid bud

In that little lake of light from the moon's calm height.

A stem, a ghostly bud, on the moon-swept mud

That shimmers like a pond; and over there beyond

The guardian forest high, menacing and strange,

Invades the empty sky with its wild black range.

And they watch hour by hour that small lonely flower

In that deep forest place that hunter never found.

It shines without sound, as a star in space.

And the silence all around that solitary place

Is like silence in a dream; till a sudden flashing gleam

Down their dark faces flies; and their lips fall apart

And their glimmering great eyes with excitement dart

And their fingers, clutching the branches they were touching,

Shake and arouse hissing leaves on the boughs.

And they whisper aswoon: Did it move in the moon?

O it moved as it grew!

It is moving, opening, with calm and gradual will

And their bodies where they cling are shadowed and still,

And with marvel they mark that the mud now is dark,

For the unfolding flower, like the goddess in her power,

Challenges the moon with a light of her own,

That lovelily grows as the petals unclose,

Wider, more wide with an awful inward pride

Till the heart of it breaks, and stilled is their breath,

For the radiance it makes is as wonderful as death.

The morning's crimson stain tinges their ashen brows

As they part the last boughs and slowly step again

On the village grass, and chill and languid pass

Into the huts to sleep.

Brief slumber, yet so deep

That, when they wake to day, darkness and spendour seem

Broken and far-away, a faint miraculous dream;

And when those maidens rise they are as they ever were

Save only for a rare shade of trouble in their eyes.

And the surly thick-lipped men as they sit about their huts

Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then,

Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin,

Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony,

Chip and grunt and do not see.

But each mother, silently,

Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut,

For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air,

A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed

With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies,

And stare softly at the ember, and try to remember,

Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seen

Like an early evening star when the sky is pale green:

A quiet silver tower that climbed in an hour,

Or a ghost like a flower, or a flower like a queen:

Something holy in the past that came and did not last . . . .

But she knows not what it was.

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