Harold Monro

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Gravity

   I

Fit for perpetual worship is the power

That holds our bodies safely in the earth.

When people talk of their domestic gods,

Then privately I think of You.

We ride through space upon your shoulders

Conveniently and lightly set,

And, so accustomed, we relax our hold,

Forget the gentle motion of your body --

But You do not forget.

Sometimes you breathe a little faster,

Or move a muscle:

Then we remember you, O Master.

   II

When people meet in reverent groups

And sing to their domestic God,

You, all the time, dear tyrant, (How I laugh!)

Could, without effort, place your hand among them,

And sprinkle them about the desert.

But all your ways are carefully ordered,

For you have never questioned duty.

We watch your everlasting combinations;

We call them Fate; we turn them to our pleasure,

And when they most delight us, call them beauty.

   III

I rest my body on your grass,

And let my brain repose in you;

I feel these living moments pass,

And, from within myself to those far places

To be imagined in your times and spaces,

Deliberate the various acts you do: --

Sorting and re-arranging worlds of Matter

Keenly and wisely. Thus you brought our earth

Through stages, and from purpose back to purpose,

From fire to fog, to dust, to birth

Through beast to man, who led himself to brain --

Then you invoked him back to dust again.

By leave of you he places stone on stone;

He scatters seed: you are at once the prop

Among the long roots of his fragile crop.

You manufacture for him, and insure

House, harvest, implement and furniture,

And hold them all secure.

   IV

The hill . . . The trees . . . From underneath

I feel You pull me with your hand:

Through my firm feet up to my heart

You hold me, -- You are in the land,

Reposing underneath the hill.

You keep my balnace and my growth.

I lift a foot, but where I go

You follow: you, the ever-strong,

Control the smallest thing I do.

I have some little human power

To turn your purpose to my end,

For which I thank you every hour.

I stand at worship, while you send

Thrills up my body to my heart,

And I am all in love to know

How by your strength you keep me part

Of earth, which cannot let me go;

How everything I see around,

Whether it can or cannot move,

Is granted liberty of ground,

And freedom to enjoy your love;

Though you are silent always, and, alone

To You yourself, your power remains unknown.

Goldfish

They are the angels of that watery world,

With so much knowledge that they just aspire

To move themselves on golden fins,

Or fill their paradise with fire

By darting suddenly from end to end.

Glowing a thousand centuries behind

In pools half-recollected of the mind,

Their large eyes stare and stare, but do not see

Beyond those curtains of Eternity.

When twilight flows into the room

And air becomes like water, you can feel

Their movements growing larger in the gloom,

And you are led

Backward to where they live beyond the dead.

But in the morning, when the seven rays

Of London sunlight one by one incline,

They glide to meet them, and their gulping lips

Suck the light in, so they are caught and played

Like salmon on the heavenly fishing line.

   *    *    *    *    *

Ghosts on a twilight floor,

Moving about behind their watery door,

Breathing and yet not breathing day and night,

They give the house some gleam of faint delight.

Dog

You little friend, your nose is ready; you sniff,

Asking for that expected walk,

(Your nostrils full of the happy rabbit-whiff)

And almost talk.

And so the moment becomes a moving force;

Coats glide down from their pegs in the humble dark;

The sticks grow live in the stride of their vagrant course.

You scamper the stairs,

Your body informed with the scent and the track and the mark

Of stoats and weasels, moles and badgers and hares.

We are going out. You know the pitch of the word,

Probing the tone of thought as it comes through fog

And reaches by devious means (half-smelt, half-heard)

The four-legged brain of a walk-ecstatic dog.

Out in the garden your head is already low.

(Can you smell the rose? Ah, no.)

But your limbs can draw

Life from the earth through the touch of your padded paw.

Now, sending a little look to us behind,

Who follow slowly the track of your lovely play,

You carry our bodies forward away from mind

Into the light and fun of your useless day.

   *    *    *    *    *

Thus, for your walk, we took ourselves, and went

Out by the hedge and the tree to the open ground.

You ran, in delightful strata of wafted scent,

Over the hill without seeing the view;

Beauty is smell upon primitive smell to you:

To you, as to us, it is distant and rarely found.

Home . . . and further joy will be surely there:

Supper waiting full of the taste of bone.

You throw up your nose again, and sniff, and stare

For the rapture known

Of the quick wild gorge of food and the still lie-down

While your people talk above you in the light

Of candles,and your dreams will merge and drown

Into the bed-delicious hours of night.

The Nightingale Near the House

Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn:

It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond

Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond

Stares. And you sing, you sing.

That star-enchanted song falls through the air

From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,

Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground;

And all the night you sing.

My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee

As all night long I listen, and my brain

Receives your song, then loses it again

In moonlight on the lawn.

Now is your voice a marble high and white,

Then like a mist on fields of paradise,

Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,

Then breaks, and it is dawn.

Man Carrying Bale

The tough hand closes gently on the load;

   Out of the mind, a voice

Calls "Lift!" and the arms, remembering well their work,

   Lengthen and pause for help.

Then a slow ripple flows from head to foot

While all the muscles call to one another:

   "Lift!" and the bulging bale

   Floats like a butterfly in June.

So moved the earliest carrier of bales,

   And the same watchful sun

Glowed through his body feeding it with light.

   So will the last one move,

And halt, and dip his head, and lay his load

Down, and the muscles will relax and tremble.

   Earth, you designed your man

Beautiful both in labour and repose.

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