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    Poems - Second Series
    Poems - Second Series
    Poems - Second Series
    Ebook103 pages54 minutes

    Poems - Second Series

    By John Collings Squire

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    Poems - Second Series

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      Book preview

      Poems - Second Series - John Collings Squire

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems - Second Series, by J. C. Squire

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: Poems - Second Series

      Author: J. C. Squire

      Release Date: October 26, 2011 [EBook #37861]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS - SECOND SERIES ***

      Produced by Al Haines

      POEMS

      SECOND SERIES

      By J. C. Squire

      London:

      William Heinemann Limited

      1922

      TO

      EDWARD SHANKS

      PREFACE

      Three years ago I published a volume called Poems: First Series, which contained a collection of what I had written between 1905 and March, 1918.

      The present collection contains all that I have written since then. The Birds and nine shorter poems were published in a small booklet in 1919; The Moon was separately published in 1920; but the majority of the poems here printed appear in book form for the first time, and twelve have never previously been published.

      The poems are as nearly as possible in chronological order, except that the group called An Epilogue should have been dated 1917.

      J. C. S.

      September, 1921.

      CONTENTS

      YEAR

      Dedication Preface

      1918 The Birds A Dog's Death A Poet to his Muse Processes of Thought. I II III Airship over Suburb The Invocation of Lucretius An Epilogue:

      I The Fluke II The Conversation III The Deaf Adder IV The Landscape V Another Hour An Impression Received from a Symphony Fen Landscape Meditation in Lamplight Harlequin

      1919 Winter Nightfall A Far Place Late Snow Song: You are My Sky Song: The Heaven is Full Old Song Epitaph in Old Mode The Moon The Happy Night

      1920 Constantinople Elegy Wars and Rumours, 1920

      1921 To a Musician The Rugger Match

      THE BIRDS

      (To Edmund Gosse)

      Within mankind's duration, so they say,

      Khephren and Ninus lived but yesterday.

      Asia had no name till man was old

      And long had learned the use of iron and gold;

      And æons had passed, when the first corn was planted,

      Since first the use of syllables was granted.

      Men were on earth while climates slowly swung,

      Fanning wide zones to heat and cold, and long

      Subsidence turned great continents to sea,

      And seas dried up, dried up interminably,

      Age after age; enormous seas were dried

      Amid wastes of land. And the last monsters died.

      Earth wore another face. O since that prime

      Man with how many works has sprinkled time!

      Hammering, hewing, digging tunnels, roads;

      Building ships, temples, multiform abodes.

      How, for his body's appetites, his toils

      Have conquered all earth's products, all her soils;

      And in what thousand thousand shapes of art

      He has tried to find a language for his heart!

      Never at rest, never content or tired:

      Insatiate wanderer, marvellously fired,

      Most grandly piling and piling into the air

      Stones that will topple or arch he knows not where.

      And yet did I, this spring, think it more strange,

      More grand, more full of awe, than all that change,

      And lovely and sweet and touching unto tears,

      That through man's chronicled and unchronicled years,

      And even into that unguessable beyond

      The water-hen has nested by a pond,

      Weaving dry flags into a beaten floor,

      The one sure product of her only lore.

      Low on a ledge above the shadowed water

      Then, when she heard no men, as nature taught her,

      Flashing around with busy scarlet bill

      She built that nest, her nest, and builds it still.

      O let your strong imagination turn

      The great wheel backward, until Troy unburn,

      And then unbuild, and seven Troys below

      Rise out of death, and dwindle, and outflow,

      Till all have passed, and none has yet been there:

      Back, ever back. Our birds still crossed the air;

      Beyond our myriad changing generations

      Still built, unchanged, their known inhabitations.

      A million years before Atlantis was

      Our lark sprang from some hollow in the grass,

      Some old soft hoof-print in a tussock's shade;

      And the wood-pigeon's smooth snow-white eggs were laid,

      High amid green pines' sunset-coloured shafts,

      And rooks their villages of twiggy rafts

      Set on the tops of elms, where elms grew then,

      And still the thumbling tit and perky wren

      Popped through the tiny doors of cosy balls

      And the blackbird lined with moss his high-built walls;

      A round mud cottage held the thrush's young,

      And straws from the untidy sparrow's hung.

      And, skimming forktailed

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