Poems Read online

  So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.

  They were not ours:

  We never heard to which front these were sent;

  Nor there if they yet mock what women meant

  Who gave them flowers.

  Shall they return to beating of great bells

  In wild train-loads?

  A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

  May creep back, silent, to village wells,

  Up half-known roads.

  Greater Love

  Red lips are not so red

  As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

  Kindness of wooed and wooer

  Seems shame to their love pure.

  O Love, your eyes lose lure

  When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

  Your slender attitude

  Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,

  Rolling and rolling there

  Where God seems not to care;

  Till the fierce Love they bear

  Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.

  Your voice sings not so soft, –

  Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, –

  Your dear voice is not dear,

  Gentle, and evening clear,

  As theirs whom none now hear,

  Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

  Heart, you were never hot

  Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;

  And though your hand be pale,

  Paler are all which trail

  Your cross through flame and hail:

  Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

  Insensibility

  1

  Happy are men who yet before they are killed

  Can let their veins run cold.

  Whom no compassion fleers

  Or makes their feet

  Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

  The front line withers.

  But they are troops who fade, not flowers,

  For poets’ tearful fooling:

  Men, gaps for filling:

  Losses who might have fought

  Longer; but no one bothers.

  2

  And some cease feeling

  Even themselves or for themselves.

  Dullness best solves

  The tease and doubt of shelling,

  And Chance’s strange arithmetic

  Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.

  They keep no check on armies’ decimation.

  3

  Happy are these who lose imagination:

  They have enough to carry with ammunition.

  Their spirit drags no pack.

  Their old wounds save with cold can not more ache.

  Having seen all things red,

  Their eyes are rid

  Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.

  And terror’s first constriction over,

  Their hearts remain small-drawn.

  Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

  Now long since ironed,

  Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.

  4

  Happy the soldier home, with not a notion

  How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,

  And many sighs are drained.

  Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:

  His days are worth forgetting more than not.

  He sings along the march

  Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,

  The long, forlorn, relentless trend

  From larger day to huger night.

  5

  We wise, who with a thought besmirch

  Blood over all our soul,

  How should we see our task

  But through his blunt and lashless eyes?

  Alive, he is not vital overmuch;

  Dying, not mortal overmuch;

  Nor sad, nor proud,

  Nor curious at all.

  He cannot tell

  Old men’s placidity from his.

  6

  But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

  That they should be as stones;

  Wretched are they, and mean

  With paucity that never was simplicity.

  By choice they made themselves immune

  To pity and whatever moans in man

  Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

  Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

  Whatever shares

  The eternal reciprocity of tears.

  Dulce et Decorum est

  Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

  Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

  Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

  And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

  Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

  But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

  Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

  Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

  Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

  Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

  But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

  And floundering like a man in fire or lime. –

  Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

  As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

  In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

  He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

  If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

  Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

  And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

  His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  The Dead-Beat

  He dropped, – more sullenly than wearily,

  Lay stupid like a cod, heavy like meat,

  And none of us could kick him to his feet;

  Just blinked at my revolver, blearily;

  – Didn’t appear to know a war was on,

  Or see the blasted trench at which he stared.

  ‘I’ll do ’em in,’ he whined. ‘If this hand’s spared,

  I’ll murder them, I will.’

  A low voice said,

  ‘It’s Blighty, p’raps, he sees; his pluck’s all gone,

  Dreaming of all the valiant, that aren’t dead:

  Bold uncles, smiling ministerially;

  Maybe his brave young wife, getting her fun

  In some new home, improved materially.

  It’s not these stiffs have crazed him; nor the Hun.’

  We sent him down at last, out of the way.

  Unwounded; – stout lad, too, before that strafe.

  Malingering? Stretcher-bearers winked, ‘Not half!’

  Next day I heard the Doc’s well-whiskied laugh:

  ‘That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray!’

  The Chances

  I mind as ’ow the night afore that show

  Us five got talking, – we was in the know, –

  ‘Over the top to-morrer; boys, we’re for it.

  First wave we are, first ruddy wave; that’s tore it.’

  ‘Ah well,’ says Jimmy, – an’ ’e’s seen some scrappin’ –

  ‘There ain’t no more nor five things as can ’appen; –

  Ye get knocked out; else wounded – bad or cushy;

  Scuppered; or nowt except yer feeling mushy.’

  One of us got the knock-out, blown to chops.

>   T’other was hurt like, losin’ both ’is props.

  An’ one, to use the word of ’ypocrites,

  ’Ad the misfortoon to be took by Fritz.

  Now me, I wasn’t scratched, praise God Amighty

  (Though next time please I’ll thank ’im for a blighty),

  But poor young Jim, ’e’s livin’ an’ ’e’s not;

  ’E reckoned ’e’d five chances, an’ ’e ’ad;

  ’E’s wounded, killed, and pris’ner, all the lot,

  The bloody lot all rolled in one. Jim’s mad.

  Asleep

  Under his helmet, up against his pack,

  After the many days of work and waking,

  Sleep took him by the brow and laid him back.

  And in the happy no-time of his sleeping,

  Death took him by the heart. There was a quaking

  Of the aborted life within him leaping …

  Then chest and sleepy arms once more fell slack.

  And soon the slow, stray blood came creeping

  From the intrusive lead, like ants on track.

  Whether his deeper sleep lie shaded by the shaking

  Of great wings, and the thoughts that hung the stars,

  High-pillowed on calm pillows of God’s making

  Above these clouds, these rains, these sleets of lead,

  And these winds’ scimitars;

  – Or whether yet his thin and sodden head

  Confuses more and more with the low mould,

  His hair being one with the grey grass

  And finished fields of autumns that are old …

  Who knows? Who hopes? Who troubles? Let it pass!

  He sleeps. He sleeps less tremulous, less cold,

  Than we who must wake, and waking, say Alas!

  S. I. W.

  I will to the King,

  And offer him consolation in his trouble,

  For that man there has set his teeth to die,

  And being one that hates obedience,

  Discipline, and orderliness of life,

  I cannot mourn him.

  W. B. YEATS

  I THE PROLOGUE

  Patting goodbye, doubtless they told the lad

  He’d always show the Hun a brave man’s face;

  Father would sooner him dead than in disgrace, –

  Was proud to see him going, aye, and glad.

  Perhaps his mother whimpered; how she’d fret

  Until he got a nice safe wound to nurse.

  Sisters would wish girls too could shoot, charge, curse;

  Brothers – would send his favourite cigarette.

  Each week, month after month, they wrote the same,

  Thinking him sheltered in some Y. M. Hut,

  Because he said so, writing on his butt

  Where once an hour a bullet missed its aim.

  And misses teased the hunger of his brain.

  His eyes grew old with wincing, and his hand

  Reckless with ague. Courage leaked, as sand

  From the best sandbags after years of rain.

  But never leave, wound, fever, trench-foot, shock,

  Untrapped the wretch. And death seemed still withheld

  For torture of lying machinally shelled,

  At the pleasure of this world’s Powers who’d run amok.

  He’d seen men shoot their hands, on night patrol.

  Their people never knew. Yet they were vile.

  ‘Death sooner than dishonour, that’s the style!’

  So Father said.

  II THE ACTION

  One dawn, our wire patrol

  Carried him. This time, Death had not missed.

  We could do nothing but wipe his bleeding cough.

  Could it be accident? – Rifles go off …

  Not sniped? No. (Later they found the English ball.)

  III THE POEM

  It was the reasoned crisis of his soul

  Against more days of inescapable thrall,

  Against infrangibly wired and blind trench wall

  Curtained with fire, roofed in with creeping fire,

  Slow grazing fire, that would not burn him whole

  But kept him for death’s promises and scoff,

  And life’s half-promising, and both their riling.

  IV THE EPILOGUE

  With him they buried the muzzle his teeth had kissed,

  And truthfully wrote the mother, ‘Tim died smiling.’

  Mental Cases

  Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?

  Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,

  Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,

  Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked?

  Stroke on stroke of pain, – but what slow panic,

  Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?

  Ever from their hair and through their hands’ palms

  Misery swelters. Surely we have perished

  Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

  – These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.

  Memory fingers in their hair of murders,

  Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.

  Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,

  Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

  Always they must see these things and hear them,

  Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,

  Carnage incomparable, and human squander,

  Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.

  Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented

  Back into their brains, because on their sense

  Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;

  Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh

  – Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,

  Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.

  – Thus their hands are plucking at each other;

  Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;

  Snatching after us who smote them, brother,

  Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

  Futility

  Move him into the sun –

  Gently its touch awoke him once,

  At home, whispering of fields unsown.

  Always it woke him, even in France,

  Until this morning and this snow.

  If anything might rouse him now

  The kind old sun will know.

  Think how it wakes the seeds –

  Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

  Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides

  Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?

  Was it for this the clay grew tall?

  – O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

  To break earth’s sleep at all?

  Conscious

  His fingers wake, and flutter; up the bed.

  His eyes come open with a pull of will,

  Helped by the yellow May-flowers by his head.

  The blind-cord drawls across the window-sill …

  What a smooth floor the ward has! What a rug!

  Who is that talking somewhere out of sight?

  Why are they laughing? What’s inside that jug …

  ‘Nurse! Doctor!’ ‘Yes; all right, all right.’

  But sudden evening muddles all the air.

  There seems no time to want a drink of water,

  Nurse looks so far away. And everywhere

  Music and roses burst through crimson slaughter.

  He can’t remember where he saw blue sky.

  More blankets. Cold. He’s cold. And yet so hot.

  And there’s no light to see the voices by;

  There is no time to ask – he knows not what.

  Disabled

  He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,

  And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,

  Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park

  Voices of boys rang sadd
ening like a hymn,

  Voices of play and pleasure after day,

  Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.

  * * *

  About this time Town used to swing so gay

  When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees,

  And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim, –

  In the old times, before he threw away his knees.

  Now he will never feel again how slim

  Girls’ waists are, or how warm their subtle hands;

  All of them touch him like some queer disease.

  * * *

  There was an artist silly for his face,

  For it was younger than his youth, last year.

  Now, he is old; his back will never brace;

  He’s lost his colour very far from here,

  Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,

  And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race,

  And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.

  * * *

  One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg,

  After the matches, carried shoulder-high.

  It was after football, when he’d drunk a peg,

  He thought he’d better join. – He wonders why.

  Someone had said he’d look a god in kilts,

  That’s why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg;

  Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts

  He asked to join. He didn’t have to beg;

  Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.

  Germans he scarcely thought of; all their guilt,

  And Austria’s, did not move him. And no fears

  Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts

  For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;

  And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;

  Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.

  And soon he was drafted out with drums and cheers.

  * * *