English

Head bowed beneath her black turban, she glances up at her daughter
who eyes in the mirror herself, yellow hair and beautiful face.

This charm of vacant lots!
The helpless fields that lie
Sinister, sterile and blind—
Entreat the eye and rack the mind,
Demand your pity.
With ashes and tins in piles,
Shattered bricks and tiles
And the débris of a city.

Far from our definitions
And our aesthetic laws
Let us pause
With these fields that hold and rack the brain
(What: again?)
With an unexpected charm
And an unexplained repose
On an evening in December
Under a sunset yellow and rose.

Suddenly into the still air burst thudding
And thudding, and cold fear possessed me all,
On the grey slopes there, where winter in sullen brooding
Hung between height and depth of the ugly fall
Of Heaven to earth; and the thudding was illness' own.
But still a hope I kept that were we there going over,
I in the line, I should not fail, but take recover
From others' courage, and not as coward be known.
No flame we saw, the noise and the dread alone
Was battle to us; men were enduring there such

There is a man who has swept or rubbed a floor
This morning crying in the Most Holy Name
Of God for pity, and has not been able to claim
A moment's respite, that for one hour, or more.
But can the not-conceiving heart outside
Believe the atmosphere that hangs so heavy
And clouds the torment. Afterwards in the leavy
And fresher air other torments may abide,
Or pass; and new pain; but this memory
Will not pass, it is too bad and the grinding
Remains, and what is better in the finding
Of any ease from working or changing free

Aveluy and New Year's Eve, and the time as tender
As if green buds grew. In the low west a slender
Streak of last orange. Guns mostly deadest still.
And a noise of limbers near coming down the hill.
Nothing doing, nothing doing, and a screed to write,
Candles enough for books, a sleepy delight
In the warm dug-out, day ended. Nine hours to the light.
There now and then now, one nestled down snug.
A head is enough to read by, and cover up with a rug.
Electric. Clarinet sang of ‘A Hundred Pipers’
And hush awe mystery vanished like tapers

Whole is by breaking and by mending.
The body is a day of ruin,
The mind, a moment of repair.
A day is not a day of mind
Until all lifetime is repaired despair.

To break, to day-long die,
To be not yet nor yet
Until dreaming is of having been,
Until dreaming is of having dreamed—
How in those days—how fast—
How fast we seemed to dream—
How fast we talked—how lost—
How lost the words until—
Until the pen ran down
To this awakened not forgetting.

But in those days always

The change of self in wide address of self
To use of self in the kind wideness
Of sense-experience: this loses,
Though memory has
One lasting integration—
The steady growth of death.

And so the habit of smile alters.
And so the hair in a new parting falls.
Can recognition be
Past loss of hour-by-hour identity?
Where is the self that withered
And the self that froze?
How do the rising days succeed to vacancy?

The days are in a progress,
As death in a steady growth,
From no to no and yes.

Sorrows play at the edge of these willow leaf curves
They are often reflected, deep, deep,
In my water blossom inlaid mirror.
I am too pretty to bother with an eyebrow pencil.
Spring hills paint themselves
With their own personality.

You earthly Souls that court a wanton flame,
Whose pale weak influence
Can rise no higher then the humble name
And narrow laws of Sence,
Learn by our friendship to create
An immaterial fire,
Whose brightnesse Angels may admire,
But cannot emulate.

Sicknesse may fright the roses from her cheek,
Or make the Lilies fade,
But all the subtile wayes that death doth seek
Cannot my love invade:
Flames that are kindled by the eye,
Through time and age expire;
But ours that boast a reach far higher

A yellow leaf, from the darkness
Hops like a frog before me;
Why should I start and stand still?
I was watching the woman that bore me
Stretched in the brindled darkness
Of the sick-room, rigid with will
To die: and the quick leaf tore me
Back to this rainy swill
Of leaves and lamps and the city street mingled before me.