We took no tearful leaving,
We bade no long good-byes.
Men talked of crime and thieving,
Men wrote of fraud and lies.
To save our injured feelings
’Twas time and time to go –
Behind was dock and Dartmoor,
Ahead lay Callao!
The widow and the orphan
That pray for ten per cent,
They clapped their trailers on us
To spy the road we went.
They watched the foreign sailings
(They scan the shipping still),
And that’s your Christian people
Returning good for ill!
God bless the thoughtful islands
Where never warrants come;
God bless the just Republics
That give a man a home,
That ask no foolish questions,
But set him on his feet;
And save his wife and daughters
From the workhouse and the street!
On church and square and market
The noonday silence falls;
You’ll hear the drowsy mutter
Of the fountain in our halls.
Asleep amid the yuccas
The city takes her ease –
Till twilight brings the land-wind
To our clicking jalousies.
Day long the diamond weather,
The high, unaltered blue –
The smell of goats and incense
And the mule-bells tinkling through.
Day long the warder ocean
That keeps us from our kin,
And once a month our levée
When the English mail comes in.
You’ll find us up and waiting
To treat you at the bar;
You’ll find us less exclusive
Than the average English are.
We’ll meet you with our carriage,
Too glad to show you round,
But – we do not lunch on steamers,
For they are English ground.
We sail o’ nights to England
And join our smiling Boards –
Our wives go in with Viscounts
And our daughters dance with Lords,
But behind our princely doings,
And behind each coup we make,
We feel there’s Something Waiting,
And – we meet It when we wake.
Ah, God! One sniff of England –
To greet our flesh and blood –
To hear the traffic slurring
Once more through London mud!
Our towns of wasted honour –
Our streets of lost delight!
How stands the old Lord Warden?
Are Dover’s cliffs still white?
SUSSEX
God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good.
So one shall Baltic pines content,
As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground – in a fair ground –
Yea, Sussex by the sea!
No tender-hearted garden crowns,
No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
But gnarled and writhen thorn –
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
And, through the gaps revealed,
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
Blue goodness of the Weald.
Clean of officious fence or hedge,
Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff-edge
As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
The sunlight and the sward.
Here leaps ashore the full Sou’west
All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
The Channel’s leaden line;
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
Along the hidden beach.
We have no waters to delight
Our broad and brookless vales –
Only the dewpond on the height
Unfed, that never fails –
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
Which way the season flies –
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
Like dawn in Paradise.
Here through the strong unhampered days
The tinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
The Lord who made the hills:
But here the Old Gods guard their ground,
And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
Dreams, as she dwells, apart.
Though all the rest were all my share,
With equal soul I’d see
Her nine-and-thirty sisters fair,
Yet none more fair than she.
Choose ye your need from Thames to Tweed,
And I will choose instead
Such lands as lie ’twixt Rake and Rye,
Black Down and Beachy Head.
I will go out against the sun
Where the rolled scarp retires,
And the Long Man of Wilmington
Looks naked toward the shires;
And east till doubling Rother crawls
To find the fickle tide,
By dry and sea-forgotten walls,
Our ports of stranded pride.
I will go north about the shaws
And the deep ghylls that breed
Huge oaks and old, the which we hold
No more than ‘Sussex weed’;
Or south where windy Piddinghoe’s
Begilded dolphin veers,
And black beside wide-bankèd Ouse
Lie down our Sussex steers.
So to the land our hearts we give
Till the sure magic strike,
And Memory, Use, and Love make live
Us and our fields alike –
That deeper than our speech and thought,
Beyond our reason’s sway,
Clay of the pit whence we were wrought
Yearns to its fellow-clay.
God gives all men all earth to love,
But since man’s heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Belovèd over all.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground – in a fair ground –
Yea, Sussex by the sea!
CHANT-PAGAN
Me that ’ave been what I’ve been –
Me that ’ave gone where I’ve gone –
Me that ’ave seen what I’ve seen –
’Ow can I ever take on
With awful old England again,
An’ ’ouses both sides of the street,
And ’edges two sides of the lane,
And the parson an’ ‘gentry’ between,
An’ touchin’ my ’at when we meet –
Me that ’ave been what I’ve been?
Me that ’ave watched ’arf a world
’Eave up all shiny with dew,
Kopje on kop to the sun,
An’ as soon as the mist let ’em through
Our ’elios winkin’ like fun –
Three sides of a ninety-mil
e square,
Over valleys as big as a shire –
‘Are ye there? Are ye there? Are ye there?’
An’ then the blind drum of our fire …
An’ I’m rollin’ ’is lawns for the Squire,
Me!
Me that ’ave rode through the dark
Forty mile often on end,
Along the Ma’ollisberg Range,
With only the stars for my mark
An’ only the night for my friend,
An’ things runnin’ off as you pass,
An’ things jumpin’ up in the grass,
An’ the silence, the shine an’ the size
Of the ‘igh, inexpressible skies –
I am takin’ some letters almost
As much as a mile, to the post,
An’ ‘mind you come back with the change!’
Me!
Me that saw Barberton took
When we dropped through the clouds on their ’ead,
An’ they ’ove the guns over and fled –
Me that was through Di’mond ’Ill,
An’ Pieters an’ Springs an’ Belfast –
From Dundee to Vereeniging all!
Me that stuck out to the last
(An’ five bloomin’ bars on my chest) –
I am doin’ my Sunday-school best,
By the ’elp of the Squire an’ ’is wife
(Not to mention the ’ousemaid an’ cook),
To come in an’ ‘ands up an’ be still,
An’ honestly work for my bread,
My livin’ in that state of life
To which it shall please God to call
Me!
Me that ’ave followed my trade
In the place where the lightnin’s are made;
’Twixt the Rains and the Sun and the Moon –
Me that lay down an’ got up
Three years an’ the sky for my roof –
That ’ave ridden my ’unger an’ thirst
Six thousand raw mile on the hoof,
With the Vaal and the Orange for cup,
An’ the Brandwater Basin for dish, –
Oh! it’s ’ard to be’ave as they wish
(Too ’ard, an’ a little too soon),
I’ll ’ave to think over it first –
Me!
I will arise an’ get ’ence –
I will trek South and make sure
If it’s only my fancy or not
That the sunshine of England is pale,
And the breezes of England are stale,
An’ there’s somethin’ gone small with the lot,
For I know of a sun an’ a wind,
An’ some plains and a mountain be’ind,
An’ some graves by a barb-wire fence,
An’ a Dutchman I’ve fought ’oo might give
Me a job were I ever inclined
To look in an’ offsaddle an’ live
Where there’s neither a road nor a tree –
But only my Maker an’ me,
And I think it will kill me or cure,
So I think I will go there an’ see.
Me!
LICHTENBERG
Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heart-strings crack –
They start those awful voices o’ nights
That whisper, ‘Old man, come back!’
That must be why the big things pass
And the little things remain,
Like the smell of the wattle by Lichtenberg,
Riding in, in the rain.
There was some silly fire on the flank
And the small wet drizzling down –
There were the sold-out shops and the bank
And the wet, wide-open town;
And we were doing escort-duty
To somebody’s baggage-train,
And I smelt wattle by Lichtenberg –
Riding in, in the rain.
It was all Australia to me –
All I had found or missed:
Every face I was crazy to see,
And every woman I’d kissed:
All that I shouldn’t ha’ done, God knows!
(As He knows I’ll do it again),
That smell of the wattle round Lichtenberg,
Riding in, in the rain!
And I saw Sydney the same as ever,
The picnics and brass-bands;
And the little homestead on Hunter River
And my new vines joining hands.
It all came over me in one act
Quick as a shot through the brain –
With the smell of the wattle round Lichtenberg,
Riding in, in the rain.
I have forgotten a hundred fights,
But one I shall not forget –
With the raindrops bunging up my sights
And my eyes bunged up with wet;
And through crack and stink of the cordite,
(Ah, Christ! My country again!)
The smell of the wattle by Lichtenberg,
Riding in, in the rain!
HARP SONG OF THE DANE WOMEN
What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
She has no house to lay a guest in –
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.
She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you –
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.
Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken –
Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.
You forget our mirth and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables –
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.
Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades falling hollow
Is all we have left through the months to follow.
Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
‘RIMINI’
Marching Song of a Roman Legion of the Later Empire
When I left Rome for Lalage’s sake,
By the Legions’ Road to Rimini,
She vowed her heart was mine to take
With me and my shield to Rimini –
(Till the Eagles flew from Rimini –)
And I’ve tramped Britain, and I’ve tramped Gaul,
And the Pontic shore where the snow-flakes fall
As white as the neck of Lalage –
(As cold as the heart of Lalage!)
And I’ve lost Britain and I’ve lost Gaul,
And I’ve lost Rome and, worst of all,
I’ve lost Lalage!
When you go by the Via Aurelia,
As thousands have travelled before,
Remember the Luck of the Soldier
Who never saw Rome any more!
Oh, dear was the sweetheart that kissed him,
And dear was the mother that bore;
But his shield was picked up in the heather,
And he never saw Rome any more!
And he left Rome, etc.
When you go by the Via Aurelia
That runs from the City to Gaul,
Remember the Luck of the Soldier
Who rose to be master of all!
He carried the sword and the buckler,
He mounted his guard on the Wall,
Till the Legions elected him Caesar,
And he rose to be master of all!
And he left Rome,
etc.
It is twenty-five marches to Narbo,
It’s forty-five more up the Rhone,
And the end may be death in the heather
Or life on an Emperor’s throne.
But whether the Eagles obey us,
Or we go to the Ravens – alone,
I’d sooner be Lalage’s lover
Than sit on an Emperor’s throne!
We’ve all left Rome for Lalage’s sake, etc.
THE SONS OF MARTHA
The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have
inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the
careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she
was rude to the Lord, her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary’s Sons, world without
end, reprieve, or rest.
It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and
cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care
that the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care
to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by
land and main.
They say to mountains, ‘Be ye removèd.’ They say to
the lesser floods, ‘Be dry.’
Under their rods are the rocks reprovèd – they are not
afraid of that which is high.
Then do the hill-tops shake to the summit – then is
the bed of the deep laid bare,
That the Sons of Mary may overcome it, pleasantly
sleeping and unaware.
They finger death at their gloves’ end where they
piece and repiece the living wires.
He rears against the gates they tend: they feed him
hungry behind their fires
Early at dawn, ere men see clear, they stumble into his
terrible stall,
And hale him forth like a haltered steer, and goad and
turn him till evenfall.
To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till
death is Relief afar.