ambush,
The pistol cocked, the code-word committed to memory;
The youngest drummer Knows all the peace-time stories like the oldest soldier, Though frontier-conscious,
About the tall white gods who landed from their open boat, Skilled in the working of copper, appointing our feast-days, Before the islands were submerged, when the
weather was calm, The maned lion common, An open wishing-well in every garden; When love came easy.
Perfectly certain, all of us, but not from the records, Not from the unshaven agent who returned to the camp; The pillar dug from the desert recorded only
The sack of a city, The agent clutching his side collapsed at our feet, "Sorry! They got me!"
Yes, they were living here once but do not now,
Yes, they are living still but do not here;
Lying awake after Lights Out a recruit may speak up:
"Who told you all this?" The tent-talk pauses a little till a veteran answers "Go to sleep, Sonny!"
Turning over he closes his eyes, and then in a moment Sees the sun at midnight bright over cornfield and pasture, Our hope.. .. Someone jostles him, fumbling for boots,
Time to change guard: Boy, the quarrel was before your time, the aggressor No one you know.
Your childish moments of awareness were all of our world, At five you sprang, already a tiger in the garden, At night your mother taught you to pray for our Daddy
Far away fighting, One morning you fell off a horse and your brother mocked you: "Just like a girl!"
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You've got their names to live up to and questions won't help, ! You've a very full programme, first aid, gunnery, tactics, The technique to master of raids and hand-to-hand fighting;
Are you in training? Are you taking care of yourself? Are you sure of passing The endurance test?
Now we're due to parade on the square in front of the
Cathedral,
When the bishop has blessed us, to file in after the choir-boys, To stand with the wine-dark conquerors in the roped-off pews, Shout ourselves hoarse: "They ran like hares; we have broken them up like firewood; They fought against God,"
While in a great rift in the limestone miles away At the same hour they gather, tethering their horses
beside them;
A scarecrow prophet from a boulder foresees our judgement,
Their oppressors howling; And the bitter psalm is caught by the gale from the rocks: "How long shall they flourish?"
What have we all been doing to have made from Fear That laconic war-bitten captain addressing them now "Heart and head shall be keener, mood the more As our might lessens": To have caused their shout "We will fight till
we lie down beside The Lord we have loved"?
There's Wrath who has learnt every trick of guerilla warfare, The shamming dead, the night-raid, the feinted retreat; Envy their brilliant pamphleteer, to lying
As husband true, Expert impersonator and linguist, proud of his power To hoodwink sentries.
Gluttony living alone, austerer than us,
Big simple Greed, Acedia famed with them all
For her stamina, keeping the outposts, and somewhere Lust
With his sapper's skill, Muttering to his fuses in a tunnel "Could I meet here with Love, I would hug him to death."
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There are faces there for which for a very long time
We've been on the look-out, though often at home we imagined,
Catching sight of a back or hearing a voice through a doorway,
We had found them at last; Put our arms round their necks
and looked in their eyes and discovered We were unlucky.
And some of them, surely, we seem to have seen before: Why, that girl who rode off on her bicycle one fine
summer evening And never returned, she's there; and the banker we'd noticed
Worried for weeks ; Till he failed to arrive one morning and his room was empty, Gone with a suitcase.
They speak of things done on the frontier we were never told, The hidden path to their squat Pictish tower They will never reveal though kept without
sleep, for their code is "Death to the squealer": They are brave, yes, though our newspapers
mention their bravery In inverted commas.
But careful; back to our lines; it is unsafe there, Passports are issued no longer; that area is closed; There's no fire in the waiting-room now
at the climbers' junction, And all this year
T
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Work has been stopped on the power-house;
the wind whistles under The half-built culverts.
Do you think that because you have heard that on
Christmas Eve
In a quiet sector they walked about on the skyline,
Exchanged cigarettes, both learning the words for "I love you" In either language,
You can stroll across for a smoke and a chat any evening? Try it and see.
That rifle-sight you're designing; is it ready yet?
You're holding us up; the office is getting impatient;
The square munition works out on the old allotments Needs stricter watching;
If you see any loiterers there you may shoot without warning, We must stop that leakage.
All leave is cancelled to-night; we must say good-bye.
We entrain at once for the North; we shall see in the morning
The headlands we're doomed to attack; snow
down to the tide-line: Though the bunting signals "Indoors before it's too late; cut peat for your fires," We shall lie out there.
from "The Orators": November 1931
Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven, Make simpler daily the beating of man's heart; within, There in the ring where name and image meet,
Inspire them with such a longing as will make his thought Alive like patterns a murmuration of starlings Rising in joy over wolds unwittingly weave;
Here too on our little reef display your power,
This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp,
The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;
And make us as Newton was,who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
For now that dream which so long has contented our will,
mean, of uniting the dead into a splendid empire, Under whose fertilising flood the Lancashire moss
Sprouted up chimneys, and Glamorgan hid a life Grim as a tidal rock-pool's in its glove-shaped valleys, Is already retreating into her maternal shadow;
Leaving the furnaces gasping in the impossible air, The flotsam at which Dumbarton gapes and hungers; While upon wind-loved Rowley no hammer shakes
The cluster of mounds like a midget golf course, graves Of some who created these intelligible dangerous marvels; Affectionate people, but crude their sense of glory.
Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future; For the seed in their loins were hostile, though
afraid of their pride, And, tall with a shadow now, inertly wait.
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In bar, in netted chicken-farm, in lighthouse, Standing on these impoverished constricting acres, The ladies and gentlemen apart, too much alone,
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Consider the years of the measured world begun, The barren spiritual marriage of stone and water. Yet, O, at this very moment of our hopeless sigh
When inland they are thinking their thoughts but are
watching these islands, As children in Chester look to Moel Fammau to decide On picnics bythe clearness or withdrawal of her
treeless crown,
Some possible dream, long coiled in the ammonite's slumber Is uncurling, prepared to lay on our talk and kindness Its military silence, its surgeon's idea of pain;
And out of the Future into actual History,
As when Merlin, tamer of horses, and his lords to whom
Stonehenge was still a thought, the Pillars passed
And into the undared ocean swung north their prow,
Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn