Robert Bridges - October and Other Poems with Occasional Verses on the War

Behold! Man setteth thine image in the height of Heaven
And hallowing his untemper’d love
Crowneth and throneth thee ador’d
(Tranquilly joyous to hold
The man-child in thine arms)
God-like apart from conflict to save thee
To guard thy weak caressive beauty
With incontaminate jewels of soul
Courage, patience, and self-devotion:
All this glory he gave thee.

Secret and slow is Nature
Imperceptibly moving
With surely determinate aim:
To woman it fell to be early in prime
Ready to labour, mould, and cherish
The delicate head of all Production
The wistful late-maturing boy
Who made Knowing of Being.

Therefore art thou ador’d
Mother of God in man
Naturing nurse of power:
They who adore not thee shall perish
But thou shalt keep thy path of joy
Envied of Angels because the All-father
Call’d thee to mother his nascent Word
And complete the creation.

Thro’ innocent eyes at the world awond’ring
Nothing spake to me more superbly
Than the round bastion of Windsor’s wall

That warding the Castle’s southern angle
An old inheritor of Norman prowess
Was call’d by the folk the Curfew Tow’r.

Above the masonry’s rugged courses
A turreted clock of Caroline fashion
Told time to the town in black and gold.

It charmed the hearts of Henry’s scholars
As kingly a mentor of English story
As Homer’s poem is of Ilion:

Nor e’er in the landscape look’d it fairer
Than when we saw its white bulk halo’d
In a lattice of slender scaffoldings.

Month by month on the airy platforms
Workmen labour’d hacking and hoisting
Till again the tower was stript to the sun:

The old tow’r? Nay a new tow’r stood there
From footing to battlemented skyline
And topt with a cap the slice of a cone

Archæologic and counterfeited
The smoothest thing in all the high-street
As Eton scholars to-day may see:

They—wherever else they find their wonder
And feed their boyhood on Time’s enchantment—
See never the Tow’r that spoke to me.

Sweet pretty fledgelings, perched on the rail arow,
Expectantly happy, where ye can watch below
Your parents a-hunting i’ the meadow grasses
All the gay morning to feed you with flies;

Ye recall me a time sixty summers ago,
When, a young chubby chap, I sat just so
With others on a school-form rank’d in a row,
Not less eager and hungry than you, I trow,
With intelligences agape and eyes aglow,
While an authoritative old wise-acre
Stood over us and from a desk fed us with flies.

Dead flies—such as litter the library south-window,
That buzzed at the panes until they fell stiff-baked on the sill,
Or are roll’d up asleep i’ the blinds at sunrise,
Or wafer’d flat in a shrunken folio.

A dry biped he was, nurtured likewise
On skins and skeletons, stale from top to toe
With all manner of rubbish and all manner of lies.

Mazing around my mind like moths at a shaded candle,
In my heart like lost bats in a cave fluttering,
Mock ye the charm whereby I thought reverently to lay you,
When to the wall I nail’d your reticent effigys?

Who goes there? God knows. I’m nobody. How should I answer?
Can’t jump over a gate nor run across the meadow.
I’m but an old whitebeard of inane identity. Pass on!
What’s left of me to-day will very soon be nothing.

Two demons thrust their arms out over the world,
Hell with a ruddy torch of fire,
And Hate with gasping mouth,
Striving to seize two children fair
Who play’d on the upper curve of the Earth.

Their shapes were vast as the thoughts of man,
But the Earth was small
As the moon’s rim appeareth
Scann’d through an optic glass.

The younger child stood erect on the Earth
As a charioteer in a car
Or a dancer with arm upraised;
Her whole form—barely clad
From feet to golden head—
Leapt brightly against the uttermost azure,
Whereon the stars were splashes of light
Dazed in the gulfing beds of space.

The elder might have been stell’d to show
The lady who led my boyish love;
But her face was graver than e’er to me
When I look’d in her eyes long ago,
And the hair on her shoulders fal’n
Nested its luminous brown
I’ the downy spring of her wings:
Her figure aneath was screen’d by the Earth,
Whereoff—so small that was
No footing for her could be—
She appeared to be sailing free
I’ the glide and poise of her flight.

Then knew I the Angel Faith,
Who was guarding human Love.

Happy were both, of peaceful mien,
Contented as mankind longeth to be,
Not merry as children are;
And show’d no fear of the Fiends’ pursuit,