I edged back against the night.

The sea growled assault on the wave-bitten shore.
And the breakers,

4 Like young and impatient hounds,

Sprang with rough joy on the shrinking sand.
Sprang-but were drawn back slowly

With a long, relentless pull,

Whimpering, into the dark.

Then I saw who held them captive;

And I saw how they were bound

With a broad and quivering leash of light,
Held by the moon,

As, calm and unsmiling,

She walked the deep fields of the sky.

AUTUMN

(To My Mother)

How memory cuts away the years,
And how clean the picture comes
Of autumn days, brisk and busy;
Charged with keen sunshine.
And you, stirred with activity,
The spirit of those energetic days.

There was our back-yard,

So plain and stripped of green,

With even the weeds carefully pulled away
From the crooked red bricks that made the walk,
And the earth on either side so black.

Autumn and dead leaves burning in the sharp air.
And winter comforts coming in like a pageant.
I shall not forget them :-

Great jars laden with the raw green of pickles,

Standing in a solemn row across the back of the porch, Exhaling the pungent dill;

And in the very center of the yard,

You, tending the great catsup kettle of gleaming copper, Where fat, red tomatoes bobbed up and down

Like jolly monks in a drunken dance.

And there were bland banks of cabbages that came by the wagon-load,

Soon to be cut into delicate ribbons

Only to be crushed by the heavy, wooden stompers.

Such feathery whiteness-to come to kraut!

And after, there were grapes that hid their brightness under a grey dust,

Then gushed thrilling, purple blood over the fire;

And enamelled crab-apples that tricked with their fra

grance

But were bitter to taste.

And there were spicy plums and ill-shaped quinces,

And long string beans floating in pans of clear water Like slim, green fishes.

And there was fish itself,

Salted, silver herring from the city. . . .

And you moved among these mysteries,

Absorbed and smiling and sure;

Stirring, tasting, measuring,

With the precision of a ritual.

I like to think of you in your years of power

You, now so shaken and so powerless

High priestess of your home.

LAKE SONG

The lapping of lake water
Is like the weeping of women,
The weeping of ancient women
Who grieved without rebellion.

The lake falls over the shore
Like tears on their curven bosoms.
Here is languid, luxurious wailing;
The wailing of kings' daughters.

So do we ever cry,

A soft, unmutinous crying,

When we know ourselves each a princess
Locked fast within her tower.

The lapping of lake water
Is like the weeping of women,
The fertile tears of women
That water the dreams of men.

John Gould Fletcher

John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, January 3, 1886. He was educated at Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts) and Harvard (1903-7) and, after spending several years in Massachusetts, moved to England, where, except for brief visits to the United States, he has lived ever since.

In 1913, Fletcher published five tiny books of poems which he has referred to as "his literary wild oats," five small collections of experimental and faintly interesting verse. Two years later, Fletcher appeared as a decidedly less conservative and far more arresting poet with Irradiations-Sand and Spray

(1915). This volume is full of an extraordinary fancy; imagination riots through it, even though it is often a bloodless and bodiless imagination.

In the following book, Goblins and Pagodas (1916), Fletcher carries his unrelated harmonies much further. Color dominates him; the ambitious set of eleven "color symphonies" is an elaborate design in which the tone as well as the thought is summoned 'by color-associations, sometimes closely related, sometimes far-fetched.

Meanwhile, Fletcher had been developing. After having appeared in the three Imagist anthologies, he sought for depths rather than surfaces. Beginning with his majestic "Lincoln," his work has had a closer relation to humanity; a moving mysticism speaks from The Tree of Life (1918), the more native Granite and Breakers (1921) and the later uncollected poems.

LONDON NIGHTFALL

I saw the shapes that stood upon the clouds:
And they were tiger-breasted, shot with light,
And all of them, lifting long trumpets together,
Blew over the city, for the night to come.
Down in the street, we floundered in the mud;
Above, in endless files, gold angels came

And stood upon the clouds, and blew their horns
For night.

Like a wet petal crumpled,

Twilight fell soddenly on the weary city;

The 'buses lurched and groaned,

The shops put up their doors.

But skywards, far aloft,

The angels, vanishing, waved broad plumes of gold, Summoning spirits from a thousand hills

To pour the thick night out upon the earth.

FROM "IRRADIATIONS"

The trees, like great jade elephants,

Chained, stamp and shake 'neath the gadflies of the breeze;
The trees lunge and plunge, unruly elephants:

The clouds are their crimson howdah-canopies;
The sunlight glints like the golden robe of a Shah.
Would I were tossed on the wrinkled backs of those trees.

Which lifts its head above the mournful sandhills;
And patiently, through dull years of bitter silence,
Untended and uncared for, begins to grow.

Ungainly, labouring, huge,

The wind of the north has twisted and gnarled its branches:

Yet in the heat of midsummer days, when thunder-clouds ring the horizon,

A nation of men shall rest beneath its shade.

And it shall protect them all,

Hold everyone safe there, watching aloof in silence;
Until at last one mad stray bolt from the zenith
Shall strike it in an instant down to earth.

1 See pages 54, 78, 84, 139, 142.