With dread of what my lips might say. Then hurried on his witless way, And when I came, she stood, alone Because her heart was dead, She could not sleep. Three days, three nights, She did not stir: Three days, three nights, Who never closed her eyes Her tearless, staring eyes, That seeing naught, saw all. The fourth night when I came from work, I found her at my door. "And will you cut a stone for him?" She said and spoke no more: And fixed her grey eyes on my face, And, as she waited patiently, I could not bear to feel Those still, grey eyes that followed me, And pierced my marrow like cold steel. And so I rose, and sought a stone; And cut it, smooth and square: And, as I worked, she sat and watched, Night after night, by candlelight, I cut her lover's name: Night after night, so still and white, And like a ghost she came; And sat beside me in her chair; And watched with eyes aflame. She eyed each stroke; And hardly stirred: She never spoke A single word: And not a sound or murmur broke She watched, with bloodless lips apart, And silent, indrawn breath: Death cut still deeper in her heart: And when at length the job was done, As if, at last, her peace were won, She breathed his name; and, with a sigh, Next night I laboured late, alone, SIGHT 1 By the lamplit stall I loitered, feasting my eyes Oranges like old sunsets over Tyre, And apples golden-green as the glades of Paradise. And as I lingered, lost in divine delight, My heart thanked God for the goodly gift of sight And all youth's lively senses keen and quick . . . When suddenly, behind me in the night, I heard the tapping of a blind man's stick. 1 From Borderlands and Thoroughfares by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Copyright, 1915, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission of the publishers. Edward Thomas, one of the little-known but most individual of modern English poets, was born in 1878. For many years before he turned to verse, Thomas had a large following as a critic and author of travel-books, biographies, pot-boilers. It needed something foreign to stir and animate what was native in him. So when Robert Frost, the New England poet, went abroad in 1912 for two years and became an intimate of Thomas's, the English critic began to write poetry. Loving, like Frost, the minutia of existence, the quaint and casual turn of ordinary life, he caught the magic of the English countryside in its unpoeticized quietude. It is not disillusion, it is rather an absence of illusion. Poems (1917), dedicated to Robert Frost, is full of Thomas's fidelity to little things, things as unglorified as the unfreezing of the "rock-like mud," a child's path, a list of quaint-sounding villages, birds' nests uncovered by the autumn wind, dusty nettles. His lines glow with a deep reverence for the soil. Thomas was killed at Arras, at an observatory outpost, on Easter Monday, 1917. IF I SHOULD EVER BY CHANCE If I should ever by chance grow rich I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, And let them all to my elder daughter. The rent I shall ask of her will be only I shall give them all to my elder daughter. TALL NETTLES Tall nettles cover up, as they have done These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough Long worn out, and the roller made of stone: Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. This corner of the farmyard I like most: COCK-CROW Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night Each facing each as in a coat of arms:- Seumas O'Sullivan James Starkey was born in Dublin in 1879. Writing under the pseudonym of Seumas O'Sullivan, he contributed a great variety of prose and verse to various Irish papers. His reputation as a poet began with his appearance in New Songs, edited by George Russell ("A. E."). Later, he published The Twilight People (1905), The Earth Lover (1909), and Poems (1912). |