Inarticulate Grief
Let the sea beat its thin torn hands
In anguish against the shore,
Let it moan
Between headland and cliff;
Let the sea shriek out its agony
Across waste sands and marshes,
[ . . . ]
Richard Aldington's "Inarticulate Grief" was published in the 1917 Some Imagist Poets anthology. The poem can be read in full in the original publication context at the following locations:
HathiTrust - Digitized by the University of Virginia
Cul-de-Sac
There flickers one small yellow flame
Blown by a fretful breeze
That casts small shadows on the ground
To dance between the trees
As some uncared-for, dusty shell
Still covers, hidden deep,
The murmur that a child once heard,
So the sad houses sleep
While hid within their leprous walls
That strike the heart with fear,
Move echoes of forgotten joy
None but the homeless hear.
Gaunt figures haunt the narrow street
And stoop to seek within
For what the day's poor comfort
May have dropped into a bin.
Beneath the night's dark covering
These phantoms come and go,
More frail, unreal, and mournful
Than the shadows that they throw.
Like broken windows of a room
Where one is lying dead,
Their eyes gaze out upon the streets
The weary feet must tread.
For them the days are throbbing wounds,
Hard livid weals of light
The sun has raised upon the gloom
Of their eternal night;
The city but a cavern, Man
Has tunnelled into space,
From whose high roof the mocking stars
Can watch each haggard face.
And so they flit by aimlessly
These outcasts from their kind,
And ever seek an outlet
Where no outlet is to find.
Save where beneath a high blank wall
With shaken souls they see
Some useless clothes a shadow left
To hang upon a tree.
View Helen Rootham's poem in the 1917 Wheels anthology. It has been digitized at the following locations:
Librivox audio recording hosted on Archive.org
The Modernist Journals Project
Dust
When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world's delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night ;
When your swift hair is quiet in death,
And through the lips corruption thrust
Has stilled the labour of my breath
When we are dust, when we are dust!
Not dead, not undesirous yet,
Still sentient, still unsatisfied,
We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit,
Around the places where we died,
And dance as dust before the sun,
And light of foot, and unconfined,
Hurry from road to road, and run
About the errands of the wind.
And every mote, on earth or air,
Will speed and gleam, down later days,
And like a secret pilgrim fare
By eager and invisible ways,
Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,
Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that's I
Shall meet one atom that was you.
Then in some garden hushed from wind,
Warm in a sunset's afterglow,
The lovers in the flowers will find
A sweet and strange unquiet grow
Upon the peace; and, past desiring,
So high a beauty in the air,
And such a light, and such a quiring,
And such a radiant ecstasy there,
They'll know not if it's fire, or dew,
Or out of earth, or in the height,
Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,
Or two that pass, in light, to light,
Out of the garden, higher, higher . . .
But in that instant they shall learn
The shattering fury of our fire,
And the weak passionless hearts will burn
And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above ;
And they will know poor fools, they'll know!
One moment, what it is to love.
View Brooke's poem in Georgian Poetry 1911-1912. It has been digitized at the following location(s):
;
Portrait of a Lady
"Thou hast committed—"
"Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead."
The Jew of Malta.
I
Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself —as it will seem
to do—
With "I have saved this afternoon for you"
And four wax candles in the darkened room
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead
An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb
Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.
We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-
tips.
[. . .]
T.S. Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady" was first published in Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (vol. 1 no. 3) in September 1915. It was first anthologized in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse in 1916. The full poem contains three sections. The selection here is an excerpt from the first section (the poem still remains under copyright protection in Belgium).
Digitized versions of the original publication context(s):
Others: An Anthology at Archive.org
Others: A Magazine at the Modernist Journals Project