Year: 2018

“The Giant Puffball” by Edmund Blunden

The Giant Puffball

From what sad star I know not, but I found 
Myself new-born below the coppice rail,
No bigger than the dewdrops and as round,
In a sward, no cattle might assail.

And so I gathered mightiness and grew
With this one dream kindling in me, that I 
Should never cease from conquering light and dew
Till my white splendour touched the trembling sky.

A century of blue and stilly light
Bowed down before me, the dew came again,
The moon my sibyl worshipped through the night,
The sun returned and long abode; but then

[ . . . ]

Edmund Blunden's poem "The Giant Puffball" was published in the 1922 Georgian Poetry anthology. To read it in full in a digitized version of this publication click the following link:

Archive.org

 

“Sea Gods” by H.D.

Sea Gods

                             I
They say there is no hope—
Sand — drift — rocks — rubble of the sea —
The broken hulk of a ship,
Hung with shreds of rope,
Pallid under the cracked pitch.

They say there is no hope
To conjure you —
No whip of the tongue to anger you—
No hate of words
You must rise to refute.

They say you are twisted by the sea,
You are cut apart
By wave-break upon wave-break,
That you are misshapen by the sharp rocks,
Broken by the rasp and after-rasp.

That you are cut, torn, mangled,
Torn by the stress and beat,
No stronger than the strips of sand
Along your ragged beach.

                             II
But we bring violets,
Great masses — single, sweet,
Wood-violets, stream-violets,
Violets from a wet marsh.

Violets in clumps from hills,
Tufts with earth at the roots,
Violets tugged from rocks,
Blue violets, moss, cliff, river-violets.

Yellow violets' gold,
Burnt with a rare tint —
Violets like red ash
Among tufts of grass.

We bring deep-purple
Bird-foot violets.
We bring the hyacinth-violet,
Sweet, bare, chill to the touch—
And violets whiter than the in-rush
Of your own white surf.

[ . . . ]

H.D.'s poem "Sea Gods" was published in the 1916 Some Imagist Poets anthology. To read the poem in full in this publication context follow the links below:

Archive.org

The Modernist Journals Project

Project Gutenberg (text version)

“In Bad Taste” by Osbert Sitwell

In Bad Taste

The platitudinous multitude advance,
They tear their hair and speak with bated breath,
And some are young—tho' prematurely aged,
And others old—tho' desperately young.
Sometimes they roar out biblical abuse,
At other times they wrap their ranting thoughts
In the fair-woven garment of hypocrisy,
Or roll their silly eyes,—or uplifted
Thank God they are not like to Publicans.
But most I love their favourite axiom
That age is but a virtue, youth a sin:—
" This line is gloomy and this view is false.
Life is a thing of joy and platitudes.
Oh ! to be simple now that Spring is here!
Play Oranges and Lemons, Nuts and May,
And sing and gambol through a joyous day.—
When we were young, we danced upon the hills
In tall top-hats and patent-leather shoes
To the wild music of a mandoline.
All decent youth should sing ' the Rosary'
In a sweet, simple, untrained tenor voice,
Or softly whistle ' Songs of Araby':—
Then would you grow to a malign old age,

[ . . . ]

Osbert Sitwell's poem "In Bad Taste" was published as the preface to the second printing of the first "cycle" (issue) of the Wheels poetry anthology. The first edition of the first cycle was published in December 1916 and the second edition was published in March 1917. To read "In Bad Taste" in full in its original publication context, follow the link below:

The Modernist Journals Project

“Sunday in a Certain City Suburb” by Maxwell Bodenheim

Sunday in a Certain City Suburb

Four men whose lives are the beginning of sun-
                                                             silenced afternoons,
And whose orange and red scarfs are the sole flowers
Of the washed-out afternoons,
Sit, shifting dominoes.
The afternoon outside of them dies, as fruit slowly
                                                 pressed between fingers,
But still the four stiff men shift dominoes . . . 
Their wives, wide women with tight, garnished hair,
Sit in the back-yard, whispering tiny secrets and
                                        munching strings of grapes.

 

[ . . . ]

 

Maxwell Bodenheim's poem "Sunday in a Certain City Suburb" was published in the 1916 Others anthology. To read the rest of this poem in this publication context visit the following link(s):

Archive.org

HathiTrust - original copy from Harvard University

HathiTrust - original copy from University of Michigan

“The Bird at Dawn” by Harold Monro

The Bird at Dawn

What I saw was just one eye
In the dawn as I was going:
A bird can carry all the sky
In that little button glowing.

Never in my life I went
So deep into the firmament.

He was standing on a tree,
All in blossom overflowing;
And he purposely looked hard at me,
At first, as if to question merrily:
'Where are you going?'
But next some far more serious thing to say:
I could not answer, could not look away.

Oh, that hard, round, and so distracting eye:
Little mirror of all sky!—
And then the after-song another tree
Held, and sent radiating back on me.

If no man had invented human word,
And a bird-song had been
The only way to utter what we mean,
What would we men have heard,
What understood, what seen,
Between the trills and pauses, in between
The singing and the silence of a bird?

 

Harold Monro's poem "The Bird at Dawn" was published in the 1917 Georgian Poetry anthology. To see it in a digitized version of this publication click the following link(s):

Archive.org

Project Gutenberg (text version)

“Scent of Irises” by D.H. Lawrence

Scent of Irises

A faint, sickening scent of irises
Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table
A fine proud spike of purple irises
Rising above the class-room litter, makes me unable
To see the class's lifted and bended faces
Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and sable.

 

I can smell the gorgeous bog-end, in its breathless
Dazzle of may-blobs, when the marigold glare overcast
You with fire on your brow and your cheeks and your chin
             as you dipped
Your face in your marigold bunch, to touch and contrast
Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-smocks
Dissolved in the golden sorcery you should not outlast.

 

You amid the bog-end's yellow incantation,
You sitting in the cowslips of the meadows above,
— Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-blobs,
Me full length in the cowslips, muttering you love —
You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent,
You, with your face all rich, like the sheen on a dove — !

 

You are always asking, do I remember, remember
The buttercup bog-end where the flowers rose up
And kindled you over deep with a coat of gold?
You ask again, do the healing days close up
The open darkness which then drew us in,
The dark that swallows all, and nought throws up.

 

You upon the dry, dead beech-leaves, in the fire of night
Burnt like a sacrifice; — you invisible —
Only the fire of darkness, and the scent of you!
— And yes, thank God, it still is possible
The healing days shall close the darkness up
Wherein I breathed you like a smoke or dew.

 

Like vapour, dew, or poison. Now, thank God,
The golden fire has gone, and your face is ash
Indistinguishable in the grey, chill day,
The night has burnt you out, at last the good
Dark fire burns on untroubled without clash
Of you upon the dead leaves saying me yea.

 

D.H. Lawrence's poem "Scent of Irises" was published in the anthology Some Imagist Poets in 1915. To view it in digitized versions of this publication follow the links below:

Archive.org

HathiTrust

The Modernist Journals Project

“Home Thoughts in Laventie” by Edward Wyndham Tennant

Home Thoughts in Laventie

Green gardens in Laventie!
Soldiers only know the street
Where the mud is churned and splashed about
By battle-wending feet;
And yet beside one stricken house there is a glimpse of grass,
Look for it when you pass.

Beyond the Church whose pitted spire
Seems balanced on a strand
Of swaying stone and tottering brick-
Two roofless ruins stand, [been
And here among the wreckage where the back wall should have
We found a garden green.

The grass was never trodden on,
The little path of gravel
Was overgrown with celandine,
No other folk did travel
Along its weedy surface, but the nimble-footed mouse
Running from house to house.

So all among the vivid blades
Of soft and tender grass
We lay, nor heard the limber wheels
That pass and ever pass,
In noisy continuity until their stony rattle
Seems in itself a battle.

At length we rose up from this ease
Of tranquil happy mind,
And searched the garden's little length
Some new pleasaunce to find ;
And there, some yellow daffodils and jasmine hanging high
Did rest the tired eye.

The fairest and most fragrant
Of the many sweets we found,
Was a little bush of Daphne flower
Upon a mossy mound,
And so thick were the blossoms set and so divine the scent
That we were well content.

Hungry for Spring I bent my head,
The perfume fanned my face,
And all my soul was dancing
In that little lovely place,
Dancing with a measured step from wrecked and shattered towns
Away . . . upon the Downs.

I saw green banks of daffodil,
Slim poplars in the breeze,
Great tan-brown hares in gusty March
A-courting on the leas ;
And meadows with their glittering streams, and silver
scurrying dace,
Home . . . what a perfect place.

Edward Wyndham Tennant's poem "Home Thoughts in Laventie" was published in the 1916 "cycle" (as the issues were called) of the Wheels poetry anthology. To read the poem in its publication context, visit the following links:

Archive.org

The Modernist Journals Project

“Iris” by Frances Gregg

Iris

Ah, bow your head, white sword flower,
Lest you pierce the thing you would save,
Lest your white beauty slay me.
Let your heart's blue stain
Plead for my frailty.

 

Frances Gregg's poem "Iris" was published in the 1916 Others anthology. To view digitized versions of this publication click the following links:

Archive.org

“Reciprocity” by John Drinkwater

Reciprocity

I do not think that skies and meadows are
Moral, or that the fixture of a star
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees
Have wisdom in their windless silences.
Yet these are things invested in my mood
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,
That in my troubled season I can cry
Upon the wide composure of the sky,
And envy fields, and wish that I might be
As little daunted as a star or tree.

 

You can read John Drinkwater's poem "Reciprocity" in Georgian Poetry 1916-1917, the anthology in which it was published. Follow the links to view digitized versions of this publication:

Archive.org

Project Gutenberg (HTML version)

“Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar” by Allen Upward

Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar

 

The Bitter Purple Willows

     Meditating on the glory of illustrious lineage I lifted
up my eyes and beheld the bitter purple willows growing
round the tombs of the exalted Mings.

 

The Gold Fish

Like a breath from hoarded musk,
Like the golden fins that move
Where the tank's green shadows part—
Living flames out of the dusk—
Are the lightning throbs of love
In the passionate lover's heart.

 

The Intoxicated Poet

     A poet, having taken the bridle off his tongue, spoke
thus: "More fragrant than the heliotrope, which
blooms all the year round, better than vermilion letters
on tablets of sendal, are thy kisses, thou shy one!"

 

The Jonquils

      I have heard that a certain princess, when she found
that she had been married by a demon, wove a wreath
of jonquils and sent it to the lover of former days.

 

The Mermaid

     The sailor boy who leant over the side of the Junk
of Many Pearls, and combed the green tresses of the
sea with his ivory fingers, believing that he had heard
the voice of a mermaid, cast his body down between
the waves.

 

The Middle Kingdom

     The emperors of fourteen dynasties, clad in robes of
yellow silk embroidered with the Dragon, wearing gold
diadems set with pearls and rubies, and seated on
thrones of incomparable ivory, have ruled over the
Middle Kingdom for four thousand years.

 

The Milky Way

     My mother taught me that every night a procession
of junks carrying lanterns moves silently across the
sky, and the water sprinkled from their paddles falls
to the earth in the form of dew. I no longer believe
that the stars are junks carrying lanterns, no longer
that the dew is shaken from their oars.

 

The Sea-Shell

      To the passionate lover, whose sighs come back to
him on every breeze, all the world is like a murmuring
sea-shell.

 

The Swallow Tower

      Amid a landscape flickering with poplars, and netted
by a silver stream, the Swallow Tower stands in the
haunts of the sun. The winds out of the four quarters
of heaven come to sigh around it, the clouds forsake
the zenith to bathe it with continuous kisses. Against
its sun-worn walls a sea of orchards breaks in white
foam; and from the battlements the birds that flit
below are seen like fishes in a green moat. The windows
of the Tower stand open day and night; the
winged Guests come when they please, and hold communication
with the unknown Keeper of the Tower.

Published in The Glebe (vol. 1, no. 5) in February 1914, special Des Imagistes number (and in subsequent editions of Des Imagistes).

To see Allen Upward's sequence "Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar" in digitized versions of these publications you can visit the following links:

Archive.org (Des Imagistes, published by Albert and Charles Boni, New York, 1914) 

Blue Mountain Project (The Glebe)

Modernist Journals Project (The Glebe)

Modernist Journals Project (Des Imagistes, published by Albert and Charles Boni, New York, 1914)

Modernist Journals Project (Des Imagistes, published by The Poetry Bookshop, London, 1914)