Songs of Ourselves

Volume 2: Part 4
Love, Wisdom and Age
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Content

1. The Forsaken Wife Elizabeth Thomas

2. After Philip Bourke Marston
3. A Leave-Taking’ Algernon Charles Swinburne
4. I Find No Peace Sir Thomas Wyatt
5. I Hear an Army James Joyce
6. Rooms Charlotte Mew
7. Love in a Life Robert Browning
8. Waterfall Lauris Edmond
9. Verses Written on Her Death-bed… Mary Monck
10. Rhyme of the Dead Self A R D Fairburn
11. Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples Percy Bysshe Shelley
12. Nearing Forty Derek Walcott
13. Now Let No Charitable Hope Elinor Morton Wylie
14. From An Essay on Criticism Alexander Pope
15. The Character of a Happy Life Henry Wotton

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The Forsaken Wife

Elizabeth Thomas (‘Corinna’)

Methinks, ’tis strange you can’t afford

One pitying look, one parting word;
Humanity claims this as due,
But what’s humanity to you?

Cruel man! I am not blind,

Your infidelity I find;
Your want of love my ruin shows,
My broken heart, your broken vows.
Yet maugre all your rigid hate,
I will be true in spite of fate;
And one preeminence I’ll claim,
To be forever still the same.

Show me a man that dare be true,

That dares to suffer what I do;
That can forever sigh unheard,
And ever love without regard:
I then will own your prior claim
To love, to honour, and to fame;
But till that time, my dear, adieu,
I yet superior am to you.

want – lack
maugre –despite

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After
Philip Bourke Marston

I
A little time for laughter,
A little time to sing,
A little time to kiss and cling,
And no more kissing after.

II
A little while for scheming
Love's unperfected schemes;
A little time for golden dreams,
Then no more any dreaming.

III
A little while 'twas given
To me to have thy love;
Now, like a ghost, alone I move
About a ruined heaven.

IV
A little time for speaking
Things sweet to say and hear;
A time to seek, and find thee near,
Then no more any seeking.

V
A little time for saying
Words the heart breaks to say;
A short sharp time wherein to pray,
Then no more need of praying;

VI
But long, long years to weep in,
And comprehend the whole
Great grief that desolates the soul,
And eternity to sleep in.

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A Leave - Taking
Algernon Charles Swinburne

Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear.

Let us go hence together without fear;
Keep silence now, for singing-time is over,
And over all old things and all things dear.
She loves not you nor me as all we love her.
Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear,
She would not hear.

Let us rise up and part; she will not know.

Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here?
There is no help, for all these things are so,
And all the world is bitter as a tear.
And how these things are, though ye strove to show,
She would not know.

Let us go home and hence; she will not weep.

We gave love many dreams and days to keep,
Flowers without scent, and fruits that would not grow,
Saying 'If thou wilt, thrust in thy sickle and reap.'
All is reaped now; no grass is left to mow;
And we that sowed, though all we fell on sleep,
She would not weep.

Let us go hence and rest; she will not love.

She shall not hear us if we sing hereof,
Nor see love's ways, how sore they are and steep.
Come hence, let be, lie still; it is enough.
Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep;
And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love.

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Let us give up, go down; she will not care.

Though all the stars made gold of all the air,
And the sea moving saw before it move
One moon-flower making all the foam-flowers fair;
Though all those waves went over us, and drove
Deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair,
She would not care.

Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see.

Sing all once more together; surely she,
She too, remembering days and words that were,
Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we,
We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there.
Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me,
She would not see.

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I Find No Peace
Sir Thomas Wyatt

I find no peace, and all my war is done.

I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on.
That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise—
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
I love another, and thus I hate myself.
I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

season – relish
that loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison- that which (i.e. love)neither loosen the bonds
that tie me, nor fully constraints me, still imprisons me
scape no wise – escape by any means
At my device – by my own will or power
eyen – eyes
plain – complain
feed me in – am revived by

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I Hear an Army …
James Joyce

I hear an army charging upon the land,

And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name:

I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:

They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

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Rooms
Charlotte Mew

I remember rooms that have had their part

In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—
Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem
to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun—in the rain.

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Love in a Life
Robert Browning

I
Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her—
Next time, herself!—not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew:
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather.

II
Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune—
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest,—who cares?
But 'tis twilight, you see,—with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!

cornice-wreath – ceiling decoration

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Waterfall
Lauris Edmond

I do not ask for youth, nor for delay

in the rising of time's irreversible river
that takes the jewelled arc of the waterfall
in which I glimpse, minute by glinting minute,
all that I have and all I am always losing
as sunlight lights each drop fast, fast falling.

I do not dream that you, young again,

might come to me darkly in love's green darkness
where the dust of the bracken spices the air
moss, crushed, gives out an astringent sweetness
and water holds our reflections
motionless, as if for ever.

It is enough now to come into a room

and find the kindness we have for each other
- calling it love - in eyes that are shrewd
but trustful still, face chastened by years
of careful judgement; to sit in the afternoons
in mild conversation, without nostalgia.

But when you leave me, with your jauntiness

sinewed by resolution more than strength
- suddenly then I love you with a quick
intensity, remembering that water,
however luminous and grand, falls fast
and only once to the dark pool below.

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Versus Written on Her Death-bed at Bath

to Her Husband in London
Mary Monck (‘Marinda’)

Thou who dost all my worldly thoughts employ,

Thou pleasing source of all my earthly joy,
Thou tenderest husband and thou dearest friend,
To thee this first, this last adieu I send!
At length the conqueror death asserts his right,
And will for ever veil me from thy sight;
He woos me to him with a cheerful grace,
And not one terror clouds his meagre face;
He promises a lasting rest from pain,
And shows that all life’s fleeting joys are vain;
Th’ eternal scenes of heaven he sets in view,
And tells me that no other joys are true.
But love, fond love, would yet resist his power,
Would fain awhile defer the parting hour;
He brings thy mourning image to my eyes,
And would obstruct my journey to the skies.
But say, thou dearest, thou unwearied friend!
Say, should’st thou grieve to see my sorrows end?
Thou know’st a painful pilgrimage I’ve past;
And should’st thou grieve that rest is come at last?
Rather rejoice to see me shake off life,
And die as I have liv’d, thy faithful wife.

pilgrimage - spiritual journey

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Rhyme of the Dead Self

A.R.D. Fairburn

Tonight I have taken all that I was

and strangled him that pale lily-white lad
I have choked him with these my hands these claws
catching him as he lay a-dreaming in his bed.

Then chuckling I dragged out his foolish brains

that were full of pretty love-tales heighho the holly
and emptied them holus bolus to the drains
those dreams of love oh what ruinous folly.

He is dead pale youth and he shall not rise

on the third day or any other day
sloughed like a snakeskin there he lies
and he shall not trouble me again for aye.

heighho the holly – a reference to the chorus of the song ‘ Blow, blow thou winter wind’ in
Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act 2 Scene 7)
holus bolus – wholesale, in one go

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Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.

II
I see the Deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone,—
The lightning of the noontide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

III
Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned—
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround—
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

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IV
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

V
Some might lament that I were cold,
As I, when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan;
They might lament—for I am one
Whom men love not,—and yet regret,
Unlike this day, which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.

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Nearing Forty
Derek Walcott

(for John Figueroa)

The irregular combination of fanciful invention may delight awhile by

that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest. But
the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted and the mind can
only repose on the stability of truth…

—SAMUEL JOHNSON

Insomniac since four, hearing this narrow,

rigidly metred, early-rising rain
recounting, as its coolness numbs the marrow,
that I am nearing forty, nearer the weak
vision thickening to a frosted pane,
nearer the day when I may judge my work
by the bleak modesty of middle age
as a false dawn, fireless and average,
which would be just, because your life bled for
the household truth, the style past metaphor
that finds its parallel however wretched
plain as a bleaching bedsheet under a gutter-
ing rainspout, glad for the sputter
of occasional insight; you who foresaw
ambition as a searing meteor
will fumble a damp match and, smiling, settle
for the dry wheezing of a dented kettle,
for vision narrower than a louvre’s gap,
then, watching your leaves thin, recall how deep
prodigious cynicism plants its seed,

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gauges our seasons by this year’s end rain

which, as greenhorns at school, we’d
call conventional for convectional;
or you will rise and set your lines to work
with sadder joy but steadier elation,
until the night when you can really sleep,
measuring how imagination
ebbs, conventional as any water clerk
who weighs the force of lightly falling rain,
which, as the new moon moves it, does its work
even when it seems to weep.

John Figueroa – (1920-1999), Jamaican poet and teacher

Samuel Johnson - (1907- 1784) English scholar and poet

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Now Let No Charitable Hope

Elinor Morton Wylie

Now let no charitable hope

Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am by nature none of these.

I was, being human, born alone;

I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
What little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere

The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

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From An Essay on Criticism

Alexander Pope

A little learning is a dang'rous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir'd at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But more advanc'd, behold with strange surprise
New, distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleas'd at first, the tow'ring Alps we try,
Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;
Th' eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthen'd way,
Th' increasing prospect tires our wand'ring eyes,
Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

Pierian spring – the fount of poetry and learning on Mount Olympus, the home of Muses in
classical mythology
Muse- one of the nine personifications of arts and sciences in classical mythology

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The Character of a Happy Life

Henry Wotton

How happy is he born and taught

That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill!

Whose passions not his masters are;

Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Untied unto the world by care
Of public fame or private breath;

Who envies none that chance doth raise,

Nor vice; who never understood
How deepest wounds are given by praise;
Nor rules of state, but rules of good;

Who hath his life from rumours freed;

Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruin make oppressors great;

Who God doth late and early pray

More of His grace than gifts to lend;
And entertains the harmless day
With a religious book or friend;

—This man is freed from servile bands

Of hope to rise or fear to fall:
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.

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