Part 22 (1/2)

Time, you old gipsy, Why hasten away?

Last week in Babylon, Last night in Rome, Morning, and in the crush Under Paul's dome; Under Paul's dial You tighten your rein-- Only a moment, And off once again; Off to some city Now blind in the womb, Off to another Ere that's in the tomb.

Time, you old gipsy man, Will you not stay, Put up your caravan Just for one day?

THE BIRDCATCHER

When flighting time is on, I go With clap-net and decoy, A-fowling after goldfinches And other birds of joy;

I lurk among the thickets of The Heart where they are bred, And catch the twittering beauties as They fly into my Head.

THE MYSTERY

He came and took me by the hand Up to a red rose tree, He kept His meaning to Himself But gave a rose to me.

I did not pray Him to lay bare The mystery to me, Enough the rose was Heaven to smell, And His own face to see.

_Harold Monro_

The publisher of the various anthologies of Georgian Poetry, Harold Monro, was born in Brussels in 1879. He describes himself as ”author, publisher, editor and book-seller.” Monro founded The Poetry Bookshop in London in 1912, a unique establishment having as its object a practical relation between poetry and the public, and keeping in stock nothing but poetry, the drama, and books connected with these subjects. His quarterly _Poetry and Drama_ (discontinued during the war and revived in 1919 as _The Monthly Chapbook_), was in a sense the organ of the younger men; and his shop, in which he has lived for the last seven years except while he was in the army, became a genuine literary center.

Of Monro's books, the two most important are _Strange Meetings_ (1917) and _Children of Love_ (1919). ”The Nightingale Near the House,” one of the loveliest of his poems, is also one of his latest and has not yet appeared in any of his volumes.

THE NIGHTINGALE NEAR THE HOUSE

Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn: It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond Stares. And you sing, you sing.

That star-enchanted song falls through the air From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground; And all the night you sing.

My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee As all night long I listen, and my brain Receives your song; then loses it again In moonlight on the lawn.

Now is your voice a marble high and white, Then like a mist on fields of paradise, Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, Then breaks, and it is dawn.

EVERY THING

Since man has been articulate, Mechanical, improvidently wise, (Servant of Fate), He has not understood the little cries And foreign conversations of the small Delightful creatures that have followed him Not far behind; Has failed to hear the sympathetic call Of Crockery and Cutlery, those kind Reposeful Teraphim Of his domestic happiness; the Stool He sat on, or the Door he entered through: He has not thanked them, overbearing fool!

What is he coming to?

But you should listen to the talk of these.

Honest they are, and patient they have kept; Served him without his Thank you or his Please ...

I often heard The gentle Bed, a sigh between each word, Murmuring, before I slept.

The Candle, as I blew it, cried aloud, Then bowed, And in a smoky argument Into the darkness went.

The Kettle puffed a tentacle of breath:-- ”Pooh! I have boiled his water, I don't know Why; and he always says I boil too slow.

He never calls me 'Sukie, dear,' and oh, I wonder why I squander my desire Sitting submissive on his kitchen fire.”