Heaved Moab of the mountains like a sea.

  FANTASIA

  The happy men that lose their heads

  They find their heads in heaven,

  As cherub heads with cherub wings,

  And cherub haloes even:

  Out of the infinite evening lands

  Along the sunset sea,

  Leaving the purple fields behind,

  The cherub wings beat down the wind

  Back to the groping body and blind

  As the bird back to the tree.

  Whether the plumes be passion-red

  For him that truly dies

  By headsmen’s blade or battle-axe,

  Or blue like butterflies,

  For him that lost it in a lane

  In April’s fits and starts,

  His folly is forgiven then:

  But higher, and far beyond our ken,

  Is the healing of the unhappy men,

  The men that lost their hearts.

  Is there not pardon for the brave

  And broad release above,

  Who lost their heads for liberty

  Or lost their hearts for love?

  Or is the wise man wise indeed

  Whom larger thoughts keep whole?

  Who sees life equal like a chart,

  Made strong to play the saner part,

  And keep his head and keep his heart,

  And only lose his soul.

  A CHRISTMAS CAROL

  (The Chief Constable has issued a statement declaring that

  carol singing in the streets by children is illegal, and morally

  and physically injurious. He appeals to the public to discourage

  the practice. — Daily Paper.)

  God rest you merry gentlemen,

  Let nothing you dismay;

  The Herald Angels cannot sing,

  The cops arrest them on the wing,

  And warn them of the docketing

  Of anything they say.

  God rest you merry gentlemen,

  May nothing you dismay:

  On your reposeful cities lie

  Deep silence, broken only by

  The motor horn’s melodious cry,

  The hooter’s happy bray.

  So, when the song of children ceased

  And Herod was obeyed,

  In his high hall Corinthian

  With purple and with peacock fan,

  Rested that merry gentleman;

  And nothing him dismayed.

  TO CAPTAIN FRYATT

  Trampled yet red is the last of the embers,

  Red the last cloud of a sun that has set;

  What of your sleeping though Flanders remembers,

  What of your waking, if England forget?

  Why should you share in the hearts that we harden,

  In the shame of our nature, who see it and live?

  How more than the godly the greedy can pardon,

  How well and how quickly the hungry forgive.

  Ah, well if the soil of the stranger had wrapped you,

  While the lords that you served and the friends that you knew

  Hawk in the marts of the tyrants that trapped you,

  Tout in the shops of the butchers that slew.

  Why should you wake for a realm that is rotten,

  Stuffed with their bribes and as dead to their debts?

  Sleep and forget us, as we have forgotten;

  For Flanders remembers and England forgets.

  FOR FOUR GUILDS

  FOR FOUR GUILDS:

  I. THE GLASS-STAINERS

  To every Man his Mystery,

  A trade and only one:

  The masons make the hives of men,

  The domes of grey or dun,

  But we have wrought in rose and gold

  The houses of the sun.

  The shipwrights build the houses high,

  Whose green foundations sway

  Alive with fish like little flames,

  When the wind goes out to slay.

  But we abide with painted sails

  The cyclone of the day.

  The weavers make the clothes of men

  And coats for everyone;

  They walk the streets like sunset clouds;

  But we have woven and spun

  In scarlet or in golden-green

  The gay coats of the sun.

  You whom the usurers and the lords

  With insolent liveries trod,

  Deep in dark church behold, above

  Their lance-lengths by a rod,

  Where we have blazed the tabard

  Of the trumpeter of God.

  FOR FOUR GUILDS:

  II. THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS

  In the world’s whitest morning

  As hoary with hope,

  The Builder of Bridges

  Was priest and was pope:

  And the mitre of mystery

  And the canopy his,

  Who darkened the chasms

  And domed the abyss.

  To eastward and westward

  Spread wings at his word

  The arch with the key-stone

  That stoops like a bird;

  That rides the wild air

  And the daylight cast under;

  The highway of danger,

  The gateway of wonder.

  Of his throne were the thunders

  That rivet and fix

  Wild weddings of strangers

  That meet and not mix;

  The town and the cornland;

  The bride and the groom:

  In the breaking of bridges

  Is treason and doom.

  But he bade us, who fashion

  The road that can fly,

  That we build not too heavy

  And build not too high:

  Seeing alway that under

  The dark arch’s bend

  Shine death and white daylight

  Unchanged to the end.

  Who walk on his mercy

  Walk light, as he saith,

  Seeing that our life

  Is a bridge above death;

  And the world and its gardens

  And hills, as ye heard,

  Are born above space

  On the wings of a bird.

  Not high and not heavy

  Is building of his:

  When ye seal up the flood

  And forget the abyss,

  When your towers are uplifted,

  Your banners unfurled,

  In the breaking of bridges

  Is the end of the world.

  FOR FOUR GUILDS:

  III. THE STONE-MASONS

  We have graven the mountain of God with hands,

  As our hands were graven of God, they say,

  Where the seraphs burn in the sun like brands

  And the devils carry the rains away;

  Making a thrift of the throats of hell,

  Our gargoyles gather the roaring rain,

  Whose yawn is more than a frozen yell

  And their very vomiting not in vain.

  Wilder than all that a tongue can utter,

  Wiser than all that is told in words,

  The wings of stone of the soaring gutter

  Fly out and follow the flight of the birds;

  The rush and rout of the angel wars

  Stand out above the astounded street,

  Where we flung our gutters against the stars

  For a sign that the first and the last shall meet.

  We have graven the forest of heaven with hands,

  Being great with a mirth too gross for pride,

  In the stone that battered him Stephen stands

  And Peter himself is petrified:

  Such hands as have grubbed in the glebe for bread

  Have bidden the blank rock blossom and thrive,

  Such hands as have stricken a live man dead

  Have struck, and stricken the dead alive.

  Fold your hands before heaven in praying,

  Lift up your hands into heaven and cry;

  But look where our dizziest spires are saying

  What the hands of a man did up in the sky:

  Drenched before you have heard the thunder,

  White before you have felt the snow;

  For the giants lift up their hands to wonder

  How high the hands of a man could go.

  FOR FOUR GUILDS:

  IV. THE BELL-RINGERS

  The angels are singing like birds in a tree

  In the organ of good St. Cecily:

  And the parson reads with his hand upon

  The graven eagle of great St. John:

  But never the fluted pipes shall go

  Like the fifes of an army all a-row,

  Merrily marching down the street

  To the marts where the busy and idle meet;

  And never the brazen bird shall fly

  Out of the window and into the sky,

  Till men in cities and shires and ships

  Look up at the living Apocalypse.

  But all can hark at the dark of even

  The bells that bay like the hounds of heaven,

  Tolling and telling that over and under,

  In the ways of the air like a wandering thunder,

  The hunt is up over hills untrod:

  For the wind is the way of the dogs of God:

  From the tyrant’s tower to the outlaw’s den

  Hunting the souls of the sons of men.

  Ruler and robber and pedlar and peer,

  Who will not harken and yet will hear;

  Filling men’s heads with the hurry and hum

  Making them welcome before they come.

  And we poor men stand under the steeple

  Drawing the cords that can draw the people,

  And in our leash like the leaping dogs

  Are God’s most deafening demagogues:

  And we are but little, like dwarfs underground,

  While hang up in heaven the houses of sound,

  Moving like mountains that faith sets free,

  Yawning like caverns that roar with the sea,

  As awfully loaded, as airily buoyed,

  Armoured archangels that trample the void:

  Wild as with dancing and weighty with dooms,

  Heavy as their panoply, light as their plumes.

  Neither preacher nor priest are we:

  Each man mount to his own degree:

  Only remember that just such a cord

  Tosses in heaven the trumpet and sword;

  Souls on their terraces, saints on their towers,

  Rise up in arms at alarum like ours:

  Glow like great watchfires that redden the skies

  Titans whose wings are a glory of eyes,

  Crowned constellations by twelves and by sevens,

  Domed dominations more old than the heavens,

  Virtues that thunder and thrones that endure

  Sway like a bell to the prayers of the poor.

  THE CONVERT

  After one moment when I bowed my head

  And the whole world turned over and came upright,

  And I came out where the old road shone white,

  I walked the ways and heard what all men said,

  Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,

  Being not unlovable but strange and light;

  Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite

  But softly, as men smile about the dead.

  The sages have a hundred maps to give

  That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,

  They rattle reason out through many a sieve

  That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:

  And all these things are less than dust to me

  Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

  SONGS OF EDUCATION

  SONGS OF EDUCATION:

  I. HISTORY

  Form 991785, Sub-Section D

  The Roman threw us a road, a road,

  And sighed and strolled away:

  The Saxon gave us a raid, a raid,

  A raid that came to stay;

  The Dane went west, but the Dane confessed

  That he went a bit too far;

  And we all became, by another name,

  The Imperial race we are.

  Chorus

  The Imperial race, the inscrutable race,

  The invincible race we are.

  Though Sussex hills are bare, are bare,

  And Sussex weald is wide,

  From Chichester to Chester

  Men saw the Norman ride;

  He threw his sword in the air and sang

  To a sort of a light guitar;

  It was all the same, for we all became

  The identical nobs we are.

  Chorus

  The identical nobs, individual nobs

  Unmistakable nobs we are.

  The people lived on the land, the land,

  They pottered about and prayed;

  They built a cathedral here and there

  Or went on a small crusade:

  Till the bones of Becket were bundled out

  For the fun of a fat White Czar,

  And we all became, in spoil and flame,

  The intelligent lot we are.

  Chorus

  The intelligent lot, the intuitive lot,

  The infallible lot we are.

  O Warwick woods are green, are green,

  But Warwick trees can fall:

  And Birmingham grew so big, so big,

  And Stratford stayed so small.

  Till the hooter howled to the morning lark

  That sang to the morning star;

  And we all became, in freedom’s name,

  The fortunate chaps we are.

  Chorus

  The fortunate chaps, felicitous chaps,

  The fairy-like chaps we are.

  The people they left the land, the land,

  But they went on working hard;

  And the village green that had got mislaid

  Turned up in the squire’s back-yard:

  But twenty men of us all got work

  On a bit of his motor car;

  And we all became, with the world’s acclaim,

  The marvellous mugs we are:

  Chorus

  The marvellous mugs, miraculous mugs,

  The mystical mugs we are.

  SONGS OF EDUCATION:

  II. GEOGRAPHY

  Form 17955301, Sub-Section Z

  The earth is a place on which England is found,

  And you find it however you twirl the globe round;

  For the spots are all red and the rest is all grey,

  And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

  Gibraltar’s a rock that you see very plain,

  And attached to its base is the district of Spain.

  And the island of Malta is marked further on,

  Where some natives were known as the Knights of St. John.

  Then Cyprus, and east to the Suez Canal,

  That was conquered by Dizzy and Rothschild his pal

  With the Sword of the Lord in the old English way;

  And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

  Our principal imports come far as Cape Horn;

  For necessities, cocoa; for luxuries, corn;

  Thus Brahmins are born for the rice-field, and thus,

  The Gods made the Greeks to grow currants for us;

  Tobacco and petrol and Jazzing and Jews:

  The Jazzing will pass but the Jews they will stay;

  And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

  Our principal exports, all labelled and packed,

  At the ends of the earth are delivered intact:

  Our soap or our salmon can travel in tins

  Between the two poles and as like as two pins;

  So that Lancashire merchants whenever they like

  Can water the beer of a man in Klondike

  Or poison the meat of a man in Bombay;

  And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

  The day of St. George is a musty affair

  Which Russians and Greeks are permitted to share;

  The day of Trafalgar is Spanish in name

  And the Spaniards refuse to pronounce it the same;

  But the Day of the Empire from Canada came

  With Morden and Borden and Beaverbrook’s fame

  And saintly seraphical souls such as they:

  And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

  SONGS OF EDUCATION:

  III. FOR THE CRÊCHE

  Form 8277059, Sub-Section K

  I remember my mother, the day that we met,

  A thing I shall never entirely forget;

  And I toy with the fancy that, young as I am,

  I should know her again if we met in a tram.

  But mother is happy in turning a crank

  That increases the balance at somebody’s bank;

  And I feel satisfaction that mother is free

  From the sinister task of attending to me.

  They have brightened our room, that is spacious and cool,

  With diagrams used in the Idiot School,

  And Books for the Blind that will teach us to see;

  But mother is happy, for mother is free.

  For mother is dancing up forty-eight floors,

  For love of the Leeds International Stores,

  And the flame of that faith might perhaps have grown cold,

  With the care of a baby of seven weeks old.

  For mother is happy in greasing a wheel

  For somebody else, who is cornering Steel;

  And though our one meeting was not very long,

  She took the occasion to sing me this song:

  “O, hush thee, my baby, the time soon will come

  When thy sleep will be broken with hooting and hum;

  There are handles want turning and turning all day,

  And knobs to be pressed in the usual way;

  O, hush thee, my baby, take rest while I croon,

  For Progress comes early, and Freedom too soon.”

  SONGS OF EDUCATION:

  IV. CITIZENSHIP

  Form 8889512, Sub-Section Q

  How slowly learns the child at school

  The names of all the nobs that rule

  From Ponsonby to Pennant;

  Ere his bewildered mind find rest,

  Knowing his host can be a Guest,

  His landlord is a Tennant.

  He knew not, at the age of three,

  What Lord St. Leger next will be

  Or what he was before;

  A Primrose in the social swim

  A Mr. Primrose is to him,

  And he is nothing more.

  But soon, about the age of ten,

  He finds he is a Citizen,

  And knows his way about;

  Can pause within, or just beyond,