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To Charles Brasch
Preface
Part One
Sleep Will Come Singly • A Ballad of Bad Omens • The Tempest • Sea Legend • Fire Without Phoenix • The Time of the Eagle • And I, In Arcady • The Beachcomber • For One Flying • A Handful of Sea Shells • A Figure at the Window • Island
Part Two
Ceremony of Pain • Dream • Soldier's Pay • Monastic Ruins • A Performance of Death & The Maiden • At a Holy Well • From a Train in the Midlands • In Radcliffe Square, Oxford • The Streets of My City • In the Fields of My Father's Youth • Colophon—The Poet to his Book
Source: Oliver, W. H., Fire Without Phoenix: Poems 1946-1954. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1957
Electronic source: Fire Without Phoenix: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
In Praise of Violence
None, it may be, will either grieve or grow
Till time, with violence, ends all argument.
From end to end of an embittered peace
None may learn skill from our predicament.
Now word and gesture probe the wilderness;
Combative shadows ape true flesh and blood;
We populate the waste with incubi
Whose counterfeits, we trust, will stem the flood
Of grief and growth. Honour him, then, who waits
For time to bring its profitable war
With actual adversaries, sin and love,
To plant their standards on our neutral shore
As they are high in the heart. Honour to him
Who makes no easy foes, sees foe and friend
Flexing within the coffined knock and flow
That made these men and islands, makes their end.