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
A Ballad of Bad Omens
The owls above the cornfield stretch
Their eyes to megalithic size,
The rats and mice are mountainous,
The stalk is cracked, the ear is wise.
No-one eats the curdled corn,
Rats and mice want bigger prey,
And so upon the stonehenge owls
They make their meal from day to day.
The ear of corn leans to the earth,
Escapes the rodentary rage;
Perverted to a foreign feast
Takes from the earth a sinful wage.
The field of life is upside down,
The world of nature knows no laws;
The owl, the rat, the corn have all
Denied the fundamental cause.