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
The Tempest
1 The First Voyage
Dreaming of destinies, wisdom's
Servant, Prospero, knew neither
Storm's anger nor the fear of death,
Though no-one had thought, in Milan,
That the frail ship could last.
And Miranda, the wheel's favourite,
A rapt babe, was smiling at
Private delights as the ship flew,
In spite of the bad boards, over
Dark ocean to their enchanted
Island. With a dream's movement
They sailed to their citadel
Where wisdom spun vengeance
For another age, for one more holy.
2 Ferdinand awakes
Awakened by the island's carol
He who could remember the salt wave
Stinging his eyeballs, knew not
Whether pasture and populous trees
Were a new heaven or the deep sea's floor.
But the musical air, where a chorus of songs
Drew another, more purposeful, theme
From land and quiescent ocean,
Seemed to him, surely, a soft refuge.
Then the music, rising, called him
To a new journey and he knew not
Whether it would prove more ghostly.
3 The Wrecked Vessel
Safely at anchor now the tired ship lies
And all beneath her boards are sound asleep;
Their eyes are sealed with honey and their mouths,
So sweetly closed, brood on the gentle rest
The gods of sailors guard beneath the sea.
Here are no echoes of the wrecking stress
Of wind and water, rock and groaning tide;
Here on the long sea-bottom lie
Jewels and ivory, and a quick bright fish
Darts between wandering bands of light, the last
Remembrance of the sun.
And these, for this time dead, while currents knock
Gently against their resting vessel's side,
Swim in the cold green place the sea keeps whole.