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
Sea Legend
This delicate sea urchin's shell, and its opposite index,
A spatulate pine cone, were found lying side by side
On a savage shore where the patient Pacific is torn
Across acres of rock and gravel. A symbol, a legend?
Both of them empty, having spent their living matter,
The seed and the soft flesh, where all is uncouth and brutal,
A shore littered with the shells of a hundred crayfish
Beaten to death by a high sea on a plateau
Of smooth round stones, greedily eaten by sea gulls,
Cleaned by the scurrying sea lice, joining that other detritus,
Sepulchres of white and sapless trees
So dried and brittle that the mere sun sets them alight:
Both of them empty, both of them shapely and fine,
Merge in the total destruction. This legend.