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 Time of the Eagle
The time of the eagle is not yet,
Or has gone by.
Once, when the eagle fell
Crags screamed the story in a night wind
Till it filled the whole sky
And desolation rang like a dull bell
Where waterfalls carried the burden
Through hanging trees
Laden with mist and rain.
Then even the night birds were silent.
The first ragged breeze
At morning took up the refrain.
On a high peak, torn and shattered,
His strong wings lay,
Beak splintered on rock,
The glorious arc, his soaring, still,
And arrogant sway
Were scattered where the small winds plucked
Feather from feather till bone lay bare.
Conquering then,
Earth-fed and earth-fashioned,
Proud over pinnacle and tree;
Alive and alight when
Storm thundered, how he but hastened
Homeward to the sharp stones
And a bereaving wind!
And when the storm died
All the earth knew its proud creature
Had fallen, fallen
And gone was the glory, the pride.
The time of the eagle was the time
When all earth and fire forged
Brilliant in speed
The structure of heavenly hopes;
When every desire
A world in its youth had freed
Formed the conquering curve of a wing,
Built the proud beak,
Knew, on those pinions, the sky,
The rolling cloud floor and the mountain tops.
Now let this latter time seek
The time of the eagle, which has gone by.