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
And I, In Arcady
And I, in Arcady, on a bitter morning,
Saw that the frost had frozen the grass into spears,
Had edged like long knives the branches swinging
At one time over an idle river.
And there, in Arcady, had been arrested
Just at the climax, that unearthly pageant
Of nymphs and water dwellers, satyrs and drunken men;
Each earth form was figured in air like a pattern of petals
Falling, poised at the brimful, so that I saw about me
The grinning satyr, the nymph, and the starting faun,
Caught at the climax, leaping or lying,
Bent on whole pleasures. They shone around me like white
Statues half seen, and their white was made brilliant
As the frost glittered under impotent sunlight.
The green had turned black beneath ice.
And one I found there, where the shade was deepest,
Where a dark green river curved beneath banks
Hung over with ferns and shadowed by tall stark trees,
One I found there, now that the stream was frozen,
Rising, as a nymph would, towards sunlight,
To the soft bank of ferns and the hanging branches,
Who had been caught there, and reached out forever,
Brilliant and pleading, to the vanished summer.