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 Beachcomber
Tall ships were wrecked here and exotic cargoes
Spilled on the beach, not yet for the wave
And rock to disfigure, nor inquisitive gull to discard,
But for his delectation. For the space of an hour
Between tide and conquering tide
He could walk among an old world's refuse,
Decking worn smooth and bone fretted on rock,
Metal turned golden and red and shaped like small roses,
Run his fingers through them until the whorled shell,
The ocean's own grace, became part of his own fancy;
And then walk homewards as the tide gathered
With his head full of ghosts.
Then the wild wind carried
Shells, bone and roses into a common fortune.
Walking homewards he knew that the time was soon coming
When the wave would gather him too
And his long bones mingle
With that old, imaginable world
Of roses hammered from gold and dyed with his own blood.