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
For One Flying
For one flying, for the one who dived through my days
Dividing the year like an annihilating hawk,
Flying so that the air about me sang in praise
Like the wind's nerve plucked, and in such glory that dark
Hills covered in pines were redeemed and made bright;
For the one who was an echo of angels, and at once
Was dream and reality, earth and the infinite
Heavens, I would offer, that not by chance
Should that feat live, these hands, these eyes,
This celebrating song. For though to-morrow hold
The failing of wings and the end of the precise
Ectasy, this miracle will carry through each cold
New morning till the grip upon our days
Of ice is ended, and the world is one in praise.