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
A Handful of Sea Shells
I remembered — did she remember? —
The girl gone to grief with a chorus of shells
Carolling, with the sea's humour
Comforting her disquieted hours,
Spray shrouding
Her cloud of recollected pain.
Did she remember that half-mythological girl,
The girl gone mad with the ocean,
Fixed in my mind by a gaunt gull falling,
Did she remember as she turned her worn shells
Over and over on an old table?
For her dress was green, her neck white as wave-drift,
So that she seemed the sea's very creature.
I who sat watching could only remember
The girl gone to grief like a gull falling
And that was my folly.
But she who sat there would only recall
Some small hours spent on the shore
And, if her mind turned further,
It went without grief to a simpler prospect than this:
Of life as solemn and gay as a wave breaking
And as terrible; no mere human
But a quite elementary fall.
The girl gone to grief was my own figment
And, because she could no longer so die,
This girl died quite in my mind.
Then the sea and the one turning shells
Lived more purely, with a more precise meaning,
Held and given shape in a greater grief and joy.