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 Figure at the Window
On a Romantic Poet
1 The Gesture
That was a vacant gesture. The wind
At four o'clock in the morning knew it well,
Too well for you whose desperate small hand
Reached only as far as the light from your window fell,
Not to be pitied. But the wind that rides along
Your empty street and over the shuttered sea
Will give you her verdict if you listen long.
She will say, and not in everything deceptively,
That it was not without a certain grace,
That ritual rising and falling of a closed hand;
In another, more remote, and timeless place
It would be well-founded. Your renunciation would stand
Boundless and bare, as cold as a dreaming face,
And always have meaning in that wind-filled land.
2 Paradise gained
The face of this land is pitted with antique marble;
The wind tells stories among colonnades;
Her voices echo through deserted rooms; able
To wander at will she rules where the shades
Are perpetual, among the broken statues and the ruins
Of an early tormented time. Her tales enhance
The pale untortured beauty they assume
Under the dead light, in their perfect trance.
One here looks on with eyes as pale as glass
Whose hands held, yesterday, grief, joy and pain.
See, how among the marble trees he moves,
Sings with the homeless winds, as wordless as
A gathered spirit, and at last attains,
Here in this paradise, his home, and all its sorrow proves.
3 Dream's End
Spring thunder over the sleeping country
Carried from cold blue mountains a tremor of doom;
So that you asked the wind, Are the gods angry?
But the wind was ignorant, the wind played her own tune.
And again you asked, Do the mountains mean murder?
But the indifferent air, the grass and the leaves,
Would not answer. Then you wondered, Can there be further
Destruction in a dead place, can the numbed hand freeze?
But the spring thunder was merciless. An eddy of air
Cold from serene mountains swept all the leaves
From room, terrace, and deserted garden.
Then the wind's voice, rising, cried with a severe
Hatred, like a spirit grieved by lost and remembered lives,
And you were running, running, gripped with a familiar pain.