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
Island
Twilight is memoried. A current of cold air
Runs from an offshore island over a green
And nervous stretch of water. Within the stream
Of memories that slip towards these bare
Deserted sandhills there are voices, clear
And ringing over the sea's long curving line;
Voices and murmurs echoing a dream
The world had once, of innocence. Despair
Inherited the dream. Against a yellow sky
The island, rimmed with fire, stands from the sea,
A black uplifted place where embers turn
To tongues and lips of flame and endlessly
Re-echo fire and fortune to this high
Waste shore where dry bones wait to burn.