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
Dream
Drought in the valley,
Brown hills creaking with heat;
Earth in its centre parched
And breaking apart;
Deep granite veins
Flaking like fragile ash;
Air become branching flame,
Watercourse, furnace-mouth;
Marriage of fire in the sky
With the core of the earth.
The valley ringed
By a glittering line
Of black broken mountains
Capped with a molten
Sun-fall and shower;
Over their shoulder
Fire in the heavens
Climbing the wall of the sky;
At noon's meridian
Sun's terrible eye
Powdering ember and ash.
At evening the mountains
Electric with flame;
Sky dark and brilliant
Crackling with stars;
Echo of thunder
On the wind proclaiming
Fires in the arch of the sky
Leaping together.