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
Soldier's Pay
A visit to Blenheim Palace
Proliferation of stone: symmetrical chimney pots
Climb over the hill in a squadron as you walk
From the stylite duke between sentinel
Columns of tree-trunks over the bastioned bridge to the iron gates.
All England's dogs and children scamper over the grass;
Hoof prints are sunk in the turf — here England's
Chargers cavorted and wheeled on holiday from the wars.
In the eighteenth century, carriages, horses, grave and extended councils;
Men home from wars, to their spoils, to their women;
Grant him the manor of Woodstock, architects, money to build.
Now, a good democrat, I lean in a port of that bridge
Spanning a valley flooded to give it purpose,
Watch through the wintry mist, endless
Columns of trees like an army cross the ridge.