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
Monastic Ruins
At Abingdon a skeletal window frame
Sprouts like a crocus from its gothic ruin,
From stones that cased it once and topped its arch
With towers, pointed, intricate as a leaf.
And now not even my half-closed eyes can recall
Its blaze of glass. Each feast and prayer is done.
The tower whose bells those trumpeting centuries
Described as much as any sound, are fallen low,
Scattered, and covered up with harsh swart vine.
Window and ruin are hid by trees: each leaf,
Time's moment passing, wounded as it fell
The arch and cross, but imperceptibly
Cut its slight wound, until the populace
Scrambled for liberties and brought them down.
Now every leaf brings comfort to the stones
Heaped up and broken like a man destroyed
Needing no healer but a sexton's art.
The creepers spin, devouring stone on stone;
Busy above me ravens croak and flap;
Children go chattering; beneath the trees
Seventeen and eighteen start their life of love
Gangling, grotesque, indifferent to grace.