Fire Without Phoenix : Part Two : At a Holy Well


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To Charles Brasch In Praise of Violence Preface An Attitude for a New Zealand Poet 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	At a Holy Well An opulent summer day had gone to earth; Had offered, to the curious passer-by, Somnolent cattle munching as they lay, And swallows tumbling round the Binsey Inn. At the day's end, a long and oppresive dusk Heavy with heat, dust-smell and ashes. We walked to the well through an avenue of elms Leafy and hummocked like hills, airless between. There was a thunder of pigeons from a nearby hedge Muttering over the meadow. Each sight and sound Was menacing, veiled: foliage dense and still, An aircraft murmuring counties away, and the boom of birds. Here, more than centuries past, an irascible saint Cursed until Providence provoked a spring When she and her sisters drank; and then proceeded, Naming the well St Margaret's, in innocence back to Oxford. Her pertulance had good cause. That was a summer Nightfall heavy with dust and birdsong; Even a saint could not stir a step to one side, Though rivers wound and trickled round the copse, There to be freshened, but must have water at hand Before the enveloping earth, Foliage, birdsong, and midsummer thunder Made her remove from her high and arrogant course. Saints cannot yield, even an inch, to the earth; Dullness and sleep, unending in the shade Of a cloud of trees, and with the air incanting, Had robbed the earth of a statement, the map of a cross.