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
In Radcliffe Square, Oxford
On a wet and wintry dusk in Radcliffe Square
While a gusty wind torn between pinnacles
Volleyed the sound of bells from wall to wall,
A man and a woman were busy quarelling
Under a corner gas-lamp, splayed on the sheer
Cliff of the library wall.
He in a uniform, she young and resentful,
Were standing at two arms' distance, eloquent
So caught in disgust and despair, more than in words
The ignorant wind whipped from their twisting lips.
That was the surface, a trivial hate: their money,
Merchandise, or souls, the issue.
Walls, spire and pinnacles, commemorating
Our Blessed Lady and all hallowed souls
Observed the decline of their love. St Mary's
Tower of bell notes boomed around the square
Echoing welcome welcome welcome into heaven;
Had not one clear note for these dead.
Cobble stones gleamed; a dark dome shoved the clouds;
Heaven was everywhere present everywhere full
Of foreboding.
They, separating, left the square empty
As the bells became still. Then the shouldering dome and the spire
Springing to heaven on a crutch of stone
Were lost in a scurry of rain. Heaven was everywhere
Present, everywhere mourned their loss.