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 the Fields of My Father's Youth
1
In the fields of my father's youth, now bountiful and green,
I walked and stared, half-recollecting each
New but anticipated emblem of a past
once legendary, now more remote than legend,
remembering all he had told for the delight of children:
folk-habits, succession of seasons and lives,
the dim procession of my ancestors
walking through centuries this treadmill lane.
Its trench between stone bramble-plaited hedges
wound where the contour made a passage easy,
past fertile hills where he had worked all seasons,
last of the peasant line who broke this earth.
Mill and manor, farm house, cottages,
kept up an easy, sociable conversation:
a discourse of rank and degree, proud and humble
linked by its cautious line in a common life.
I celebrated every moderate hope
that lay embedded in the lane's hard clay
feeling myself made radical once more;
and celebrated, too, the manor house,
crown of the country, elegant, discreet
as well-worn riches, sweet as piety.
2
How many hopes were trenched in the secretive lane?
I populated every crossroad with
a host of suicides impaled on hate:
passionate, modest, impossible hopes, denied
in life and death the four unwinding roads
which lead, whichever way, to difference.
When it was moonlight, how many bones
jangled together at Black Cross and White Cross
as an army of lost liberators gaped for flesh?
How great a multitude of dreams? Not his,
at the end. They leapt across an era and a world and pitched
full-flighted, ready to flower, on an empty island,
travelled the dust and gravel of a new highroad
linking, not age to age, but moderate hope to hope.
Solitude, dream, their pinched and starving hopes,
his and my ancestors', he brought to breed
in the raw clay and timber of a settlement
new and elsewhere; not anywhere
the manor's grace could mock their stuntedness.
3
His dream is fulfilled in an acre of fertile ground;
took body in a house, a family;
in leisure, fruit and flowers, company;
work winning ease, children bringing home
children for grandparents, warmth for autumn.
The dream is fulfilled in an empty island town,
a street of stucco shops and iron verandahs
perched on the site of a violated forest;
a temporary borough pitiable
beneath the winter snow range meditating
flood and disaster in the final spring—
not yet. Clay gapes in cuttings and the soil runs down
each winter river; land is dying; yet
there will be life in it enough for him,
enough for the dream to flourish and express
a permanent hope lodged in impermanence,
given, in one brief life, a chance to live
apart from that perpetual English rite:
one taken chance, then newness, all things strange.
Till that time fall from the mountain and the sky
I think the innumerable peasantry within
his hand and eye, the ground bass of that theme
particular skill and courage elaborate,
are strong and sappy in his acre garden
and, I expect, are happy as never on earth
moving in his disguises among strawberry frames,
directing the growth of flowers round a house.
They are prodigal there who died in paucity
and, having raised a county's fodder and crops,
delight themselves in more luxurious harvests.
And I think they talk through the words of poetry
he writes to me here in England, telling me
of the growth and profit and joy of his fruitful acre
as once in passion and in oratory
they stood on platform, soapbox, with the jobless,
full of the argument of state, rebelliously
talking down privilege, arguing equal rights.
That dream flower faded, cynically abused;
the song of equality became a bribe
offered abroad by immoral political apes,
while good men reeled in the wake of procureurs.
There is only the garden full of surprising fruit.
4
The lane led away to the by-pass, to the rail,
to the university town, this desk, these words.
Can I who live by his flight relinquish either
the peasant's dream or the eloquent manor house?
Both were his first and every birthday gift.
All those who sleep in tears within my seed
will reach, if I do not, the breaking point
where loyalties depart and go their ways
separate, hostile, taking up their arms
to meet in battle on the disputed field
of England's and our own heart's heritage.
That will be time for treasons and for faith.