Three Poems

I
Babylon where I go dreaming
When I weary of to-day,
Weary of a world grown gray.

II
God loves an idle rainbow,
No less than laboring seas.

III
Reason has moons, but moons not hers
Lie mirrored on her sea,
Confounding her astronomers,
But, oh, delighting me!

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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Reason has Moons

Reason has moons, but moons not hers,
Lie mirror'd on the sea,
Confounding her astronomers,
But O! delighting me.
. . . . .
BABYLON - where I go dreaming
When I weary of to-day,
Weary of a world grown grey.
. . . . .
GOD loves an idle rainbow,
No less than labouring seas.

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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The Bells of Heaven

'Twould ring the bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs,
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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A Wood Song

Now one and all, you Roses,
Wake up, you lie too long!
This very morning closes
The Nightingale his song;

Each from its olive chamber
His babies every one
This very morning clamber
Into the shining sun.

You Slug-a-beds and Simples,
Why will you so delay!
Dears, doff your olive wimples,
And listen while you may.

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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After

"How fared you when you mortal were?
What did you see on my peopled star?"
"Oh well enough," I answered her,
"It went for me where mortals are!

"I saw blue flowers and the merlin's flight
And the rime on the wintry tree,
Blue doves I saw and summer light
On the wings of the cinnamon bee."

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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February

A few tossed thrushes save
That carolled less than cried
Against the dying rave
And moan that never died,
No bird sang then; no thorn,
No tree was green beside
Them only never shorn -
The few by all the winds
And chill mutations born
Of Winter's many minds
Abused and whipt in vain -
Swarth yew and ivy kinds
And iron breeds germane.

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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The Late last Rook

The old gilt vane and spire receive
The last beam eastward striking;
The first shy bat to peep at eve
Has found her to his liking.
The western heaven is dull and grey,
The last red glow has followed day.
The late, last rook is housed and will
With cronies lie till morrow;
If there's a rook loquacious still
In dream he hunts a furrow,
And flaps behind a spectre team,
Or ghostly scarecrows walk his dream.

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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The House Across the Way

The leaves looked in at the window
Of the house across the way,
At a man that had sinned like you and me
And all poor human clay.
He muttered: 'In a gambol
I took my soul astray,
But to-morrow I'll drag it back from danger,
In the morning, come what may;
For no man knows what season
He shall go his ghostly way.'
And his face fell down upon the table,
And where it fell it lay.
And the wind blew under the carpet
And it said, or it seemed to say:
'Truly, all men must go a-ghosting
And no man knows his day.'
And the leaves stared in at the window
Like the people at a play.

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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Playmates

It's sixty years ago, the people say:
Two village children, neighbours born and bred,
One morning played beneath a rotten tree
That came down crash and caught them as they fled;
And one was killed and one was left unhurt
Except for certain fancies in his head.
And though it's all so very long ago
He's never left the wood a single day;
I've often met him peeping through the leaves
And chuckling to himself, an old man grey;
And once he started in his cracked old voice:
'We're playing I'm a merchant lost his way,
She's robbers in the wood behind yon tree,
The minute we grow up too big to play' -

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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The Journeyman

Not baser than his own homekeeping kind
Whose journeyman he is -
Blind sons and breastless daughters of the blind
Whose darkness pardons his, -
About the world, while all the world approves,
The pimp of Fashion steals,
With all the angels mourning their dead loves
Behind his bloody heels.
It my be late when Nature cries Enough!
As one day cry she will,
And man may have the wit to put her off
With shifts a season still;
But man may find the pinch importunate
And fall to blaming men -
Blind sires and breastless mothers of his fate,
It may be late and may be very late,
Too late for blaming then.

poem by Ralph Hodgson
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