A Sunset
Westward a league the city lay, with one
Cloud's imminent umbrage o'er it: when behold,
The incendiary sun
Dropped from the womb o' the vapour, rolled
'Mongst huddled towers and temples, 'twixt them set
Infinite ardour of candescent gold,
Encompassed minaret
And terrace and marmoreal spire
With conflagration: roofs enfurnaced, yet
Unmolten,-columns and cupolas flanked with fire,
Yet standing unconsumed
Of the fierce fervency,-and higher
Than all, their fringes goldenly illumed,
Dishevelled clouds, like massed empurpled smoke
From smouldering forges fumed:
Till suddenly the bright spell broke
With the sun sinking through some palace-floor
And vanishing wholly. Then the city woke,
Her mighty Fire-Dream o'er,
As who from out a sleep is raised
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poem by William Watson
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The Great Misgiving
'NOT ours,' say some, 'the thought of death to dread;
Asking no heaven, we fear no fabled hell:
Life is a feast, and we have banqueted--
Shall not the worms as well?
'The after-silence, when the feast is o'er,
And void the places where the minstrels stood,
Differs in nought from what hath been before,
And is nor ill nor good.'
Ah, but the Apparition--the dumb sign--
The beckoning finger bidding me forgo
The fellowship, the converse, and the wine,
The songs, the festal glow!
And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit,
And while the purple joy is pass'd about,
Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit
Or homeless night without;
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poem by William Watson
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Lines (With A Volume Of The Author's Poems Sent To M.R.C.)
Go, Verse, nor let the grass of tarrying grow
Beneath thy feet iambic. Southward go
O'er Thamesis his stream, nor halt until
Thou reach the summit of a suburb hill
To lettered fame not unfamiliar: there
Crave rest and shelter of a scholiast fair,
Who dwelleth in a world of old romance,
Magic emprise and faery chevisaunce.
Tell her, that he who made thee, years ago,
By northern stream and mountain, and where blow
Great breaths from the sea-sunset, at this day
One half thy fabric fain would rase away;
But she must take thee faults and all, my Verse,
Forgive thy better and forget thy worse.
Thee, doubtless, she shall place, not scorned, among
More famous songs by happier minstrels sung;--
In Shakespeare's shadow thou shalt find a home,
Shalt house with melodists of Greece and Rome,
Or awed by Dante's wintry presence be,
Or won by Goethe's regal suavity,
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poem by William Watson
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Felicity
A squalid, hideous town, where streams run black
With vomit of a hundred roaring mills,-
Hither occasion calls me; and ev'n here,
All in the sable reek that wantonly
Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn,
One may at least surmise the sky still blue.
Ev'n here, the myriad slaves of the machine
Deem life a boon; and here, in days far sped,
I overheard a kind-eyed girl relate
To her companions, how a favouring chance
By some few shillings weekly had increased
The earnings of her household, and she said:
'So now we are happy, having all we wished,'-
Felicity indeed! though more it lay
In wanting little than in winning all.
Felicity indeed! Across the years
To me her tones come back, rebuking; me,
Spreader of toils to snare the wandering Joy
No guile may capture and no force surprise-
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poem by William Watson
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Our Men
Our men, they are our stronghold,
Our bastioned wall unscaled,
Who, against Hate and Wrong, hold
This Realm that never quailed;
Who bear the noblest burden
Life lays on shoulders broad,
Asking not fame or guerdon,
Asking not gold or laud.
They go where England speeds them;
They laugh and jest at Fate.
They go where England needs them
And dream not they are great,
And oft, 'mid smoke and smother
By blinding warstorm fanned
Sons of our mighty Mother,
They fall that she may stand.
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poem by William Watson
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To James Bromley With 'Wordsworth's Grave
Ere vandal lords with lust of gold accurst
Deface each hallowed hillside we revere--
Ere cities in their million-throated thirst
Menace each sacred mere--
Let us give thanks because one nook hath been
Unflooded yet by desecration's wave,
The little churchyard in the valley green
That holds our Wordsworth's grave.
'Twas there I plucked these elegiac blooms,
There where he rests 'mid comrades fit and few,
And thence I bring this growth of classic tombs,
An offering, friend, to you--
You who have loved like me his simple themes,
Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain,
And loved the land whose mountains and whose streams
Are lovelier for his strain.
It may be that his manly chant, beside
More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune;
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poem by William Watson
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The Ballad of the 'Britain's Pride
It was a skipper of Lowestoft
That trawled the northern sea,
In a smack of thrice ten tons and seven,
And the
Britain's Pride
was she.
And the waves were high to windward,
And the waves were high to lee,
And he said as he lost his trawl-net,
'What is to be, will be.'
His craft she reeled and staggered,
But he headed her for the hithe,
In a storm that threatened to mow her down
As grass is mown by the scythe;
When suddenly through the cloud-rift
The moon came sailing soft,
And he saw one mast of a sunken ship
Like a dead arm held aloft.
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poem by William Watson
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Autumn
Thou burden of all songs the earth hath sung,
Thou retrospect in Time's reverted eyes,
Thou metaphor of everything that dies,
That dies ill-starred, or dies beloved and young
And therefore blest and wise,-
O be less beautiful, or be less brief,
Thou tragic splendour, strange, and full of fear!
In vain her pageant shall the Summer rear?
At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf,
Crumbles the gorgeous year.
Ah, ghostly as remembered mirth, the tale
Of Summer's bloom, the legend of the Spring!
And thou, too, flutterest an impatient wing,
Thou presence yet more fugitive and frail,
Thou most unbodied thing,
Whose very being is thy going hence,
And passage and departure all thy theme;
Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem,
And thou at height of thy magnificence
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poem by William Watson
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Dedication Of 'The Dream Of Man' To London, My Hostess
City that waitest to be sung,--
For whom no hand
To mighty strains the lyre hath strung
In all this land,
Though mightier theme the mightiest ones
Sang not of old,
The thrice three sisters' godlike sons
With lips of gold,--
Till greater voice thy greatness sing
In loftier times,
Suffer an alien muse to bring
Her votive rhymes.
Yes, alien in thy midst am I,
Not of thy brood;
The nursling of a norland sky
Of rougher mood:
To me, thy tarrying guest, to me,
'Mid thy loud hum,
Strayed visions of the moor or sea
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poem by William Watson
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The Raven's Shadow
Seabird, elemental sprite,
Moulded of the sun and spray-
Raven, dreary flake of night
Drifting in the eye of day-
What in common have ye two,
Meeting 'twixt the blue and blue?
Thou to eastward carriest
The keen savour of the foam,-
Thou dost bear unto the west
Fragrance from thy woody home,
Where perchance a house is thine
Odorous of the oozy pine.
Eastward thee thy proper cares,
Things of mighty moment, call;
Thee to westward thine affairs
Summon, weighty matters all:
I, where land and sea contest,
Watch you eastward, watch you west,
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poem by William Watson
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