Form: a quarterly of the arts (1.1916/1917)

Poems by G. Plunkett, J. Freeman,

RIS

To such delicious music
runs your being
You seem poised as a bird
upon the wave,
Floating through ether,
lighted on a spray—
Nay, so your will can wing you, to our seeing,
With every fluttering motion we grow grave,
Fearing you vanish fairily away.

You may not part the hearts that you awaken,
Dear spirit of the lambent flame of thought,
While to a home unseen trembles your smile;
Wanting you earth were but a nest forsaken—

0 rapturous wings ! into your eddies caught
Like leaves, we follow you to your happy isle!

GEORGE NOBLE PLUNKETT

THE WISH

That you might happier be than all the rest,
Than I who have been happy loving you,

Of all the innocent ev’n the happiest—

This I beseeched for you.

Until I thought of those unending skies—

Of stagnant cloud, or fleckless dull blue air,

Of days and nights delightless, no surprise,

No threat, no sting, no fear;

And of the stirless waters of the mind,

Waveless, unfurrowed, of no living hue,

With dead leaves dropping slowly in no wind,
And nothing flowering new.

And then no more I wished you happiness,

But that whatever fell of joy or woe

1 would not dare, O sweet, to wish it less,

Or wish you less than you.

JOHN FREEMAN

THE POND
Gray were the rushes
Beside the budless bushes,

Green-patched the pond.

The lark had left soaring
Though yet the sun was pouring
His gold here and beyond.

Bramble-branches held me,

But had they not compelled me
Yet had I lingered there,

Hearing the frogs and then
Watching the water-hen

That stared back at my stare.

There amid the bushes

Were blackbird’s nests and thrush’s,

Soon to be hidden.

In leaves on green leaves thickening,

Boughs over long boughs quickening,

Swiftly, unforbidden.

The lark had left singing
But song all round was ringing,

As though the rushes
Were sighingly repeating
And mingling that most sweet thing
With the sweet notes of thrushes.

That sweetness rose all round me,

But more than sweetness bound me,

A spirit stirred;

Shadowy and cold it neared me,

Then shrank as if it feared me—

But ‘twas I that feared.

JOHN FREEMAN

TIME FROM HIS GRAVE
When the south west wind came
The air grew bright and sweet, as though a flame
Had cleansed the world of winter. The low sky
As the wind lifted it rose trembling vast and high>
And white clouds sallied by
As children in their pleasure go
Chasing the sun beneath the orchard’s shadow and
snow.

Nothing, nothing was the same !

Not the dull brick, not the stained London stone,,
Not the delighted trees that lost their moan—
Their moan that daily vexed me with such pain
Until I hated to see trees again;

Nor man nor woman was the same
Nor could be stones again,

Such light and colour with the south west came.
As I drank all that brightness up I saw
A dark globe lapt in fold on fold of gloom,

With all her hosts asleep in that cold tomb,

Sealed by an iron law.

And there amid the hills,

Locked in an icy hollow lay the bones
Of one that ghostly and enormous slept
Obscure ’neath wrinkled ice and bedded stones.
But as spring water the old dry channel fllls,

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