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

W. H. Davies and F. Carter

Came the south west wind filling all the air.

Then Time rose up, ghostly, enormous, stark,
And all that Life puts forth to Life shall come again.
With cold gray light in cold gray eyes, and dark
Dark clouds caught round him, feet to rigid chin.
The wind ran flushed and glorious in,

Godlike from hill to frozen hill-top stepp’d,

And swiftly upon that bony stature swept.

Then a long breath and then quick breaths I heard,
In those black caves of stillness music stirred,
Those icy heights were riven:

From crown to clearing hollow grass was green;
And godlike from flushed hill to hill-top leapt
Time, youthful, quick, serene,

Dew flashing from limbs, light from his eyes
To the sheeny skies.

A lark’s song climbed from earth and dropped from
heaven,

Far off the tide clung to the shore
Now silent nevermore.

. . . Into what vision’d wonder was I swept,
Upon what unimaginable joyance had I leapt!

JOHN FREEMAN

POINT AND MORDANT

WHAT have we in this iron age?

What have we in this land of care?
Naught to enjoy, naught to assuage,
Far less destroy, our black despair.

Our days of living are not long
Our tree of life is blown and bare,

There is small pleasure in a song
Written in pain to print with care
In black and red our deep despair.

We scribble scrabble on a page;

Our leaves of folly here and there
May flutter this sick age’s rage;

But what are we to know or care
That they are smug—or we despair.

The painful penline’s bitter gage
Is copper coin, but I know where
A plate of copper may be found
To give the mordant chance to bite
Through dark asphaltum’s waxen ground;

To print a proof and give to light
The steel point’s tale of our despair.

FREDERICK CARTER

WHAT THOUGHTS ARE MINE

HAT thoughts are mine when she is
gone,

And I sit dreaming here alone:

My fingers are the little people
That climb her breast to its red
steeple;

And, there arrived, they play until

She wakes and murmurs-uLove, be still.”

She is the patient, loving mare,

And I’m the colt to pull her hair;

She is the deer, and my desire
Pursues her like a forest fire;

She is the child, and does not know
What a fierce bear she calls u bow-wow.”

But Lord, when her sweet self is near,

These very thoughts cause all my fear;

I sit beneath her quiet sense,

And each word fears its consequence:

So, Upuss, puss, puss!” I cry. At that
I hang my head and stroke the cat.

W. H. DAVIES

CONFESSION

NE hour in every hundred hours,

I sing of childhood, birds and
flowers:

Who reads my character in song,
Will not see much in me that’s
wrong.

But in my ninety hours and nine,

I would not tell what thoughts are mine:

They’re not so pure as find their words
In songs of childhood, flowers and birds.

W. H. DAVIES

18