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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
ON READING THAT THE REBUILDING OF YPRES APPROACHED COMPLETION, by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: I hear you now, I hear you, shy perpetual companion Last Line: "is the wind in the rampart trees." Alternate Author Name(s): Blunden, Edmund Subject(s): World War I; First World War | |||
I HEAR you now, I hear you, shy perpetual companion, Whose deep whispers Never wholly failed upon my twilight; but for months now Too dimly quivered About the crowded corridors of purpose and the clamouring Swarmed ingresses where like squinting cobblers and half-tailors On a weary ship that moors in dock, with grimy hatches, Cross-purpose jangles. Those the master, with a sudden fountain anger, towering By his mood a Cyclops, Back has driven, back, and snivelling, cackling, down the ladder. I, so springing, Have lashed the buzzing bullies out, and in the freed air pause now, Hearing you, whose face is ever one and ever million, This dear dead one's, this dear living one's, no man's and all men's, True map of Flanders. Wordless language! well to me this moment making music, Utmost union. So, so, so we meet again; here we know our co-existence, And your voice is My self-utterance, while the region thus is hush and lonely, Not a charlatan thought there left to gnaw my heart is skulking, Nor one sunbeam sets the tingling atoms dancing by me Like doubt's mad apings. But my danger lies even here, even now worn weak and nerveless I go drooping, Heavy-headed, and would sleep thus lulled with your love's fulness. Sharply awake me With fierce words, cold as the fangs of bayonets in the frozen saps, Simple as the fact that you must kill, or go for rations, As clear as morning blue, as red and grotesque as the open mouths Of winter corpses. I hear you now: the voice, the voice of marching bowed battalions, Of one strong soldier, Now black-haired Daniells, now more saxon Clifford, now hale Worley -- O, speak. Our old tongue. "I was Thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile, thou whiteness, Ypres, How mighty in thy misery, how royal in thy ravishing, With fingers brittle as ice, I champed and clattered by the convent And shouted orders; Which echoes scrambling on the snowy walls and eyeless bulwarks Made haste to carry, But they could not, for the curious air was overburdened With ancient echoes. Vaults below the convent, when they pitied and would shelter, Scarce could lure me, counter-lured though eyelids pressed like roof-leads; Nor such sights as the circling pigeons of poor St. Martin held me From my huge labours. Blood-like swam the moon, the city's sable wounds lurked, Still she cried out, Be most constant! Thence with clumsy zeal and sacred cursing Through the shrill grass, Through the trapping thicket-thorns of death, that sudden planter, While in the light of the moon and snow his blueness masked all faces, Stern I went, the weaker kind most mercilessly heartening To the shambles All for her, that gap-toothed witch, that beauty at the butcher's, To me intrusted; Nor did I desert her, though without so much as a second's warning, Some harsh slash-hook Slit my skull and poured out all the fountains of my senses; Burst the bloodgates; still I came, and went and came to man her, Left Posthoornstraat and Goldfish Chateau, joined with waxen hands the cleft trench, Hating and loving. She, with that, was sometime mild and from the spectre ruin Herself seemed lifting; Walking in some silent moments, to the glimmer of candles, I smiled and marvelled How the dusky houses in the rainy gloom with feigned renaissance Stood for life, and surely from the opened doors would be duly coming Women and lightfoot children, lover there in the lamplight grow to lover -- Death, stop that laughing! Nor has ever been the man, not Milton with his angels, Who found such chorus, Such diapason and amazement in strange old oriental Fantasy-places, As I in gross and clod-like names of hamlets by the city; The fame of Kemmel clanged, and Athens dulled: I listened If one spoke of Zonnebeke with thronged imagination, A dazing distance. For words spoke at the Mermaid, I would not give the meanest That I heard echoing In some green-shuttered Nachtegaal or Kasteel, a brief evening, While the panes were jumping; Far less one of the sweet astounding jests and sallies That dared contest with smoking salvoes the forlorn hope's attention, That wreathed the burning steel that slew with man's eternal laurel In that one city. For her was much accomplished, and she will not forget me, Whose name is Legion; She will know who knew her best, and with his rough warm garment Would have wrapt her; Her midnight tears will ever well as grayly she remembers The hillock's signifying tree, that choked and gouged and miry Was like a cross, but such a cross that there no bleeding Figure Might hang without tautology. And mine she is; they now may build, sign and assign there, Above bright doorways Paint in gold their titles; shrine among their tufted gardens, As did their elders, The statues of their mild desire Arcadian: but I Am in the soil and sap, and in the becks and conduits My blood is flowing, and my sigh of consummation Is the wind in the rampart trees." | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...D'ANNUNZIO by ERNEST HEMINGWAY 1915: THE TRENCHES by CONRAD AIKEN TO OUR PRESIDENT by KATHARINE LEE BATES THE HORSES by KATHARINE LEE BATES CHILDREN OF THE WAR by KATHARINE LEE BATES THE U-BOAT CREWS by KATHARINE LEE BATES THE RED CROSS NURSE by KATHARINE LEE BATES WAR PROFITS by KATHARINE LEE BATES THE UNCHANGEABLE by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN ALMSWOMEN by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN |
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